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Well, what can I say? This was meant to be humorous, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt for most of the way through (and it was funny, actually), but the hero just stepped beyond the pale, for me.<\/p>\nWell, what can I say? This was meant to be humorous, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt for most of the way through (and it was funny, actually), but the hero just stepped beyond the pale, for me.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the premise: Sarah Meade is the vicar\u2019s sister, living a quiet life in a country parish and at the age of twenty-four, almost at the point of giving up on the prospect of marriage. Besides, she\u2019s been in love with neighbour Adam, Viscount Cheverell, for years, but he looks on her as a sort of honorary sister. He\u2019s the only son, with four highly-strung sisters, which has made him ultra-sympathetic to female troubles. He\u2019s set up homes for unmarried mothers and schools, and he\u2019s also managed to acquire three mistresses – simultaneously!<\/p>\n
Now, some readers will back away at this point, but I like to give a book the benefit of the doubt with its basic premise, however implausible or unheroic, and see how things develop from there. Adam finds himself in difficulties with all three mistresses, so when he\u2019s summoned home to deal with one of his troublesome sisters, the three follow him there. To avoid inflicting them on his rather strait-laced mother, he sends them round to the vicarage, for Sarah and brother Jonathan to deal with. Meanwhile his sisters are determined to see him married off, and descend on him with three candidates. He agrees that he probably ought to get married, and so begins a delicate dance around the three women, while also dealing with his three mistresses.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no doubt that all this is very funny, if the reader can set aside the pearl-clutching that the three mistresses evoke. It\u2019s meant to be light-hearted fluff, and given the date it was written (more than thirty years ago), mores were quite different then and the heroes of Regency romances were expected to be men\u2019s men. Mistresses were just a normal part of the genre, and I don\u2019t mind that (much). What got seriously up my nose is the despicable way Adam treats Sarah. Time after time he says (or thinks), \u201cOh, Sarah\u2019s a good sport, she won\u2019t mind,\u201d and Sarah herself says at one point, \u201cIf he says that one more time, I\u2019m going to scream.\u201d And you can see her point. He treats her *really* badly, he expects her to deal with his mistresses, and then, when he gets himself entangled with all three of his marriage candidates, he expects her to sort that out, too!<\/p>\n
Needless to say, it all comes right in the end, but I have to wonder just how faithful a husband Adam would be. He\u2019s just too susceptible to womankind and (frankly) too stupid to avoid future entanglements, and he\u2019s just the sort of idiot to think, \u201cOh well, it\u2019ll be fine because Sarah will never know about it.\u201d Ugh. So for me this only rates three stars, but it\u2019s very well written, and for anyone less twitchy about male misbehaviour, looking for a light-hearted traditional read, this will probably suit you very well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, what can I say? This was meant to be humorous, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt for most of the way through (and it was funny, actually), but the hero just stepped beyond the pale, for me. Here\u2019s the premise: Sarah Meade is the vicar\u2019s sister, living a quiet life in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-4199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-dunn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199","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=4199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4203,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions\/4203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}