STAFF PUBLICATION: Viscount Overboard (Ladies Least Likely Book 1)
Award-winning author, Misty Urban, has had her fill of ‘historical romances with rich, beautiful people gossiping at expensive parties.’ Instead, in Viscount Overboard (Oliver Heber, 2023), Urban leans into her scholarly background in medieval romance – the world of ‘odd and disfigured characters: lepers, hermits, wild men of the woods’ – to introduce the reader to a found family living at St. Sefins, an abandoned priory near Newport, Wales. It’s 1799, and Gwen, a healer, offers sanctuary for the hurt and abandoned, including impoverished widows, disabled children, and Dovey, a formerly enslaved woman. When the new Viscount Penrydd, owner of St. Sefins, decides to sell, everything is suddenly at risk, but an accident brings opportunity. Penrydd washes up on the shores of the Severn with no memory of who he is. But Gwen’s decision to keep him in the dark while she wins him to her cause may cost her dearly.
Romance beckons for Gwen and Penrydd, but obstacles – Gwen’s haunting past, the class disparity between them, Penrydd’s battle scars – make a happy outcome uncertain. Secondary characters also keep the pages turning. Gwen’s friend, Dovey, for example, ‘sprang to life, fully formed,’ a character with ‘strength and resilience’ who ‘can be shrewd where Gwen would cave.’ Her future is tied to Gwen’s, adding to the rising tensions.
Urban’s love of Wales shines throughout as she combines historical knowledge seamlessly into her characters’ daily lives. Women in Welsh history feature, including Jemima Fawr, who repelled an invasion on British soil, and Marged ferch Ifan, described by Urban as ‘a legend in her own right’. And then there is St. Gwladys, to whom Gwen prays. ‘Gwladys gets all the tropes,’ Urban explains: ‘abducted princess, wise queen, fertile mother, then patroness of her own religious house. She became Gwen’s hero, and mine.’ Readers ready to ditch the ballroom will enjoy the ‘wild beauty’ of Newport’s coastline, most notably when it plays its own part in the drama, through the devastating Severn Bore, a tidal surge.
Viscount Overboard deftly supports Urban’s argument that historical romance has much more to offer when a writer explores ‘what might be happening in the shadows or the fringes of the fashionable world’ and ‘what happens to the people who don’t fit in’. Romance, adventure, history, and an intriguingly different cast of characters: find them all here.
