A difficult one for me to rate. I’m a huge fan of Susan Speers, who is one of the most original Regency authors around. I never quite know what she’ll come up with next, and I love that uncertainty. But it does mean that her books are quite hit or miss with me. This one was more miss than hit, but still an intriguing read.
Here’s the premise: Lady Jane Wilverhampton is living a retired life with her godmother in Scotland, trying to escape the misery of an almost-betrothal that went wrong and family scandal. But when she’s invited to a house party, she meets again the man who broke her heart a number of years ago, when he married someone else. It wasn’t from choice – the two were caught alone in the library together and forced to marry. Now she’s dead, and Angus Killoran is free again, but Jane has made a vow never to marry. Her father and younger brother were both tainted by a kind of madness, and she won’t pass on that bad blood to another generation. But Angus has a younger brother, Fergus, who is supposed to be wooing the daughter of their hosts, a beautiful heiress who will restore the Killoran fortunes. Unfortunately, Fergus has taken a shine to Jane…
The characters here have an awful lot of history. There’s the halcyon days of Jane and Angus’s courtship in France. The misery of his entrapment, forcing him to marry. There’s his wife’s death in a fire, partially destroying the family home. Then there is Jane’s father, and his cruelty to her mother and to the children. Jane’s younger brother has committed murder, although we never hear much about that, and he’s living abroad. And finally, Jane’s older brother, who also vowed never to marry, has broken that vow and is expecting his first child. All of this is revealed piecemeal in flashbacks, which gives the book a disjointed feel.
There are numerous side characters, none of whom are ever brought to the front of the stage so that we can get to know them properly. They simply flit about, moving into Jane’s view and then out again, easily forgotten. I would have liked to know more about the heiress, for instance, and also about young Catriona and her brother. What was the point of them in this story? I have no idea.
As for Angus and Fergus, I never really understood what they were thinking or feeling, or why they didn’t sit down together and talk openly about Jane. It seemed as though they simply drifted about in a helpless, purposeless way. And then there was Jane herself. What did she feel? Where was the emotion? Sometimes she cried and paced about impatiently, but I can’t say that any of the intense feelings she ought to be (and was!) experiencing came across to me. A lot of this was frustrating to me. I’m not a huge fan of angsty heroines, but with the sort of tragedies sweeping through Jane’s life, I wanted to feel her pain more intensely than I did.
If this sounds negative, it’s because there is an unusual and powerful story here that struggled to escape the unemotional tone of the writing. Perhaps other readers can fill in the gaps between what was written and what was beneath the surface, but I found it too difficult. There were moments when the emotion reached me, but mostly it was submerged. The writing was also marred by proofreading errors, with a lot of wayward punctuation, and a few anachronisms (no teddy bears in the Regency, for example). Speers has written some amazing books, but this one was an interesting read that just didn’t quite work for me. I still recommend it, and the whole series, for anyone who’s tired of the usual Regency tropes. Three stars.
Susan Speers is one of my favourite authors, not because she’s the World’s Best Writer (she has her faults, like most writers do), but because she always takes me by surprise. I just never know from one book to the next what I’m going to find. More than that, even within the book itself, I never know where it’s going. With most Regencies, once the characters are on stage and the circumstances are laid out, it’s generally easy to predict what will happen. Not the details, but the general flow. Not with a Speers book, and there’s an edginess to that that’s almost entirely lacking elsewhere in the genre. Mary Balogh had it in some of her early works, but it’s rare. One reviewer described this book as thrilling, and I can see why. I find it unsettling, but it’s still fascinating, as all Speers’ books are. I’ve varied in how much I’ve enjoyed each one, but I would never dream of missing one, and now that Amazon has stopped telling followers about new releases, she’s the only author where I regularly check to see if there’s a new one out.
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.
After the success of Felicity, I was nervous about this, since the author’s history in this series is wildly variable. But this is another success. It lacks some of the dazzling originality of previous books, returning to the well-trodden Regency style of drawing room manners, but it is so polished a performance that I have few quibbles. The romance is credible, the writing is stylish and there’s a surer hand than before with the plotting. An excellent read.
Finally! After five books in the series where the author’s talent almost shone through but was drowned out by misfiring plots, a scattergun approach to punctuation and (in one case) sheer dullness, here she gets everything right. Fascinating characters, an engrossing story, a villain unmasked and a heart-warming romance – this one works on all fronts, and the editing is excellent, too.
This series is a real mixed bag. Abigail was delightful, Belinda a little less successful, Cecily a powerful and absorbing read. But this one is just dull. The focus is a children’s Nativity play, there are a couple of nasty characters with no redeeming qualities, and a hero who’s just a very nice man. The heroine doesn’t show much character, either, and absolutely nothing of interest happens. The slowness isn’t helped by dialogue that covers every word spoken between the characters.
The enjoyable aspect of a series like this is that every book is different. It’s like a box of chocolates where you don’t know until you try it whether you’ve got the strawberry cream or the caramel or the nutty one. I loved Abigail, was ho-hum about Belinda and now Cecily is perhaps the strongest story yet. But be warned – for sensitive souls, it’s a bit of a weepy.
I loved the first book in this series, Abigail, and immediately plunged into this one, which featured one of the intriguing side characters from the first book. Sadly, it is nothing like as resounding a success as the first one. Large parts of the plot are, not to put too fine a point on it, a hot mess.
A delightful book that almost made it to five stars. This is the first of a series focusing on Regency spinsters, those not born to great beauty or wealth or connections, who must eke out an existence as best they can. Miss Abigail Grey is a little-regarded step-daughter of her mother’s second husband, and, with her mother long-dead, has a difficult future ahead of her. But when she accompanies her wilful half-sister to a house party for the Marquess of Southey to choose a bride, Abigail recognises him as the impoverished soldier she rejected seven years earlier. There’s never any doubt as to where this is going, but the journey is entrancing.