Thanks to Avon and Harper Voyager for this eARC!

I have really liked all of the books in this series, but this one was my favorite. The best way I can describe it is as a Victorian (I think Victorian, they say there's a queen, and the reform vibes feel Victorian, but could be earlier) reimagining of Pretty Woman. Loved! Take me to the English countryside - I would love the walks!

The Mistress Esperience
by Scarlett Peckman

Setting:
Victorian England

Characters:
Thaïs Magdalene
Lord Alastair Eden
Colin Camberwell
Seraphina
Adam
Cornelia
Rafe
Eleanor
Maria
Hattie
Sophie

Tropes:
Class Difference
Smex worker heroine
Blue stockings
The Society of Sirens
Lessons of seduction

Goodreads:
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 6 stars fabulous read

Spice:
🌶 🌶 🌶

Review:
I absolutely loved this book. It was 6 stars and one of my new all time favorites. I quick way to describe it, is historical romance meets pretty woman. Thaïs was an absolute joy of a character I loved her wit, charm, and sexual assureddness. She was a spitfire and wonderful. Eden was a sweet, caring and passionate hero. I adored the banter, especially when Thaïs wanted to make Eden blush. The tender scenes when Thaïs got sick, utter perfection. I haven't read a historical this well written in a long time. Peckman has a bright anf glorious future. I can't wait for her next book.

Thais’ only purpose is to make Lord Eden blush and push him out of his comfort zone with her crude language for her own enjoyment. She’s teaching him how to court his future wife and along the way they obviously fall for each other. The chemistry between Eden and Thais was present from the moment they were on page together. They knew each other before the book begins so they are confortable with each other’s presence except Eden is a little prudish when Thais is comfortably naked. Enjoyed reading.

What a great conclusion to the Society of Sirens trilogy. While The Rakess will forever be my favorite book in the series, The Mistress Experience is a close second. I was pleasantly surprised by the unexpected sweetness between Thais and Alastair. There was such great emotional maturity between our main couple that their relationship never felt forced. Must read for anyone that loves the inexperience MMC/experienced FMC trope. Thank you to Netgalley for the eARC!

Overall 4/5
Heat 5/5!!!!

I liked this one! Once again the author goes a great job of giving us well defined characters which both disrupt & subvert the typical genre expectations & tropes, & the spicy scenes are frequent and sizzling. I found the conclusion of it yo wrap a bit suddenly, considering the significant social implications involved in this couple getting together I’d expected a bit more time spent parsing that out, but ultimately it is still a satisfying conclusion to the series.

This book was everything I want in a historical romance! It’s my first by this author and I will now be reading everything else they’ve ever written. I really really loved this one.

I loved the characters and their back and forth, I felt like they were both making each other braver as time went on. Very much an opposites attract match but I thought they were so sweet. I also loved the underlying plot of Thaïs and her friends building their home for educating and helping women. Thankfully, I didn’t feel I was missing much by not having read the previous two books in the series, everything was explained enough. (Though I will be reading them asap bc I loved the bits of the other couples we saw in this one!) This premise was so fun to me and not something I’ve read before, it also lead really well to the ultimate conflict between them without feeling super cheesy.

I really enjoyed this and look forward to reading a lot more from this author! Also, this series has stunning covers I can’t wait to have on my shelves.

Wow, I have no idea where to begin because I just finished reading this and my heart is overwhelmed. I went into this book expecting it to be a super fun, entertaining and steamy romance, and it ended up being that and so much more. I already loved the first two books in this Society of Sirens series, but this one was my absolute favorite yet.

The Mistress Experience by Scarlett Peckham follows Thaïs and Lord Eden, Alastair. Thaïs is one of London's most famous prostitutes and she takes part in an auction for the cause of women's rights - where the winner gets to spend a month with her. That ends up being Eden who couldn't be more different from every patron Thaïs ever had before. He wants her help to learn the ways of pleasing his future wife. He is shy and proper and a perfectionist in all things and he wants to be the best husband and lover possible.

From the premise, I expected this to be quite a fast-burn sexy historical romance, but what makes it so incredibly special is the friendship and tenderness that develops between them before everything else. They're isolated together in a small town, trying to hide their identities, and they have only each other for company. It has a bit of the city girl/small town guy dynamic, which I never saw like this in a historical romance, only contemporary, and it was so much fun.

