I really wasn't that interested going into An Offer from a Gentleman. It seemed to me largely just something to get through before I could start in on the Bridgertons I actually wanted to read about. This is because Benedict, frankly, was a complete non-entity in the previous two books. It felt as if Julia Quinn was aware of this as she immediately introduces Benedict's primary internal conflict as being the fact that he's perceived as interchangeable with his brothers, except Anthony is responsible and overbearing and Colin is charming, affable, and witty and no one is quite sure what Benedict is. How meta!

That said Quinn definitely tried hard to introduce some kind of hook into the narrative and thus we were, for better or worse, saddled with a very literal Cinderella story. The first half of the book is serviceable, but it's ultimately much stronger once the narrative breaks out of that framing mostly because Benedict and Sophie's true love at first sight just... isn't that convincing. I'm always willing to make allowances and certainly don't need everything to be pragmatic or even cynical, but the problem is that if I've never really seen the characters interact before they determined that they were desperately in love, I'll take your word for it, sure, but I won't really be invested.

In the second half, we get to actually see Benedict and Sophie interact as people and things really come alive much better there. For me, Benedict remains fairly bland, but an excellent lady can rescue a lot, and Sophie is most definitely excellent. One thing I did very much like about this book is that Quinn actually takes a moment to address the stunning classism inherent to Regency romances about upper class British society. By situating Sophie as a servant and then actually acknowledging the massive power differential and making Sophie understand it and challenge it and drag Benedict into line as well, she manages to take something that could have been super skeevy and have it work. In addition, the end of the book and the ~unexpected savior~ who shows up during the climax is aces.

Ultimately, this is still one of the weakest novels of the series, but very readable nonetheless.