Feminism, female friendships, and a widower architect with baggage... but (in my opinion) not enough "f*ckery".

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/ 5

As reviewed on Boobies & Noobies, a romance novel review podcast. Listen to the full review on your favorite podcast platform or on Boobies & Noobies website.

What a delight! Peckham turns a trope on its head for a delicious result that is anything but predictable. Looking forward to the next one!

I love the idea of a female rake, but I wasn't in love with this general story of a good-hearted woman who was done badly by a man. Maybe because it feels like a rake needs reforming while Seraphina just needs the power to do what she wants.

The Rakess by Scarlett Peckham is not your typical historical romance. Seraphine is not a traditional woman. She's unmarried and absolutely uninterested in becoming that way. She's all about living how she wants, taking lovers and promoting women's rights. Adam was very much traditional. He was a widower who had no want of a lover rather than a wife. Adam had traditional values of the time.
There were several aspects of this story that could be 'triggering'. They both had things to be sad about.
I had a difficult time really getting into this book.

I had such high hopes for this book. It seemed like several of my friends were RAVING about it. But I resisted it because it is historical and I so rarely read historical romance. But then Tasha L. Harrison tweeted about how feminist the book it and I feel like calling a book feminist means it is for me. Sadly, this book was not for me. It felt like it was dragging out the conflict FOREVER. Sera is so sad. Adam is not quite as sad. Usually books about sad people really work for me. And possibly if this were in a modern setting I would have lost my mind over it. But I didn’t. I DNFed around the 60% mark, after it took me about a week to get that far. I am sure that the praise for this book is well earned, it just didn’t work for me.

The Rackess turns the historical novel on its head and introduces a lively new series that will be gobbled up by romance readers. Instead of the the Rake, who is piled with women and drink, we get Seraphina Arden an enlightened woman who hates the double standards on men and women. She has become famous for her writing about how women should be equal to men and the plight of women in a male dominated world. She drinks, smokes, and takes lovers whenever she wants.

But when she goes back home to the sea for a month of writing her personal memoirs, she encounters a handsome Scot named Adam. A widower with two small children, he wasn't looking for a love affair during his summer at the sea. But when he meets Seraphina sparks fly.

I absolutely loved how this turned the traditional rake book upside down on its head. It also had an amazingly deep story about motherhood, traditional roles, and women's rights that struck right to my core. It is a beautiful novel that every romance reader to indulge in.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

There were parts of this book I loved and parts I hated. I haven't read anything quite like it before so I wasn't sure what to expect going in. I appreciate a sex positive heroine who is not ashamed of who she is and wants to empower other women. That aspect was great. I struggled with the historical language a bit, though I'm sure I'd get used to it if I read more of the genre. What I didn't like was how the storyline was either dirty sex or boringness. There didn't seem to be much in-between to drive the story forward. I found myself skimming to get through. Overall I'm glad I read it, though I'd mostly recommend it for readers who know they like historical romance and the rake trope.

What a different historical romance story! I never read this kind of book before. Female Rake! That is new - in a good way! I will definitely follow this author's upcoming books because the idea was splendid, the writing good and at some moments I had to pause and rethink in what century I am living it for the simple fact I was so into the book it felt like a real thing! LOL

Absolutely impeccable historical romance! I loved Scarlett's take on a female rake and everything about this book was lovely. I will definitely be purchasing it for my library and any sequels!

I have heard a lot of praise about Peckham's writing, to the point where I was a little nervous about reading this, given that I feared my expectations would be overblown. I shouldn't have worried.

This book is very, very good.

Sera is such a wonderful heroine: smart, bearing up under some horrific things that were done to her in the past, surrounded by true friends (girl gang!!). She's so well matched with Andrew, widowed father of two terrific kids whose starchiness can't hide his good heart and open mind.

There is also a VERY Leverage-like subplot where the girl gang +1 goes undercover which I enjoyed th heck out of.

