{"id":5199,"date":"2024-01-14T12:26:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-14T12:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=5199"},"modified":"2024-01-14T12:26:00","modified_gmt":"2024-01-14T12:26:00","slug":"review-a-snowbound-courtship-by-holli-jo-monroe-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2024\/01\/14\/review-a-snowbound-courtship-by-holli-jo-monroe-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: A Snowbound Courtship by Holli Jo Monroe (2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"This is a delightful little book, only novella length, but still packing in quite a lot of story, for all that. I\u2019ve never read this author before, but I\u2019ll be looking out for other books by her from now on.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the premise: And it\u2019s one of the most original ones I\u2019ve come across. Josephine Pearce had a happy and fulfilled life with her widowed father and her three younger sisters. She\u2019s still single at twenty-seven, but that\u2019s never bothered her. But now her father has died, there\u2019s no brother to inherit, so the estate has passed to a cousin and his unpleasant wife. Life has become pretty miserable, and there\u2019s no prospect of a season in London for one of the sisters to find a husband. So Jo is going to do what responsible older sisters must do – she\u2019s going to get a husband for herself, and a home for all the sisters. And she knows just who and how. Her object is Mr Wallace, the steward on the neighbouring estate of Oakstone Hall, and if she times one of her charitable visits just right, she\u2019ll get caught in a storm and have to take shelter in Oakstone Hall and stay overnight, she\u2019ll be compromised and the honourable Mr Wallace will be forced to offer for her. This sounds like a pretty ruthless plan, but she\u2019s fairly certain that Mr Wallace would not be averse to the idea.<\/p>\n

Which is a fascinating concept. I\u2019ve read innumerable books where the heroine is accidentally compromised, and quite a few where an unscrupulous female, not the heroine, tries to get herself compromised by the hero, but this is the first time the heroine has set out quite calmly and rationally to get herself compromised by a man, and not even a handsome, titled man, just someone situated to take care of her and her sisters.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, her careful plans go badly awry. The storm is worse than she\u2019d expected, she\u2019s almost run down by a stranger on horseback, whose horse then bolts, and they\u2019re both forced to take shelter in a hermit\u2019s hut on the Oakstone estate. Since they\u2019re soaking wet, this involves undressing down to their underwear to dry out their clothes. Of course it does. Fortunately, it turns out that he\u2019s not a stranger at all, but a neighbour she was friendly with as a child. And wouldn\u2019t you just know it, he grew up to be pretty hot stuff, handsome, charming and the heir to a title. What are the odds, eh? And wouldn\u2019t you just know it even more, they get discovered by the very Mr Wallace that Josie had been planning to entrap.<\/p>\n

From here on, the plot\u2019s one that any experienced reader of the genre would expect, but it\u2019s none the worse for that. There\u2019s a lot of agonising on both sides over whether they\u2019re doing the right thing, and since Mr Wallace insists on thrusting himself into the middle of the situation, it all gets a bit complicated. I rather liked the effort that went in to trying to hide the truth of the situation from the world at large in order to protect Josie\u2019s reputation. So many Regencies skate over that aspect, but it felt very authentic to me.<\/p>\n

Of course everything comes to a very satisfactory conclusion. There were one or two oddities of language (a transactional relationship? In a Regency novel?) but otherwise this was beautifully written. As a novella, it naturally lacks the subplots that a full length novel would feature, but that just means that all the focus is on the central romance. A highly enjoyable read. Five stars.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a delightful little book, only novella length, but still packing in quite a lot of story, for all that. I\u2019ve never read this author before, but I\u2019ll be looking out for other books by her from now on. Here\u2019s the premise: And it\u2019s one of the most original ones I\u2019ve come across. Josephine […]<\/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":[255],"class_list":["post-5199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-monroe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5199","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=5199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5203,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5199\/revisions\/5203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}