Author: Mary Kingswood

Review: Highcliffe House by Megan Walker (2024)

Posted May 21, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

I’m not at all sure what to make of this one. It’s well written, although I strongly dislike the dual first person perspectives, but none of it really convinces me and it doesn’t quite feel Regency to me, although I can’t quite say why. Just something out of kilter.

Here’s the premise: Anna Lane detests her wealthy father’s business partner, Graham Everett. He’s always taking her father away from her, sometimes just by distracting him with business affairs and sometimes physically, leaving her alone, since her mother is dead. After she mistakenly entangles herself with the wrong man, all she wants is time alone with her father to recover, but Graham is once again there to distract him. And this time, her father sends her off with Graham to check out his latest investment while he pursues an interest elsewhere.

The new investment is in Brighton, where Graham lives, and Anna is required to live with his family in their rather shabby house. At first, she dislikes the situation intensely, but the family slowly grow on her, and the view from her window is incomparable. Despite her determination to tell her father not to invest, Anna can’t help being charmed by Brighton – the pebbly beach, the Steine, the library and the Pavilion gardens, not the mention the sea air and the vibrancy of the coast.

She’s also charmed by Graham, and here’s one area where the plausibility wobbles somewhat. In only a week, Anna goes from outright hostility to head over heels in love, and frankly, that doesn’t convince me for a moment. His feelings have been established much earlier so there’s not so much of a leap to love, but hers shift from one extreme to the other.

I confess that I don’t really get Anna. She seems too volatile to me, too willing to be hurtful just for the sake of it, and not even pretending to a surface politeness with Graham. She blames him for her father’s absences, even though her father is his own man and able to make his own decisions about how he spends his time. I found it a little odd that he needed to travel so much because of his investments, since rich men usually just handed over the money and left managers and attorneys and bankers deal with the sordid details. But apparently he travelled so much that he couldn’t even spare the two weeks a year he usually spent with Anna at Lyme.

I notice a trend in modern Regencies away from the traditional means of winning or losing a fortune (gambling, usually) towards the uncertainties of ‘investments’ (usually unspecified). Which is all very well, but authors need to be careful of having their Regency gentlemen too involved in actual work, which was a huge no-no. Yes to putting money into a venture, but no to having anything at all to do with running it. This book doesn’t do that, but all that travelling Mr Lane does comes very close. This book also steps outside the traditional boundaries by having Anna directly involved in an investment decision, another modern trend of heroines who are actively involved in more than embroidery and good works.

Here’s another oddity. Graham, we discover, comes from very humble, not to say scandalous stock, yet he’s become a trusted associate of a very wealthy and well-connected man like Mr Lane. How precisely did that work? I’m not sure that the book ever explains it satisfactorily. Graham is a little easier to understand than Anna. He’s the classical self-made man, hauling himself up by his bootstraps to a life where he and his family need never worry about money again. He talked about one more big investment which would see him succeed, but you have to wonder if he would ever truly be satisfied, or whether there would always be ‘one more investment’.

The star attraction of the book is Graham’s family, his gentle mother, his initially hostile but easily won over sister Ginny, and the delightfully outspoken and original Tabitha. And Anna, society girl that she is, manages to shed all her starchy upper-class ways and fit right in. There’s a charming moment when Graham emerges after a long evening working at his correspondence and accounts, to find Anna and the sisters practising the waltz and falling about laughing, as sisters do. It not only shows how well Anna has melted into the Everetts’ embrace, but also how alone Graham is, the only son trying hard to restore the family’s fortune’s in place of his feckless disappeared father. He seemed oddly serious and out of place at that moment.

There are quite a few moments like that scattered throughout the book where the author’s talent shines through despite things that seem odd elsewhere. Some scenes, like the outing to the pebble beach, start off by Anna and Graham being snippy with each other and end in pure fun. There there are the moments of vulnerability for both Graham (the cow) and Anna (Mr Lennox). The romance is finely drawn, despite the speed of it, and Brighton comes out of it very well.

