Mary Kingswood's Blog, page 6

Review: Christmas Belle by Mary Balogh (1994)

A much better read than the first book in the series (The First Snowdrop, to which I gave three stars – for a Mary Balogh book!). This one has a vastly improved hero, and two possible brides for him, both trying to do their best in difficult circumstances.

Here’s the premise: Jack Frazer has been invited to spend Christmas with his ducal grandparents, along with their vast family, a lot of organised events he’ll be required to participate in, and his future bride. At least, a young lady has been invited, and Jack will be expected to court her and, if they like each other, to propose. He’s not much minded for marriage, having enjoyed his freedom very much, thank you, but he finds himself obeying the summons and meeting the young lady, only to discover that, while she’s very pretty, she’s also very young, a petite, doll-like creature who looks as if she’s straight out of the schoolroom.

Meanwhile, the main entertainment of the festivities is to be provided by a renowned actress, Isabella, the Comtesse de Vacheron, who will perform several extracts from Shakespeare, with the aid of a supporting cast provided by the family. She’s a widow with two children, and remarkably respectable for an actress, having been feted in both France and Britain. There’s only one problem – she was Jack’s mistress for a year nine years ago, a relationship that ended in anger and bitterness. Neither is happy to find the other at the party, but they agree quite early on to leave the past where it belongs and avoid each other as much as possible.

The reader knows, of course, how well that’s going to work out. What makes this whole setup so interesting is that Jack’s potential bride, Juliana Beckford, is also given equal billing with the two principals, so we see her thoughts and feelings as well as Jack’s and Bella’s. I liked Juliana very much. Some reviewers called her spineless, but I think she’s a perfect Regency lady, well brought up, if very innocent and unversed in the ways of the world, and she puts her duty and obedience to her parents above her own wishes. They have arranged a very prestigious marriage for her to the grandson of a duke, a man of independent wealth, and even though she worries about him being so much older and more experienced than her, and she isn’t in love with him, she sets out to do what she feels is the right thing.

Jack, too, is determined to do the right thing. He accepts at an early stage that he’s going to offer for her, and sets himself to court her conscientiously, taking things slowly because he realises she’s very innocent. And if he has reservations about her youth and his lack of physical desire for her, he tells himself that will grow, and that he can make her happy. He’s being honourable and mature and not trying to recapture his youth with Bella, and that makes him a proper hero in my book.

Bella I’m less sure of. I’m not much enamoured of heroines who are so driven to succeed in their chosen profession that they essentially sabotage every other part of their lives. But I suppose she was young and naive and caught in a difficult situation when she was Jack’s mistress, and as a mother she can’t be faulted. She puts her children first, always, and I can only applaud that. The children, actually, are a real highlight of the book. They’re not merely ciphers or plot devices or there to be winsomely cute or wilfully awful. Things do get a bit schmaltzy towards the end, but Balogh keeps it just on the right side.

I do dislike the obvious double standard. One of the reasons Jack and Bella fell out was because he was convinced she was sleeping with other men, despite her denials. When he finally realises the truth, there’s an air of: oh, that’s all right then, she’s not a slut after all. Whereas he consoled himself after their parting by sleeping with every woman he could get his hands on. But somehow nothing is ever said about that.

What else grated? The vast assortment of relations, and since most of them are happily paired off with young children, it’s difficult not to believe that there’s a whole series somewhere that told the stories of them all. As it was, the only ones I knew were the awful hero from The First Snowdrop and his wife, and I remembered Freddie (‘I’ve got no brains’) from that book, too, because really, could Balogh not have given him some variation? The whole acting thing was pretty tedious, and apart from the plot device of getting a famous actress to the house, there was no point to it. There was no moment of revelation when Jack and Bella acted together, and all the lurches forwards and back in their relationship happened for other reasons. I’m not a big fan of a Christmas setting with snowball fights and decorating the rooms and the inevitable kissing bough. And did they really have an evening church service in the Regency? And please, please, please can we banish the obligatory skating on the lake scene, followed by the mind-numbingly predictable falling through the ice scene. It’s been done. It’s old.

But despite my grumbles, I really loved this book – mostly! I can’t quite give it five stars, but Balogh did her usual trick of making me cry several times, so let’s call it a very good four stars. Warning: it’s Balogh so there are sex scenes.

