Wales, 1926. Lady Caroline has been told her whole life that the combination figure and her brains makes her an entirely unattractive candidate on the marriage mart. When Harry Burton shows an interest in her, Caroline is thrilled, and recognizes that it must be true love. She elopes with Harry in the dead of night, and then run off to the Welsh countryside. On their wedding night, though, she finds him in bed with her lady's maid, of all people! Followed immediately by a mortifying incident where she meets her father-in-law! And then her new husband runs away! In the time that Caroline looks to seek divorce or annulment, she finds a friend in her father-in-law David, Lord Menai, and perhaps something more. Stevie Sparks knows how to serve up traumatic backstories and emotional high stakes for her characters. Despite the intensity of the ruination for Caroline, this was light on the Sparks trauma scale, especially for this series. One thing I've always loved about these books is that even though they have underlying trauma, the emotional impact is treated with great respect, so I'll be honest when I picked this up during my professional busy season, I was looking for some fictional trauma to balance out long work hours and over-extension of emotional capacity. Freed by the Marquess didn't quite hit the spot I was hoping it would hit - it's the lowest angst of Sparks's books. The romance between David and Caroline has a forbidden element, because he's her father-in-law, but Harry is such a terrible husband he never feels like he's really part of the picture. (Honestly, good on Stevie Sparks for striking this balance!) The conflict feels low stakes overall; though perhaps if you read it back-to-back with Despising the Duke, you want that lower stakes conflict. I enjoyed the trans-Atlantic crossing and the peek at 1920s New York City with its speak easies and the high end social life. The strength of this book is in the character development for Caroline as she learns to value herself outside of the constraints of her marriage-in-name and as she finally enters adulthood not by getting married but by finally shaking free her mother's voice in her head and standing on her own as her own woman. This is an age gap forbidden romance novel, which are tropes I'm not normally drawn to.... but if Stevie Sparks writes it and sets it in the post WWI/Jazz age, I'm going to read it, because even when it isn't a complete knockout read for me, it's still going to hit a sweet spot.