A warning: this is going to be slightly spoilery, because it’s impossible to analyse the book properly without getting into the nitty-gritty, so if you really don’t want to know anything, don’t read on.

I really don’t know what to make of this. My first reaction is that it’s a shambles – too long spent on the preliminaries, then a huge explosion, an inexplicable flounce and then some over-angsty tidying up. It’s unbalanced, with too much time wasted on description and not enough on character development. But on the plus side – well, it’s Mary Balogh.

Here’s the premise: Devlin Ware, Viscount Mountford, is twenty-two, and the eldest son and heir to the Earl of Stratton. Their home, Ravenwood, is portrayed as some kind of paradise on earth, and the beautiful and loving Ware family as paragons of virtue and duty, bent on giving everyone, high or low, a rattling good time at fetes and balls and feasts throughout the year. Naturally they do all the work and organising themselves. Fully a third of the book, believe it or not, is devoted to painting a cloying, not to say nauseating, picture of the beautiful Ware family and their idyllic life with all the rosy-cheeked and loyal locals (who are all named, by the way, as if we need to know all this stuff). It is an info-dump of astronomic proportions.

The info-dump culminates in a grand fete and ball, at which Devlin and all his family run round selflessly ensuring the locals are all enjoying themselves, while the locals make appreciative noises and hold log-splitting contests and dance round the maypole (in July? Well, whatever). At the ball, Devlin dances with the eighteen year old daughter of neighbours, Gwyneth Rhys, and dances her right out into the garden where they discover that they have been in love with each other for years, he proposes, she accepts, they kiss, and isn’t all this just so sweet?

And then a thing occurs, and this is where it gets spoilery. Devlin and Gwyneth come across another couple hoping for a spot of privacy in the garden, and perhaps something more than a kiss. Unfortunately, it’s Devlin’s father and the mysterious widow who’s recently moved to the village, and they seem to know each other rather well. Oh noes! She must be his mistress, yet the earl has brought her here as a guest into his home, under the nose of his countess. Now, the Regency (in fact the whole Georgian era, and the Victorian too) was quite relaxed about a married man having a mistress, but the cardinal rule is you don’t bring her anywhere near your wife.

Devlin is incandescent with rage at this insult to his mother and his sisters, and creates a huge and very melodramatic scene. I imagine the author intended this sudden explosion as a contrast with the peaceful scenes that preceded it, and it actually does that very well, like a sudden thunderstorm at the end of a perfect summer day. But the effect is not what Devlin expected – his family turn on him, and he is banished.

Now this is the point where the book goes off the rails for me. His mother wants him gone, for whatever reason, so go he must, but there is a whole world out there he could have gone to. What he does is, frankly, inexplicable to me – he signs up to join the army and go off to fight Napoleon. I can only suppose that he had some kind of death wish, but it’s never really explained. When he goes to say farewell to Gwyneth, she rails at him that they could have gone to her relatives in Wales, they could still have married, so why does he have to join the army, and it’s a very good question. I suppose the main reason is: because the plot demanded it.

Devlin survives the war, albeit with an interesting scar. His half-brother, Ben, who had chosen to go with him, also survives. Another brother, Nicholas, who had planned to enter the army himself, also goes off to fight (why? Two brothers from one family in the war is just madness), but he also survives. And the Earl of Stratton dies and Devlin is forced to return home and pick up the threads of his old life as best he can. Except that everything has changed. He has changed, but everyone else in the family has changed too. There are no more fetes and open days. There is no happy family, selflessly arranging entertainments for the locals (they’re doing their own arranging). Everyone is miserable.

Gwyneth, meanwhile, is still unmarried (well, we never saw that coming, did we?). She tells herself she’s over Devlin and is ready to marry the nice Welshman who’s passionate about music and seems to be passionate about her, too. But then Devlin reappears and all bets are off. I’m going to be honest here, and say that the rest of the book runs on fairly predictable rails. Devlin takes up the reins of the estate, rebuilds bridges with his family, develops a new relationship with the locals and ends up marrying Gwyneth after all, and absolutely none of it is surprising, with one exception. Gwyneth turns out to be the saving grace of this book, because Devlin is a wet blanket almost to the end. And then we get the schmaltzy wedding day, which is twelve teaspoons of sugar sweet, so you have been warned. There is one fairly soft-focus sex scene, which made no sense to me at all, but I suppose a Balogh book without any sex would be too much of a novelty.

I love Mary Balogh to pieces, and even though I was saying ‘Wait, what?’ at frequent intervals and nothing happened for far too long and Devlin was a drip, she still hit me right in the feels time after time. But this just doesn’t feel like the Regency, to me. That whole first third of the book, with the frankly over the top generosity of the Wares, rang false with me. The very idea that they would open the park to anyone who wanted to enjoy it is (for me) incredible, and far too modern an idea. The whole point of large estates was to keep the riff-raff out so that the toffs never had to encounter them. They might conceivably hold an open day once a year, but even that feels more Victorian than Regency to me.

