This is actually two separate novellas, "Merry Christmas, Mrs. Robinson" by Delilah Marvelle and "The Twelve Days of Seduction" by Maire Claremont. I'm a fan of Marvelle's work but haven't read Claremont's before. Normally I try to get multi-author collections from the library, but none of my libraries bought this, and at 99 cents I figured paying for something I might only read half of was better than missing a Marvelle book.
"Merry Christmas, Mrs. Robinson" was a very good story that may have suffered just slightly from the amount of space it had as a novella. It's a friends to lovers story, in which after several years of separation, the widowed Mrs. Robinson reconnects with her old friend Martin, whom she never knew was actually, as a teenager, the mysterious Mr. X with whom she fell in love via letters. (She believed that her late husband was Mr. X when they married, but found out he wasn't before he died.) Over the course of the story she discovers how the two sides of the man that she knew fit together. He's a little older and more confident. She's a little wiser. My one complaint was that Mrs. Robinson's issues seem a little under explored, to the point where some of them maybe could have been skipped. From the beginning, I expected her issues to stem from the circumstances of her first husband's death, but near the end she brings up problems in their sex life that appear to have come out of nowhere to take care of the rule of romance that says that if the heroine is not a virgin, she can't have had a good sexual relationship before the one with the hero. Delilah Marvelle can do better than that. Still, overall, this was a lovely story.
Overall: A-
I was less sold on "The Twelve Days of Seduction," because I had trouble understanding Adrianna's motivations. At the beginning, she appears to be attempting to live a respectable life. She has secured a position as a governess, probably the most respectable employment to which she can aspire. She publishes her novels under a different name. (It appears that her pen name is her original name and she's going by a false one, but it' still not the name she's currently using otherwise.) But when Alexander discovers her and says she may stay if she stays as his mistress, she doesn't appear to consider the reputation she has built for herself at all. Her only concern is for whether, as his mistress instead of his ward's governess, she will still be able to associate with the girl or if she will be kept away in London, and not at all for what might happen to her if she becomes his mistress and *then* gets tossed out. And although she says she wants him to seduce her for twelve days first, she doesn't actively do anything to try to persuade him not to separate her and his daughter/ward, or object to the eventual separation (she asks in that first conversation, he says it would be cruel to separate them too quickly, that's that), and her agreement to be his mistress doesn't seem to be contingent on how well he does in the twelve days. The three of them were charming together in all combinations but I had trouble seeing what the point of the whole exercise was supposed to be.
Overall: C
"Merry Christmas, Mrs. Robinson" was a very good story that may have suffered just slightly from the amount of space it had as a novella. It's a friends to lovers story, in which after several years of separation, the widowed Mrs. Robinson reconnects with her old friend Martin, whom she never knew was actually, as a teenager, the mysterious Mr. X with whom she fell in love via letters. (She believed that her late husband was Mr. X when they married, but found out he wasn't before he died.) Over the course of the story she discovers how the two sides of the man that she knew fit together. He's a little older and more confident. She's a little wiser. My one complaint was that Mrs. Robinson's issues seem a little under explored, to the point where some of them maybe could have been skipped. From the beginning, I expected her issues to stem from the circumstances of her first husband's death, but near the end she brings up problems in their sex life that appear to have come out of nowhere to take care of the rule of romance that says that if the heroine is not a virgin, she can't have had a good sexual relationship before the one with the hero. Delilah Marvelle can do better than that. Still, overall, this was a lovely story.
Overall: A-
I was less sold on "The Twelve Days of Seduction," because I had trouble understanding Adrianna's motivations. At the beginning, she appears to be attempting to live a respectable life. She has secured a position as a governess, probably the most respectable employment to which she can aspire. She publishes her novels under a different name. (It appears that her pen name is her original name and she's going by a false one, but it' still not the name she's currently using otherwise.) But when Alexander discovers her and says she may stay if she stays as his mistress, she doesn't appear to consider the reputation she has built for herself at all. Her only concern is for whether, as his mistress instead of his ward's governess, she will still be able to associate with the girl or if she will be kept away in London, and not at all for what might happen to her if she becomes his mistress and *then* gets tossed out. And although she says she wants him to seduce her for twelve days first, she doesn't actively do anything to try to persuade him not to separate her and his daughter/ward, or object to the eventual separation (she asks in that first conversation, he says it would be cruel to separate them too quickly, that's that), and her agreement to be his mistress doesn't seem to be contingent on how well he does in the twelve days. The three of them were charming together in all combinations but I had trouble seeing what the point of the whole exercise was supposed to be.
Overall: C
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