This is a pleasant read, where nothing the least bit unpredictable shakes the plot from well-worn rails, but it’s none the worse for that. I liked daydreaming Elaine (incongruously named for a tragic heroine) and sober Sir Phillip, and if I could have done with less of their internal monologues, that’s just me.

Here’s the premise: Miss Elaine Brooke returns from school in Bath to join her widowed mother in genteel poverty. They live in the shadow of the local ‘big house’, where Elaine’s childhood friend, Daniel Ashburn, has morphed over time into her ideal man, and the hero of many of her fanciful daydreams. Meeting him again and being exposed once more to his careless charm sets her halfway to serious love. But Daniel’s older brother, the weighed-down-by-responsibility Sir Phillip, is determined to see Daniel settle down with heiress Miss Talbot. He’s been courting her all spring in London, but never got to the point of a proposal. Now Sir Phillip is hosting the Talbots and others in a house party to finally bring Daniel up to scratch. Elaine is the big problem here, not only distracting Daniel from doing his duty, but also becoming a distraction to Sir Phillip, too.

And that is basically the whole plot, which unfolds exactly as you’d expect, with the principals starting by cordially disliking each other and gradually inching, in a two steps forward and one back sort of way, towards an understanding of their hearts, or at least a straightening out of the multitude of misunderstandings along the way. There’s a huge amount of internal musing of the does she/doesn’t she and will he/won’t he variety, which I found became tedious after a while. I much prefer a romantic couple who know their own minds from the start, but I freely admit that the author builds their journey from enemies to lovers very skilfully. The encounters between Sir Phillip and Elaine are beautifully written. It’s only the internal wavering that I disliked, so much so that I was skipping forward at the end to get to the denouement.

A well-written tale with likeable and very relatable principals, which could have done with a bit more bite in the plot. Four stars.

This is a delightful little book, only novella length, but still packing in quite a lot of story, for all that. I’ve never read this author before, but I’ll be looking out for other books by her from now on.

Here’s the premise: And it’s one of the most original ones I’ve come across. Josephine Pearce had a happy and fulfilled life with her widowed father and her three younger sisters. She’s still single at twenty-seven, but that’s never bothered her. But now her father has died, there’s no brother to inherit, so the estate has passed to a cousin and his unpleasant wife. Life has become pretty miserable, and there’s no prospect of a season in London for one of the sisters to find a husband. So Jo is going to do what responsible older sisters must do – she’s going to get a husband for herself, and a home for all the sisters. And she knows just who and how. Her object is Mr Wallace, the steward on the neighbouring estate of Oakstone Hall, and if she times one of her charitable visits just right, she’ll get caught in a storm and have to take shelter in Oakstone Hall and stay overnight, she’ll be compromised and the honourable Mr Wallace will be forced to offer for her. This sounds like a pretty ruthless plan, but she’s fairly certain that Mr Wallace would not be averse to the idea.

Which is a fascinating concept. I’ve read innumerable books where the heroine is accidentally compromised, and quite a few where an unscrupulous female, not the heroine, tries to get herself compromised by the hero, but this is the first time the heroine has set out quite calmly and rationally to get herself compromised by a man, and not even a handsome, titled man, just someone situated to take care of her and her sisters.

Needless to say, her careful plans go badly awry. The storm is worse than she’d expected, she’s almost run down by a stranger on horseback, whose horse then bolts, and they’re both forced to take shelter in a hermit’s hut on the Oakstone estate. Since they’re soaking wet, this involves undressing down to their underwear to dry out their clothes. Of course it does. Fortunately, it turns out that he’s not a stranger at all, but a neighbour she was friendly with as a child. And wouldn’t you just know it, he grew up to be pretty hot stuff, handsome, charming and the heir to a title. What are the odds, eh? And wouldn’t you just know it even more, they get discovered by the very Mr Wallace that Josie had been planning to entrap.

From here on, the plot’s one that any experienced reader of the genre would expect, but it’s none the worse for that. There’s a lot of agonising on both sides over whether they’re doing the right thing, and since Mr Wallace insists on thrusting himself into the middle of the situation, it all gets a bit complicated. I rather liked the effort that went in to trying to hide the truth of the situation from the world at large in order to protect Josie’s reputation. So many Regencies skate over that aspect, but it felt very authentic to me.

Of course everything comes to a very satisfactory conclusion. There were one or two oddities of language (a transactional relationship? In a Regency novel?) but otherwise this was beautifully written. As a novella, it naturally lacks the subplots that a full length novel would feature, but that just means that all the focus is on the central romance. A highly enjoyable read. Five stars.