Helga without the H

Three star review, originally posted here on July 27th, 2025:

I went into this book with exactly zero expectations. I stumbled upon it in a similar fashion that I hope people might stumble upon my books (the Hope the Little Fox series; please check them out! They’re great!): I was perusing Amazon’s list of 100 “Bestselling” Free Women’s Adventure Novels. My own book (Hope the Little Fox, in case you forgot in the last 3 seconds) was listed in the #1 spot. This book was slightly behind it in the #5 spot. I’m not going to lie; most books appearing in these free lists look like absolute garbage. I mean, just absolute slop that wannabe self-publishing authors are struggling to give away. 90% of it is basically paranormal porn. Half of it has major grammatical errors in the blurbs. The covers are all ridiculous. But Discerning Grace looked different. It’s not that the book looked like it would be of a higher quality than any of the other nonsense on the list, but at least it looked like it would be a fun guilty-pleasure with an exciting plot. I mean, it’s an old-timey adventure tale about a badass chick who does dude stuff on a ship, and presumably gets some sexytimes (spoiler alert: this book has no sexytimes.) It promised to be an adult version of my all-time favorite book from childhood, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. I also (mistakenly, I’ve since learned) assumed that Lombard was in the same boas as me; a struggling hobby author just trying desperately to find readers for her little series, clawing in the dark hoping that somebody, anybody, would just hurry up and find our masterpiece, read it, love it, review it, tell everyone else on the planet to read it and love it, etc. I sensed that Lombard might be a kindred spirit.

I’ve developed a rule recently, as I’ve been reading a bit more self-published worked, sometimes by personal acquaintances, to not write Goodreads reviews for those books. It’s unrealistic to expect the same quality of editing and skill from an amateur as from a professional, and why shit on someone’s parade when, presumably, this work is something they love and poured their soul into? I went into this book assuming I’d be doing the same thing here; I thought I would likely enjoy the story as a guilty pleasure, but would find the writing to be God-awful. For a while I didn’t even list this book as “Reading” because I didn’t want to give my fellow struggling author false hopes (I am checking my books’ pages constantly.) But then I took a look at the book’s Goodreads page and realized, hot damn, Lombard has made it! 1,500 reviews?! And entire successful series after this book?! Heck’s yeah, Lombard! Way to go! I also see that a single 3 star rating and neutral review aren’t going to hurt here (like they would in my situation with significantly less reviews.) So, here we go, time for an actual honest review:

There was plenty to love in this book, and plenty to hate. So while 3 stars is typically used by me to mark books that are “fine” but elicited no strong reactions from me, in this case it’s instead marking a book that swung unevenly between extremes.

First, the good. Lombard did her homework, and homework is HARD. My very first self-published book was a historical fiction romance novel. I’m not a romance reader, but wrote an absolutely ridiculous story as a joke, thinking that if I didn’t care about making the book good, that it might help me get the book finished (I had a habit of starting works but never seeing them through to the end.) When I finished and re-read my gibberish, though, I realized it actually wasn’t THAT bad, and I went through the exercise of self-publishing it, mostly for fun. The biggest problem, however, was that I had set my book in a real historical setting, without having done any historical research. I tried to retrofit the book with historical accuracy after completing my draft. Oh my God. NEVER write a book this way. First of all, I literally couldn’t warp history to fit my narrative. But even where I could get some details to match history a bit better, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of details that authors must know. Every single paragraph in a historical fiction reveals a new set of obscure stuff the author has to know. Do you want a character to turn out a light? Great! But how? Did people in this time and place have candles? What kind? Did they use some sort of period-specific snuffer? Or would a servant come in instead? Wait, what would a candle-snuffing servant even be called? And so on and so forth. I vowed to never write historical fiction again; it’s just too damn exhausting. Then, like an idiot, I decided to put my characters on boats in my latest novel (Hope the Daring Fox, which you should REALLY READ if you enjoy women’s adventure on the high seas!), and I was almost in tears trying to write any of the boat scenes because, again, I know nothing about boats. My draft was littered with the note “[INSERT NAUTICAL TERM HERE],” and I spent months (ahem, years, because I work slowly) trying to track down proper terminology. That’s in a completely fictional world and time, where I didn’t even need to worry about being time period appropriate.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying: KUDOS ON THE RESEARCH. I don’t know if every details is correct here, but it’s evident that Lombard put in the work to get pretty dang close. I even learned some stuff about how Uruguay was founded! Every time Lombard dropped some nautical knowledge or terminology on us, I was nodding in approval.

