Since the Surrender

Written by Julie Anne Long

Narrated by Justine Eyre

A man of action . . .

Fearless. Loyal. Brilliant. Ruthless. Bold words are always used to describe English war hero Captain Chase Eversea, but another word unfortunately plays a role in every Eversea's destiny: trouble. And trouble for Chase arrives in the form of a mysterious message summoning him to a London rendezvous . . . where he encounters the memory of his most wicked indiscretion in the flesh: Rosalind March-the only woman he could never forget.

A Woman of Passion . . .

Five years ago, the reckless, charming beauty craved the formidable Captain's attention. But now Rosalind is a coolly self-possessed woman, and desire is the last thing on her mind: her sister has mysteriously disappeared and she needs Chase's help to find her. But as their search through London's darkest corners re-ignites long-smoldering passion and memories of old battles, Chase and Rosalind are challenged to surrender: to the depths of a wicked desire, and to the possibility of love.

Contains mature themes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781541430846

Julie Anne Long

USA Today bestselling author and Rita® Award winner Julie Anne Long’s books have been translated into eighteen languages, nominated for numerous awards, and have appeared on dozens of “Best of” lists. NPR named her Pennyroyal Green series as one of the Top 100 romance series of all time. She currently lives in Northern California.

Reviews for Since the Surrender

[jendoyle2000 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I can't say I totally disagree with a bunch of the reviews out there about the issues with some of the plotlines in this book. But there's something about Julie Anne Long's writing that just stays with me--even a full week later, something that I can't say about a lot of what I read--which for me trumps everything else. Looking forward to Pennyroyal Green #5.

[lauren2013_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Since the Surrender
2 Stars

When Rosalind March's sister disappears off the streets of London, the young army widow turns to Captain Chase Eversea, her late husband's confidante and the man with whom she shared a regrettable indiscretion. Recuperating from injuries sustained in battle, Chase is reluctant to confront the painful memories of his shared past with Rosalind, but cannot deny the passion he feels for her.

The convoluted and illogical mystery together with the ridiculous descriptions of paintings of cows and debauched angels as well as the creepy marionettes and puppets turn an otherwise appealing second chances romance into the theatre of the absurd.

Chase and Rosalind have intense chemistry and the flashbacks of their shared yet forbidden attraction to one another heightens their physical and emotional connection. Many reviewers note the problematic locations for their sex scenes, but this is not as distracting as the poor plotting and outlandish circumstances.

The investigation into Lucy's disappearance and the eventual explanation has excellent potential, but the strange leaps of logic (i.e., how exactly is the painting of a cow a clue to a missing woman is beyond me), and anti-climactic resolution ruin it completely.

Julie Anne Long's Pennyroyal Green series has never truly captured my attention, but the next two books are on my Kindle so I'm willing to give it another try. Hopefully, it will improve.

[ktleyed · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This Pennyroyal series is getting better and better as we get further into it. Chase Eversea, a military man, comes face to face with his one indiscretion, Rosalind March, the wife of his former commanding officer. Now it is five years later, Rosalind is now a widow and she needs a favor of Chase that leads to the uncovering of a prostitution ring while searching for her missing sister. Together, the two must solve the mystery. I really enjoyed this romance with a mystery built into it. It reminded me of a Sebastian St. Cyr mystery. Looking forward to the next.

[jorgeousjotts · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was on board with this for the first half or so. We get more of the story about how these two met and fell in love (basically the same moment), and that's interspersed with a bit of their present day lives apart. We'd already heard a little of this throughout the previous books, but it was still pretty good. Their reunion-on though, was kinda awkward and felt continually a bit off to me for the rest of the book basically. They both did things I liked them less for- Major spoilers He seemed pretty bitter when, really, her crime was just that she hadn't dropped her entire world and family and entrusted him *with her very life* when he sprung a surprise elopement opportunity on her after they'd only been dating for a few weeks. How dare she even hesitate... *eye roll* (hurt feelings I get, but resentment makes it seem like he felt he was entitled to that extreme level of trust at a moment's notice, which is a bit much). And then he left for like a decade and never even wrote his family that he was alive or anything. I'm not sure he's in a position to cast stones really. And then setting her up for some big test of her love without the tiniest bit of encouragement from him. It just felt like an unnecessarily dick power play. And he did succeed off on his own, but it would have been much harder to go off on those adventures all while supporting a wife at home, and no one mentions that, so it's not proof really that she was wrong not to trust a pampered young man to provide for them both. And, she, although she's engaged to a perfectly nice man, she picks up with her first love, (which I don't approve of, but I was willing to give her somewhat of a pass on given the circumstances), but then she goes right back to marry that fiance(!), potentially carrying another man's child(!!), and doesn't even raise a concern or anything with him?! What?? All the better to ditch him literally standing at the altar I suppose! *facepalm* Eesh. The whole thing kind of unravelled a bit. I liked the first half well enough that I'm not going to give it 2 stars, but I'm being a tad lenient perhaps.

[samnreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I would take any one of the Redmond children to marry, I'm just saying. They are my favorite.

I found this kind of over the top but in that characteristic JAL way. So I loved it. I read her for the romancey romance fluffy feels (and I loved that all right up until one of the final scenes), but, hell that epilogue trash.

When I'm in the mood for hearts and flowers in my eyes and writing, she is pretty fantastic. Thought this was super satisfying conclusion even if I wanted a little more...

[whiskeyinthejar-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

5 stars, was there any doubt? I will say though, it's a 5 star rating put into the context of the journey you take if you read every book in the series. Taken on its own, I would have probably given it somewhere in the range of 4 stars.

Men will do things for women they wouldn’t otherwise in their right minds do.
No one knew that better than Lyon.

The Redmonds and the Everseas have been the staunch adversaries of Pennyroyal Green ever since 1066 and a cow argument, or so history murkily relays. But when Lyon Redmond meets the gaze of Olivia Eversea across a crowded ballroom, a stolen waltz changes all their destinies. Living a Romeo and Juliet story is thrillingly romantically dangerous to the young couple who put off reality for as long as they can but when they are forced to face it, reality hits back hard. A stormy night filled with fear and pride separate Lyon and Olivia for five years, until Lyon receives word that Olivia is set to marry. This time anger and hurt keep them apart until longing works to crumble their walls. The story of Lyon and Olivia has been the whispers in the corners for a long time but no one has known their full story, until now.

How she loved that sentence. "Love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart." And she loved the little silence that followed when he’d read it to her, because she knew he was thinking about her, and wanted her to know it.

I knew that Lyon and Olivia must have fallen in love hard and fast but I had no idea it was so deeply consuming. The first half of the story is mostly flashbacks to their first meeting and clandestine get-togethers. They're young and as a consequence their love is at times immature and petty but also overwhelming and deeply felt; they have the love but not necessarily the tools, experience and maturity, to understand it. Every word they spoke to each other and every action they took felt so real, believable, and raw; I lost the ability to think of them as fictional characters.

She loved him. She always had. He knew it as surely as he knew the color of his own eyes. And he was just as certain then he'd been born loving her, as surely as he'd been born with blue eyes. It was that simple. That permanent. And if it was a curse, then he didn't know what a blessing was.

Going back and seeing how it all started, the first love, excitement, and sense of home they had with each other was fascinatingly beautiful and knowing the heartache to come added some bitter sweetness to it all. I was shocked and impressed, for all the sense of doom hovering over our couple, that Ms. Long still was able to infuse them with lightness. Through their words and actions you could almost see their burdens lift when in the presence of one another and they were humorous together, which I, rightly or wrongly, didn't expect.

“Ah,” Lyon said softly. “I believe I understand now. You didn’t have the courage to fight for the woman you loved. You made the wrong choice. And look at you. Look at what you’ve become.”

If you have read the other books in the series, then you know that there has been the suggestion that Lyon's father Isaiah once loved and possibly still does, Olivia's mother Isolde. This is rumored to be the current strife between the two families and similarly in other books, Isaiah plays the villain here. The conversation between Lyon and his father was so amazingly tense and well done, it took me awhile to come out of my stupor and turn the page when the final harsh words were proclaimed.

And suddenly she hated him as much as she loved him for forcing her to make this decision, now, in the pouring rain, in the dark.

Lyon and Olivia were blinded by their love in the beginning, it added to the tension seeing everyone cautiously dancing around their covert warnings to the couple. When the real world hit our couple it was even more painful that I had prepared myself for. I think Olivia will take the brunt of anger from readers and her actions may slightly skew into added for angst sake but they still felt real.

She sensed a sort of coiled potential in him that boded ill, something was being wound tighter and tighter. His face was taut, his mouth white at the corners.
But she couldn’t seem to help herself from winding it tighter. She wanted it to break. You weren’t there. I needed you I missed you. You missed it. You missed it all.

The second half of the story is what readers have been dying for, Lyon and Olivia coming together and having their reckoning. I know I keep saying this but it all felt so real, the brittle pain between the two was gripping, deeply moving, and emotionally draining to read because of the author's talent of metamorphosing words on a page to emotions was riveting. Olivia and Lyon kept hammering away at one another with their own pain, until they both shattered from it. If I was to have a disappointment in this story, this would be it. Waiting almost ten years for their story must have made me a little into a sadist because I would have liked for their struggle and eventual main fight to have lasted longer. I was left a smidge unsatisfied with how it all went down and the swiftness of their joining and forgiveness of the past.

No one else had ever been able to really hurt her. No one else could save her from herself.

