Review – The Perks of Loving a Wallflower

Posted July 22, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Perks of Loving a Wallflower

by Erica Ridley

Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance
Pages: 368
Series: The Wild Wynchesters #2
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
As a master of disguise, Thomasina Wynchester can be a polite young lady — or a bawdy old man. She’ll do whatever it takes to solve the cases her family takes on. But when Tommy’s beautiful new client turns out to be the highborn lady she’s secretly smitten with, more than her mission is at stake...

Bluestocking Miss Philippa York doesn’t believe in love. Her heart didn’t pitter-patter when she was betrothed to a duke, nor did it break when he married someone else. All Philippa desires is to decode a centuries-old manuscript to keep a modern-day villain from claiming credit for work that wasn’t his. She hates that she needs a man’s help to do it — so she’s delighted to discover the clever, charming baron at her side is in fact a woman. But as she and Tommy grow closer and the stakes of their discovery higher, more than just their hearts are at risk.

This is an older review which it turns out I never posted! So I’ve unearthed it from the archives for you all.

This was my first book by Erica Ridley, and on the strength of it I definitely want to read more. Tommy (not quite a girl, not quite a boy, just Tommy) and Philippa (a bluestocking who is eager to get a husband, if only to please her parents) are a lovely pair, and the Wynchester family and their hijinks are a delight. I clearly need to read the first book to find out about all the things referenced in this one, and to hope for more of Jacob and his menagerie.

I enjoyed the inclusion of both Tommy’s ambivalent approach to gender and Philippa’s slow realisation of her interest in Tommy. It’s not entirely clear whether Philippa is attracted to women in general (and just hadn’t realised it yet) or purely to Tommy, but I think you could read it either way. I lean toward believing she’s demisexual, particularly since some of her described feelings fit quite well with someone on the asexual spectrum.

It’s not just a love story, though: they also have a shared mission, to declare Philippa’s friend Damaris the creator of a cypher used by the armed forces to encode messages, as opposed to her uncle who has stolen her work. That has a satisfying end, despite the censure Philippa then faces.

Now romances for Graham and Jacob, please? And all the other Wynchesters, to be fair…

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Erica Ridley, historical fiction, romance

Review – Nobody’s Princess

Posted January 30, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Nobody’s Princess, Erica Ridley

Nobody’s Princess gives Graham Wynchester a chance to really shine — something I’d been looking forward to for quite a while after his appearances in The Duke Heist and The Perks of Loving a Wallflower. Here he’s centre stage, romantic hero, and he finally has a chance to rescue a real princess (sort of).

Kunigunde is a visitor from the very kingdom the Wynchesters’ adoptive father Bean came from, and she’s on a mission to become a Royal Guardswoman, the very first. Her brothers have different ideas, and are trying pretty hard to chase her down, but Graham’s at hand to involve himself (whether she likes it or not) and save the day (whether or not she’d have come up with something for herself).

It was nice to see Graham front and centre, and maybe it’d just been a little while since I read the other books, but I was surprised by how silly he was at times. Not that I really should have been, given the Wynchesters’ banter amongst themselves — but I did have a touch of embarrassment squick about his quixotic attempts to be Kuni’s knight in shining armour.

I did love the way Kuni found herself falling in love with not just Graham, but the whole life of the Wynchester family. I wasn’t sure about how things were going to get figured out, but I found the end pretty satisfactory.

I didn’t love this as much as the first two books, and I had a bit of concern about the way Kuni was portrayed (in particular, the kind of language mistakes she made, which didn’t at all seem to fit with her proficiency with the language or my experience of people who speak English as a second language — I’m married to one, so you could say I’ve done extensive research on the subject). That said, I absolutely inhaled the book, and I had a lot of fun.