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This is a difficult one for me to rate. On the one hand, there\u2019s nothing major wrong with it, really. It just never set me alight\u2026 no, worse than that, it never even became interesting. Dull characters, predictable plot, and writing that, while competent, never sparkled.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the premise: Leonora Appleby is twenty-seven and settling into spinsterhood. She\u2019s about to be forced out of her childhood home since the new heir will soon be arriving to claim it. Meanwhile, on a neighbouring estate, the mysterious Earl Rokeby has returned, injured after the war, a younger brother inheriting after his brother died in battle. And for Leonora\u2019s best friend, Charlotte Blythe, abandoned at birth on the vicar\u2019s doorstep, there\u2019s a change which leads both girls, and former nanny Mrs Priddy, to London for the season.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know why it is that so many authors, when they decide to dive into Regency England, are so obsessed with the London season. There are so many other interesting settings to choose from, and frankly, the tired old trope of the country ingenues adjusting to the different society of London was done to death decades ago, and to sparkling effect by Georgette Heyer herself. It\u2019s disappointing to find so little originality in an author who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.<\/p>\n
At least she has done her research, and a great deal of it if the repeated descriptions of clothes, furniture and architecture is anything to go by. It certainly adds colour, and if I could have done with a trifle less colour, that\u2019s just me. There\u2019s less excuse for the title errors. One character is referred to as both Lady Livia Dearlove and the Honourable Miss Dearlove. She can only be one or the other, not both. And the curate is referred to as \u2018Curate Fopling\u2019 throughout. Clergymen were only ever addressed as Mr Fopling (or Dr, if he was a Doctor of Divinity, like Dr Grant in Mansfield Park).<\/p>\n
But what about the characters? The plot? The romance? Well\u2026 this is where it gets tricky. There are certain expectations for a Regency romance: it must have either a rattling plot, or appealing characterisation, or emotional depth, or scintillating dialogue. I\u2019d like wit as well, but that may be asking a bit much. Obviously, the more of them the better, but it must have at least one of these facets to engage the reader. This book? Not so much. The plot, far from rattling, was a pedestrian affair without a single surprising feature. The characters, particularly the two females, start off well. Leonora, in particular, being older, is both sensible and intelligent, but towards the end the need for some bumps in the road to the inevitable happy ending sees her descending into stupidity. Charlotte\u2019s silliness is more excusable given her age, but really, people, how hard is it to just tell people what\u2019s going on and not try to do it all yourself? The two leading men were very likeable and suitably heroic, but a little bit of self-awareness of their own feelings wouldn\u2019t have gone amiss. The villains were straight from central casting, a pair of standard-issue antagonists.<\/p>\n
What about emotional depth? This is what I think of as the Mary Balogh effect – she may be wobbly on historical accuracy, and her characters behave in some wildly peculiar ways, but she makes me cry every single time. This author, not so much. For one thing, time after time she tells us what the characters are thinking and feeling, instead of showing us. And then she headhops with gay abandon, jumping from one character\u2019s point of view to another even within the same paragraph. All of that serves to distance the reader from the characters, so when we really should be feeling their pain or fear or anger, we never do. And the big reveals are just tossed out there, without any emotional resonance at all. Not that they were surprising or anything, but still.<\/p>\n
As for scintillating dialogue, I cut the author some slack here, because it\u2019s a hard thing to do, and genuine wit is as rare as hen\u2019s teeth. I don\u2019t think I laughed once while reading this. Even so, there were some very intense exchanges between Leonora and Lord Rokeby (and sometimes in some bizarre places – a ballroom, for instance, or a carriage with the chaperon \u2018pretending\u2019 to sleep). I should perhaps mention that Mrs Priddy must be the world\u2019s worst chaperon. She sat with her knitting at the ball, leaving her charges unattended, and at the end, Leonora and Rokeby are stripping off and getting hot and heavy while she (again) \u2018pretends\u2019 to sleep! Ridiculous.<\/p>\n
This seems like a long catalogue of complaints, and it is, I suppose, but it\u2019s more from disappointment than anything else. There are plenty of Regencies that I can get through despite a multitude of errors because I don\u2019t expect much from them, but Jane Dunn is a different case (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, for heaven\u2019s sake!). So it ought to be literature, right? And perhaps at some level that I don\u2019t fully appreciate, it is. Maybe I\u2019m so attuned to the entertainment end of the genre that I can\u2019t see a good book when it\u2019s in front of me. But my personal requirement is to be entertained. If the author can\u2019t tell a good story which draws me in and immerses me in the lives of these people, then I\u2019m going to mark it down. I\u2019d have given it two stars except that there\u2019s some lovely writing in the descriptions of settings and clothes, so I\u2019m going to be generous and go for three stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a difficult one for me to rate. On the one hand, there\u2019s nothing major wrong with it, really. It just never set me alight\u2026 no, worse than that, it never even became interesting. Dull characters, predictable plot, and writing that, while competent, never sparkled. Here\u2019s the premise: Leonora Appleby is twenty-seven and settling […]<\/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-5941","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\/5941","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=5941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5945,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941\/revisions\/5945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}