I was given an Advance Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest review.

The title and description of this book makes romance readers drool. And while there are certainly things to love about Scarlett Peckham's novels and how she makes the mundane seem scandalous, the female rake worked better in theory than in practice. Instead of finding Sera's sexuality a positivity, it feels hollow and vacant and sad. She is tortured by "ruining" Adam, and the dynamic never really switches away from that.

I really enjoyed this! Ladies supporting ladies supporting other ladies, hot romance, and a story that I want to read the next one.

A scintillating, seductive and sensuous historical romance, The Rakess is a bold, high-spirited and captivating tale of forbidden passion, impossible sacrifices and devastating secrets that continues to cement Scarlett Peckham’s standing as one of the genre’s fastest-rising stars.

Seraphina Arden has spent the last couple of years shocking the members of polite society with her scandalous exploits with the opposite sex, her distaste for propriety and convention and her belief in equality for women. Sera has never cared a jot about what society thinks of her. As long as she has the approval of her fellow Sirens – a group of women who are just as passionate about social reform as she is – and the ability to live as she pleases, then she is perfectly happy and content. Sera has known her fair share of heartache and unhappiness and she certainly does not want any more of that in her life. She has sacrificed far too much to be the mistress of her own destiny and she will not give up her freedom for anyone – not even Adam Anderson, the man who comes to mean everything to her…

Adam Anderson is a widowed architect who is completely and utterly dedicated to his two children and his burgeoning business which he runs with his brother in law. Adam is working his fingers to the bone trying to establish his business and win the custom of the upper classes to help the growth and expansion of his firm. If the Scottish architect is to be accepted by the Ton, he not only needs to be the very best he can be, but also ensure that not a single whisper of scandal is attached to his name. However, a chance encounter with the delectable and desirable Seraphina Arden could well end up putting all of his hard work in jeopardy…

Sera’s reputation might precede her, but the more time Adam spends with the scandalous Miss Arden, the more he realizes that her notoriety has managed to totally eclipse and overwhelm her kind heart and generous spirit. As they begin to spend more and more time together, the impenetrable walls which they had built around their hearts quickly begin to crumble and giving into the attraction that sizzles between them soon proves inevitable. But torn between duty and desire, will Adam end up sacrificing this unexpected chance at happiness because of his business?

Sera has already lost so much and despite the fact that Adam has made her feel alive for the first time in ages, she cannot run the risk of getting her heart broken ever again. Are Sera and Adam going to let this second chance slip through their fingers? Or will they find a way to triumph over all the obstacles standing in their way?

Scarlett Peckham’s The Rakess is a beguiling historical romance that flips the conventions of the genre on its head and deftly and expertly delights and entertains its readers with a delicious blend of wicked wit, steamy sensuality, heart-pounding drama and searing emotion.

The Rakess features two brilliantly drawn characters who are flawed, strong, vulnerable, intelligent and incredibly believable and their love story is so exquisitely written readers will feel every emotion Sera and Adam go through.

The Rakess is not your traditional historical romance and it is certainly not for the faint-hearted, but it is a multi-layered and mature tale readers will struggle to put down.

The Rakess (Society of Sirens #1). By Scarlett Peckham. 2020. Avon (ARC eBook).

⁠Known throughout England as The Rakess, Seraphina Arden has set Society gossip ablaze with the news of her upcoming memoirs. With plans to expose the man who ruined her and use the profits to open a home and school for ruined women, Sera sets off to where it all began—to Cornwall. There she meets Adam Anderson, a Scotsman and architect hired on by the neighboring estate to oversee a project. The handsome widow and father of two children is too wholesome—too nice, for Sera’s taste; but she desires him nonetheless.

For all that Sera appears as a siren in his dreams, Adam sees her as a lonely and vulnerable woman and wishes to extend his friendship so that she doesn’t have to remain lost in her own reputation. Now, she has seduced him into the sea. Will the beautiful woman who he has seen be so tender to his children help mend his own broken heart, or dash him against the rocks without a care?

