I was really excited to read this book even though the first one was just okay for me. An Arab heroine who is also a bonesetter? Gimme!

Hanna is a spinster who is determined to open a dispensary to continue the practice she learned from her father. The obstacles are many and she's not undaunted until Viscount Griffin enters the picture. Griff lives in constant pain from a war injury. He's also the main suspect in his parent's murders. When he witnesses a beautiful woman dislocating the wrist of an obnoxious aristocrat he's fascinated by her and then suspicious when he recognizes the necklace she's wearing is the same one his mother was wearing when she was murdered.

This book started with a bang. Hanna strolls into a tavern-like a boss and upon finding out idiot regency frat boy was just messing with her, she angrily grabs his hand and dislocates his wrist. Then she strolls right back out. I wish I could say the rest of the book is this exciting but alas!

Besides Hanna's heritage and skill set, I found very little else to like about this book. The romantic tension is non-existent as the entire story is driven by the mystery plot which anyone can guess who the culprit is as soon as he walks onto the page. The hero is as exciting as a bowl of day-old oatmeal. He does absolutely nothing even remotely romantic. He proposes to another woman to save her honor and this drags on until almost the very end. What about Hanna? Well, when she needs him, he literally rubs his forehead and mutters the equivalent of "oh, dear". This reader needs a hero who is going to turn the world inside out for the woman he loves. Not one who shuffles his feet and whines about how difficult everything is 🙄

Griff was a cardboard cutout compared to Hanna. While I did like her and she was the saving grace for me, I lost respect for her when suddenly her character decided that putting her career and reputation on the line was okay as long as she gets to make out with the hot Viscount. The choice to have sexual relations with Griff in her damn place of work, a place she fought so hard to get and keep open, was so out of character and so out of the blue that if this had not been an ARC I would have closed the book right then and there. It was ridiculous and reversed everything she said and did up to that point. I skimmed over the love scene because I was not invested in the relationship. The mystery gets solved, Griff makes some completely unoriginal declarations. The end. 2 1/2 stars for Hanna the rest gets the side eye from me.

⭐⭐.5 /5
🔥/5

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my review copy.

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.

Q: what’s one of your fave 2021 covers? I think this one is gorgeous!

Shout-out to Diana Quincy for writing a viscount/bonesetter couple in The Viscount Made Me Do It, a daring combo that was fun to read for the first time.

Hanna Zaydan is the bonesetter in question, a woman who faces discrimination on account of her profession, her sex, & her Arabic ancestry & culture. But she’s not bowing down to anyone’s idea of what she should do, not even her mother & grandmother, who want her to marry an Arabic man & stop practicing bonesetting.

Viscount Thomas Ellis “Griff” has spent the last couple of years in tremendous pain but that’s not why he visits Hanna. It’s because he sees her wearing his murdered mother’s necklace & wants to question her about its providence.

The fact that she heals his arm when others haven’t been able to garners his respect for life & her beauty & demeanor capture his more romantic admiration.

But there are big obstacles between them & tbh, I had my doubts about how it would all work out.

The characterization of Hanna is often delightful. She’s ambitious, skilled, & she really isn’t afraid of much. There’s a flower scene with Griff—where she really lets her feelings go— that I adore.

But Griff is frequently frustrating to me. One mark in his favor is his appreciation for Hanna’s skill, but I find his overall attitude toward her & their relationship to be not as romantic as I would like. There are a couple of moments where I feel like he’s somewhat cold.

Hanna is a compelling heroine but sadly the romance in this one is a little lackluster for me.

3.5 ⭐️. Release date: 07/27.


CW:


Xenophobia; misogyny; murder in past

3.5 Stars

I absolutely loved book one in this series, so I had super high expectations going into this book. I loved Griff's character in the first book as the hero's friend, so I was excited to see him and uncover more about his tragic past and his parents' deaths.

