{"id":4317,"date":"2022-05-06T21:46:46","date_gmt":"2022-05-06T21:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=4317"},"modified":"2022-05-06T21:52:25","modified_gmt":"2022-05-06T21:52:25","slug":"review-forlorn-hope-by-judith-hale-everett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2022\/05\/06\/review-forlorn-hope-by-judith-hale-everett\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Forlorn Hope by Judith Hale Everett (2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"One never knows what to expect from a Judith Everett book (which is very much a good thing, in my estimation). After two books set in the same immediate family, this one veers off at a tangent with a minor character from book 2, Geoffrey Mantell, a second son making a career in the army, and the strange, rather fey, girl next door, Emily Chandry. The two strike up a childhood friendship, and meet again as adults when Geoffrey is on leave. He spends his time searching in rather desultory style for a wife, but when he returns to the war, he decides that Emily is the one he wants. He returns in time from his soldiering only to find that he\u2019s too late – she\u2019s married and gone.<\/p>\n

Now, this is the central premise of the book, the tipping point, and it\u2019s revealed in the blurb, but we don\u2019t reach it until well past the 25% point. I confess I read the many early chapters in some impatience to get to the meat of the story – and of course to the resolution, because how is there to be a happy ending out of all this? I was very, very curious to find out how the author resolves this conundrum. I had some ideas, but there were a number of ways this could go. It\u2019s a very intriguing premise.<\/p>\n

From this point on, the story revolves largely around Geoffrey\u2019s efforts to put his love for Emily behind him, find himself a wife and move on with his life. All of which he fails to do in pretty spectacular fashion. Gradually he finds himself drawn into the oddity of Emily\u2019s marriage, and the even greater oddity of her now deceased father\u2019s machinations, since his determination to keep his presumed fortune out of the hands of his avaricious son-in-law creates problems for everybody.Geoffrey is a straight-down-the-line character, an honourable and dutiful man in a family of rather wilder types. His older brother Francis is a rake quite uninterested in settling down with a wife. His sister, Clara, is an unrepentant flirt who\u2019s also in no hurry to marry. His mother only seems interested in getting the three of them suitably married. His father is distant, thinking his son a dull dog. Which he is, of course. I like an honourable hero as much as anyone, but I don\u2019t like one who angsts at great length about his situation. There was, frankly, far too much time spent with Geoffrey agonising over Emily, and how he was to be the friend to her that was all he was allowed to be, while not showing his true feelings, and how he must find himself a wife to distract himself. I\u2019d have liked him a lot better if he\u2019d simply taken himself back into the army or found himself something else to do, preferably at the other end of the country. But of course, then there would have been no story.<\/p>\n

Emily is (to my mind) a much more interesting character. As a child, she was unloved and neglected, spending her time in the woods, semi-feral, and building a fairy village in a clearing, complete with miniature houses, people and animals. Geoffrey is drawn to the endeavour as much as to the girl, and the two became friends in childhood while jointly working on the project. The whole concept is both magically creative but also unutterably sad, that she (or in fact both of them) were so little loved within their own families that they created a fantasy world to play out the happier lives of their pretend villagers. I liked that Emily grew up to be such a strong character, despite the neglect, taking charge of her own destiny as far as the law and circumstances allowed. She escaped her horrible father by marrying a man who wasn\u2019t perfect, by any means, but with whom she could at least have a better life, and when the final crisis comes, she takes charge then, too. Good for her.<\/p>\n

Even the side characters like Francis and Clara are livelier and more interesting than stolid Geoffrey. He\u2019s such a goody-two-shoes that he spends time in London, while he\u2019s supposedly looking for a wife, helping a random stranger with her affairs. Now, the random stranger happens to be the heroine of book 2, and so we see again some of the events of that book, but this time from Geoffrey\u2019s perspective. This is not uninteresting to those who have read (and remember) book 2, but it adds nothing at all to this book except to illustrate that Geoffrey is a Good Person, which frankly we\u2019ve already seen too much convincing evidence of. So that whole section of the book could easily have been dispensed with. It may well be that when the Branwell Chronicles is completed, these little cross-over vignettes will add depth and richness to the series-long story, but for me, impatient to find out just what was going on with Emily, this whole section was an irrelevance.<\/p>\n

As the book progresses, it veers more into Gothic melodrama, with some dramatic happenings before our hero and heroine get their inevitable happy ending. I wasn\u2019t entirely satisfied by the resolution to the problem of getting Emily out of her marriage, but it was perfectly in keeping with the Regency, and the nature of the characters themselves, so I won\u2019t quibble over it. In fact, the author has such a sure hand in evoking the Regency that the odd Americanism that creeps in is quite startling (my favourite is the very non-British \u2018grandbabies\u2019). But really, there are vanishingly few of these, and in general the writing is quite brilliantly accurate to the period, without being heavy.<\/p>\n

Overall, this didn\u2019t resonate with me the way the first two books in the series did. There\u2019s a greyness and lack of humour that probably exudes from Geoffrey (and is therefore totally in keeping), but I felt it weighed the book down somewhat. I would have liked more of a spark from Geoffrey, a little less of the remorseless agonising and sheer goodness, and a lot less of the repetitive pursuit of an eligible match when his heart wasn\u2019t in it. I could have done without any of the overlap with book 2, and the sub-plot with Geoffrey\u2019s mother added nothing very much to the story. Conversely, I would have liked a bit more of Emily, and that curious marriage. If this were the first Everett book I\u2019d read, I\u2019d probably have given it three stars and never read anything else by her (in which case I\u2019d have been very much the loser). But it\u2019s so beautifully written, and evokes such a believable Regency, that I\u2019m going to give it four stars and hope for better fortune with the next book.<\/p>\n

There are very few authors who have the courage to take an idea, a character, a situation and simply allow it to unwind at its own pace and in its own way, without ever trying to nudge it into the familiar plot-ruts. Writers like Mary Balogh, E A Dineley and Arabella Brown can do it, and Everett is of the same ilk. Such writing can be hit or miss, and this one isn\u2019t a total success for me. Nevertheless, I respect and applaud the attempt, I have the utmost admiration for Everett\u2019s talent and I will always prefer this kind of uncompromising originality to the majority of cookie-cutter Regencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One never knows what to expect from a Judith Everett book (which is very much a good thing, in my estimation). After two books set in the same immediate family, this one veers off at a tangent with a minor character from book 2, Geoffrey Mantell, a second son making a career in the army, […]<\/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":[205],"class_list":["post-4317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-everett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4317","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=4317"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4329,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4317\/revisions\/4329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}