(Yes, I am posting two reviews in one day, it's my birthday so I'll do as I please. I might even post another one this evening.) Personal Rating: 4 Stars Goodreads Rating: 4.01 Stars For three years, the Cloaked Bandit has terrorized Wessex, robbing the nobility by knifepoint and a well-placed arrow. But little does anyone know, this bandit is in fact Juliana Wessex, the rightful ruler of the land and a girl her tyrannical uncle—the current Lord Wessex—believes was killed along with her father. Juliana has become skilled at hiding from Lord Wessex in the forest, using her stolen goods to provide food and shelter to the peasants her uncle has taxed into poverty. But when she robs Collin Goodrich, her red hair betrays her true identity. Lord Collin remembers Juliana from their childhood—and challenges her to stay on his estate for a week in hopes she will leave her thieving ways and become a proper lady once more. Juliana is intrigued by Collin and his charms, but only time will tell if he can overcome her distaste of the nobility—as well as win her heart. (goodreads.com) I won an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of this book in a Goodreads giveaway and because of that I purchased and read the first book in the series, An Uncertain Choice. Personally, I enjoyed this book much more than the one before it. I liked the action scenes, the characters, and the settings better than I liked those features in the first book. While I liked Juliana better than I liked Rosemarie (from the first book), I still had a hard time getting attached to her. She brags quite frequently, which was tolerable for a while, but got on my nerves at certain points. I liked that she didn’t mind stealing at first, but came to realize it was not the path she should be taking in her life. I also liked that she was out in the battles with all of the guys, instead of being rescued most of the time like other female protagonists (cough, cough, Lady Rosemarie, cough, cough). She was a decent character, but she’s not a memorable one. Lord Collin was by far my favorite part of this book. While the guys in YA novels are hardly ever very interesting to me, Lord Collin pretty much made this book. Not his constant flirting, which was a bit hard to read, but his all around personality. He was funny, he was witty, and I was genuinely concerned for what would happen to him in this story. I’m glad that many of the chapters were told from his perspective, in contrast to An Uncertain Choice, where the male protagonist gets very few chapters in his voice and the ones that he does get are kind of dull. I never felt bored with Collin’s chapters. The plot for this story was good, but it felt a bit too much like the plot from the first book. Much of both stories were centered around helping the poor, which I have no objection to, but they never really helped the peasants in concrete ways. They gave out food and clothing, but eventually those things will run out or fall apart. What I would have liked to see was the MCs helping their people to help themselves. Setting aside farming land, altering laws, or creating jobs. I did like that in A Daring Sacrifice that they wound up building homes for the poor, but I still felt they could have done more. The peasants in this series actually seem kind of lazy because they aren’t farming or working at trades. Unfortunately, the peasants, apart from a few, were mostly just props in the story. Once again, A Daring Sacrifice did much better about including the poor as actual characters that An Uncertain Choice, but it still only gave about three peasants names. The fight scenes were exciting and interesting in this book, though the final battle seemed very similar to the fight scene at the end of the first one. I liked the physical fights as well as the verbal ones. Collin and Irene’s arguments were particularly interesting. Irene in herself was an amusing character and she reminded me a lot of Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice. Some of this stuff I’m just being snooty about, but as a whole I enjoyed this book immensely and I’m very happy to have read it. The third book to this series, For Love and Honor, is set to come out March 7th, 2017 and I am quite excited for it. Until next time! Image: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25280316-a-daring-sacrifice
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