Review: 'Tis the Season for Lady Sarah (A Wallflower's Wish, #4) by Maggie Dallen & Katherine Ann Madison

   

Print Length: 127 pages

Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing (November 3, 2020)

From Goodreads.com: Lady Sarah believed she’d found her one true love. But feelings can be deceiving...

It’s going to be the wedding of the season...at least, that’s what her mother keeps saying. Unfortunately for Sarah, it’s not her own nuptials that have the family in such a twitter, but her brother’s. Still, Sarah’s own love, Mr. Emmet Stallworth, a merchant, is in faraway lands, where he’s attempting to earn enough to ask for her hand, so why not throw herself into preparations for her brother’s marriage?

Except...everything begins to go wrong.

Stallworth returns, only to announce that he’s already married. Sarah waited for him; how could he do this to her? And then there’s the annoying Earl of Everly, who seems to pop up at the least convenient times. The arrogant rake has that knowing smile and he keeps poking at her wounds.

But when she nearly ruins her brother’s big day, it’s Everly who saves her. In that moment, Sarah can’t help but wonder if her heart had it wrong after all...

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My Rating: 2 stars out of 5

I wanted to like this one, because we do occasionally get to see glimpses of what these characters could be if this was a full-length book and not a novella, but good lord did it have its issues. 

To begin with one of the main issues throughout this story is Lady Sarah demanding that she not be treated like a child, all while acting like a child. Whether it be chasing a man outside in full view of the servants because she just "has" to speak with him, or even worse, trying to sneak out of her house at night to meet with said man, Sarah just does not make good choices. Something that Lord Everly (her brother's best friend who had been tasked with looking out for her in her brother's absence) is quick to point out. 

Added to it, she is also extremely fickle in her affections having thought herself in love with Mr. Stallworth (we are unsure of exactly how long she has thought this as we only know that he has been gone for the last year and a half). However, the moment he re-appears in her life (with a fiancé in tow nonetheless) and Lord Everly steps in to prevent her from potentially causing a scene, she decides that she is attracted to him instead? So much so that without a care (or a thought, again see why I said she made bad choices), she kisses Lord Everly on the porch outside of the ballroom just to spite Mr. Stallworth who had come outside. Never mind the fact that such a thing would ruin her. 

The rest of the book is a repetitive (and childish) back and forth between the two. Somehow they have both realized that they are in love with each other, but Lord Everly refuses to allow himself to fall in love after being hurt, and besides Sarah is his best friends little sister who could never have feelings for him. Meanwhile, Sarah is lamenting the fact that Lord Everly will never see her as a grown woman, merely the  childish sister of his best friend and therefore he could never have feelings for her. Rinse and repeat, until Mr. Stallworth attempts to force their hand with her brother Max (a plot point that I still don't understand). 

It is only then, when facing down her irate brother do they realize they do supposedly love each other (and really there was no indication during any of this that they truly had any kind of feelings for each other other than annoyance), and of course they will live happily ever after. 

I really wanted them to get to know each other better. To actually see them develop feelings for one another over time instead of him doing one nice thing for her and her completely forgetting all about the guy she had been pining after for eighteen months, and him just suddenly deciding he had always been in love with her. It was wasted potential in my opinion. 

However, this is a clean read (meaning nothing more than a few kisses are shared), and short enough that I read it in a day. I may read one of the other novels in this series at a later date just to give these authors another chance because I definitely see the potential with their story-telling.