Quibbles? I’ve mentioned my dislike of having dual points of view both in the first person (I went, I said…). I invariably get muddled as to whose perspective it is (but that’s just me; I do understand why authors and readers like that style). There were a few Americanisms and anachronisms. I had to smile at the idea of hunting elk! But one thing made me shudder: the repeated use of Ms Peale. Other characters were Miss or Mrs, so why was this one character referred to by the very modern term Ms?

Overall, this was probably not my kind of book. I’d say it was aimed at a less traditional audience, who won’t be upset by the anachronisms or the quirks of the Regency depicted here that make me uneasy. Nevertheless, I mostly enjoyed it, the romance was powerful, and I liked Graham’s family very much (especially Tabitha). So I’m going to go for four stars.

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Review: Olivia by Joan Smith (1981)

Posted May 21, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

Not a perfect book by any means. The heroine is not very likeable, the hero is all over the place, and the supporting characters are largely useless, but there was something about it that got under my skin, and by the end I felt deeply sorry for the heroine.

Here’s the premise: Olivia Fenwick doesn’t get on with her new stepmother, so she’s taken a year away from home to act as governess/companion to the daughter of a distant but high-ranking relation. With the daughter safely wed, she decides to continue her successful career, but this time she’ll market herself as a very superior type of governess, more a family guest than an employee, although charging a phenomenal rate for her services. She settles for a baron’s family, with two daughters, and at first everything goes swimmingly. Only Lady Synge’s brother, Lord Philmot, seems unimpressed by Olivia’s abilities, taking every opportunity to denigrate her.

But gradually things start to go wrong, and Olivia finds herself in very difficult circumstances, not entirely of her own making. I said that she’s not very likeable – she’s arrogant, intolerant, a raging snob and has no self-awareness. Even so, I did actually admire her independence of spirit and was very sorry when everything started to fall apart for her. The hero – well, he veers about from outright antagonism to a kind of heavy-duty flirtation, and sometimes it’s hard to know what to make of him. That’s not helped by the first person narration from Olivia’s point of view, so we only ever see Lord Philmot through her eyes and she’s not the most perceptive person in the world. To be honest, I was quite prepared to dislike him quite thoroughly, since he not only has a mistress in tow for the early part of the book, he tries it on with Olivia, too, and then effectively punishes her when she won’t play the game. But he can be very charming when he wants to be, and he does eventually set things right for Olivia (which he should have done, since most of her problems were his fault).

One of the interesting points in the book is the contrast between the aristocracy, who vary from selfish to outright wicked, and the middle classes. Olivia reveres the nobility, and just can’t see when they’re being horrible. Her now-married former charge, for instance, who cold-bloodedly excludes Olivia from all her social events, which Olivia sets down to forgetfulness or her new husband’s influence. Even when Olivia overhears her talking about ‘a bossy old scold’, she doesn’t for one minute imagine it’s herself being spoken of. It’s quite sad, actually.

But her middle class relations in Hans Town are a lovely, normal family who welcome Olivia with genuine friendliness, and her own family in Bath are equally lovely, setting off for London instantly when they hear what has happened to her, to make sure things are set right. And Olivia is by this time so humbled by her experiences that she finds that her stepmother is perfectly tolerable, in fact. Slightly vulgar, but good-hearted and not at all the enemy she’d imagined.

And the hero eventually becomes suitably heroic, and the book wraps up in the annoying way of books of this age with an abrupt kiss and that’s it. Anyone looking for a schmaltzy extended epilogue – sorry, not happening. This was a bit uneven, and there are a few Americanisms, but in the end I enjoyed it enough to give it four stars.

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Review: To Catch A Husband by Sophia Holloway (2024)

Posted May 20, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

I loved everything about this book. It felt like a much older book, one written perhaps twenty or thirty years ago, and I mean that as a very sincere compliment. Lately, I’ve almost despaired of modern Regencies, where the characters behave in modern ways with very modern sensibilities and sometimes even modern language. Sophia Holloway is one of the very few who avoids all these pitfalls.