The Rakess is an emotional read with a generous does of steam. While I wasn’t exactly a fan of Sera’s decisions in the last few chapters, nor the epilogue, I enjoyed Adam and Sera’s story—a friends-to-lovers romance with a bit of danger mixed in.

Adam is in town to get a job done when he mets Seraphina. He knows her reputations but is drawn to her. The more time they spend together, the more he sees that her reputation is not all that she is. But he can't afford the scandal that would come his way if it was known that they were having an affair. How long can they keep it a secret?

Seraphina is in the home she grew up in to write her memoir. She plans to expose the man that ruined her all those years ago and the proceeds will go to financing her dream of helping others. But when Adam gets too close to her, she does what she always does and pushes him away.

While they both fell in love, they each have their own reasons for not admitting it. Do these two stand a chance of getting their HEA?

I loved this story!! It was definitely different from the historical romances that I read. We have a female rake and a lonely widower. It broke my heart to read how Seraphina was being treated by most of the people that she didn't consider a friend. Even though she said that her ill treatment didn't bother her, the way she hid behind a bottle told you otherwise. I love that Adam saw a side of her that she tried to hide from everyone except those closest to her and pushed her to be a better person.

This was a great read and a nice change from what I normally read in this genre. I'm excited to see what she comes up with for the next book in the series!

Such an interesting and sexy read. A twist on the story of a rake. A fight against unfair societal standards. Great characters who are authentic and remain authentic. Seraphina does not change or give up her causes for love. Adam is a man faced with a lot of choices and has to decide if a being with a a Rakess is what he wants. Such a great read that sticks it to society and introduces a whole group of delicious characters!

Let me start this review by stating that this book will not be for everyone. This is the most unique historical romance I have ever read, and for some people who only want fluffy/romcom historicals, you will be disappointed by this.

So, I went into this with pretty low expectations bc a lot of people I follow gave this 3 stars. However, I ended up LOVING this and I thought it was absolutely incredible. I immediately adored all of the characters, and while Seraphina’s story was heart wrenching, there was a lot of beauty to it as well. This punched me right in the feels and there were even times where I teared up and cried a bit.

I think a lot of people will go into this thinking/hoping it’ll be a fun book about a woman who doesn’t give a f*ck and does who and whatever she wants, but that’s not really what this is. This is definitely a drama, not a comedy. We learn about what made Sera into the woman she is today, which at the beginning of this book is a depressed woman who uses sex and alcohol to cope with her past while also being a badass in terms of fighting for equality for women. She eventually starts working to overcome her issues while also falling in love with a wonderful man in the process.

Something I also enjoyed about this was the atmosphere most of the book took place in. I could really imagine the coastal town where Sera and Adam meet, and the stormy scenes were just everything. Also the smut in this was pretty great.

I can’t recommend this enough and I cannot wait to read the next books in this series!!

*I voluntarily read and reviewed an ARC of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.* 

DNF @ 77% 

A rakess instead of a rake -- women taking back the power and being free with sex! I was ready to love this book. I will say first though I enjoyed the author's note and there some good lines. 

Unfortunately, this one didn't work for me. It was more slow-paced than I usually like and while I was hoping for more sex positivity that isn't really what I got. Although, (another positive here) I feel like this book is quite historically accurate. 
The characters are rather... bland. Seraphina is kind of unlikable and Adam truly felt boring. There are some good scenes between them though and I like that Adam tries to stick up for his thoughts and morals -- I dislike how Seraphina kept pushing him... 

In the end, I probably could have kept going -- I was determined to finish this book -- but the author pulled out a trope I really, really dislike. So, I decided to drop it. 

This isn't a horrible book though, I think people who really enjoy historical fiction will enjoy this one, it just wasn't for me.