Next up, Lombard exhibited some imaginative wordsmithing. This is the first line that really jumped out at me:

“The spoils of his salivary incontinence stretched like macabre threads in the corners of his mouth.”
I mean… that’s ONE way to say, “He was drooling.” I’m not sure what to make of the fact that all of Lombard’s best sentences were used to describe our villain’s gross face:
“Snatching up the teacup, she hurled it at his head. Her aim was off, and it bounced harmlessly off the side of his puffy, pink neck.”
“Silverton’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his tongue protruded from his mouth like the globular stamen of a flower as his juddering jowls deflated with a long, quivering rasp.”
Juddering jowls deflating! Oh my God, I love it. We REALLY hate this guy’s fat face!

At other times, however, I found the writing a a bit weak. Dialogue suffered from the overuse of “show don’t tell.” A character said a line, then we had a sentence describing what they were physically doing. Then the next character said a response, then we had a sentence describing that that character was doing. Then the first character responded to the response, then we had a sentence describing what they were doing. Conversations dragged on forever. Also, some of the elaborate descriptions left me puzzled. Lombard refers to people’s teeth a lot in contexts that didn’t make sense. Our first steamy kiss involved teeth getting smashed, for example.

The storyline was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was classic fun! A spunky heroine goes aboard a ship pretending to be a boy! She learns to do adventure! There’s peril with angry sailors, peril with natives, peril with bounty-hunters, etc. There are kidnappings and fights and escapes. There are romantic rivalries and bucking of societal norms. But this book also had a pattern of setting us up to expect adventure and excitement that never comes to fruition. We have warnings about an impeding storm, but then our heroine just sits in her room and we never get an exciting storm scene. We are told that our heroine becomes a decent sailor, but we never see her utilize any of these sailing skills. I don’t think she ever even climbs up in the rigging. We are told she learns to fight, and that she’s fantastic with a gun, and she makes a big deal about claiming that she can take care of herself because she’s got these new skills. But then she gets repeatedly kidnapped and beat up without a hint of putting up a fight. We begin a storyline about a stolen cutter, but that goes nowhere. We begin a storyline about a kidnapped native who will become a translator, and that storyline goes nowhere. We begin a storyline about the love interest literally sailing around the world to save our heroine, but when he gets there he just asks the bad guy, “Hey, is my girlfriend here? No? Okay, sorry to bug you” and then he just leaves and does nothing else.
Most importantly, we’re promised a tale about a strong female protagonist who, it turns out, winds up being a whiny idiot. Grace is just insufferably stupid, and she never learns from her hubris.

This brings me to my main critique, which is that our main characters are flat as cardboard, and their love story is paper-thin. Why do these two people supposedly like each other? We have no idea. An entire book goes by, and we learn virtually nothing about the main love interest except that he works on a ship and smells good. They don’t seem to have any chemistry. We’re told they go on evening walks and maybe bond about astronomy, but we don’t really live those scenes with them. There’s no spark. No connection. And no consistency; it feel like the characters flip-flop in their feelings towards one another from page to page, and not for any discernible reason. Occasionally our story jumps to the love interest’s POV, but these scenes add virtually nothing to the story, as they don’t take us into his seemingly vapid head.

Bottom line: This book isn’t going to win any Pulitzers. And the characters and story could have used some more time in the oven to develop. But it was still a fun romp in a fun setting, and the best thing I can say is that I wish we’d had MORE of it. More time to delve into her life undercover. More time to actually explore our abandoned plotlines. More time to get to know our characters. But maybe that’s what the sequels are for…