Here’s the premise: Miss Mary Lound is twenty-five, and a spinster, being happier outdoors than in drawing rooms or ballrooms. That’s never bothered her, but now she’s in a difficult position. Her father’s debts and her brother’s unwillingness to try to repay them means that her beloved home of Tapley End has been sold, and she and her scatterbrained mother are living in near destitution in the Dower House. But the new owner, Sir Rowland Kempsey, is a pleasant man of thirty or so, and if she could catch him, Mary would be free of the threat of starvation, and mistress of Tapley End. It was worth a try…

Trouble is, Mary’s never tried to attract a man before, and she has no idea how to do it. Her early attempts are not very successful, and only serve to deter her target. If only she knew that he was attracted to open, honest and straightforward Mary just as she was. Meanwhile, her neighbour and almost-like-a-brother Sir Harry Penwood is sighing over the beautiful Madeleine Banham, and finding his own courtship troubled by smooth-talking and rakish Lord Cradley. This is the heart of the book – how exactly does one catch a husband? The beautiful Madeleine would like a gentleman who sees more to her than the exquisite exterior, while Mary would just like a man who sees her, and doesn’t veer away the instant the lovely Miss Banham appears.

This is not a particularly complex book, either in romance terms or in the plot. After a series of missteps, Mary and Sir Rowland manage to reach an accommodation that allows them to drift towards love, and Lord Cradley is seen off by his own misdeeds. Not much happens, in other words, but that doesn’t matter a bit. These characters are so real and so likeable that I was rooting for them all the way. Even the side characters, like Sir Rowland’s younger brother, Madeleine’s parents and the butterfly-minded Lady Damerham, are delightful. There was a certain amount of coincidence in how things worked out towards the end, but not so much as to be implausible.

As far as the writing goes, absolutely nothing tripped me up, not a single anachronism or Americanism, although I would have liked it if the author had used the word ‘nice’ less often. Such a bland word, surely she could have found something more interesting? Otherwise, the whole book is perfection, and I highly recommend it. Five stars.

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Review: A Modest Independence by Mimi Matthews (2019)

Posted May 20, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 2 Comments

A strange contrast with the first book in the series. That was riveting, with a fascinating premise and intriguing characters, an absolute page turner from the start. This was… well, just a little bit boring.

Here’s the premise: poor relation and companion Jenny Holloway has been given the modest independence of the title, five thousand pounds which will allow her to travel and see the world. Initially, she wants to travel to India to see if she can’t find out what really happened to the Earl of Castleton. Is he really dead? If not, whatever became of him? Solicitor Tom Finchley helps her by releasing her money and making travel arrangements. And at the last minute, he decides he can’t let her go all that way with only servants, so he goes with her himself.

And if that were all, this book would be half its length (and probably all the better for it). But Tom likes Jenny rather more than he should, and proposes that they become affectionate companions. It’s not a courtship, since neither of them wants to marry, merely an acknowledgement of an attraction between them. This is where I take issue with him, because what on earth does he expect to happen if they get close and affectionate on a long journey involving boats and trains and who knows what else? The pair fall ever deeper in love, that’s what happens, all the while knowing that there’s no prospect of marriage. Jenny plans to stay abroad indefinitely and Tom will go back to London to take up his life as a solicitor, so they have no future as a couple, and I can’t quite forgive him for behaviour that can only lead both of them to deep unhappiness.

Nevertheless, that is what he does, so the first half, at least, of the book consists of the two of them kissing and touching and getting ever closer, while angsting continuously about it. The travel itself, while obviously well researched, is not particularly interesting and the endless introspection is, frankly, dull. Things liven up a bit when they get to Delhi and start asking about Lord Castleton. The mystery part of the story unfurls pretty much as you’d expect. And then the adventure is over, Jenny and Tom leave India and head back to Egypt where Jenny is going to stay for their final separation. And finally, finally Tom does the truly heroic thing – he respects Jenny’s wishes and leaves her there to begin her new life without him, even though it breaks his heart.