The relationship between them is so sweet, loving, tender, and deeply moving. It feels real and genuine, and it made my heart ache the whole way through. It was so clear that they were utterly perfect for each other from the start. Only Alastair was oblivious and stubbornly clung to societal expectations and propriety, and Thaïs held the belief that no one like him could ever marry her. I rooted for them so hard the whole way through, and couldn't wait to see their happily ever after.

I also have to talk about how incredibly iconic Thaïs is. She's one of the most wonderful heroines I've ever read about in my life. She's unapologetically herself, independent, confident, funny, a bit spoiled, smart, caring, kind, and so many other things. From page one, I knew the book would be the best time, even just because of her.

And Alastair is so damn sweet and kind, and I loved him just as much. I absolutely love the way this book breaks typical stereotypes we see in m/f romances, and in a historical setting at that. He's the shy and inexperienced and nervous one, and we need to see more male characters like that. He's also observant, thoughtful, and attentive, and such a wonderful romance hero.

I could gush about this book for days because of how special of a reading experience it was. I can't wait for it to be published so I can hold a copy in my hands. If it wasn't clear, if you would like to read a small town, forced proximity, sweet & emotional & sexy & tender historical romance with the most incredible heroine and the sweetest hero, you have to pick this up.

✨The Buttoned-Up to Completely Undone Earl Experience✨

Well this is by far my favorite book in the series!! It was really everything the summary stated it would be: A buttoned-up earl getting sex lessons from a notorious courtesan. He was so bumbling and earnest with his sexy spectacles and cooking abilities!! And she was a city girl trapped in the countryside trying to loosen him up.

I do love an alpha hero, but Alistair has got to be my favorite hero type. I had so much fun seeing his embarrassment slowly turn to confidence. Thaïs had a heart of gold and I loved her so much. She was so bright and fun. I think it could’ve been a bit steamier—hello, Chekov’s sex toys!!—but it was definitely a hot read. Sex lessons will ALWAYS hit different.

I will say, I do think Peckham phoned it in with the epilogue. It was more so an epilogue for the series as a whole rather than for the couple. Like it gave me a bit, but I wanted to see them at least a year out!!! It was practically expected from what we learned throughout the books and their wants for the future!!!

The third act hurt, but in a good way. I do think we needed like one more chapter??? Just to ease the heartache a bit and see them happy with nothing having over their heads. Also how did the scandal go??? This clearly seemed like the final book in the series, but hopefully Peckham will continue to write stories for some of the side characters.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5 🌶️🌶️.75/5


P.S. She better have gotten a kitten!!!! These are the things I need to know!!! Chekov’s kitten!!


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

A fun and sexy historical romance! I loved the plot as well as the chemistry and sweetness between the main characters. The cover is also breathtaking. Thanks Avon and Netgalley for my copy.

I AM OBSESSED. 🚨🚨🚨 New all-time favorite alert.

This book is everything I want in a historical romance and I devoured it in twenty-four hours. I am a HUGE @scarlettpeckham fan and the last installment of the Society of Sirens series delivers so hard 😭😭. Thaïs and Alastair are PERFECT and the way their love story unfolds is just chef’s kiss 🧑🏼‍🍳💋.

Thaïs is a notorious courtesan and Alastair is a respectable albeit politically progressive earl. He wants to marry, but lacks experience (and has one persistent problem in the bedroom!!! calling all readers who like a man who struggles to, uh, contain his excitement—I AM THIS READER). So what does he do? Pay for a month of Thaïs’s time (all proceeds going to the Sirens’ Institute for Women, of course) so that she can teach him how to please his future wife. She is bawdy and loud and chaotic. He is buttoned-up and secretly (okay, not secretly at all) a complete simp for her. It’s soooooo good.

I will also add that this book is relatively low-angst for Peckham, so if you are interested in her work but like a read with fewer barriers for the central couple, I’d recommend starting here!

Thank you so much to @avonbooks for the ARC. THE MISTRESS EXPERIENCE will be out June 25th and can be preordered now. Do it, you won’t be disappointed!! This is one I’ll be thinking about for a long time 🙏🏼.

This is an amazing book that will delight romance fans! I also just really love the cover, which I found striking.

I really enjoyed this book - but it's not a typical historical romance. I hadn't read the first 2 books in the series but I think this book could be read as a standalone without too much confusion.

