reviewed by
Jennifer Kahng
Romance novels tend to be somewhat cliché. Once the two main characters meet, it's rather obvious what's going to happen and from there, every time the two main characters are in the same scene, smut happens.
Not so much with My Lady Knight. In fact, for the first half of the book, I kept thinking to myself, "Would you two have sex already?"
Perhaps it's because the female lead, Isabella de Montfort, is very nun-like, having been raised in an...unorthodox abbey. Known as Sister Isabella she is anything but a docile young servant of God. In fact, she is as close to a female knight in service to the Queen as she could get. Isabella's forte is healing with various herbs and she wields a whip when things get out of hand.
But she is no match for the male lead, Jordan le Courtenay, a knight in service of the King who has lost his taste for battle. He tells her he feels nothing of the world having been forced to fight numerous pointless battles as the King's sons fight for their right to ascend the throne. Try as she might, she finds herself falling in love with him despite his claims that he feels nothing for her.
Except he does. Why is it Jordan lusts after the strange woman that is Isabella de Montfort? And ignores the very proper Lady Odette who is dead set on having Jordan be her husband?
Clearly, Isabella and Jordan were meant to be together. It's a romance novel, after all. But no smut is had in the entire first half of the book. Sure, there is kissing and even some quite heavy petting, but they have a mission, you see, to retrieve documents for the Queen in order to end future wars.
Actually, the sexual tension between the two irritated me a little bit. Normally, that kind of tension is good and builds up over time as it leads to smut. But the way Kelley wrote Isabella disappointed me. She is a strong minded, independent woman; a knight in as many ways as she can be, having been taught to fight for herself. Yet introduce an attractive male and she goes all wimpy. Clearly, having been cloistered in an all female institution had its disadvantages.
In any case, the inevitable does happen, although the first time it's...not quite what either of them believes it to be. "Drug induced hallucination" is the best description.
Luckily, the novel doesn't fall apart and cast the characters into an unending series of trysts. Isabella and Jordan do, in fact, complete their mission, although not for lack of just about every force, natural and human, coming against them. I have to admit I felt the ending fell a little flat. Given all the adventures the pair had gone through in the middle of the book, the ending was rather anti-climactic. But still, it was rather interesting to read a romance novel that very much wanted to stick to its plot and have the sex be a supplement to the main plot.
