This is very much a book of two halves. The early chapters, as the hero and heroine inch towards an accommodation, are charming. The later chapters, as we’re inundated with relatives and drama, I found less successful but still enjoyable, and hooray for an older and wiser couple (he’s fifty and she’s thirty two).
Here’s the plot: Our hero, Hunt (the Marquess of Huntercombe), lost his wife and children to smallpox years ago, and now that his remaining heir has died, he urgently needs to marry and start begetting again. His sisters are pushing him towards newly-out candidates, but the prospect of a bride young enough to be his daughter appals him. How about a widow, one with children already as proof of her fertility? And almost at once he meets a most unlikely prospect, the impoverished widow of a duke’s younger son, living outside good society. He’s strongly attracted to Lady Emma Lacy, and her children, Harry and Georgiana, take to him, so what can go wrong? Only that she refuses him, that’s what. But when her son, now heir to the dukedom, is at risk of being taken from her, she realises she has to have a husband who can protect her children.
So the stage is set for a marriage of convenience, and this aspect of the book is beautifully written and very powerful. Both of them have to learn to make accommodations for their new situation, they both have pasts that haunt them and the children create a whole swathe of unexpected tensions between them. I particularly liked the awkwardness of marital sex with a relative stranger (yes, there are some graphic sex scenes, so avoid if that’s not your thing).
And then there’s the difficulty of re-introducing the scandalous Emma into the upper echelons of society again. But this is where the plot starts to go slightly off the rails. Firstly, there’s a deluge of relations, on his side, on hers and from her husband’s family, who are uniformly hostile towards Emma and hellbent on interfering. It would be lovely if these various families could include at least one or two members who were as friendly and downright normal as Hunt and Emma themselves.
Then there are the left-over characters from what is clearly a previous book in the series, which I hadn’t read. This wasn’t a problem, plotwise, but they were wheeled out with the clear expectation that readers would fall on their necks with cries of joyful recognition, which falls a bit flat when one hasn’t actually read that book. I discovered that I already own it, so I will be reading it, but it was a tad disconcerting, all the same.
And then there’s the drama part of the story. I won’t go into the details of this to avoid spoilers, but to my mind it made zero sense. If the villain had set out with a certain aim, then there were far simpler ways of going about it, and it seemed to me that the threat still existed at the end of the book (but maybe I misunderstood that part, who knows).
Nevertheless, even with the somewhat illogical villainy, the relationship between the main characters was always front and centre, and was strong enough to carry the story. The author’s grasp of the Regency era was exceptionally good, and my only quibble was whether Lady Emma Lacy’s title should actually be Lady Peter Lacy. Not totally sure about that. A great read, with a fine mix of the emotional and the dramatic, with a few humorous interludes as well. A good four stars.
The third full-length novel from this new author, and it’s another corker. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Regency romance set in Wales before, but Davis skilfully creates the backdrop and the array of characters, both the aristocratic and the not-quite-gentry.
A short and sweet free story from one of my new favourite authors. Phoebe is awaiting the return of the man she loves from his tour of the continent. Without a formal betrothal, she wasn’t able to write to him, but every day she wrote a line or two in a year-long letter. Now she awaits his arrival at a ball, with the letter heavy in her reticule. But before he appears, she overhears dreadful news – he’s enamoured of a woman he met he France. So when she finally meets him again, to save her pride she makes up an attachment to another man.
This is an oddball one, completely wacky and wild, but very, very funny. Lilah Chadwick and Lord Drakesley (Drake) meet in inauspicious circumstances – at a country coaching inn, squabbling over the only available carriage for hire. Both are determined to have it and not prepared to yield, so when they discover that they are bound for the same place, they do the only sensible thing and share the carriage.
Susan Speers is one of my must-read authors, and although her books vary from the electrifying to the rather dull, they are always different. I just never know what’s going to turn up next, and that’s a large part of what makes this series so fascinating. This one veers slightly to the dull end of the spectrum, but it’s still a fine read, a cut above most Regencies and well worth the more than a year’s wait since Georgette.
So. Much. Fun. I absolutely loved this book, almost from beginning to end. Almost? Well, there were a few moments early on when I feared that it was going to get bogged down in a lot of Harry Potter-esque magic school descriptions, with all the action pushed to the last few chapters, which is probably perfect for some readers but not me. Happily, things warmed up pretty quickly and there were some tremendous goings-on that had me cheering wildly. And the ending was twelve shades of awesome.
The very last book in my project to reread all Heyer’s Regency novels in the order they were written. This is very far from her best work, and sadly it’s actually a rehash of what I personally regard as her most entertaining book, Black Sheep, but with far less likable protagonists, less humour, and a much sketchier plot. Even so, I found a lot to like about it.
This was a disappointment. Partly because I’ve read this story before- twice! Both The Foundling and Sprig Muslin feature a man chasing round the countryside on behalf of some naive ingenue in trouble (generally self-created), while the romance is a perfunctory affair, more or less ignored until the last chapters. And whereas those books displayed all Heyer’s trademark sparkling wit and amusing side characters, this one was just plain dull. Apart from the opening chapter and a few moments in Harrogate, there was nothing much to raise even a wry smile.
Such an interesting film, and one I was drawn to purely for its research potential, but ended by finding a great deal more. It isn’t entirely satisfactory, sacrificing historical accuracy to dramatic storytelling, but it was nevertheless very enjoyable to watch, and superb in both acting and the lush visual presentation.
The romance isn’t entirely satisfactory, but that’s partly because Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Dido, is something of a blank slate. She’s very lovely, of course, and the costumes show her off to glorious advantage, but she lacks something of the nuances in her performance, so that it’s often hard to know what she’s feeling. I was never terribly clear, to be honest, as to why she became engaged to Oliver Ashford. It’s presumed to be the result of bowing to the conventional wisdom that a woman needs a man to take care of her (and her fortune), but happily she breaks free of this in time for a resolution with clergyman’s son, lawyer and political campaigner John Davinier.
I loved Wyndcross, the predecessor to this book, so I knew right from the start that I would love this, too, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a very different story, in many ways a more conventional Regency romance, complete with that time-honoured plot-device, the fake betrothal, and perhaps it doesn’t quite reach the sublime heights of Wyndcross, but that was a very high bar.