BRAZEN AND THE BEAST is the take-no-prisoners book 2 in the Bareknuckle Bastards series by the indomitable Sarah Maclean. This book is simultaneously a feminist romp and a touching romance. Hip, hip, hooray for Maclean and her glorious writing! Tongue firmly in cheek, I had a marvelous time tumbling along in the wake of Hattie and her Beast.

The current trend in historical fiction is to write strong feminist characters who typically are gratingly anachronistic. While Hattie seems definitely advanced for her time, she is portrayed so endearingly and without any twee, making it easy to glory in her strong opinions and desire to lead her own life without the ridiculous constraints of the males of the time who try to band her in. I adore her rally cry for The Year of Hattie, where she will achieve her 4 point plan to captain her own fate: Business, Home, Fortune, Future. Lady Henretta Sedley is the daughter of an earl who built a shipping business. Her useless fribble of a brother can't manage to tie his own shoes, let alone run a shipping empire, and Hattie is salivating to run the family business. Her hidebound father (of course) doesn't want to pass the reins to her until Hattie comes up with the plan to use her ill-planned brother's thefts from Beast, the criminal king of Covent Garden, to force her brother to abdicate the running of the company.

Enter Beast, who has his own ideas of how to use Hattie's brother's thefts to force his own smuggling agenda and achieve some revenge. Brazen and the Beast pits two prodigious intellects against each other. They are closely matched in wits, but they find themselves tripped up over and over by the inconvenient lust that bubbles between them. The ways that Beast champions Hattie and her wishes are meltingly sweet, and it's grand how Hattie has the gumption to stand up against the men arrayed around her, with Beast's at times, but sometimes against his wishes as Beast struggles with his own desires to keep Hattie "safe."

Maclean is a favorite historical romance author of mine, who can consistently deliver a smoking romance along with intelligence and witty repartee, wrapped up in a great plot. BRAZEN AND THE BEAST is emotionally satisfying, titillating, and delivers a feminist rally cry all at once. That's a tall order for a romance, but Maclean delivers in spades. Huzzah.