ARC courtesy of Netgalley

In her opening Author's Note, Peckham writes about the idea with which this first book in her new series began: of writing a romance featuring not a male, but a female, rake. Given the double standard in which our culture (especially in the past, but also still today) praises men for their sexual exploits while condemning and shaming women for theirs, simply switching the sex of the traditional rake figure isn't really workable. At least, not without invoking another trope, Peckham argues: the trope of the ruined woman. Though Peckham argues that the novel which follows combines the two tropes, the book ultimately depends far more on the latter than on the former.

A second source for her story, Peckham notes, is Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman she discovered via reading Charlotte Gordon's dual biography of Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Invoking the elder Wollstonecraft set up certain expectations for me, a scholar of 18th and 19th century British Lit: specifically, expectations about the character of the female protagonist, which may have made me not care for the first chapters of the story (because they don't really deliver on those expectations). Wollstonecraft did have several passionate love affairs outside of marriage, it's true, but I'd never consider her a female rake, someone who indulged in sex for sex's sake only, without caring for her partner. Her attitude was pretty much the opposite: she cared too much for the three men with whom she had extramarital affairs, while the first two ultimately treated her much as a rake would, by abandoning her. In her Author's Note, Peckham refers to Wollstonecraft's most famous work as <i>A Vindication of the Rights of Women</i> rather than its actual title, <i>A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</i> (at least in the ARC I read; was it corrected in the actual book?), which suggests that she was more familiar with the biography of Wollstonecraft than with her ideas (Wollstonecraft is deeply suspicious of sex in <i>The Vindication</i>). Peckham does say that Wollstonecraft was "certainly not a freewheeling rake," which suggests that Wollstonecraft might not be the best model for her main character, Seraphina Arden, whom we first meet on her way to a sexual tryst with her latest of many lovers.

The story that Peckham spins starts off quite slowly. Seraphina has left London to stay in the Cornwall house she's inherited from her parents, near the town which witnessed her "ruin" as a young woman and shamed her out of society. Since then, Sera has become infamous by penning books about the wrongs done to women by society, and by lecturing and advocating for female rights (the writing of such works is not at all ahistorical, but the idea that she would become financially well-off by so-doing certainly is; Wollstonecraft was often scrambling to make financial ends meet). Sera has left London to write her latest book, a memoir, which promises to reveal the identity of the aristocratic man who initially ruined her (a secret that the book keeps hidden from the reader, too). But the townspeople are not at all happy at her return, and someone tries intimidate and frighten her by leaving offensive signs and dead birds on her property.

In the opening chapter, Seraphina is off to a tryst with her latest casual lover, one of many she's taken over the 12 years since she was last in Cornwall. But instead of finding Henri at the abandoned belvedere on the edge of her property, she meets Scotsman and widower Adam Anderson, an architect working on remodeling the estate next to Seraphina's ramshackle house. Sera ends up sending Henri away ("Last night, Henri had tragically revealed himself to be that most unwelcome of creatures: a cuddler") and later propositioning Adam. But Adam, once as adventurous and reckless as Sera, turns Sera down (due to interesting backstory which I won't reveal here). But about a third of the way into the story, he reconsiders, and the two engage in a passionate sexual tryst. And despite his beta hero presentation, Adam turns out to be quite the experienced and daring lover, a perfect sexual match for Sera.

Before they begin their affair, Sera is having difficulty writing her memoir, since she's never really faced the trauma of what happened to her. That trauma, it turns out, as is the case with many a male rake in historical romance, has led her to engage in sex without emotional connection: "Erotic entertainment was like a trapdoor from one's worries. She longed to slide out of her mind and into bed." Thus, Peckham's novel isn't really a female sex-positive story, but rather the story of a woman who uses sex (and alcohol) wrongly, to keep herself emotionally safe, a woman who must learn to stop pushing others away and to settle into a long-term monogamous heterosexual relationship. Minor characters suggest that this isn't the only possible way for a woman to be happy in society, but the main romance plot certainly does.