I want to have a grumble here about the whole missing earl thing. The 6th Earl has been declared dead on the say so of one eye-witness in the middle of an intense battle, although his body was never found. That is apparently enough for the powers that be in London to accept, so the will is executed and the 7th Earl steps forward. Then Jenny goes off to India to (possibly) find the missing earl. And no one, at any time, ever considers the ramifications if he should happen to be alive. The new earl displaced. The dispositions of the will to be untangled. In practice, of course, no one would have accepted the earl was dead without a great deal more evidence, and a body, at the very least. So whether the earl is ever found or not, the potential ramifications should have been very much in everyone’s mind. It may seem a small point, but I can’t quite forgive it.

My other big grumble is the way the two principals behave and their endless agonising over it. I’m not not a big fan of angsty books, and this one is practically wall-to-wall angst. In every other respect the book is beautifully written, and I’m sure the research is spot on, so if you like travelogues and/or angst, you’ll love this book. For me though it was only a three star read, and a disappointment after the sharpness of the first book.

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Review: The Improper Governess by Carola Dunn (1998)

Posted May 16, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

A lovely old-fashioned Regency with all that entails. Yes, it has some weaknesses, like an implausible premise, a hero with a penchant for mistresses and a romance that comes to the boil only in the last paragraph, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nevertheless.

Here’s the premise: Lord Ashe is in the market for a new mistress after setting his last ladybird loose, and there’s an opera singer who’s a bit different – she do nicely. But supper with the lady makes him realise that she’s more different than he had guessed – not only young and innocent, but also caring for two younger brothers. He decides not to press her, giving her the remains of the supper for the boys and taking her home, where the boys turn out to be surprisingly well brought up. Lord Ashe is intrigued and concerned by some of the information Lissa and the boys let slip, so when his widowed sister has trouble keeping a governess for her sickly son, Ashe proposes Lissa for the job. She’s suspicious that he’s just using that as an excuse to seduce her, but when another potential seducer circles close to her, she reluctantly accepts the offer.

From here on, there aren’t too many surprises. Lissa turns out to be an excellent governess, her two brothers make good playmates for Ashe’s nephew, Colin, and Ashe behaves impeccably. It’s an odd thing, but rakes in Regencies always do behave impeccably once the story gets under way, although Ashe does at least have believable moments of still hankering after Lissa. Colin turns out to have what sounds like asthma, but a bolt for the country and Ashe’s own estate restores him to health, and the three boys enjoy a healthy outdoorsy existence.

There’s bound to be a fly in the ointment, however, and here it’s Colin’s mother, a clothes-obsessed social butterfly and her noble suitor, who let the cat out of the bag regarding Lissa’s former occupation as an opera singer (regarded as no better than a prostitute). All sorts of ructions ensue, but in the midst of the mayhem, Ashe, having long resisted looking into Lissa’s mysterious past, now sets out to discover who precisely she is. More ructions ensue, and really, he should have known better. He knew perfectly well that they were escaping from a violent home, so it would have been much better to leave well alone. Or, since he was very much in love by this point, he could have gone to Lissa and said: ‘I want to marry you, but to keep you and the boys safe, I need to know just who you are.’

But of course everything comes right in the end, without very much effort, in fact, and Ashe finally says and does the right thing. This isn’t a perfect book by any means, but then what is? But it’s very well written, with a realistically evoked Regency era and no Americanisms or anachronisms that I noticed at all, and I enjoyed it so much that I can’t give it less than five stars.

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Review: Blossom Time by Joan Smith (1997)

Posted May 16, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

Finally, a Joan Smith Regency I can enjoy unreservedly. I liked both hero and heroine, the side issues were interesting and there was a lovely kiss quite early on which should have ignited something, and perhaps it did, but the romance still only smouldered until the very end.

Here’s the premise: Rosalind Lovelace is twenty-four, and seemingly firmly on the shelf. Her brother is engaged, so she’ll soon be superfluous in her own home. However, some poetry she’s written has been accepted for a fancy London magazine, and the publisher wants to meet her. She’d have preferred to keep her writing secret, especially from her neighbour Lord Harwell, who would tease her unmercifully about it, but when Lord Sylvester Staunton arrives, not only is her secret revealed but it seems that she has acquired an admirer. Could this lead to a marriage offer? Lord Harwell certainly thinks so, and he realises rather belatedly that Rosalind would be the perfect wife for himself.

