A short romance novella of servants in a Victorian setting.

Starcross Lovers is the story of Harry and Ginny, both servants in the home of Lord Peter deVere. Ginny is the lady maid for Lord Peter’s wife, Lady Mariah, and Harry runs the stables. They’ve been in a longstanding will they/won’t they situation with some fooling around here and there but nothing concrete in terms of emotions. But, since this is a romance novel, OF COURSE they’ve both been mutually pining and not talking at all about their situation.

I like the way Farmer works this series. Her main long-form novels concern the Lords and Ladies and then the novellas that come in between are about the relationships between the servants. It’s a brilliant way of keeping people interested in your series and providing some fan service for the stories that fans really want to hear more of.

This is a fine, quick read. There’s one big sex scene with some making out in between, but I didn’t consider it erotica (which is the heading it’s under at my library). I struggle with books like these because I know I should suspend my disbelief but honestly, every part of this book could have been explained had the couple just SPOKEN to one another a time or two. It was a bit repetitive in that every hurdle they came across basically boiled down to them not talking to each other. Even when Ginny is being courted by another man, a quick 2 minute conversation could have fixed a lot of things. I know that’s not the nature of the romance novel, and had they talked this book wouldn’t exist in the first place, but honestly after they argued without talking for the third time, I was kinda done with this book. Other than that I thought it was fine. The romance was cute, the characters were enjoyable and having it be relatively short made it much more bearable to get through the parts I disliked.

Title:  Starcross Lovers
Author:  Merry Farmer
Format:  Paperback
Pages: 158
ISBN: 9781980410621