And then the oddities, like face painting for the children – really?? And a baby carrier. These things are not impossible to imagine happening in the Regency, but to my mind, they sound too modern. Gwyneth rides astride sometimes, a huge no-no. Then there’s the baby fat that gives younger daughter Stephanie such grief. Look, fat was absolutely not a problem in the Regency. Right up to the 1920s, when the health craze kicked in, being plump or downright fat was a sign of wealth. Conspicuous consumption was a real thing, and only poor people were thin (or anyone with actual consumption – TB – so being thin was regarded as dangerously unhealthy for anyone who could afford to eat well). Then there are feeders for the wild birds. Well, that’s possible, I suppose, but Regency people kept exotic birds like parrots or songbirds in cages. Wild birds were either for eating or for scientific study (by stuffing or dissecting) or not interesting. Also, the author obviously doesn’t realise that a university education in the Regency was nothing like the modern version. Far from needing to work hard for exams, the sons of the nobility had no need to take any exams, or even to turn up to lectures. They paid, they got a degree.

On the whole, this book was a disappointment. It’s beautifully written, because of course it is, it’s Mary Balogh, for heaven’s sake. But the pacing was all wrong, and the central conceit felt contrived. If I were writing it, I’d have been tempted to start with the fatal fete, condensing all the dull info-dump into little vignettes. Or it could have started with Devlin returning home as earl, showing the earlier events in flashback. Either would, in my opinion, have worked better than the long, long opening chapters.

I also didn’t find any of the characters terribly interesting (apart from Ben, and maybe Stephanie), and it was just too darned sweet for my palate. I like a little tartness in my Regencies, and I also like to be surprised, and that just didn’t happen. And having grumbled at ridiculous length about this book, I confess I read it avidly the whole way through, if only to see the big explosion and find out how things worked out for Devlin’s family. This is the first of the series, so maybe the rest, unburdened by the scene-setting of the opener, will be more interesting. Three stars.

Mary Balogh is a brilliant writer and one of her greatest talents is to create a unique situation for her characters and then let that work itself out in the most logical and not always the easiest way. This is a marriage of convenience story, but it looks with uncompromising honesty at what a great many Regency marriages must have been like. It’s about expectations of marriage, and yes, it’s about how sex plays into that, so it’s not a traditional read, nor is it a comfortable tale, so anyone looking for light-hearted fluff should move on. It is, however, both powerful and fascinating.

Here’s the premise: Lord Astor has recently come into his title and estates, and knows he has an obligation to marry to secure the succession. He also owes an obligation to the widow and daughters of his predecessor, who have been left unprovided for. He can fulfil both requirements at once by marrying one of the daughters. He’s never met them, for the relationship is a distant one, but he’s unbothered by which one it should be. After all, what does it matter? His wife won’t be a big part of his life, will she? Apart from producing a few children, she’ll have her own life and he’ll keep his mistress and his masculine friends and pursuits. So he leaves it up to their mother to decide which one is most appropriate. Since the eldest daughter and beauty of the family, Frances, is likely to marry a neighbour, she puts forward her second daughter, Arabella, to marry the viscount. And after a brief period of misunderstanding, and thinking he’s going to get the beauty, he swallows his disappointment and proposes to Arabella, the small, plump one.

The ladies had a misunderstanding, too, for they thought the viscount was an older man. Arabella, thinking herself plain and uninteresting, is quite happy to marry such a man and have a placid marriage, leaving her sister free to marry the man she’s in love with. But the older man was Lord Astor’s father, now dead, and the son is something of a paragon – handsome, fashionable, with perfect manners, and everything that Arabella would never dare to dream of and doesn’t feel worthy of. She’s reduced to stumbling inarticulacy in his presence. She tells him, however, that she’ll be a dutiful and obedient wife and he’s satisfied. That’s what he wants, after all, someone he can basically ignore while he lives his own life, just as he did before.

So the marriage takes place, and yes, it’s consummated, and no, Balogh doesn’t shy away from the details. It’s not outrageously graphic, but it’s clear that Lord Astor has very fixed ideas about sex. What he enjoys with his mistress is purely for pleasure, and he wouldn’t expect anything as uninhibited as that with his respectable and chaste wife. Instead, she gets sex for procreation, perfunctory and by the sound of it deeply unpleasant. She meekly puts up with it, because she’s an obedient wife and it’s her duty.