Review: Lace For Milady by Joan Smith (1980)

I don’t know why, but I felt like I’d read this book before. The grumpy heroine, the eccentric lord who courts her (sort of), the even more eccentric companion and the smuggling subplot – it all felt a bit familiar. But the tetchy arguments between hero and heroine (I won’t flatter them by calling them banter) and the not-quite-sure-what-he’s-up-to hero are classic Joan Smith, and it was all very enjoyable.

Here’s the premise: Miss Priscilla Denver, after a fairly impecunious childhood, has finally come into a sizeable inheritance, so she decides to uproot herself and move nearer to her only surviving relation, an aunt living on the south coast. She buys a neglected dower house from the aunt, and settles there contentedly with her middle-aged spinster companion, Miss Slack. But then her neighbour, the Duke of Clavering, turns up and it appears that he owns the land on which the dower house is built, and the leasehold only has a few more years to run. But not to worry, he’ll buy back the house at whatever Priscilla paid for it, or maybe even more, so she’ll be able to buy another house and everyone will be happy, won’t they?

Except Priscilla, of course, who quite likes this house, thank you very much, and she’s deeply suspicious of the duke’s motives for buying it from her. First he says he wants it for an elderly relative, then it’s to be a museum, since there’s a Roman fort underneath it. There are also some Roman remains in the middle of a field, which the duke is protecting by deploying mantraps around it, which Priscilla deplores. There are some strange noises emanating from the fireplace in the house, which the duke fails to satisfactorily explain. Is it ghosts? Or smugglers? Or simply someone banging about in the cellar? Priscilla is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, and the duke is equally determined to get her out of the house.

It’s an odd thing, but looking back on this, none of the various components worked particularly well. The heroine is, frankly, a termagant, often driven to do something just because she’s told she shouldn’t. The hero is almost as grumpy as she is, and as devious and slippery as an eel. It’s hard to believe a word he says. The romance consists of the two of them quarrelling (I don’t think there’s another word for it, and it certainly isn’t flirting). The hero pays more attention to the middle-aged companion than he does to the heroine, and we don’t see the slightest hint of affection in him until she is injured (doing something she’s been told not to do). The proposal is the same kind of quarrelling, only lightly modified.

And yet, somehow it all works. It’s not my favourite type of Regency (I like my hero and heroine to show some actual sign of emotion rather than well-I-suppose-I’ll-have-to-marry-you nonsense), but Joan Smith is such a stellar writer, and there are so many laugh-out-loud moments that I can see I’ll have to give it four stars.

Review: The Sprinter by Kate Archer (2022)

Well, here’s a thing – a Kate Archer book that failed to make the 5* grade. What went wrong? Well, technically nothing. The book’s as entertaining as the previous ones, but somehow it felt very samey. The country girl brought up to London to be launched into society by a high-ranking lady with no daughter of her own, the business of planning gowns and public appearances, the (male) relation of said high-ranking lady who is immediately drawn to the country girl, the balls and misunderstandings and comic servants and so on. There are differences, but there’s a strong air of deja vu about it.

Here’s the premise: Lady Heathway is one of six ladies who have no daughter of their own, so decide to help a girl into society who would otherwise not have a season. Lady Heathway’s chosen girl is Grace Yardley, daughter of a deceased viscount, who has been banished to the dower house with her drooping mother by the new viscount. With very little money to live on (I wonder why? Where is the widow’s jointure?) and the dower house practically falling down around their ears, her mother takes to her bed and Grace struggles to manage with just a couple of servants. Into this dispiriting setup arrives the letter from Lady Heathway inviting Grace to London. She can’t possibly leave her mother, so she declines and that appears to be that.

Lady Heathway, however, is not a lady who allows that to be that. She turns up at the dower house, tame nephew, Lord Gresham, in tow, and summarily disposes of all objections. Grace’s mother is to have the full time care of a nurse to tend to her needs for whatever ails her, and a top physician from London will be dispatched to oversee the case. Grace is to pack and leave for London immediately. And so it happens.