And so the plot unfurls in amusing style, much of it revolving around Rosalind’s brother’s vulgar and snobbish future wife. Her excesses were very entertaining, and even though the final outcome was never in any doubt, the route there was a pleasant one. I never felt that the characters were behaving oddly or were being manipulated purely to advance the plot.

I loved Lord Harwell (or Harry, as Rosalind and her brother charmingly call him), who never put a foot wrong and never became the sort of overbearing arrogant man so beloved of older Regencies. I liked Rosalind, too, pragmatically building a new life for herself when faced with a sister-in-law she couldn’t get along with. And if she seemed a bit bossy sometimes, that was inevitable given that she’d been running the household for years, and her brother had leaned on her to make all the difficult decisions. Her hopes for Lord Sylvester were rather sad, when she would much rather have stayed at home. And then, a fine ending, with all loose ends neatly tied up and Harry and Rosalind finally getting together for a repeat of that lovely kiss. A very enjoyable five stars.

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Review: The Matrimonial Advertisement by Mimi Matthews (2018)

Posted May 14, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

This was so close to being a five star read – an intriguing premise, fascinating characters, an atmospheric setting and lots of promise for dramatic revelations – what could go wrong? I’ll get to that.

Here’s the premise: Justin Thornhill has managed to hoist himself up from humble beginnings to buy a run-down house in the West Country. All he needs is a wife to help him run the place. Helena Reynolds needs to escape from London, and she’s desperate enough to answer a matrimonial advertisement. She’ll marry a complete stranger if he’ll keep her safe. I find this a fascinating premise. It’s obvious that both these two have dark stories to tell. Justin is an ex-soldier with scars and burns covering his body. Helena has bruises to hide, too. But they accept each other as they are, and they quickly marry.

Instantly, Helena’s past turns up to disrupt them, and Justin’s fears that she’s too grand to be marrying the likes of him are fully realised. But he does what he has agreed to do, and gets rid of the men who would take her back to London and all the horrors she wanted so badly to escape from. I won’t spoil things by going into details about either her past or Justin’s, but suffice it to say that she is being pursued by a very powerful person.

Up to the halfway point, this is a fascinating story, beautifully realised and steeped in atmosphere and mystery. The two main characters are wonderfully real in all their interactions (a bit of a beauty and the beast vibe going on there), and the clifftop abbey and its odd inhabitants suitably gothic. I did wonder if it always rained quite so much in Devon, and maybe they could have just the occasional balmy day, but it was certainly atmospheric.

But the second half, where Helena and Justin go to London and do all sorts of conventional things – balls, morning calls, the theatre – is much less interesting, and at the very end, the biggest problem of all – an outbreak of I’m-not-worthy-itis from Justin, so that he takes off back to Devon and Helena’s not invited. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, even more than a Great Misunderstanding, it’s a hero who simply assumes he knows what’s best for the heroine. Look, selfless heroes everywhere, treat your heroines with a bit of respect, all right? They’re sensible people with hopes and fears and feelings too, so ASK what they want before self-righteously sloping off and leaving them with a broken heart.

But other than that, I don’t have much to grumble about. This is set in the Victorian era, not the more familiar (to me) Regency, so some things that seemed odd to me might be quite legitimate. The talk of annulment, for instance – very much not a thing in the Regency, but maybe it’s fine by the mid-Victorian era. I did wonder that the 6th Earl was so easily declared dead on the say-so of just one person. Usually with titles, the fear of making a mistake kept the title in abeyance unless there was an actual body. And I disapproved hugely of leaving the money that usually supported a title to someone else entirely. Being a peer was an expensive business, and the poor man was supposed to live in a manner appropriate for his station, not in penury. And why was the income from the estate not tied to the entailed land, in the form of rent-paying tenant farmers, as was usual? So I wasn’t quite sure how that worked.

Still, these are trivial points. The book is beautifully written, it feels authentic to its time (and I loved the way Helena’s big skirts were a constant reminder of that) and the two main characters were wonderful. Justin, in particular, is a true hero. Only that stupid last-minute outbreak of unworthiness annoyed me enough to keep it to four stars. And now I’m going straight on to the next book in the series to find out just what did happen to Giles.