What was most intriguing to me at the start of this book was Hanna and her profession. Hanna is a bonesetter and is not taken seriously by any medical professional at the time. Griff sees that she's wearing his mother's necklace that his mother had the day she died, so he immediately is suspicious of Hanna and wants to know how the got the necklace. To get closer to her, Griff asks Hanna to take a look at his arm, which has been painful ever since he injured it in the war two years ago. To Griff's surprise, he actually starts to like Hanna and she is able to fix his arm, something no doctor has ever been able to do. I enjoyed how Hanna and Griff started to like each other, but I wanted to feel more urgency regarding Griff's parents' murder. He had spent the last ten years having people think he killed his parents, yet when he's so close to figuring it out, he drags his feet and doesn't really want to find out. I get that he was scared of the truth, but it felt like he didn't really care and didn't want to find out right away. So much time passed in the book when he could have just followed clues much more quickly and figured things out on his own. I also wanted just a little more from the romance and just a little more about Hanna and her family. I know that Hanna is Arab and that she took over her father's bone setting business, but I would have liked to see her family just a little more to understand their dynamic and why she was so adamant she could never marry Griff and had to marry an Arab man. Sure we heard her say it over and over again, but I wanted to feel it from her family more too.

Overall, I really enjoyed the story, there were just components that were a bit lacking and I wanted a bit more from. The urgency of uncovering the murderer of Griff's parents, the romance, Hanna and her family...I wanted just a little more from everything. But overall it was a fun read!

New to me author. I really enjoyed this book! Well written,loved the characters and plot! Can't wait to read more.

Along with lots of romance and sexual tension, this novel has a suspenseful mystery. I thought the book a bit slow to start but soon I was turning pages to find out what would happen next. There are surprises and twists that make this a compelling and enjoyable read. There is a villain who is truly evil. Although this is book two of the series it is a standalone novel. However the first book, HER NIGHT WITH THE DUKE, is also a most enjoyable read. Characters from that book make brief appearances in this book. I highly recommend this book as well as the series.

This was an enjoyable read and slight continuation from the previous book, Her Night with the Duke. This story explore many topics such as women in the medical field, cultural/racial prejudices, family grief, and more. Yet her characters still felt alive, relatable, and by no means perfect as they tried to show the other what they truly felt. I enjoyed how Quincy delves into the historical background of being Bonesetter which is a profession I had not been familiar with until now. Quincy has clearly done her research and it also makes the genre of regency romance even more dynamic than the classic "ballroom drama." Griff and Hanna had great banter, they clearly need to work through some trust issues but overall their passion and desire to see and respect the other was very swoon-worthy.

Hanna was trained by her father to be a bonesetter. As a woman AND a bonesetter, she struggles to gain respect in the medical community. By pure coincidence, Griff crosses paths with Hanna. Hanna makes a lasting first impression, but what Griff notices the most about Hanna is the fact that she is wearing the necklace his mother was wearing the night she was murdered. Under the guise of seeking healing for a war injury, Griff starts seeing Hanna hoping to finally figure out who killed his parents.

I loved this book! There is much to be said about the way Hanna is treated throughout the book and I loved how she refused to allow society to put her in the box they wanted to. Griff definitely steps in it more than once, but as the book goes on, he starts to recognize the lack of respect his peers have for Hanna, not only as a bonesetter, but as a human being. This book was absolutely delightful and is my favorite historical romance of the year thus far! If you love heroines who are ahead of their time and love to read two characters longing to be together, I would highly recommend this to you!

I love that you get to glimpse into the way other cultures bond. Hanna and Griff's story is so heartwarming. They had a chance meeting in a bar that would alter their lives forever. Hanna is trying to figure her future out while Griff is holding on to the past. While they try to meet in the middle, they have a lot to work through. Really good story!

I loved this one. The heroine was independent, kind and I liked learning about the art of bone setting because that is what the heroine does for a living. I did feel that the mystery bit of this was a bit obvious, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time reading this historical romance.

