In the first book of the "Brides of Montclair" series, Noramary Marsh marries Duncan Montrose as a "substitute bride" when his fiancee, her cousin, elopes with another man. Although she'd had her own secret plans to marry her childhood sweetheart Robert, she understands it to be her duty to her family to save them from disgrace by fulfilling the promise they made to Duncan: to provide him with a bride. Noramary is determined to put the past behind her and look to her future as the mistress of Montclair, and as Duncan Montrose's wife. She hopes she will find happiness and purpose in her new life.

I'd read the third and fourth books of the "Brides of Montclair" series as a child and adored one of them (the other was a fine book, but I hated the heroine so I couldn't really like it), and was always curious to read more. Finally I did. I would have loved it when I was younger, and, actually, I quite enjoyed it now. It's an interesting story, if perhaps a bit unrealistic--I hope--and although the heroine may be a little too good and too lacking in self-confidence, the characters are well defined. More importantly, this book made me truly feel emotions for and along with the heroine. It genuinely touched me.

It's nice to have books about a romance that don't include anything more graphic than a passionate kiss--not that I'm a prude, but I don't feel like I need to read all the details of someone's sex life. Or maybe I am a prude. Either way, it's nice to not have to deal with it, because it means that what's really important is not the sex, but the love. This is a story about a couple falling in love. There are easy times and hard times, there is happiness and misery, and there is love. It's the kind of thing there should probably be more of.

There was a lot of mention of Christianity and G-d. I could have done without that, but I didn't really mind it. Maybe this was written to be a Christian book (that would explain the lack of sex), although I don't recall there being as much mention of that stuff in the two other "Brides of Montclair" books I'd read as a child--of course, I didn't notice anything Christian about Narnia when I read it as a child either. Regardless, I didn't take it as preachy, because I think it's appropriate for people of that time period to be devout Christians and, moreover, to think about G-d more often than I assume Christians nowadays do.

The only thing that bothered me at all about the book was the fact and the way that slaves were included: the heroine is introduced to the black household staff, who were described as "servants." Presumably this term is a more child-friendly way of introducing the topic, which is in some ways admirable but in other ways a cop-out. I honestly don't know if it would have been better or worse to just call them slaves...I mostly wish that the issue didn't exist at all, but it's an unerasable part of American history. At the time and place that this story takes place, there was obviously slavery, and it would have been unrealistic and unnatural for there not to have been slaves in the story, but it still made me uncomfortable. What made me positively cringe, however, was the accents that the so-called servants spoke it. Again, this may have been realistic, but it was uncomfortable to read.