The ending had me a bit divided, on one hand I see what Lyon needed and was asking for from Olivia but on the other hand, it felt like forced in angst again. These characters weren't perfect but they will overfill your heart, stomp on it, and most importantly absorb you into their story. We get explanations into little mysteries that were sprinkled throughout the series, the white gloves, Olivia's miniature, and the elm tree. While others, Isaiah and Isolde's true story and Olivia's father's involvement in the slave trade, are still left strongly implied but never confirmed. I know some readers will sympathize strongly with Landsdowne, Olivia's fiancé. Thankfully, the author doesn't make him an easy victim, readers will like him, but I was also ok with him getting a bit of the shaft in this book. As with Henry in What I Did for a Duke, this wasn't to be his story and his happily ever after wasn't Olivia, I bet he has something better and right waiting for him on the horizon.

"Why did you do it?' she whispered. He was silent a moment, thoughtful. And then his mouth quirked at the corner.
"Because you couldn't." He said it gently. But deliberately. Ruefully. Laying those words out as if delivering a truth. Just the way he'd done the night he'd left: What if loving you is what I do best? It was indeed what he did best. He had gone and proved it. Her breath snagged in her throat.

Lyon and Olivia's journey is the sweeping love saga we all dream about, not sure we would want or could survive going through, read and reread, and end up pushing a bit desperately at friends to read. Is the last half and ending a bit sappy and over indulgent with looking back at past characters and overall stories? Yes but it's also the ending those of us that have been there from the beginning ultimately deserved. This might sound weird but I would suggest waiting a while after finishing the last chapter and moving on to reading the epilogue, I found it took away from my sweet closure of Lyon and Olivia’s story. I’ve seen rumblings of Ms. Long moving into the world of contemporaries and I think we may have a glimpse here of where that move may start.

My almost ten year wait was to get to the immediate above quote and let me tell you, it was worth every sibling, cousin, and friend story to get there. Read this series and find out what I mean.

[bookworm2bookworm · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Let me start this review by giving some authors my unsolicited advice about the length of their series.

If you’re writing a series, knowingly or unknowingly, keep extending it from 3-4 books to 10 and beyond; if you’re building up a character/characters through out the length of the series, you better not drop the ball and give us a watered down version of that build up.

One word to describe this last book in the series is “whimper”. Throughout reading this story I kept hoping that I’ll find something, anything to at least like, but that didn’t happen.

I thought that the back story of Olivia and Lyon as teenagers falling in love would explain much of Olivia’s pining for him all these years. It didn’t. I thought for sure I’d like Lyon when I met him, I didn’t. There was zero chemistry between the two. I was told about the “lust” they felt for each other, but there was no love there. NONE!

This was a HUGE let down.

I love second chance romance and this was supposed to be an epic story. The author had built this enormous mystery about Olivia through out a series [which had some hits and misses], but to let us down like this at the end? Not cool.

To tell you more about why I was disappointed, would give too many spoilers, and I don’t like doing that. I will say this. When you give me a hero with flaws, I expect to fall in love with him by the end of the book. What I don’t expect is to be confronted with his flaws over and over again, so that by the end, he just isn’t redeemable.

And when you give me a secondary character like Landsdowne, you better not leave me guessing what the hell happened to him, especially if this is THE END of the series. WTH?!

If you’ve read the previous 10 books, like I did, you’ll probably want to read this one too. But if you haven’t read them in order and you’re not familiar with this author, don’t bother with this story. Try to read ‘What I Did for a Duke’. It is sublime!

Melanie for b2b

Complimentary copy provided by the publisher

[reesa00 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After reading Violet's book, I did not want Olivia and Lyon to end up together. I thought Olivia was naive and spoiled after that book. This book is a great story but much of it is told in flashbacks (which I hate). Olivia comes off much better in this book and earlier items are explained but somewhat superficially. This book could have been amazing but I felt the end game was in sight way too much instead of focusing on the journey and character development. A nice ending to the series (skip the epilogue which is lame) but not the triumph it could have been.

[n.w.moors-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a hard review to write for me. Very much like writing a review for Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation series, this last book in the Pennyroyal Green series is one that I have been dreading reading and waiting impatiently for quite some time.From the very first book, The Perils of Pleasure, where Colin Eversea escapes the hangman's noose to find love with the woman hired to free him, I have enjoyed every single book of the series. Colin's sister, Olivia, has been a part of each book, doing her good works against the slave trade, stoic and mysterious. Lyon Redmond has also appeared in each book, never literally, but as the golden heir to the Redmond family lost and mourned by all. All you know as the reader is that something went terribly wrong between Lyon and Olivia that does not seem will ever be put right.This book opens with Lyon receiving word of Olivia's impending wedding to Viscount Lansdowne. Olivia has finally given up on ever hearing from Lyon again and decided that her only path is marriage. Lansdowne loves her and it would make her family happy to see her finally settled. And the story goes from there.I read this book in a day. I loved it. It finally explained what happened to them originally. They are two strong-willed people who fall instantly and very believably in love at first sight. That feeling between them never truly changes though there were moments when I was not sure that I would get my HEA for Lyon and Olivia. A bonus was the last chapter. Very well done, Ms. Long. I highly recommend the entire series, but this is a book I will reread.