{"id":1043,"date":"2018-01-19T17:26:04","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T17:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=1043"},"modified":"2021-09-01T10:01:06","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T10:01:06","slug":"review-return-to-the-regency-by-audrey-harrison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2018\/01\/19\/review-return-to-the-regency-by-audrey-harrison\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: ‘Return to the Regency’ by Audrey Harrison [Trad]"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is such a lovely idea! Who wouldn\u2019t want to be picked up after a difficult year and offered the chance to go back to the Regency era for a couple of weeks? With money, servants, accommodation – everything provided. Even a fairy godmother. Who could fail to be healed and comforted by the gentle manners of two hundred years ago? But for Catherine, it doesn\u2019t quite work out as expected.<\/p>\n

And that pretty much summarises this book, too. What should be a delightful escapist read turns out to be\u2026 well, rather dull. The modern-day part of the story just didn\u2019t capture my interest and the Regency part was not much more than a run-down of Regency life in Bath. Now, the details were fascinating, and a salutary reminder that, however romantic the Regency seems when it\u2019s got Colin Firth in it, in reality that part of history was really pretty unpleasant. The clothes were uncomfortable, the food was barely edible and the perfect manners concealed a great deal of misbehaviour. And then there\u2019s the healthcare\u2026<\/p>\n

But while the author\u2019s research has obviously been pretty thorough, the rest of the book is less up to snuff. The characters are either very good or totally villainous, and it\u2019s not difficult to spot which is which. I\u2019d have liked either heroine Catherine or hero Chris to display something less than goody-two-shoes virtue, which gets a bit tedious after a while. And the inevitable misunderstanding between them is horribly cliched. Then there\u2019s a plot twist at the end which felt utterly contrived.<\/p>\n

Now, if this sounds very critical, I did actually enjoy the story quite a bit. It\u2019s a gentle, easy read with two pleasant main characters and a resounding HEA. My only problem with it is that it\u2019s not a Regency romance, it\u2019s really a contemporary romance with a portal element, and if that\u2019s your thing, you might well enjoy it more than I did. But it wasn\u2019t really my cup of tea, so that keeps it to three stars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is such a lovely idea! Who wouldn\u2019t want to be picked up after a difficult year and offered the chance to go back to the Regency era for a couple of weeks? With money, servants, accommodation – everything provided. Even a fairy godmother. Who could fail to be healed and comforted by the gentle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[85],"class_list":["post-1043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-harrison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3899,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions\/3899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}