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Review: Manor For Sale, Baron Included by Esther Hatch (2021)

Posted May 14, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

OK, so this is frivolous to the extreme, and a pleasant palate-cleanser after an overdose of angst in the last book I read. Plausible? Not in the slightest, but it’s still a lot of fun.

Here’s the premise: Jonathan (or John), Lord Farnsworth, has inherited an awkward situation: several unprofitable entailed estates, which he can’t sell, and just one that he can sell to set him financially on his feet again. Trouble is, it’s the only one he regards as home, the place he was happiest, because it was where his mother lived. He really, really doesn’t want to sell it, but when he discovers that the potential buyer is a beautiful young woman, he’s intrigued. Maybe he can sell to Miss Duncan and then marry her, and get the estate back again? But he quickly discovers that Sally is very far from being impressed by his title or his person, and, what is worse, she’s doing all sorts of unspeakable things to the house. So that’s not going to plan, at all.

I have to say that John is rather an endearing character. He bumbles ineffectually around on the fringes of Sally’s life while she does her best to ignore him, and when that doesn’t work, to deter him. And he never wavers in his determination to marry Sally, finding ever more reasons for it as time passes and he slides slowly but irrevocably deep in love with her. She takes longer to reach that point, because although he thinks it will be easy to win her because of the title (all girls want to marry a nobleman, don’t they?), she is prejudiced against noblemen for good and sound reasons which he knows nothing about. So when he finally steps forward to propose, he’s shocked when she icily rejects him.

At this point I would really have liked the two to sit down and discuss just why they feel the way they do. John needed to tell Sally how much he loved her and not make it about the house, and she needed to explain her reservations, not to mention trying to get to know him a bit better. After all their interactions at this point, surely she owed him that and not simply making assumptions about him. But Sally the hard-nosed-business-woman doesn’t seem to be able to read John’s character the way she would in a business deal. In many ways, she’s not a very likeable person, but perhaps that’s due to her unusual upbringing, being given responsibility for a business. All the softer, more caring part of her personality is focused around her sister, but I’m not sure that’s enough to redeem her for the awful way she treats John.

To be honest, this is not a book I would normally read – it sounds too frivolous by half, and it’s true that the early chapters are pretty silly (although also pretty funny, especially the pond and the squirrel). It’s also a strange sort of world these characters inhabit. The Dorset house seems to exist in a vacuum, with no neighbouring gentry, not even the vicar, and Sally’s mother and another chaperon are conspicuous by their absence. What sort of mother stays in London enjoying herself while her two unmarried daughters take off for Dorset to live on their own? I know this is the Victorian age, not my usual Regency, but mores haven’t changed that much.

But the silliness of the opening chapters gives way later to a much more profound style, which I liked very much. The scene in the library is one that will stay with me for a long time (even though, once again, Mama is far too neglectful of her daughter; where was she while all that kissing was going on?). Sally is still wildly making assumptions almost to the end of the book, but happily everyone else gangs up on her to bring about the long-awaited happy ending. A very different read, for me, but enjoyable. Four stars.

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Review: Something Old by Rebecca Connolly (2021)

Posted May 13, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

This is not my kind of Regency at all. Nothing wrong with it, and I totally understand why many readers would love it, but it just doesn’t do it for me, sadly. Too much angst and introspection, and not enough action.

Here’s the premise: Thomas and Lily Granger have been married for five years. They were inching along a path of gentle courtship when Thomas lost virtually all his money. He then asked for Lily’s hand solely to use her dowry to re-establish himself. Now, five years later, he’s finally achieved that. He’s not only solvent again, but he has Lily’s original dowry to restore to her, as well as his own somewhat improved finances. But even though he loves his wife, guilt has kept him from showing her any affection at all. Now he wants to start again, wooing her as he should have done before they married. But is it too late?

And here’s the kicker: unbeknownst to him, Lily has been in love with him for years, but she’s all but given up hope of their marriage ever developing into a real marriage of mutual affection.