The interesting element of this is that Lord Astor is doing his duty, too. He’s not an unkind man, in fact he’s rather gentlemanly and considerate. He willingly takes Arabella to town with her beautiful sister for company, he escorts them everywhere, rigs them out in fashionable clothes and supervises Arabella’s transformation to stylish woman-about-town. And he genuinely thinks he’s being considerate by keeping the procreation efforts to brief sessions in the dark, without any embarrassing foreplay. But all the time, he keeps his mistress and is rather surprised to find himself losing interest in her, and actually enjoying his wife’s company instead. He even finds himself distracted during sessions with his mistress by thoughts of his wife.

And so the stage is set for the transformation that will upset the applecart. Arabella gradually gains confidence in company – not with her husband, but with other, safer, men, who are less distractingly handsome and charming. She becomes a success. And Lord Astor gradually realises that a wife can’t simply be ignored. She’s a real person with real feelings, and he begins to care about those feelings, just a little. The way they both change, little by little over many chapters, is one of the joys of the book, beautifully evoked by Balogh. We see it happen because we’re privy to both characters’ thoughts all the way through. And when the crisis comes and Arabella finds out about the mistress, we know their thoughts on that, too, and follow every step of their journey to understanding each other.

Some reviewers have compared this book to some of Georgette Heyer’s works, in particular A Civil Contract or The Convenient Marriage, and although there are similarities, the book that I’m most reminded of is another Balogh one, Dancing With Clara. In that, the marriage is just as cold-blooded an arrangement, between a dissolute rake and gambler who’s wasted his fortune, and a wealthy heiress who is wheelchair bound. It suits them both – he gets her money, and she gets a virile young man as her husband. But that story had a realistic resolution which was (for me, anyway) deeply unsatisfying. The Obedient Bride has a much more positive ending, perhaps less realistic, but much more in keeping with the expectations of romance readers. This isn’t an easy read, but it is a deeply rewarding one, and I commend it to anyone looking for a clear-eyed deconstruction of a marriage of convenience. Five stars.

This was a difficult book for me to judge. Were it by an author unknown to me, I’d probably have gone with 2*, but with Balogh I’m prepared to see it as an aberration, a brave stab at something that ultimately failed. It ranks, however, as by far the most boring Balogh book I’ve ever read.
Here’s the premise: Lady Rachel Palmer is a social butterfly, the beautiful and vivacious star of the London season, charming even the most unlikely confirmed bachelors to her side. David Gower is the precise opposite, a serious, pious clergyman who may be the younger son of an earl, but isn’t going to let that stand in the way of him devoting his life to his parishioners and good works, living a life of relative poverty. Two people less likely to hit it off could hardly be imagined, yet they have the misfortune to fall in love with each other at first sight. It’s impossible, of course. Except that Rachel doesn’t accept that it’s impossible…

And that, in a nutshell, is the entire book. They spend endless chapters agonising over a dilemma that wouldn’t even exist if either of them had two brain cells to rub together. Here’s the thing: there actually is no obstacle whatsoever to them marrying. He’s of suitable rank, she has a dowry sufficient to support them in reasonable comfort even if he gives away every penny of his income, there’s no reason why she can’t satisfy whatever social cravings she suffers from by visiting her relations, or beetling up to London now and then. A little compromising would have done the job nicely. But no, he has to be noble and self-sacrificing because he’s convinced that she can’t hack it as a clergyman’s wife, and it takes him the entire book to realise that actually, she can make that decision for herself, thank you very much.

She, meanwhile, is proving that she’s too flighty for words by dithering about between David, an old friend and a marquess before finally going off the rails completely and walking out in the middle of a ball with a thunderstorm going on. I get that the author wanted to show her finally breaking free of the stifling constraints of society (aka politeness), but that’s just stupid. And what happens afterwards is even more stupid and melodramatic, and seemed to my mind completely out of alignment with the introspective nature of most of the book.

That, I think, was what made it so unspeakably boring, for me. The two principals go round and round the same things (in their heads) with occasional forays into Serious Conversations, liberally larded with religious stuff. Yes, folks, this a deeply Christian book. I’m not qualified to judge that element of the story, and it wasn’t what made it boring (in my opinion, Regency authors should introduce far more religion into the genre, given that it was an integral part of normal life for virtually the entire population). But if you DO introduce it, and portray one of the characters, at least, as a man of deeply felt faith, then you should really not have him inflicting passionate kissing and much pawing on the heroine. Mixed signals there.

No, what really drove me nuts was the constant and repetitive angsting, and the hero disrespecting the heroine by repeatedly stating that she doesn’t know her own mind and he can’t marry her for her own good. Ugh. And I really don’t get why Christian service can only be demonstrated in abject poverty. It’s all very well to give away virtually all your money, but what happens when your eight or ten children all need to be fed and shod and educated in a manner befitting the grandchildren of noblemen, and you’ve given away every last penny of your wealth? You’ll be going to your more sensible relations for handouts, that’s what. I would have loved to see some mite of commonsense penetrate the skulls of these two dipwits, but no, they were determined to be self-sacrificing.

