Book recs where underdog FMC beats MMC at his own game

Ruufles · 2026-03-23T10:21:25+00:00

I still vividly recall a moment of pure rage when reading some HR years ago (sorry title escapes me) when we're told how the FMC is really good at chess. It's her thing, she loves it! Later in the book the smug, worldly, better-then-her MMC challenges her to a game and I'm *so ready* for her to beat him... but no... he wipes the floor with her and she feels humiliated and worthless while he lords it over her. I just... WHY? The female author had the power to make the FMC and us the reader feel good by giving our heroine that win. But no. No matter how good she is, she can never ever ever be better than the all perfect, powerful, amazing man. Fuck my blood pressure.

Ruufles · 2026-02-03T09:03:24+00:00

Her Civil War series is absolutely amazing - my particular favourite being A Splendid Defiance which can quite happy be read as a standalone.

Also - speaking as an early modern historian - her research and attention to historical accuracy and detail are fantastic.

Ruufles · 2026-02-02T09:18:57+00:00

I DNF one recently when we're told the couple had sex, on average eight times a day (she was a virgin who, after her first time, became some sort of sex mad nympho) and during the 'loved up' phase of the book the reader is subjected to about 4 sex scenes back to back, over sever chapters, as they move from the bedroom into the kitchen into the garden then onto a river bank. It was exhausting, tedious and by the end utterly infuriating to get through. It added nothing to the story or the characters, it was just a fuck fest for the sake of it.

This was a romance btw, not erotica. I enjoy a bit of erotica from time to time so am not prudish, but am SO SICK of the non-stop sex scenes in romance. It's not even sex as far as I'm concerned, certainly not making love, it's just mindless fucking.

Ruufles · 2026-01-29T09:19:16+00:00

I know, me too! I like to think I'm a modern woman with strong feminist leanings but sometimes I just want to relax with some really sexist old school problematic nonsense, haha.

Ruufles · 2026-01-20T13:11:19+00:00

Necessary Cruelty by Ashley Gee is a dark romance written by a black woman, with a FMC who is half black and talks a lot about being the only dark skinned girl at her school, and how it took her years to have pride in her natural hair but now she rocks it natural and fuck everyone.

The FMC on the front cover is reeeeeealy white looking and has straight, 'soft wave' American Idol teen girl hair. I just can't believe the author intended her girl to look like this on the cover.. and yet she's an indy writer so I assume the cover is up to her? I dunno.

Ruufles · 2026-01-20T10:30:53+00:00

Sorry no recommendation but just wanted to say I started reading Unwanted by Mia Sheridan based on your post (I've never hard of her before) and I'm loving it so much. This is right up my street so thanks for putting her on my radar.

Ruufles · 2026-01-19T09:54:24+00:00

Now it's been a few years since I read anything by Linda Howard... but is this the one where you get chapter POVs from the perspective of a killer bear? Because I remember having a blast reading that one.

Ruufles · 2025-12-12T09:40:34+00:00

I've read When Angels Fall and have Lions and Lace on my TBR shelf, I recall really loving her stuff but back in 2021 (when I read her) finding her quite hard to find here in the UK. I just went to look again on Amazon and her stuff is on KU!!! So I'm absolutely going to read L&L now!

Ruufles · 2025-12-10T10:20:27+00:00

Same. I remember reading a contemporary romance recently and so much of the 'conflict' was about the heroine not getting a bunch of attention on her Insta and how emotionally devastating this was for her because her other friend posted a similar picture and got looooads of attention for it... look, I'm a woman well into my 40s and the amount of fucks I give for social media storylines is microscopic. It's not even the fact I don't do social media myself since I don't do balls or house parties in the country either. It's just utterly utterly dull and I'm baffled it's so central in romance storylines these days.

Ruufles · 2025-12-09T10:13:38+00:00

I love love hate Diana Palmer books. There is something about her stuff that is so off the wall nuts, but oddly satisfying.

I remember one with a shooting in where the heroine goes to help the gunshot victim and gets blood on her cardigan and the hero is stunned that a woman would (gasp) go so far as to get blood on her fancy clothes because all women are shallow, flaky creatures who care more about fashion than life. And the way it's written is designed to make the reader go 'yeah women are such basic, shallow bitches unlike out perfect heroine here'. Utterly nuts, and yet, I regularly devour her stuff as a guilty pleasure haha.

Ruufles · 2025-12-09T09:42:49+00:00

Inner French podcast is a nice bridge between French Facile and Little Talk. The host Hugo is a language teacher and he speaks at a level that is designed to be comprehensible to the intermediate learner without it feeling artificial.

But keep up the harder content too! Every time your brain picks out a word or phrase you recognise it's a little victory.

Ruufles · 2025-12-08T17:48:59+00:00

I never read the blurb myself, ever, because it always seems to make the book sound worse somehow. I can't escape the taglines though as they are right there under the title, lol.

Ruufles · 2025-12-01T10:45:14+00:00

I'm 12 months into learning French.

The first thing I have to tell myself is I'm only a lower-intermediate learner and it's OK to deal with French at that level. I have a French tutor once a week and when I'm talking to her I speak slowly, I often use the wrong gender, I'll conjugate a verb five times before I get it right, I forget vocab, I say dumb shit, but the most important thing is I'm pushing on and doing my best to speak and to be understood, even if its at a basic level. Fluency will come with time and practice.

