The Rogue of Fifth Avenue by Joanna ShupeThe Rogue of Fifth Avenue on May 28, 2019
Pages: 384
Format: eBook
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three-stars

Silver-tongued lawyer.
Keeper of secrets.
Breaker of hearts.

He can solve any problem…

In serving the wealthy power brokers of New York society, Frank Tripp has finally gained the respectability and security his own upbringing lacked. There’s no issue he cannot fix…except for one: the beautiful and reckless daughter of an important client who doesn’t seem to understand the word danger.

She’s not looking for a hero…

Excitement lay just below Forty-Second Street and Mamie Greene is determined to explore all of it—while playing a modern-day Robin Hood along the way. What she doesn’t need is her father’s lawyer dogging her every step and threatening her efforts to help struggling families in the tenements.

However, she doesn’t count on Frank’s persistence…or the sparks that fly between them. When fate upends all her plans, Mamie must decide if she’s willing to risk it all on a rogue…

I went into this expecting to love it. This book pretty much has everything I should love. But for some reason it just didn’t work for me.

Mamie Greene is a society darling. She picks pockets of the rich at night and delivers their money to poor needy families by day. And to me, she felt reckless and naive.

We’re told over and over that she’s the responsible one (out of her sisters), and yet, I never felt we saw that. We see her acting irresponsibly from the get-go. I don’t know. I just didn’t like Mamie. I think we’re supposed to see her as having a good heart, but to me she came off as very immature.

She’s agreed with her father that she’ll marry his best friend’s son (it’s been understood since birth that they’d marry), but only if her sisters can marry whoever they want. The ending showed us her father never thought it would be a hardship for her. So Chauncey (the fiance) turns out to be a creep. It seemed unnecessary. Couldn’t she have just gotten out of the marriage because of the other reasons? I did like how it was handled though.

Frank is Mamie’s father’s attorney. He’s the best lawyer in New York and he’s known as being where the rich and influential take their business. He’s also a hotly anticipated hero who’s been in previous books. However, you won’t be confused in any way. Frank has been watching out for Mamie and keeping her out of trouble in order to keep her father from finding out about her sticky fingers. Frank doesn’t know why she’s stealing money since she’s the daughter of one of the richest men in New York. He assumes she’s a bored little Knickerbocker princess.

They have some intense chemistry, and they challenge each other, but I just didn’t like her, Frank either, for that matter. He was hiding his childhood. Frank was the son of a drunk who beat his wife. Frank got the chance to get out of Five Points and never look back. His mom encouraged it, as most moms would, wanting the best for him and all that. But Frank took it as her telling him to leave and never come back. So he sent money but never looked back. He changed his name and reinvented himself. BUT he had a brother and sisters. He just…left.

Mamie is giving money to a couple families down there who begin to remind Frank of his early years, and it’s freaking him out. His old life begins to creep into his new life, and crosses into Mamie’s secret life. At one point, he has to face the fact that he left and that it hurt his family.

There’s a line towards the end where she thinks, “She became a different person with him, a confident and bolder woman.” And I thought, really? she was kind of like that the whole time. She never at any point seemed to lack confidence or boldness. It was weird. For such a great author, I felt like we were told a lot of things about Mamie, rather than shown.

This review is longer than I’d expected, and not as positive as I’d hoped. The book was fine. I want to read the next one, but I’m disappointed I didn’t love this one. I think I would have DNF’d it if I hadn’t wanted to see how Mamie got out of her betrothal. But I’m glad I didn’t since I think around 50% in the book gets better.

***ARC courtesy of the publisher Avon Books

three-stars