Grace is quite happy to have the pleasure of a season, and soon finds that Lady Heathway has been planning this for a long time, even to the precise dress designs. She still worries about her mother, but she’s enjoying herself, and especially the company of handsome Lord Gresham, who seems to be spending a lot of time calling at the house. But the letters from her mother are deeply concerning – the doctor and nurse are overbearing, and force her out of doors and to eat things she’d rather not eat, and have they no sympathy for a poor invalid at all? But when Lady Heathway dismisses these concerns out of hand, Grace determines to make a bolt for the country to see her mother, and climbs out of her bedroom window to do so.

Needless to say, everything that could go wrong, does, and Grace acquires a reputation as a sprinter (hence the book’s title). From here the book spirals into a tangled web of plot complications, with Lord Gresham determined to keep all other suitors away from Grace so that he can marry her himself, while she thinks she has no chance with him, and determines to accept the first offer she gets, in order to get her sick mother out of the leaky dower house as soon as possible. And meanwhile, the villain of the piece is determined to throw a spoke in everyone’s wheels and get his revenge.

Needless to say, it all works out satisfactorily in the end, with all misunderstandings cleared up, and I did enjoy it, but perhaps I’ve just read too many of Archer’s books back to back because it didn’t resonate with me the way the previous ones did. But the humour is still there in spades, and I’m hopeful that the next book will be a little bit different, to restore the freshness. The writing is a pleasure to read, as always, although I wondered a little at White’s having a pool room (could this be billiards, perhaps?). Four stars.

Review: A Masked Deception by Mary Balogh (1985)

One of the things I most admire about Mary Balogh is her ability to look unflinchingly at her characters and their behaviour. This is one of those cases where I rather wish she had flinched, and given the hero at least one or two redeeming features. This was her first published work, so perhaps one should make allowances, but it’s difficult. This is a fairly ranty review so it’s quite spoilerish. Don’t read unless you want to know most of the plot.

Here’s the premise: Six years ago, Richard, the Earl of Brampton, had met a passionate but regrettably anonymous stranger at a masked ball. She disappeared before the unmasking, and he was never able to find her again, although he’s never forgotten her. Now, with his mother agitating for him to marry and sire the essential heir, he settles on mousy Margaret Wells, who will give him no trouble, and can be safely left in the country raising the heir while he maintains his mistress in London. What he doesn’t know is that Margaret is the very same passionate stranger he remembers so vividly. He also doesn’t know that she fell instantly in love with him six years ago. So the scene is set for a gradual rediscovery of that passionate interlude.

Except that’s not what happens. Richard decides that he can’t inflict passion on his mousy wife, so sex is a brief, perfunctory affair, and she is too mouse-like to complain. And naturally, she can’t possibly tell him that she was the stranger from six years ago. Wait… why ever not? Well, because the plot requires her to keep quiet about it, that’s why. And so she does, but she’s a bit sad, because she enjoyed all that sexy kissing and fumbling under clothes from six years ago and she’d like a bit of that now, thank you very much. But when younger sister Charlotte arrives for her come out and asks why she’s a bit sad, Margaret tells her the whole story, and Charlotte has the brilliant idea that Meg should dress up in her mask costume again and see if she can entice Richard into a bit of that sexy stuff. And so she does, arranging to just happen to bump into him at Vauxhall’s, and would you believe it, he not only falls for his mysterious stranger all over again and gets hot and heavy with her, but he doesn’t even recognise his own wife?

Well, no, I wouldn’t believe it, actually. They even begin a torrid affair in his best mate’s bed, and even though he sees the similarities with his wife, he doesn’t once twig that it’s actually her. Yet the best mate, who doesn’t know her half as well, recognised her instantly. How ridiculous is that?
The other major stumbling block to credibility is Margaret herself. We’re supposed to believe that her public persona is very calm and reserved, almost cold in its lack of emotion. Nothing, it seems, dents her composure. But somehow, put her in a Marie Antoinette costume, a wig and a mask, and she becomes an unrestrained nymphomaniac. I would have found this more credible if we’d been shown any sign of this inner tempestuousness, but there’s nothing at all, not a flash of anger or a sharp word or the slightest hint of a flounce. She doesn’t even speak up for herself, simply accepting whatever neglect or implied insult her husband heaps on her head.

