REVIEW: "A Perfect Fifth" by Jaycie Morrison

"A Perfect Fifth" by Jaycie Morrison

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5 Stars)

Cute historical romance!

We follow two main characters; Zara Keller, a talented pianist hoping to secure a position at The Royal College of Music; and Lady Jillian Stansfield, an intelligent woman desiring a meaningful life, but with obligations to set those ambitions aside for marriage and children. Zara challenges Jillian to pursue her ambitions and to be true to herself, making the hardest decisions of her life. But when tragedy strikes, saving Jillian may cost Zara her dream job and the chance at love.

Overall an enjoyable read! This is a slow burn romance that explores sexuality and identity, challenged by homphobia and manipulative men. The side characters would have benefitted from being more developed, I think. We get lots of lovely details about both Zara and Jillian, but the other people seem to be slightly forgotten. Which seems like a miss when they're still used as occasional narrators. I did enjoy the different POVs, as I feel like they give a good overview of the story, but if all of them had been as thought through as the main characters it would have been more exciting to read.

As a musician, I thank the author for the moments of accurate music theory. There are way too many books out there that are painful to read, because of the lack of musical understanding...

There's a little pet peeve for me in this story, albeit a tiny detail. In my personal opinion, whenever an author tries to write how a foreigner speaks English, it's either a hit or a miss. This time it's unfortunately a miss. Somewhere along the line Zara meets a German woman and the brief dialogue between the two was written in what I call ”General foreign”; Imagine understandable English, but with obvious grammar or word mistakes that doesn't match the character's original language structure. This doesn't in any way drag down the rating for me, becuase it's not a vital part of the story, but as someone who doesn't have English as her first language, it's always going to annoy me when I read it.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review! I enjoyed reading it.

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