What Ales the Earl by Sally MacKenzie

 

WHAT ALES THE EARL is a pretty cute read although the pacing, in my opinion, is uneven. It starts out pretty good. Harry is sent to a small town whose name I've already forgotten but sounds like Puddingtown, to investigate a mysterious amount of payment that is going there. Meanwhile, his old fling, Pen, is living there with her young daughter, Harriet. She's pretended to be a widow but all of that is about to out, which leads to rather disastrous consequences for her current marriage plans.

Enter Harry, the old fling. Who didn't know he had a kid.

I'm not the biggest fan of second chance romance but I think one of the best ways to do it is to have the characters break up when they're young and then come back together as adults who have grown up and are ready to learn from their ways. That's what happens here. Harry is a bit of a doofy playboy who is starting to want to settle down and is enamored with the idea of having a kid of his own. 

I loved the first half of the book but the second half was a major slog. I skimmed over fifty pages until the hilarious last-act conflict with the OW, which was ridiculous but still amused me. After that, though, we were back to disappointment: the ending is incredibly abrupt and there's no epilogue. Which is the author's choice, and I get it. Some people don't like epilogues. I sometimes fall into that camp too but I felt like one was needed here.

If you like Tessa Dare, I think you'll enjoy this book. I appreciated the likable albeit bratty kid character and the way the author handled the romance. The idea of a romance that revolves around a brewery was also pretty interesting and I liked that MacKenzie delved into the class differences more than most authors writing these historical rich guy/poor girl romances do. This didn't quite hit the mark for me but I still appreciated it for what it was.

2.5 out of 5 stars