A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer

So the thing you need to know about this book is that in its world, men are only about 5% of the population, so men's and women's roles are basically reversed. Men are protected and basically treated as property, and the women fight and run businesses and so on.

Other than that, it's a fairly straightforward historical romance, where the beautiful but poor son of farmers falls in love with a woman far above his station, etc. etc.

I wasn't too into it at first, and I really wished it had taken the role reversal thing to another level somehow. Other than the different family structure [which was cool--basically one man will marry a whole family of sisters, and they have like 30 kids in order to have at least one or two boys] you could have just switched all the pronouns and had a pretty normal romance novel.

Gradually, though, it grew on me and I found myself shirking my very important chores and so on to find out what happened.
There was a lot of interesting stuff about their society that was only touched on in passing, and it made me hope for a sequel that would really go into the issues that only got a surface treatment here.

Notes From the Labyrinth says it much better than I did, although I don't mind the "clair" thing like she does. (A useful term!)