All that said, when we finally get to spend real time with Adam and Sera together, Peckham gives us complex, engagingly drawn characters, characters with whom I found myself growing more and more intrigued. Adam, you see, is taken aback, even hurt, by Sera's emotional distance ("men were for displaying wit and cleavage to, not emotions") after their first sexual encounter. For her part, Sera thinks "She had been wrong about him. He was not the kind of man who became ashamed after sex. He was the kind who became moved." Walls up, Sera coldly pushes him away. Thinking of his two young children, and his sister, all of whom have accompanied him to Cornwall, Adam breaks off their affair. But then he comes back...

Only to be interrupted by the novel's subplot, about Sera's mentor being secreted away in a lunatic asylum by her husband, and Sera's effort, with her two other disreputable female friends (a painter and a courtesan), to find her and set her free. I wished that Peckham had saved that story for another book, as it is given short shrift in this one. Because when that rescue is quickly dispensed with, the story quickly returns to Sera and threats by unknown townspeople against her. Which concludes with a huge argument between Adam and a drunken Sera, each of them unaware of the hurts and reasons the other is acting and reacting they way they are. Part 1 of the novel ends with their painful separation.

Part 2 is set in London, several months later, when Sera is on the verge of publishing her memoir, and Adam is growing increasingly stressed by the demands of his business partnership with his brother-in-law. The two encounter one another again, and gradually agree to be friends. But their attraction soon overcomes their scruples, and they begin an affair once again. But when Sera's reputation endangers Adam's business prospects, their relationship is once again at risk.

So, I have mixed feelings about Peckham's latest. I still love the wit and sensuality of her prose ("[her name] would feel delicious rolling off his tongue, with all those slinking syllables"), and the depth of her character development. The story starts off slowly; it took me until about a third of the way through before I stopped being annoyed and put off by Sera because she wasn't like Wollstonecraft and because she is so off-putting herself, and began feeling emotionally connected to her. Adam is a wonderful character, deeply kind AND sexually adventurous (anal play is no biggie to him). Peckham does portray Seraphina's life as difficult because she doesn't follow social norms, but even so, the idea that many women would contribute to her and her friends' efforts to build a "philanthropic institute that would work for the advancement and education of the female sex" is wildly pie in the sky for this period. It makes it seem as if the advances of women's rights advocates in the past were far easier than they were, which doesn't give such women as Wollstonecraft enough credit for their radicalism in a time when women's rights were hugely more constrained than they are today.

Seraphina is a rakess - passionate about equality of the sexes, pursuing her sexual urges, and drinking way too much. She goes back to her childhood home to write an explosive memoir that will name a peer of the realm in the scandal of her youth and while there she meets her hot, Scottish, widowed neighbor.

What begins as a convenient summer romance quickly deepens into something more as they learn more about each other. The yearning to be more are in direct conflict with outside influences.

Thoughts: I really like the premise of the Rakess. Having a female character who is the rake, who loves sex and has it, who takes pleasure in what life has to offer despite and perhaps in spite of society’s expectations. The beginning of the book caught me. I loved the scene where they met on the bluffs, I liked the friendship between the society of Sirens femmes and their badass bravery, and I definitely liked the exploration of the ways that society shames women in a scandal but not the men involved.

What I didn’t like feels like it falls in the spoiler category so I’ll give you an opaque view of it. I didn’t love that her being a “Rakess” did not present itself the way I thought I was being promised in the opening chapters of the book. Which really lowered the rating and overall enjoyment for me.

Side note: I am so glad that contraception is a thing in modern life and that childbirth is not as dangerous as it used to be. Those hurdles really help with equality.

McDreamy to McSteamy: McDreamy with a brogue

Classy to Nasty: Classy - but I thought it was gonna be rougher based on her initial excitement over him grabbing her arm.

Hero rating: 🍆🍆🍆

Heroine rating: 🍑🍑🍑

Overall rating: ⭐⭐⭐