Now, this is an intriguing situation. I find it a little implausible that Thomas would allow his guilt to so overwhelm him that he shows no affection whatsoever to Lily. They live virtually separate lives. However, I’m always prepared to give a book its initial premise, so let it stand. The interesting question is how he deals with the situation now. No points for anyone who said: they sit down over a cup of tea and talk everything through. No, silly, this is a Regency romance, where no one ever simply explains what the problem is and proposes solutions. Instead, the couple both agonise over their situation at inordinate length, chapter after chapter that seem to be nothing but inner monologues.

The first thing Thomas does is to seek out all his best buddies, and ask them for advice. Now, this gives me a severe case of the wobbles. Even today, blokes are (in general) not good at talking to other blokes about emotional problems, and Regency blokes are (in general) more buttoned up than most. It strikes me as wildly implausible that Thomas would be so open about his problems. Generally speaking, Regency marriages were smooth on the surface, no matter what was going on behind the scenes, yet here everyone knows what’s going on and mucks in to offer advice.

I have another grumble at this point, too. All these blokish friends (and some of Lily’s female friends, too, who are also asked for advice) seem to have drifted in from an earlier series. If you’re a fan of the author, and you remember and love these characters, this will be a huge bonus for you, but I just felt as if I’d missed something vital.

After an interlude in London, where things don’t go so well for our newly courting couple, they eventually realise they have to get completely away from everywhere that’s familiar and they head off to the promised Cornwall. This perks the romance up beautifully, but it also causes an outbreak of perfection-itis. The house they rent is idyllic. They themselves are beautiful and wonderful in every way. Lily, we are repeatedly told, is just perfect. Thomas is a considerate employer (he part-owns mines in the area) and devotes time and money to the welfare of his workers and their families. Lily, being very forward-thinking, goes into one of the mines with him. When introduced to the illegitimate half-sister of a local lord, she instantly befriends her. And so on. Frankly, this gets tedious very quickly, and since there’s no plot to speak of, beyond the relationship of Thomas and Lily, there’s nothing to distract from the ongoing monologues and the perfection-itis.

Eventually, a tiny hint of a plot event arises that throws a challenge to our now adoring couple, but I confess that by this time I didn’t much care. As I said before, this style of book just isn’t my cup of tea, but for those who love this kind of emotional outpouring, this is a well-written example, with only a light smattering of Americanisms to disturb. Not a bad book at all, but for me only three stars.

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Review: Gather Ye Rosebuds by Joan Smith (1993)

Posted May 13, 2024 by Mary Kingswood in Review / 0 Comments

A strange little book, an intriguing mystery combined with the usual (for this era) unconvincing romance. It gets a bit convoluted, but very funny as the principals are supposedly working together but also trying to keep vital clues secret from each other.

Here’s the premise: Zoie Barron is an aspiring artist, planning to renovate a room of the family home to use as a studio. It was her late uncle’s room, and while clearing it out, she discovers a valuable diamond necklace, reported stolen by a neighbour some five years ago, just when the uncle returned from India and moved in with the family. Is he a thief? And if so, how can she return the necklace to the family of the owner (now dead) without any awkward questions being asked? Her attempts become increasingly awkward, and the whole scheme is soon uncovered by Lord Weylin, the head of the neighbouring family, and nephew of the necklace’s owner.

From then on, Weylin and Zoie join forces to solve the mystery of the necklace, and the strange history of the lady who owned it originally and the man who ended up with it. Or at least, they claim to join forces, but repeatedly they conceal information from each other that would reflect badly on their own family. The comedy arises from their various lies, together with the discovery of them. Probably this fell into the category of ‘Regency romp’ in its day, but there’s an element of silliness that had me veering towards three stars some of the time. But there are also some stronger moments, and the romance, while overshadowed by the mystery, is allowed to develop slowly over much of the course of the book, and I always give credit for that, since it isn’t always the case for books of this vintage. There is a nice kissing moment in the rose garden by moonlight, too, so brownie points for that. An interesting and (for me) unexpected ending to the mystery, but quite logical. It’s a quirky read that won’t suit everyone, but being generous, I’ll settle for four stars.

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