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Another gentle read from Jenny Hambly, with a delightful mix of characters, not one but two sweet romances and another of her wonderfully atmospheric houses. Oh yes, and a snappy dog and a foul-mouthed parrot. I wonder why it is that Regency parrots are always so rude? There must be one or two that could be trained to recite Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets, or quotes from the Bible. But I digress.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the premise: Lucy Talbot has been a resident of Ashwick Hall, a refuge for women fleeing from trouble, for two years, hiding away from her family and society while she recovers from a breach with her twin sister. Now her godmother has returned from abroad and wishes to reclaim Lucy and reintroduce her to society – and her own family, not just her estranged sister, but her brother, too, who was raised largely apart from his sisters. Mr Frederick Ashton (Freddie) is regarded as a buffoon because of his cherubic appearance and seeming lack of intelligence, as well as his habit of falling asleep anywhere – even at a ball! But his sleep problems result from the nightmares he\u2019s suffered from for years. To try to cure them, he determines to return to his childhood home for the first time since his parents were murdered there.<\/p>\n
So there we have the two main characters and their backstories, and as is usual with a Hambly book, there\u2019s a lot of backstory laid out upfront at the start of the book, which does tend to slow things down a bit. There\u2019s also a problem in that the two main characters are not connected and there\u2019s not the usual meet-at-a-ball setup to get things rolling. So they meet accidentally in the park on account of Jacko the monkey, which is quite cute (ha! A meet-cute, right?) but it feels just a shade coincidental.<\/p>\n
This early part of the book feels quite slow. There is all that backstory to be unfurled in the early chapters. Then there\u2019s the slow and rather forced development of the friendship between Lucy and Freddie in London. Lucy\u2019s brother makes a brief appearance and then vanishes. I wasn\u2019t sure what purpose he served in the story, but perhaps he is being prepared for a larger role in a later book. Come to that, I didn\u2019t quite see the point of Lord and Lady Kirkby, either. I wondered whether I should have recognised them from an earlier book, but even if so, I didn\u2019t think they added materially to the story. Nor did the little side story of the maid add much, except to show Lucy\u2019s compassion, although that was already clear enough, I should have thought.<\/p>\n
So this early part of the book was quite lumpy and disjointed, not uninteresting but without the usual smooth flow of Hambly\u2019s writing. But then we arrive at Ashton Manor, and the author\u2019s great strength comes to the fore – her wonderful way of describing places. The house (based on a real house, Haddon Hall, apparently) is a fascinating medieval building with all sorts of quirky passages and oddly placed stairs. I\u2019d have loved to have a proper floor plan to follow along as the characters moved about the house, but perhaps that would have spoilt the surprises. One of Hambly\u2019s earlier books, Carteret, also features a house that\u2019s so brilliantly described it\u2019s almost like another character, as it is here.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Lucy and Freddie are inching towards something more than friendship. I liked both characters. Lucy is beautifully drawn, a complex character who appears timid on the surface but has a steel backbone when required, and Freddie is just a sweetheart. Who could not love him? He\u2019s another of Hambly\u2019s unusual heroes, reminding me a little of the delightful Derry, star of Derriford, who was a perfect gentleman of surprising talents who became utterly tongue-tied in the presence of ladies.<\/p>\n
Abby I liked a lot less. I found her rather a nasty, vindictive creature at times, and although some of her mischief arose from the best of motives, it didn\u2019t always look that way. If I\u2019d been Lucy, I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d have forgiven her for some of her transgressions. There was a villain, of course, who was flagged up almost from the start, but his villainy was thwarted, naturally. This was really the only action in the whole book.<\/p>\n
The romance\u2026 well, the outcome was inevitable, but I wasn\u2019t at all sure of Freddie\u2019s dramatic proposal. It seemed to come too quickly and to be too overwrought for a man of such gentlemanly manners, but that\u2019s just me. I far prefer a gentler finale, personally. And a couple of side characters reach their own finale in a somewhat awkwardly written manner. While I\u2019m grumbling, can I just mention how confusing it is to have two characters called Lucinda and Lucy (who was also Drusilla)? And then there were all the ladies – Lady Westcliffe, Lady Wirksworth, Lady Frampton, Lady Kirkby. Each time I came across one of those, there was a momentary adjustment to make: now, which one is this? And one final grumble. I was very surprised to see some Americanisms creeping into a book by a British author – drapes instead of curtains, for instance, and \u2018quite the adventure\u2019 where I would say \u2018quite AN adventure\u2019. Trivial stuff, but it tripped me up.<\/p>\n
Does this sound very critical? Perhaps it\u2019s just the result of coming to this straight after a whole series of very different Regencies, and this suffered by contrast. It is, as always with this author, beautifully written, some of my grumbles (like putting a lot of backstory in the early chapters) are just the way this author writes, and as usual she nails the characters perfectly. This is a perfect read for anyone looking for an authentic Regency in a gentle, low-action story. Freddie is an absolute darling, and I loved the evocative descriptions of Ashton Manor, so I\u2019m going to settle for four stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another gentle read from Jenny Hambly, with a delightful mix of characters, not one but two sweet romances and another of her wonderfully atmospheric houses. Oh yes, and a snappy dog and a foul-mouthed parrot. I wonder why it is that Regency parrots are always so rude? There must be one or two that could […]<\/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":[127],"class_list":["post-5547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-hambly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5547","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=5547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5551,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5547\/revisions\/5551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}