{"id":6230,"date":"2026-05-08T08:48:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T08:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=6230"},"modified":"2026-05-08T08:48:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T08:48:05","slug":"review-fernwood-by-m-culler-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/08\/review-fernwood-by-m-culler-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Fernwood by M Culler (2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"Not my usual fare, this is a mid-Victorian romance with a complicated false identity that actually worked surprisingly well. No great depth to it, but an enjoyable read.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the premise: Eliza Southwell is an aspiring actress who\u2019s had no luck in her native Boston finding stage work, so she takes a job as companion and maid to a wealthy widow travelling to England. Surely she\u2019ll find work there? All she has to do is see her new mistress safely to her late husband\u2019s estate – how hard can it be? But when the widow dies unexpectedly while at sea, and the crew mistakenly assume Eliza is the rich widow\u2026 what\u2019s a girl to do? And when she sees Fernwood and meets her supposed sister-in-law, she\u2019s not sure she ever wants to leave.<\/p>\n

There just one small fly in the ointment – her supposed dead husband isn\u2019t dead at all, and when he turns up alive and well and clearly able to identify his supposed wife as an impostor, the fat is well and truly in the fire.<\/p>\n

This is a short book and a romance, so nothing happens that the reader can\u2019t easily predict. The husband agrees to go along with the subterfuge, the two gradually fall in love and a way is found to set everything on a proper legal footing without creating a huge scandal. The villain isn\u2019t really much of a villain, and is easily dealt with, so there isn\u2019t much of an obstacle to the happy ever after.<\/p>\n

This kind of premise only works if it\u2019s believable, and in this case, both the wife\u2019s demise and the actress who takes her place, and the husband being mistakenly thought to be dead are completely credible. The other difficult point is when the husband finds out his wife is strangely different from how he remembered her, and this is perhaps less believable, but by this point I was invested in both the principals, so I could go with the flow.<\/p>\n

I have some minor grumbles. Firstly, the use of \u2018passed\u2019 instead of \u2018died\u2019, which was a huge irritant in the early chapters. I told myself repeatedly that Eliza was American, so maybe she would say that, but it still grated. The other major irritant was the use of dual first person narrative, which made it difficult to know whose was the point of view. I know it\u2019s trendy now, but it\u2019s really hard to read, so please, authors, don\u2019t do this. These points were especially irritating as the book was otherwise very well written.<\/p>\n

Other than that, I had no quibble with the story. I would have liked it to be a bit longer to give the characters somewhat more nuanced behaviours. As it was, the principals were all too good to be true, but it\u2019s not a big deal. An enjoyable read. Four stars.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not my usual fare, this is a mid-Victorian romance with a complicated false identity that actually worked surprisingly well. No great depth to it, but an enjoyable read. Here\u2019s the premise: Eliza Southwell is an aspiring actress who\u2019s had no luck in her native Boston finding stage work, so she takes a job as companion […]<\/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":[300],"class_list":["post-6230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-culler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230","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=6230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6232,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions\/6232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}