A Night Like This (Smythe-Smith Quartet) Paperback – May 27, 2021

They fell in love at first sight when she was playing the piano at a Smyth-Smith musicale. He saved her life and they were married on a night like this.

I just adore Julia Quinn's romances. I have yet to finish one that didn't leave me with a smile on my face as I closed the last page. A Night Like This is no different. Daniel Smythe-Smith has been on a self-imposed exile to the Continent for three years after accidentally shooting his good friend, crippling him for life, and causing his friend's father to threaten his life. But after his friend, Hugh (who will be the hero in the next book of this series), finds him to let him know that Daniel is no longer in danger, Daniel returns to his home on the night the infamous Smythe-Smith musicale. He sees his cousins' governess, Anne, fumbling away at the piano and is immediately smitten. Anne is a governess with a mysterious past, one that she does not wish to share. She has had her own eight year exile, but this was an exile that was forced on her by her family and the family of her neighbor after a horrible event when she was sixteen. What follows after Daniel and Anne meet that night is a super sweet romance where friendship is formed and the demons of the past are exorcised.What I loved:Daniel and Anne. I loved these two characters. Daniel was so amazingly perceptive, understanding when Anne needed to talk and understanding when she needed to keep things inside. He was patient and willing to wait for her to be ready to share her history and her struggles with him. He could sense the moments that unnerved her in some way, and he was always careful to protect her in any way that he could, physically and emotionally. Anne had grown up as a somewhat spoiled and egotistical girl, focused on getting whatever she wanted. She was a beautiful girl used to getting attention, but after the tragedy of her sixteenth year she grew and changed into a caring woman with charm and wit. I loved her interactions with Daniel's cousins. But the best part of these two characters were their interactions with each other. There was an ease to their conversations that made their growing friendship obvious. Even though the two of them were physically beautiful, this relationship did not seem founded on purely physical attraction. It was clear that they were friends first, and I loved that.What knocked this down a star:I'm not a huge fan of melodrama in my historical romances. And this story had a huge dose of melodrama at the end. George was just so ridiculous as a villain. Sure, I understand how his scarring would have upset him. I can even see how he might hold an eternal grudge against Anne because of it. Every day that he looked in the mirror he would be reminded of what she had done ... even though it was his own fault that it happened. But (without spoiling anything) his choices at the end of this novel were absolutely over the top. He didn't need to be so melodramatically villainous. He would have been a much more interesting villain if he were not quite so maniacal. If he had been given even an ounce of layer to his personality and not simply portrayed as the 100% bad guy I would have loved to see how Daniel and Anne work to overcome the problems associated with him. As written, he was just just another cardboard cutout of a villain, set in the story simply as a means of showcasing the great love the hero and heroine have for one another.But, having said that, this is still another great Julia Quinn romance. It is a fast read that left me happy in the end. I can't wait to read Hugh's story. He fascinates me as a character. Four stars for this one!

All of JQs reads are fab if you are into happy endings. They make you smile, they make you laugh, and you mightbcry in the middle, but you always get your happy ending, the one you have wanted since the first page. Smythe-Smith is at the same level as Bridgertons for sure!

Like all of Julia’s books I have read, I loved this one and couldn’t put it down. This series so far has been just as good as he Brigerton books.

This had a strong, charming, surprisingly progressive (for the times) hero, and a strong, unobjectionable heroine. Really, there wasn't anything significant that I didn't like about either of them. There weren't even those little moments of dislike I occasionally feel for a H/H I like. Throughout the story, I was very consistent in how I felt about both Daniel and Anne: I liked them.Which is why I'm not sure why I wasn't more ... bowled over by the newest JQ book. I mean, I'm happy to put it up on my shelf next to my other JQs (basically next to ALL of the JQs ever written). But my general feeling was, "yeah, that was sweet and nice, meh." And I have no idea why.I liked the cousins just fine. I liked Daniel's weird friendship with Hugh, the guy he crippled in a (mutually) drunken duel. I liked Aunt Charlotte, even when she was doing the traditional "warning off" of the H/H because he's an earl and she's a governess. I love Daniel's family, of course, and we did get a small dose of Lady Winstead, Honoria and Marcus. I didn't mind the setting at all: I happen to adore small-towns-in-the-English-countryside settings as much as I like traditional London settings.I can't put my finger on why I wasn't totally swept away by it. If I have to list a specific dislike, the only one that comes to mind is the scene where the girls make Anne and Daniel help act out Harriet's new play. Like the scene in Just Like Heaven where the girls practiced before the musicale, OMG, it just dragged on and on. I know it was supposed to be funny and cute and endearing, but to me, I was just flipping those few pages like, come on, be done with it already. (Not done with the book; done with that little pointless scene. And I shouldn't even call it pointless because it HAD a point: to be sweet and cute and inject some levity. It achieved that purpose. I just didn't care one bit.)So I really can't say why I didn't love this book. In an odd way, I was a little bored while reading it. Just a little. Not even enough to call the book 'a little boring,' because I wouldn't call it that, but still, several times during my reading, I registered that I was just a wee bit bored.I know, none of this makes sense.