I had to laugh, though, at the heroine going about the parish distributing cakes to the poor, or reading to them, which is very nice and all, but I’m sure they would rather have had a leg of mutton! I was amused, too, at the lord of the manor grumbling about David doing his good works about the parish and distributing largesse everywhere. “That’s my job,” the lord says. Which is absolutely true. The church was there for spiritual welfare, and the aristocracy were supposed to take care of the more material needs of the poor.

I think this was a brave attempt to write a properly Christian book, and although it failed on pretty much every level for me, it’s still a beautifully written failure. There were a few historical errors, but the only one that really grated was that the clergyman was addressed as Reverend Gower, or even Vicar Gower, which was not common practice then. He would have been plain Mr Gower. And his income comes not from his patron paying him a salary, but from the tithes of the parishioners. A clergyman couldn’t just decide to retire, either. He held the living for life, although he could put a curate in if he wanted to retire from active work in the parish.

To be honest, I don’t recommend this except to Balogh completists. It’s an interesting attempt at portraying two people with deep philosophical differences, who prove ultimately to be more complex than originally suspected. I like what she tried to do in theory, I just didn’t enjoy the result very much. Three stars.

This may be a first – a Mary Balogh I didn’t enjoy. It is, of course, as well-written as all her work, but it lost me on the heroine’s character, the implausibility of the setup and the sheer torrent of angst that came close to making me lose the will to live. And the layer upon layer of subterfuge – why on earth can they not simply be straight with each other?

Here’s the premise: Jasper, Lord Montford, stakes his reputation as a seducer on virtuous country girl Katherine Huxtable. His challenge is to take her virtue within a fortnight, and by ‘take her virtue’, he means exactly what you’d expect. No fudging it with a mere kiss. And on the fourth day, he contrives a meeting with her at romantic Vauxhall, whisks her off into the undergrowth and… she puts up no resistance at all. Not in the slightest. He gazes at her through drooping lids and she melts into a puddle of panting lust. For a man she barely knows and against whom she’s been warned in the strongest possible terms. So she’s stupid, right?

This is the irreconcilable contradiction I have with the heroine. Because she’s not supposed to be stupid at all. Balogh paints her as a girl who’s actually quite thoughtful and considerate of the effects of her actions, not just on her own prospects, but on her family’s, too. So she *says* sensible things but she *does* stupid things. She sparks back at the hero sometimes when he’s trying to be a smartass. She can hold her own verbally. She just can’t control herself whenever the hero… well, does anything, really. He has only to get within twenty feet of her and she’s practically falling at his feet.

The hero’s contradictions can be explained more easily. He pretends to the world that he’s an unredeemable rake, and he is so convincing and has been portraying himself thus for so long that he actually believes it himself. So when he feels guilt or even – oh, the horror! – love, he doesn’t recognise it for what it is. And, believe it or not, he maintains this self-deception almost to the very end of the book.

The plot… well, there really isn’t one. There’s a three year time lapse, hero and heroine meet up again, they fall into each other’s arms instantly, but since they clearly can’t admit what’s blindingly obvious to everyone else (including the reader), namely that they’re full on in love with each other, because if they did the book would be a short story, they set themselves another wager. And when that goes pear-shaped, they’re bundled off to the altar double-quick time. And they STILL can’t admit the truth to each other.

And so it goes. Frankly, the whole game-playing got old really fast, as far as I was concerned. The characters weren’t believable, the banter wasn’t particularly witty or clever or even interesting, most of the time, and I just wanted to slap the pair of them upside the head and tell them to sort themselves out, pronto. I’m not a fan of characters who hide their true feelings behind layers of deception, and when they both do it, it’s just too much. It makes for a much better contrast where one character is deceptive, but the other is open and straightforward, as in the first book of this series. At least then there’s some actual conflict and the possibility of real change, instead of this artificial state of perpetual angst. And although the final third of the book was a lot better, with our hero and heroine at last talking to each other and opening up a bit, twice – twice! – the author has the hero say the wrong thing, thus plunging them back into industrial-strength angsting again. I do NOT appreciate being manipulated like that.

As for the side characters… oh Lord, what a bunch of goody two-shoes, most of them, with a couple of cartoon villains to drive the plot into places that it really doesn’t want to go. Although I liked the lazy guardian (Seth?), who was the only one with a bit of entertaining quirkiness.

So much as it goes against the grain, because normally I love Mary Balogh to pieces, I’m giving this three stars. At least I finished it, and it was touch and go at times. And I have the rest of this series already bought, so I hope things improve.