The Lady is Daring makes some surprising choices and not much else

Even though The Lady Is Daring has some excellent moments of emotional depth and complexity for its hero and heroine, it leans too far in other places.

Not to say that Lenora Bell’s For the Duke’s Eyes Only has satiated my need for adventures in historical romance, but with a title like The Lady Is Daring (also sent to me by Avon Books) for Megan Frampton’s latest, the comparisons almost invite themselves. To be fair to Ida Howlett, she doesn’t end up going to Paris and definitely doesn’t have a penchant for archaeology, but she does steal a carriage and is intelligent in her own ways.

Of course, Lord Carson — Bennett — is no Daniel, Duke of Ravenwood, either. This adventure is much more restrained to England, with Ida chasing after her sister, who has a child and thus fled high society.

All of this might seem like it’s negative, but Ida and Bennett are perfectly fine as a couple. Their attraction to each other naturally grows quickly in their close quarters; they challenge each other to be better. But whew, does Frampton also hit some points over and over again.

Ida, in particular, is meant to be the 1840s equivalent of a bluestocking, and while some novels featuring intelligent heroines don’t do enough to show how clever they are, this one goes too far in the other way. Ida always has some vaguely Latin sounding name for herself as a classification, and though the joke is funny the first few times, it starts to get old by about halfway through the book. I’d like to give props to Frampton for letting Ida be interdisciplinary, though, and namecheck Sophocles as well as Linnaeus.

But perhaps the things that stick with me most after finishing this book are three particular word choices during scenes that are meant to be particularly romantic and sexy. This is not to say that there isn’t a place for the strongest profanity in the English language in a romance novel; there’s not to say that there’s no place for it in historical romance.

It just doesn’t feel used …. precisely.

Nor do the other two words — one a particularly rude name for female anatomy modified to rhyme with runny, one a made-up word for the corresponding male anatomy that gets replaced with the more scientific name about a page later.

One’s just silly, and the latter is silly and then rendered not particularly better by the replacement word.

But there’s still a decent romance here. It’s just a bit buried beneath the issues of diction and style, in particular.