First the cover of this book is just *chef's kiss*. You don't see a lot of bodice ripper covers like this any more and I loved the whole aesthetic of it. It threw my heart back to reading the Johanna Lindsey books with the Fabio covers back in the 1990s.

Thais is a bold and daring courtesan who has auctioned off 1 month of her services to fund a school for women and girls. She is surprised when the man who she thought won the auction was merely acting as a stand-in for Lord Eden - who is prim and proper. I loved how much Thais tried her best to bother and tempt Lord Eden all throughout the book. Her crass jokes made me giggle (because I may have the humor of a 12 year old boy).

I liked the subplot of Lady Elinor and her children - which helped both Thais and Lord Eden focus on what they wanted. Plus the groveling of Lord Eden was perfect -- when he finally realized how much he messed up.

Thank you to NetGalley, Avon and Harper, and Scarlett Peckham for an ARC of this book! Definitely a book to look out for this summer when you are craving something a little spicy with a regency feeling.

This is a gorgeous, sex-positive, feminist romance that answers the perennial historical romance reader question: "how do all these heroes come by their sexual prowess?" The answer here is sex lessons.

Thaïs is loud, proud, and unabashed about being a sex worker, and her bawdy sense of humor kept me laughing throughout the book, and kept our hero perpetually blushing. Alistair is starchy, charmingly sweet hero— a cinnamon roll, if you will. Where he deviates from most HR heroes is that he has performance anxiety, a bit of a hair-trigger dick, and he's been celibate for a long time. Enter Thaïs, who agrees to teach him by way of sex lessons. I'm a huge fan of this trope, and the fact that it's a sexually-experienced woman teaching a less-experienced man is something I really enjoyed reading.

One of my pet romance theories is that when you have a main character who has much-higher-than-average sexual experience, the novelty for them tends to be the emotional rather than physical connection with their love interest, so the author needs to build on that convincingly while not sacrificing the heat (because love can absolutely impact sexual chemistry). And I thought Scarlett Peckham did an amazing job of this; I adored all these lovely moments of growing intimacy between them— Alistair cooks for Thaïs and helps her with her correspondence because she can't read or write very well, and there's so much laughter and tenderness and teasing just because of how different they are. And then there's the hugs; listen, if you'd told me hugs can be written erotically a few months ago, I'd never have believer you, but now I'm a believer.

And as this intimacy builds, they both unwittingly start to torture one another with reminders of exactly what will happen once their month together ends: Thaïs insists on judging every one of the dossiers compiled on Alistair's potential brides even as she becomes increasingly hurt over them, and in a particularly heartbreaking scene, they roleplay his future wedding night, which NEVER ends well because feelings are always caught, AND YET. Alistair is hellbent upon doing the Right and Proper thing, namely marrying an upper-class virgin, and Thaïs doesn't figure into his future plans. I thought the class difference conflict, and the portrayal of stigma against sex workers, were both handled well.

Also, can we talk about this cover?? it's so lush and beautiful and harkens back to old romance clinch covers in the best way.

The sex:

This book felt honest about a lot of aspects of sex in a way not many romance novels are. Alistair's performance anxiety is real and the book doesn't beat around the bush when it comes to portraying it, but I want to clarify, Scarlett Peckham managed to make even this hot. There's a particularly steamy moment where Alistair is washing the mud out of Thaïs's hair and like, giving her a head massage. All it takes is her returning the massage favor (which... was honestly so romantic??) and a kiss, and the man is cumming in his breeches.

I also thought it was kind of great that he built up his *sexual stamina* by masturbating a multiple times a day— you don't get a lot of male masturbation scenes in HR, so I do appreciate this. And once it clicks for Alistair, there is no stopping this man. Near the end of their lessons, they're going at it 4 times a day, on the desk, on the floor, on the dining table, in the rain, etc. etc. He's insatiable.

Thaïs is an experienced courtesan and tends to disassociate during sex, and she feels like this is even more critical as her feelings start to grow for Alistair. Because of this, she also doesn't necessarily orgasm every time earlier in their sexual relationship. But once again, once Alistair is able to figure his stuff out (and by figuring out, I mean eating her out), and Thaïs lets go, there's no going back.