I really enjoyed this book. I hadn’t read a book by this author before and didn’t know what to expect; I’m glad I have her a try. While the villain was extremely predictable, the rest of the story was quite good. I will definitely read more by this author.

I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

I've read a lot of historical romances set in Regency or Victorian London, and I've never before met a character quite like Hanna Zayden. Hanna is a skilled bonesetter from a Arab family that owns an import/export business, although in each generation of her family, there is one talented bonesetter who sees their work as their life's calling. So it is for Hanna, which is why she finds herself at 26 still unmarried; after all, what husband would not constrain her in her pursuit of healing people?

Enter Griff--Viscount Griffin--who goes from suspecting Hanna of being a charlatan and possible thief, to believing in her wholeheartedly after she demonstrates her healing abilities, to being her friend and love. They get bound up in a complicated plot that continually draws them back together, even when they repeatedly realize they should stay apart.

Hanna offers a much-needed freshness to a genre that tends towards white debutantes (even unconventional ones), and it was exciting to consider how gender, race, ethnicity, and social strata came to bear on both her romantic and professional concerns. Her character alone is worth the whole read.

However, she and Griff have minimal heat--like a lukewarm shower rather than a crackling fire. I believe them as good friends. I do not believe that their romantic or sexual chemistry is such that they are drawn inexorably to one another despite all the reasons they should stay apart.

Two reasons for this: there is a lot of telling and not a lot of showing here. We are told they miss one another, or that they love one another, or that they are attracted to one another, but it's hard to see it in Hanna or Griff's actions and thoughts. And that may be due to the other reason: the plot. There's an ostensible mystery here, although it's one you'll figure out within the first 1/3 of the book. Because the book is so mystery-driven, a lot of the interactions between the characters are forced proximity to move the action along. The plot could have be thinned considerably, and more time spent on bringing the characters together organically and showing the development of the romance.

It's not a bad story, but you will neither feel like Sherlock as you try to solve the mystery, nor will you be fanning yourself as romance heats up on the page. However, it's worth reading to become acquainted with Hanna.

Thank you for the ARK copy. This is the second book in Quincy's romance series set in London following a Middle Eastern family of cotton exporters. However, this novel is about Hanna a bonesetter. A bonesetter is a man's job and out of place in London.
Hanna and Griff, a noble find love and passion together. Great own voices read! 💖

Now I'll be honest, I'm about to be a medical student (this fall officially), so I'm not a huge fan of the whole bonesetter thing. Statistics show that these methods, in a majority of cases, cause complications and do more harm than good. The good that they do can, in all the cases I've seen, be attributed to the natural healing of our bodies (meaning the healing would've happened without intervention). I disclose my very strong opinions of this up front because I felt like it was a pretty strong bias I held and honestly didn't endear me to the main character or the story itself.

Now that that's out of the way, I'm going to leave my actual objections on the basis of health science/medical research behind and critique/comment on the book itself. Even though I hold that bias I talked about above, I LOVED Hanna. The fact that I like her despit my sus-ness towards her profession is remarkable for me and this is just Diana Quincy doing a good job with developing a likable character. Hanna is so genuinely committed to her family and patients both and is so intelligent. She wants to succeed make money and a life for herself and is unapologetic about it. I adored her SO much.

Griff didn't endear himself to me as much as Hanna did, but he was a great foil to her. I really felt the tension between them and loved the way the bounced off each other. The story does have many other likable characters who fill the pages and while I love a well written secondary character, I felt at times I wanted less extra characters and more Griff and Hanna scenes.

Overall, I really really enjoyed this. And I'm happy that this is an OwnVoices book!! I feel like the main thing I didn't like in the book is Hanna's profession and that's something that is utterly and totally a me thing. This book is the second in the series and I'm going to go back to the first and read it!!

