{"id":353,"date":"2016-11-25T11:21:56","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T11:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=353"},"modified":"2016-11-25T11:21:56","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T11:21:56","slug":"review-the-earl-and-the-girl-from-the-abbey-by-regina-darcy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2016\/11\/25\/review-the-earl-and-the-girl-from-the-abbey-by-regina-darcy\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: ‘The Earl And The Girl From The Abbey’ by Regina Darcy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I keep seeing Regina Darcy\u2019s books popping up in the bestseller lists, so eventually I had to try one of them. I found it a frustrating read. On the one hand, the story is an appealing one, the main characters are likable and there are fewer historical errors than usual in many modern Regencies. On the other hand, there were innumerable minor errors, mostly punctuation, which made me very twitchy, and the story was just too short for any real character development. Amazon judges it to be 61 pages long, but the book ends at 76% of that, the rest being taken up with chapters of other books. That\u2019s barely more than short story length.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get the historical errors out of the way first. The younger son of an earl is not a lord, not even when he\u2019s the heir presumptive. He\u2019s the Honourable Mr Davenport (in this case). Then there\u2019s the Earl managing to re-outfit himself by popping into a tailor and coming out fully supplied. Nope. The making of gentlemen\u2019s clothing was a long-drawn-out business involving selecting materials, measuring and multiple fittings, which would have taken weeks to complete. But these are minor matters, which only pedants like me care about.<\/p>\n

More concerning is the implausibility of the romance. He needs to marry an heiress, she wants to meet a man she can fall in love with. They meet once at a dinner, have one conversation and that\u2019s it. They\u2019re in love and he immediately sets off to meet Aunty (or possibly Auntie, depending on which page you\u2019re on), the Abbess of the local abbey, to ask permission to marry her niece. Not that she needs permission, being of age and all, but still. And then we\u2019re into a whole implausible scandal, with a villain so obvious it\u2019s impossible to miss. A dramatic finale and {drumroll} that\u2019s it. All done and dusted.<\/p>\n

Now, it would be possible to build this into a full-length novel, with some deeper character development. I would have liked to see more of our abbey-raised heroine encountering the peculiarities of Regency society. I\u2019d have liked to see some serious rivals for her hand (since she\u2019s an heiress) so that our hero has to work to win her over. I\u2019d have liked, at the least, a nod towards a slower courtship. A paragraph or two describing how he visits more and more often, so that their love develops more naturally, would have been enough.<\/p>\n

So for me, this wasn\u2019t a wholly satisfactory story but then I\u2019m a self-confessed pedant. It\u2019s clear from some passages that the author has a flair for writing Regency. With a little more time taken to develop the characters and their relationships, and a thorough editing pass, this would be a good, if short, read. Three stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I keep seeing Regina Darcy\u2019s books popping up in the bestseller lists, so eventually I had to try one of them. I found it a frustrating read. On the one hand, the story is an appealing one, the main characters are likable and there are fewer historical errors than usual in many modern Regencies. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-darcy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions\/357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}