The question of Richard’s morality is more ambiguous. Nowadays, a hero who maintains his mistress after he’s married and then has an unrestrained affair with a woman whose name he doesn’t even know is a bit of a non-starter for a romantic novel, but when this book was written, almost forty years ago, heroes of this type were par for the course. And he does very gradually come to appreciate his wife. He dispenses with the mistress and he even gives up his affair with the mystery lady because he tells himself he’s in love with his wife.

Meanwhile there are a couple of side romances going on, for Charlotte and also for Richard’s brother Charles. This may be an opportune moment to point out that there a great many perfectly respectable names for Regency characters, so it would be nice if authors would refrain from using two such similar ones as Charles and Charlotte. Anyway, the side romances aren’t wonderful, but in the end they’re better than the main event, which blows up in spectacular fashion.

Richard, you see, discovers the Marie Antoinette costume in his wife’s wardrobe and the slow-top finally realises that she was the mystery lady all along. Whereupon he goes into a towering rage at being made to look a fool, because it’s all about him, you see. He was the one who chose to have a torrid affair with a woman he believed was not his wife, but it’s her fault for being a slut and enticing him (or something). She tries to explain but he doesn’t want to listen, and then he crosses an inviolable line, in my view, by using violence against the heroine, his own wife. Even when she tells him not to hurt her too badly because she’s pregnant, it doesn’t calm him down because he doesn’t believe her! Only when she finally blows her top and points out what a hypocrite he is does he realise that maybe she has a point. Then he cries, tells her he loves her and they go to bed and have passionate sex, and I can’t tell you how much I despise him at this point. I don’t have much respect for her, either, but he is far, far worse. I don’t think he even knows the meaning of the word love.

This was heading for three stars, because on the whole the thing is readable and even enjoyable for much of it, and even though I wanted to slap both hero and heroine upside the head, I make allowances for the age it was written in, and it was Balogh’s first book, after all. My own first Regency was pretty terrible, too. But that ending made me so mad, I knocked it down to two stars. So there. Recommended only for completists, and definitely not for anyone looking for a clean read – there’s an awful lot of sex in it. Or a lot of awful sex for Margaret, poor girl.

The theme of this book, the Regency marriage of convenience and what it would be like in reality without the romance author’s typical sprinkling of magical stardust, is one that interests me greatly. Balogh has tackled the idea in two other books (that I know of; there may be others). Dancing With Clara (1993) suffers a little from a depressing ending, in my opinion, but in The Obedient Bride (1989) she gets it absolutely right, and with a proper hero. I highly recommend it as an antidote to the insufferable Richard.

Review: An Unacceptable Offer by Mary Balogh (1988)

These early Baloghs are a bit of a mixed bag, but even at their worst, they show flashes of the author’s brilliance, and at their best, they’re superb. After a so-so last Balogh (The First Snowdrop), this one was definitely in the superb category, although as with all older books, the reviews are fairly mixed.

Here’s the premise: Jane Matthews is still unmarried at the age of twenty-three, but she’s having another season with her younger friend, Honor Jamieson. Jane is the quiet, rather plain, sensible one, while Honor is the beautiful bubblehead, revelling in her power over men, and flirting outrageously with any male who catches her eye. And the first man to do so is Michael, Viscount Fairfax, wildly handsome and now a widower with two small daughters, and in the market for a second wife. Honor determines she’ll have him, and his friend, Joseph Sedgeworth, a much plainer man, will do for Jane.

But then a strange thing happens, for Michael decides that Jane would do very well for his second, more practical, marriage and makes her a wildly unromantic proposal, which she rejects with extreme prejudice, giving him a piece of her mind for treating her like a commodity, not a person of worth in her own right. And the twist here is that she’s been in love with him ever since she first saw him five years earlier. And as if that weren’t enough, Jane finds herself falling into a comfortable friendship with the friend, Joseph, and when he proposes, she accepts him. Silly girl.

The Michael/Jane situation reminds me a bit of Georgette Heyer’s Sprig Muslin, where the heroine turns down the hero’s pragmatic offer because she’s been in love with him for years. Which never made the least bit of sense to me. If you love the guy, then for heaven’s sake marry him and wait for him to appreciate your true worth (as he inevitably will, if he’s a halfway decent sort of bloke). But Jane wants her true worth to be appreciated right now, thank you very much, and when Joseph does so, she settles for him instead of the man she loves. Who then promptly realises what he’s lost, and falls in love with her. Of course he does.

