Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales)

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I loved her scenes with Lord Blackthorn, the friendship that grows between them was absolutely wonderful. We start of hating Lady Culver because of her extremely harsh treatment of the staff, but we also slowly get to see why she came to be that way - not that it elicits much sympathy towards her though coz she still takes out her frustrations on people who can’t talk back. The staff of the household in which Effie works are seen as barely human by their employers: their names are interchangeable, if not outright forgotten, and the burden of work they are given is barely spared a second thought.

However, being a faerie, he’s still restricted to bargain -making and so he offers to help Effie marry her lord if she completes a stitching project for him, one stitch for every minute spent on her lord-marrying plot. With an underlying air of kindness and charm grounding the entire story, Atwater infuses such heart into the second installment of her regency faerie tales.I love love loved Half a Soul and so it’s only natural that I get to the next part of the story as soon as I was able! This all happened exactly how I imagine a Faerie with good intentions trying to help a maid out would go down. Male employers often presumed that sexual favours were part of the job description for female servants. To make matters worse, pregnant servants were almost always dismissed in disgrace and left to fend for themselves—sometimes after being coerced into intimacy with their own employer.

Ten Thousand Stitches is the second book in Olivia Atwater’s Regency Fairy Tales series, and it follows Effie, a housemaid who makes a bargain with a faerie to win the heart of a gentleman she’s in love with.I loved soo many of the characters but I have to say Lord Blackthorn definitely stole my heart with his enthusiastic joy and sincerity as he strives to become a better person. Her down-to-earth attitude complemented the flighty Blackthorn perfectly as the two worked on their unusual plans.

I loved that Effie also has a magical element to her character which she wasn’t aware of but the one person who sees Effie’s true potential and the real Effie is Lord Blackthorn. Against her better judgement, Effie accepts the bargain, and soon Effie is attending balls and catching Lord Benedict’s eye. This perception is mostly why male and female servants were separated into different sleeping areas, why servants had almost no expectation of privacy, and why employers punished perceived moral slights as though they had parental authority. Also, why the heck was Effie ever wearing a fancy embroidered gown that a lady would feel comfortable going to a daytime party in to clean and make fires? I loooooooved the first one and I knew this didn’t follow the same couple but hoped it would still be as charming as the first.For all reviews, the source of the book I’m reviewing is identified in the details section at the start of the review. He tries to help Effie in different situations and although his intentions are honest whenever he tries to help her things either go very wrong or things are taken too far. Now, Effie has one hundred days and ten thousand stitches to make Mr Benedict fall in love with her and propose… if Lord Blackthorn doesn’t wreck things by accident, that is. Often his attempts to "help" go awry because he lacks understanding of the specific social and class pressures faced by a young woman working as a maid: and he has to deal with the fact that his inherent privilege often divorces his intentions from the effects of his actions.

This HIT as a person in my mid-twenties, burned out, aimless, and disillusioned with the prospect of working until I die.I listened to the audiobook, and just like he was for book one, Rafe Beckley was a fantastic narrator for it.