Overall:

I can't tell you how much I appreciate Scarlett Peckham for writing a historical romance that falls outside the norm in so many ways, and yet feels true to the subgenre in the way it merges certain realities with the romance of it all. I had so much fun reading The Mistress Experience, and I'd absolutely recommend it to any HR reader.

Thank you to Avon Books and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Rating: 4.5/5
Heat Level: 3.75/5
Publication Date: June 25th

ARC REVIEW (thanks NETGALLEY!)

Sex lessons?! Sex lessons the man needs?! Hell yes! I was A little skeptical reading since I havent Read the rest of the series but this can easily be read as a standalone. Thaïs is a whore (don’t worry it doesn’t hurt her feelings calling her that) and Alistair buys her in an auction for a month to get better at sex so he can find a wife. Alistair is a shy cinnamon roll 2 pump chump. Thaïs is kind of over being a hooker and would love nothing more than a husband and babies. I loved The banter between the 2 and how crass Thaïs was, everything she said made Alistair blush and it was hilarious. I really Wish there was more of an epilogue (I’m not sure if this was the end of the series) I just Wanted to see where they ended up living since their whole time in the country they lied and said they were brother and sister

this. book. is. incredible.

holy slowburn spicy batman. i couldnt get enough of this book. i was absolutely enthralled with this story. how did scarlett write a cooking scene that had me blushing? seemingly innocuous situations became full of heat and i couldnt have loved this book more. like im literally still chasing this high 3 days later....

This is the most emotional and sweet of the series, and is a big hit for fans of historical romance! The main characters are both written well and complexly, with the isolated setting and circumstances acting only to intensify the emotions and the conflict. Overall a wonderful wrap up of a series that played so well with conventions of romance!

Part of a series, The Mistress Experience closes out Scarlett Peckham's series of scandalous ladies, and for me the third times the charm. I actually loathed the first book, The Rackess, because the heroine wasn't even close to a Rackess, but a Fake (and very annoying) Rakess. The second book was not remotely my cup of tea. While I had to suspend more than the usual disbelief to accept a very sex-forward courtesan as the heroine (always thinking of the odds of some STDs and the occasional pregnancy! Plus the fact that she somehow manages to only sell a relatively few days a year of her favors), I thoroughly enjoyed the very cinnamon-y roll hero. Lord Alasdair Eden was one of the more original romance novel heroes I've ever read, and this is a compliment. He is a stand-up character: progressive, kind, a little stern, and completely, utterly awkward in bed. So awkward that he's basically abstinent to spare women his poor performance. But he wants to get married, and he needs to get over this. The solution: He hires Magdalene by proxy. From there, the story goes on, as these two opposites get to know each other and the two characters slowly unfurl their real selves to each other.

95% of the romance novels I read are almost instantly forgettable, the plot points plunking there way to the required happy ending, the characters little more than stereotypes. This was in the other 5%, and I'm happy to recommend it.

Five star.

An ARC was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. All opinions are my own.

Hot, hot hot. Such a well written book in typical Peckham style.

Thais is a sought out courtesan who is put into trade at a very young age, but has made her way and set her own rules. Her time is auctioned for one month to raise money for a women's school.

The winner is Alastair Eden, a upright, shy politician with very little sexual experience. Thais is to teach him how to please his potential wife.

Over the month the relationship between. Thais and Eden develops beyond the physical. Thais teaches Eden to appreciate his body and hers and how to connect with his partner. Eden breaks down Thaiss walls and she starts to fall for him. She wants a home, family and children. He is too uptight and upright to offer her that despite being in love with her. Eden makes mistakes, but he definitely grovels to get back into her heart and take the final step to marry Thais.

Ok so I wasn't fond of the last book in this series and honestly didn't know this one was actually part of that series before I started reading it. However I did like this one better than the last one. It was maybe a little "tamer" than the last and I loved who the main characters took the time to fall in loved before they jumped into bed (much to our heroine's dismay). It was a sweet story and while it did the typical "3/4 split" troupe it was still fun.

This hit the spot. Eden was such a delight! I found myself putting my hand to my chest and sighing reading his POV at times. I liked Thais as well but admittedly I liked Eden’s POV more. I loved how their relationship progressed and how they both grew over that month. This was the first Scarlett Peckham book I’ve read and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything having not read the others in the series. Can’t wait to dig into the rest!