4.5 stars - The villain was pretty easy to discern, but otherwise, this is a pretty amazing read. It checks all my boxes:

☑️ Strong heroine
☑️ A dedicated and loyal hero
☑️ Sexy times
☑️ A villain I love to hate
☑️ HEA

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

This was a solid follow to Her Night With the Duke, thought not quiet as good. I really loved that Hanna wasn't willing to compromise on what she wanted in life. I also thought that Griff was a character worth caring about which is not always the case with the male leads in historical romance. I also super love that the series is adding much needed diversity to the genre.

This was a delightful book that I didn't want to put down! Not only that, I'm now obsessed with the history of bonesetting. It's so fascinating and I really want to read On Bone-Setting that Diana Quincy talks about in her author's note.

The story follows Hanna, a bonesetter, and Griff, a viscount recovering from a war injury and searching for his parents' murderer. I don't know if it would necessarily be called a meet-cute, but the book starts with a fantastic encounter in a coffee house that really sets everything in motion for the rest of the book. I loved how the story tackled issues with ethnicity, class, and sexism; Hanna was so competent and no-nonsense, it was wonderful to read about a heroine who is so good at what she does and knows who she is. Not only that, she goes after what (or who) she wants! Griff had so much going on personally, but his goodness throughout was very clear.

I will say there were a few moments that took me out of the story while reading. These mainly occurred when there was a very sudden change from the topic at hand to topics that involved much more kissing. There were lots of "this is very important" or "we can't do this here/now" moments that jumped immediately into ignoring whatever was just said. Also, it was very hard to believe that as a medical professional, even one that focused on the musculoskeletal system, Hanna was so naive about all things sexual. You're telling me this woman can reduce a shoulder dislocation on her own but doesn't know what an orgasm is? It was one stretch too far for me.

Despite those few things that nagged at me, I really did love this story! There were multiple moments that I actually gasped at how plot strings played out; even if you know how things are going to go, she writes it in such a way that it's still so enjoyable to read with little surprises tucked in along the way! I also loved these characters, I can't wait to go back and read Her Night with the Duke, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that Rafi and Selina get their book next!

I really think romance readers are going to enjoy reading it this summer!

We need more own voices and this story fit the bill. I loved the chemistry between Hanna and Griffin. Hanna is of Arab heritage and is a bonesetter. Griffin thinks it's a scam and she can't help him until of course she does. I did think there were more characters than necessary but that is a minor nit pick for such a lovely book.

I really liked this book! I found that I struggled to connect with / like the h/H in the first book of this series, but that was not the case with this one! I found Hanna and Griff both very likable and I loved their connection.

What is this book about?:
The core of this romance is a different classes romance between a viscount and a middle class tradeswoman, as well as a romance among culturally different people. There is also a story throughout about the hero's parents' murder and one about the heroine's career.

What I liked:
The connection between the hero and heroine was great! I really loved Hanna and her commitment to her craft. I couldn't put this book down - great writing, wonderful characters, and intriguing side plots. I also much preferred Griff over Hunt from book one.

What I didn't like:
Sometimes I feel like there were some unnecessary jumps and a couple holes in the progress of the story. Also - the villain was incredibly predictable. The end was a bit rushed.

I really liked this one and I really want a story about Leela's brother!
4.5/5 stars

Lord Griffin's parents were murdered when he was young and the Ton thinks he did it. Miss Zaydan is an Arab Bonesetter who helps Lord Griffin with an old Injury. They are from different worlds and their union not allowed by society but their passion for each other says otherwise. It was an interesting read that was predictable. The passion btw the two leads were palpable. Love the Arab representation.

There's a lot to like about this Own Voices historical -- first and foremost, its heroine, bonesetter Hanna Zaydan. While I never warmed up to the viscount hero, Griff, it was easy to see why he was captivated by Hanna, with her ambition, fierce intelligence, and commitment to her patients, friends, and family. I particularly loved the scenes with Hanna and her grandmother and would happily have read many more. While the book occasionally felt a touch overcrowded with characters and plot, I really did love Hanna and look forward to reading more of Quincy's heroines.