This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @‌thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.

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Leave it to Alexis Hall to come up with a fresh angle on the romance genre – the story of two platonic friends who decide to save themselves from the machinations of others by marrying. Make no mistakes – this is a love story all about the affection between our main characters, even though those feelings are complicated, and the love they find is not traditional. What Sir Horley Comewithers (eventually known as Rufus) and Arabella (known as Belle) Tarleton begin to feel for one another during their long trip is sweet, and deeply felt.

The firmly homosexual Horley has been trapped into an upcoming marriage to a woman by his aunt, who holds the purse strings at home and resents his existence. Dealing with the situation by getting soused, he’s of no help to himself and it’s Arabella who rises to the occasion. She tells him that he ought to marry her for her fortune, if he must marry at all. After all, Belle’s dealing with the realization that she’s aromantic and has no desire to tumble head over heels for anyone. If they must be espoused, as society and finances demand, why not to each other, as they already have respect and friendly love going for them?

Horley thinks that’s a fine solution through a haze of spirits. Belle conscripts her brother and Horley’s ex, Bonny, and Bonny’s husband Valentine to help her sneak Horley out of the house and hide him in a local inn. From there – with Horley barely sober – off on the road to Gretna Green they go.

What ensues is a road trip laced with personal conflicts, encounters with the past, and affirmations of their path to a marital life. Horley yearns for a true love he considers himself unworthy of, and is barely over Bonny. Belle must figure out what sex and desire looks like to someone who eschews romance like her. They collectively have to decide if they can make their platonic marriage work, and if this is what they really want – and even if their feelings for one another carry more than a trace of platonic love.

Both of them experiment with other partners; Belle develops and consummates an attraction to Miss Verity Carswile, then falls into a daddy-domme (where SHE is the daddy) situation with Mr. Francis Smith, the overseer for Horley’s estate, after her Gretna Green marriage. Horley falls in lust with Gil, an anxious highwayman with an interest in old books and bondage whose robbery of the twosome goes more than a bit sideways. But at the end of the day, might it be the love Belle and Horley have for each other that truly means the most?

This is such a fun adventure that takes a late-act turn into deeply-felt emotions and feelings. It made me feel a million things.

You might recognize these characters from prior books if you’ve read them. Belle was the perpetually-unattainable lover of Peggy, the heroine of Book #1, Something Spectacular ( A | BN ).

Then she was the twin sister and near-fiancee of Bonny and Valentine, respectively, in Something Fabulous ( A | BN ).

Horley appears in both books and is Bonny’s lover in the latter volume. From those roots – where Belle is portrayed as impulsive and selfish and Horley is a libertine louche – both grow up handily throughout this volume. Though Belle is still the kind of woman who would gladly throw herself at an opera singer, her recklessness has been tempered with caring for others. Horley is initially loose-jointed, funny and sarcastic; he ultimately ends up growing by leaps and bounds from the man he was at the start of the series. As they spend more time together, Belle and Horley find a deep love and respect in each other that proves to be a lot deeper than they thought it would be.

I found the ending of their search for passion and love, respectively, to be rather touching, and the arrangement they made perfectly sensible. This is a banter-filled romp loaded with adventure: the sex is fun and character-revealing, and the friendships that anchor the entire experience are beautiful.

There’s plenty of time to catch up with other characters from the previous two books in the series. Peggy and Orfeo (and the baby!) and Bonny and Valentine get solid supporting roles, too. New readers will likely be lost when it comes to all of this backstory, so it’s best read after the other two volumes.

Something Extraordinary is loaded with fun, with love, with passion and with devotion. Love comes in all shapes, sizes and flavors. This is the one that tastes like heaven.