![\"\"](\"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/lovesway.jpg\")
This was a complete riot. It wasn\u2019t perfect by any means, but oh boy, was it funny! The hero and heroine were at odds throughout the book, so they threw everything at each other, verbally, and it was glorious.<\/p>\nThis was a complete riot. It wasn\u2019t perfect by any means, but oh boy, was it funny! The hero and heroine were at odds throughout the book, so they threw everything at each other, verbally, and it was glorious.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the premise: Chloe Barwick is struggling to manage the run-down family estate since her younger brother, Edward, who should be in charge, is obsessed with becoming a poet instead. While he is dreaming up lurid verses and hobnobbing with the Lake District\u2019s resident poets, she\u2019s left to cope with making the sheep raising pay, and trying to scrape together enough money to pay the mortgage every quarter. Aunt Nora, who lives with them, isn\u2019t much help, either. The neighbours, drunken Lord Carnforth and his seemingly innocent daughter Emily are even worse off, living in absolute squalor. So when Emily starts calling on a daily basis and hanging around the interesting Edward, a marriage is out of the question. Edward must marry money to rescue the estate. Chloe herself could rescue them, of course, if only she\u2019d marry Tom Carrick and his five thousand a year. It\u2019s a pity she can\u2019t stand him.<\/p>\n
Into this stasis appears the explosive person of Jack Gamble, Lord Carnforth\u2019s nephew, the traditional black sheep, so beloved of Regencies, who\u2019s just returned from India with a fortune in his pocket (another very traditional trope). He immediately sets up Chloe\u2019s back by frightening Emily into running away to Chloe and Edward\u2019s house, from where Jack, in a towering rage, removes her, sets her up with a chaperone and sets about turning her into a pampered rich lady. She seems to enjoy the attention and he seems to be seriously wooing her, and even offers for her, before beginning to discover that behind the barbed tongue, Chloe has a lot of sterling qualities and is far more interesting than ingenue Emily.<\/p>\n
This sets up a nice merry-go-round of romances. Will Emily accept Jack\u2019s offer? Will Edward care if she does? Will Chloe see the good in Jack or end up with uninteresting Tom Carrick and his five thousand pounds? The book is a vintage era Regency, so the romance is desperately short on emotion (I don\u2019t think the hero and heroine ever actually come out and say they love each other). Instead, it\u2019s high on the froth of banter and light-heartedly swapping from one potential mate to another, almost as if it doesn\u2019t quite matter. And when they decide that, no, they won\u2019t marry that person after all, it\u2019s a simple matter of saying so. This is not consistent with any Regency code of conduct that I know.<\/p>\n
In the background is the villain of the piece, who, in a light-hearted and jovial way, is determined to turn this corner of the Lake District into a vulgar theme park, with every possible tasteless attraction. The Barwick\u2019s house is so run-down that he thinks he\u2019ll just buy it when they inevitably default on the mortgage, knock it down and build a road through it. This part of the story wasn\u2019t so interesting that I wanted to read every last detail of the plans, but it was definitely more interesting than the endless descriptions of the scenery and how to run a sheep farm. All this might have been more convincing without the mention of skunks harassing the sheep and cardinals singing melodically in the beech tree. Nor was I impressed by Edward deciding to organise a fox hunt in the middle of summer (I\u2019m sure the farmers would be thrilled to have the hunt rampaging through their fields and trampling crops and scaring the sheep – save it for the winter months, please).<\/p>\n
But you know, none of this mattered tuppence, because the book is *funny*. It\u2019s written in first person for Chloe (\u2018I went\u2026\u2019 instead of \u2018she went\u2026\u2019), and that means the reader is right inside Chloe\u2019s gloriously witty, curmudgeonly and downright cynical head. It\u2019s wonderful stuff, and if I would have liked a little bit less of the theme park villainy and a little more emotion, I can accept that the book is very much of its era, where the characters are slightly cartoonish and not the fully rounded type we expect nowadays. Despite the skunks and cardinals, the sheer enjoyment of the banter makes this a five star read for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was a complete riot. It wasn\u2019t perfect by any means, but oh boy, was it funny! The hero and heroine were at odds throughout the book, so they threw everything at each other, verbally, and it was glorious. Here\u2019s the premise: Chloe Barwick is struggling to manage the run-down family estate since her younger […]<\/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":[37],"class_list":["post-4747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747","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=4747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4751,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4747\/revisions\/4751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}