Love Takes Root Books in Order

Love Takes Root is Lynn Messina's Regency romance series, and it has the same quick wit and fondness for chaos that show up in her mysteries. These books are romances first, but they are rarely quiet ones. The heroines are intelligent, stubborn, and usually one bad idea away from turning a perfectly proper season into a social emergency.

The series opens with The Harlow Hoyden, which tells you a lot about the mood right away. Emma Harlow is caught stealing an orchid in a duke's conservatory and reacts less with shame than with fresh strategic thinking. She needs help saving her sister from a dreadful engagement, and the Duke of Trent seems like a useful accomplice, whether he agrees or not. From there the books build an interconnected world of sisters, friends, and acquaintances whose lives keep colliding.

That shared-world feeling is a big part of the appeal. The Other Harlow Girl follows Emma's sister Lavinia, a serious horticulturalist who finds herself pushed into a battle of wills with the Marquess of Huntly. Miss Fellingham's Rebellion shifts to Catherine Fellingham, a practical woman trying to rescue her family from scandal while defending herself against an unwanted matchmaking scheme. Then The Fellingham Minx, The Bolingbroke Chit, and The Impertinent Miss Templeton keep widening the circle, so that characters who were once side figures get their own turn in the spotlight.

What ties the books together is not one long external plot so much as a shared taste for lively heroines who do not fit easily into the mold society has prepared for them. Some are bookish. Some are botanical obsessives. Some paint savage caricatures in secret. Some devise daring plans for patents, rescues, or revenge. All of them are more interesting than the polite role they are meant to play.

Messina also likes specific hobbies and social corners, and that gives the series texture. Orchids matter. So do inventions, art, gossip, family money troubles, bad reputations, and the endless work of managing appearances. The setting is recognizably Regency, with balls, titled men, mothers on the hunt, and rules about what a lady should do, but the books are at their best when those rules start to wobble.

The tone is bright, bantery, and affectionate. There is real feeling in the romances, but there is also a lot of comic friction. People misunderstand each other, devise ridiculous schemes, insult each other intelligently, and gradually realize that the person most likely to upset their life might also be the right one to share it.

These books are best read in order because the friendships and family links deepen as the series goes on. Still, each romance has its own center and its own couple. If you want Regency romance with smart heroines, recurring characters, and a little extra mischief in the plot, Love Takes Root is a very easy world to settle into.