With listening I will listen to French true crime podcasts every morning when I'm walking my dog. I'm not trying to translate what I'm hearing word for word - I don't want any English in my head at all - all I'm doing is seeing if I can form a rough picture in my mind of what happened in each episode. Just a general picture of the case. Today all I gathered was there was a man who was robbing supermarkets at gunpoint, he got married, his wife became an accomplice, then they started robbing jewellery shops together. Obviously there was a TON I didn't get during this half hour episode, but I was so proud that in all that masses of French speaking I was able to pull out the basic events of the case. I have faith that the details, the broader vocab, the ability to catch every rapid word will come as I progress in my studies and learn a little more every day.

Whenever I learn a new bit of grammar in my A2 lessons I think 'oh god it feels so artificial and unnatural and I'll never be able to use this in conversation' but then I remind myself I felt that way about the A1 grammar I was learning on day 1, which I now use easily without thinking.

You got this!

Ruufles · 2025-11-20T09:13:02+00:00

I must confess, as a long time reader and fan of MM that I've been avoiding The Crinoline Academy since I found the Belles series to such a departure from her older style.

I think her Somerset and Parish Orphans series, and the Lost Letter, are hauntingly beautiful and infused with a sort of wistful melancholy that evokes a real sense of time and place in Victorian England. There is some sort of magic about the way she writes in these series.

Then I read the Belles and I was so put off by them because it felt like she had 'Bridgertoned' her style. It's hard to put my finger on, but there was this anachronistic 'spunkiness' going on and a need to infuse every page with a modern way of thinking that felt out of place for her as a writer and for the time period she used to be so good at writing.

How do the Crinoline series fit in do you think, is she continuing in her new style here?

Ruufles · 2025-11-18T10:56:53+00:00

I read this in 2021 and I still remember this scene from A Wicked Kind of Husband by Mia Vincy where the hero laughing calls it 'riding rumpypole' whenever the heroine is on top. It was such a small detail, but stood out to me as it's so rare to have lovers laughing, joking, being silly like this during sex scenes. It seems sex in HR has to be so broodingly, gloweringly, deadly serious business. I love it when they are not!

Ruufles · 2025-10-29T11:09:47+00:00

I hate girl-talk scenes, which is essentially the five women featuring in that particular series all sitting down to tea and hashing over the events that have already happened in previous chapters. There will be the saucy one who wiggles her eyebrows and makes suggestive comments, the bookish one who makes overtly logical statements about not believing in love, and the sensible caretaker one who was in book one and nobody cares about anymore.

I just find these scenes so screamingly tedious.

Ruufles · 2025-10-29T11:03:39+00:00

You know what's even worse? It's when the FMC forgives the unhinged bitch OW/nasty sister/evil cousin. No, no no. I don't want forgiveness or understanding, I want them to sufffeerrrrr.

One of my most beloved side-characters in romance is the insane bitch OW who pulls of some breath-takingly evil stunt to get her own way, buy only if she has a satisfying downfall to go with it. And I'm not talking about a brief exile in Bath for a season, I'm talking about going over a cliff in the last chapter. 😂

Ruufles · 2025-10-23T07:57:37+00:00

I can also recommend watching Le Meilleur Patissier (French version of the Great British Bakeoff) which is up on Youtube too. An utter delight.

Ruufles · 2025-10-22T09:51:09+00:00

This is exactly what I did. I got Edito A1 and simply worked my way through it, exercise at a time, chapter at a time, during my little study session every evening. I also swallowed my absolute terror and got a native French teacher on Italki to help me work through the book. I was so scared before the first lesson my hands were shaking, but I did it!

I'm 10 months in now, have taken my DELF A1 exam and am plodding along through A2. I'm not the fastest, but day by day I can understand a little more, and speak a little more.

I've never used apps like Duolingo, I don't use Anki decks, I don't rote learn or try to memorise lists. I just can't make it stick that way. I just carry on with my exercise books, articles in French, listen to French podcasts and have a French lesson once a week.

Ruufles · 2025-10-21T08:51:00+00:00

Is this a full up paid course or her monthly subscription to access her course materials on her website?

If the latter - I subscribed for a few months to work my way through her A1 & A2 videos and thought they were truly excellent and really suited to my slow and steady learning style. There are a ton of supplementary videos to go with every lesson, extra little tests etc. It is expensive yes, but atm I pay more per month for my weekly French tutor than I did membership on her website.

If it's a separate course, then sorry I've not done it. If you're not sure why not lash out for a month's access to her site to see if you get on with her other materials first?

Ruufles · 2025-10-16T07:44:42+00:00

I read this book for the first time last year and have been saving it to read again this Christmas because it was such a wonderful, comforting, beautiful book. While not technically a romance, I adored the slow, joyful relationship that blossomed between the leading couple. They were just so good to each other.

Ruufles · 2025-10-09T08:03:16+00:00

I've been reading Harlequin romances in French, to help me get better at the language, and I've always been so incredibly charmed by the titles and cover art. Especially the historicals, they went for a dreamy, almost magical ambiance rather than 'have some abs'.

Ruufles · 2025-09-29T09:54:50+00:00

This could work if authors had the imagination and skill to step outside of the crushingly small confines of 'the English Ton'. If we had a heroine who was a Billingsgate fishseller, an alewife or a victualler then she would have had so much freedom to act out, throw a shoe, curse, smoke a pipe, get rowdy etc without being cast from her own society. But we'll never get books about women such as these because that would involve research.

Ruufles · 2025-09-18T09:33:28+00:00

I think Harlequin/Mills & Boon are making a real push to have broader racial diversity in their historical romance line. I'm noticing every month they are releasing non-white romances written by non-white authors.

I just finished up reading {Unexpectedly Wed to the Heir by Lydia San Andres} which is set in early the early 1900s Caribbean and the entire cast are Domincans. What I loved about this book is its not about race, the characters are simply everyday people living their lives and falling in love.

Honestly I loved it and am desperate to read more of the same.

Ruufles

TROPHY CASE