{"id":959,"date":"2017-12-05T22:43:25","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T22:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=959"},"modified":"2017-12-05T22:44:35","modified_gmt":"2017-12-05T22:44:35","slug":"review-the-ruined-lady-by-bree-verity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2017\/12\/05\/review-the-ruined-lady-by-bree-verity\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: ‘The Ruined Lady’ by Bree Verity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe it\u2019s my horrible cold that\u2019s turned my brain to mush, but this book made no sense to me on any level. I liked the premise – a lady of 32 sees herself descending into unlamented spinsterhood and determines to have one night of passion before she relinquishes all hope of love. As seducer, she chooses her childhood friend, Quincey, the Earl of Edenburgh. And this part is fine, although as so often happens, the innocent virgin turns out to have a previously unsuspected capacity for multiple orgasms, but whatever. The only constraint she lays on her friend (apart from secrecy, obviously!) is that he mustn\u2019t get all sentimental and offer to marry her, because she\u2019s not a suitable wife for an earl.<\/p>\n

And this is where things start to go off the rails somewhat, because she is Lady Felicity Merryweather, and therefore by the rules of the peerage she must be the daughter of an earl, at least (or possibly a marquess or a duke). Yes, these titles really do mean something. Anyway, a perfectly acceptable wife for an earl, one would have thought.<\/p>\n

Well, he does get all sentimental and decides that he loves her so he proposes and she rejects him, rather huffily. And then, having been shouted at by her mother for turning down a perfectly good offer (to an earl!) and given all sorts of reasons why, the very next day she demurely agrees to marry some random business acquaintance of her father\u2019s, a widower with six children. Why? And why does her father, who\u2019s a lord, remember, have business acquaintances anyway? Or, if he does, would want his titled daughter to marry one? Nope, not making sense to me.<\/p>\n

So then Felicity herself starts to go off the rails. Having been dressed by her mother in dowdy clothes and therefore ignored by society for 14 years, she suddenly decides to tart herself up a bit and lo and behold, she\u2019s beautiful and everyone wants to dance with her. Including the randy Duke of Rushton (who\u2019s addressed throughout as Lord Rushton, but let\u2019s not even get into the correct forms of address for dukes because, you know, I might start ranting and Christmas is coming). Anyway, the randy duke dances twice with Felicity, including a minuet (how shocking!) and suddenly her reputation is in danger. And so on and so forth, and none of this made any sense to me.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, I really liked Quincey, and Felicity herself when she\u2019s not making shockingly irrational decisions. There are some interesting side characters, and I liked Felicity\u2019s father, too, especially when he tells Quincey not to have daughters because they\u2019re just too much trouble. Needless to say, everything comes right in the end, and if you don\u2019t much mind how dukes are addressed and you like a bit of jolly old sex in your Regency and you haven\u2019t got a horrible cold making you grumpy, you might like this book pretty well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe it\u2019s my horrible cold that\u2019s turned my brain to mush, but this book made no sense to me on any level. I liked the premise – a lady of 32 sees herself descending into unlamented spinsterhood and determines to have one night of passion before she relinquishes all hope of love. As seducer, she […]<\/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":[79],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-verity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","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=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":965,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions\/965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}