This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @‌thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.

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Virginia Heath has crafted plenty of A-level, Squee-laden reads over the course of her historical romance writing career, and I’ve ranked her among my favorite historical authors of all time more than once. Her latest series, Miss Prentice’s Protegees, had been solid up until now, but Look Before You Leap is a weaker entry than the previous book in the line-up, All’s Fair in Love and War. I still like it more than her Meriwell Sisters trilogy, which was all right but didn’t work for me, but I found this book a small step down and a bit of a disappointment from the introductory chapter.

Miss Prentice’s School is a finishing school where young girls of good breeding go to get training for respectable occupations – in the Regency era, this means as a ladies’ companion or a governess. Horse-mad, pants-wearing Lottie Travers has just failed at being the latter twice over and is set upon being the former when a dash through Hyde Park on horseback causes her to bump into the hero – literally, and, thankfully for him, not fatally. She scolds him for not looking out, runs out and delivers his horse back to him, and leaves the man in a thunderous mood.

Said hero is Guy Harrowby, Viscount Wennington, and he’s just as horse-mad as Lottie but has the whole Viscountency riding on his shoulders. Guy is unmarried as he approaches thirty, and is being pressured by his mother and great aunt, the Dowager Lady Frinton, to get wed and pop out some kids for the estate, already. He just wants to be left alone to ride and is gunshy about romance after being hurt by his first love years ago. He tries to talk his mother into putting together a simple house party for thirty people to celebrate his birthday. But she and her sister have begun to conspire, and plot a birthday week during which they hope Guy will find the girl of his dreams. When his aunt arrives at the estate, who should be with her but Lottie, her new companion, whom she has already taken a shine to?

Guy and Lottie had immediate chemistry, and now that they’re together again something just might spark up between them. But can Guy get over his past heartbreak so that they can finally be together?

For all of the sparkle and life that Heath’s romances bring with them, there were too many running issues going on in Look Before You Leap. Chief among them was how simply ordinary the narrative is. You’ve met this sunshine-and-grumpy pairing before. Guy is a thundercloud who broods; Lottie is fiery and outspoken with a lust for life. Sometimes they kiss, sometimes they fight. Eventually they get it together, but there’s not enough attention put on the later phase of their relationship, making it feel half-mature and failing to show us they’re growing beyond the slap-slap-kiss phase of the union. The book is an endless pattern of them fighting and making up, interspersed eventually with sex scenes.

And yet I really liked Lottie in particular. She left home at sixteen to gain employment and send money back to her family in Kent, where she has four brothers. They owned a horse farm and being raised there has shaped her into the girl she is. Their mother died young and that left a mark on Lottie. She is not gently bred or weak-willed, and she is quite the delight overall. She’s the kind of girl who gets fired for stealing her employer’s horse, after all; she had spunk and spirit. The book’s worth reading for her alone, not to mention her growing connection with Lady Frinton.

But Guy? Eh. He’s the typical grump, mourning a long-ago humiliation that shouldn’t matter this much after nine years. While what was done to him was cruel, it’s been so much time that his intense focus on his own humiliation is almost cartoonish. Thus, he often comes off as self-centered and immature.

I did like a lot of the minor supporting characters, though for a chunk of the book, Guy’s mother and great aunt fall into that kind of pushy elderly matchmaker trope that I kind of hate. His father, too, is dead, which helps explain why his mother’s so baby mad. But utterly flawless was Lottie’s friendship with Lady Frinton, which was filled with vinegar and fire. I wish I could say Look Before You Leap was equally without flaws, but the heroine makes this worth reading, even if the romance runs as hot and cold as Lottie and Guy do.