{"id":743,"date":"2017-08-13T21:17:47","date_gmt":"2017-08-13T21:17:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=743"},"modified":"2017-08-13T21:17:47","modified_gmt":"2017-08-13T21:17:47","slug":"review-loving-the-marquess-suzanna-medeiros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2017\/08\/13\/review-loving-the-marquess-suzanna-medeiros\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Loving The Marquess: Suzanna Medeiros"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This one has an unusual premise: the hero has a potentially fatal and inheritable illness. He\u2019s being pressured to marry and provide himself with an heir, but he doesn\u2019t want to father a child himself. His solution is to marry an impoverished local woman who won\u2019t be in a position to refuse his solution to this dilemma: to ask his best friend to do the fathering.<\/p>\n

So far, so intriguing. But there\u2019s a lot that grated on me. For instance, the heroine, Louisa Evans and her younger brother and sister live in a small cottage alone. As in, no servants. The brother spends much of his day taking lessons from the local vicar, the sister is tinkering in the garden, and the heroine earns a few bob sewing nice dresses for the daughter of the family who reduced them to penury. Erm\u2026 so who carries buckets of coal around the house? Blackleads the grates? Cooks the meals? Feeds the chickens and the pig? Scrubs the pans? Heats all that water for the weekly bath? Carries water in from the well, for that matter? Who sweeps the carpets (on their knees, with a dustpan and brush, and yes, it needed to be done every day because of all that coal dust)? A little light sewing? I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

I also get very tired of this trope that a man (a marquess!) can be railroaded into marrying by a determined grandmother – or anyone, really. No, really he can\u2019t, and can we not for once have a hero who stands up to his relations\u2019 manipulations and tells them where they get off. He holds all the cards, after all, and could turf granny out of the house if he so chooses (which was normal practice anyway – that\u2019s what dower houses were invented for).<\/p>\n

Anyway, our two protagonists get married amidst a welter of historical inaccuracies which we\u2019ll gloss over, and the marquess introduces his bride to society at the grand ball granny\u2019s organised, thinking he\u2019s going to announce his betrothal. One up to the marquess. But then they spend the wedding night at the bride\u2019s cottage, for reasons which are unclear to me. I\u2019d imagined that this was intended to create privacy so that his friend can deflower the bride, but no. So I don\u2019t really know what the point of that was, except as an plot-driven excuse to throw the newly-weds into greater intimacy and test the marquess\u2019s resolve not to sire an heir himself. Because of course, he has one of his turns and they end up in bed together and – resolve duly tested.<\/p>\n

The illness runs through the whole book, popping up at convenient moments and disappearing when it might disrupt the resolve-testing (because, yes, the marquess\u2019s resolve is tested multiple times, in fairly graphic detail), and if there\u2019s a single reader who\u2019s surprised by the revelations surrounding the illness, I\u2019d be astonished. Some of the last chapter drama was telegraphed almost from the start. But the tricky situation between the marquess, his wife and the friend roped in to father the heir is nicely done, although I did think a lot of unnecessary angst could have been avoided if they\u2019d all sat down right away and had a nice chat over a cup of tea. However, it works well enough.<\/p>\n

A good read, well-written and without too many disturbing anachronisms (and what I found was minor and forgivable). Four stars.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This one has an unusual premise: the hero has a potentially fatal and inheritable illness. He\u2019s being pressured to marry and provide himself with an heir, but he doesn\u2019t want to father a child himself. His solution is to marry an impoverished local woman who won\u2019t be in a position to refuse his solution to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-medeiros"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","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=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}