Cross-cultural Victorian romance alive with heart, hope and strength

After the Wedding: A Worth saga romance by Courtney MilanThe only thing more inconvenient than Camilla's marriage at gunpoint is falling in love with her unwilling groom...So begins the story of Camilla Worth and Adrian Hunter. I’ve always enjoyed Courtney Milan’s Victorian romance but I really loved this one. Humorous. Passionate. Angry. Heartfelt. As I read the final words, I was filled to the brim with the happy, bubbly, lighter-than-air feeling I get from a truly beautiful book. There is something heartwarmingly-everywoman about the heroine Camilla (Cam) Worth, her unquenchable spirit and hope for the future despite the fact that deep down, she doesn’t believe she deserves love. Camilla is the daughter of a treasonous earl, trying to stay hidden so as not to bring any further shame on her family. The hero, Adrian Hunter, is the son of a duke’s daughter and a black abolitionist, an artist and a businessman, strong but gentle and always willing to believe the best of everyone. Brought together by circumstances beyond their control, they work together to wrest their futures back from the men who want to deny them control of their own destinies.Adrian gives Camilla the right to be herself, and she finds the strength and anger to fight back against with the people who would put her - and Adrian - down. He helps her to look back, and she helps him to look forward. The result is a love match started for all the wrong reasons but finding all the right reasons to continue.Aside from her memorable characters, Courtney Milan also always digs below the surface of Victorian England to uncover bits and pieces of history that still influence us today. In this case, it is china, as in crockery.  Britain was the workplace of the world for several decades of the nineteenth century, fuelled by a rise in domestic demand thanks to a growing middle and upper working class. There’s a delightful sub-plot in After the Wedding about the creation of a fine china design for display and sale at a trade exhibition.After the Wedding got me thinking about diversity in Victorian England. A little bit of digging on the web got me the information that there were roughly 10,000 black men and women in London at the time, more around the country, as the result of English tentacles stretching into every continent. They were a distinct minority, under threat of slavery before 1833 even although slavery hadn’t been legal in England since the time of William the Conqueror. However, they were probably not as feared or hated as the Irish. As always in England, class played the largest role in social standing. If you would like to do more research about Black Britain, I found this article from History Today, a helpful overview, although, of course, it does not delve into all the ethnic minorities that make up British society.After the Wedding is book 2 in the Worth Saga but can be read as a stand alone novel. I did, although I have remedy this fault in my bookshelf by downloading book 1, Once Upon a Marquess, to read immediately.BlurbAdrian Hunter, the son of a duke's daughter and a black abolitionist, is determined to do whatever his family needs-even posing as a valet to gather information. But his mission spirals out of control when he's accused of dastardly intentions and is forced to marry a woman he's barely had time to flirt with.Camilla Worth has always dreamed of getting married, but a marriage where a pistol substitutes for "I do" is not the relationship she hoped for. Her unwilling groom insists they need to seek an annulment, and she's not cruel enough to ruin a man's life just because she yearns for one person to care about her.As Camilla and Adrian work to prove their marriage wasn't consensual, they become first allies, then friends. But the closer they grow, the more Camilla's heart aches. If they consummate the marriage, he'll be stuck with her forever. The only way to show that she cares is to make sure he can walk away for good…AuthorCourtney Milan writes books about carriages, corsets and smartwatches. As one does. You can find out more about her and her  books here.