So the rest of the book is the familiar, not to say well-worn, engaged-to-the-wrong-person plot. The author’s method of extricating her characters from this tangle is ingenious, requiring the bubblehead to be sensible for once, although as it gets her what she wants, too, and she’s a very determined lady, it can also be viewed as a selfish move.

This book wasn’t subtle at all. When the scene shifts to the hero’s country home where the cute kids are waiting, inevitably they take to Jane at once and she to them, whereas the bubblehead hates kids with a passion and avoids them like the plague. Since the hero is besotted with them, any possibility of a match between them is out of the window. Meanwhile, hero and heroine are playing happy families, and bubblehead is amusing herself with the friend (who is engaged to the heroine, mark you, but bubblehead wouldn’t let a trivial detail like that stand in her way).

Since this is Mary Balogh, there has to be the obligatory sex scene, although it’s more of a quick fumble and a hasty adjusting of dress. It’s also completely unnecessary and (in my view) out of character for the people involved, but the author seems to feel the need for something graphic. It’s a pity, because otherwise this would please the traditionalists nicely. There are some minor anachronisms (dance cards and a modern style of waltz, but these are almost ubiquitous, sadly). Otherwise, this is an excellent examination of how marriage worked in Regency times, and how you choose a partner for life in the mad social whirl of the season, and the sort of mistakes that arise because of that. I very much enjoyed it. Five stars.

Review: Lord Clayborne’s Fancy by Laura Matthews (1980)

This is an odd sort of book. The reviews are mixed, to put it mildly, and I honestly thought I was going to hate it, and especially the nasty, suspicious, cheating husband, but I found it unexpectedly compelling. Strange.

Note: There’s not much of a graphic nature in the book, but the whole premise and the difficulties between hero and heroine centre on sexual matters, so if you prefer a more traditional read, avoid this one.

Here’s the premise: Jason, Lord Clayborne, and his new wife Rebecca hit a crisis on their wedding night. He discovers after consummation that she hasn’t bled, and everyone knows that virgins always bleed the first time, don’t they? Ergo, she’s not a virgin. He might just possibly be prepared to overlook this heinous crime if she would just confess to it and apologise, but she doesn’t. In fact, she’s initially mystified by his pointing to the sheets (“What do you see?” “Nothing…”), but this doesn’t clue him in. He explains, she’s horrified, can’t account for the lack of blood but assures him she’s innocent of any such behaviour. He is so outraged by this wilful refusal to admit to her crime that he abandons her to shoot all over the country, including visits to London to take up with his former mistress (as we learn later). Meanwhile Rebecca uncomplainingly busies herself with running the house and waiting patiently for her husband to come to his senses.

Now, at this point, Jason is a pretty unlikeable hero, right? Refusing to believe his wife, arrogantly assuming he knows everything there is to know about the female body and then huffily consoling himself with another woman – it’s not a great look. And a lot of the negative reviews focus on that, which is understandable. But I have some sympathy with his position. Even today, there are plenty of misunderstandings between men and women, and even when a man may know something of the workings of women in general, he may not know just how the particular one he’s intimate with works. And in the Regency, when there was no internet and not much public discussion of the facts of anatomy, it would have been much easier for a man to be ignorant of the wide variety of womanhood.

So I can totally accept that he may not have known that some women don’t bleed the first time, and if he genuinely believed that she’d deceived him, his anger and hurt are all too understandable. A certain amount of avoidance of his wife would be expected in anyone of less than saintly character, and although the mistress is generally a no-no in a hero, I can see how he might have been so thrown off his axis that a determined woman could successfully seduce him. It’s bad, but it’s forgivable, I’d say, although I see why others may think differently.

The best part of a year goes by, and they’re still estranged, but a multitude of new characters turn up, so there’s a trip to London and then back to the country, during which time Jason and Rebecca are thrown together more than they have been, and he definitely starts to soften. It’s clear that he’s being gradually drawn back to her, just as when he was courting her. It’s obvious to the reader that he’s in love with her and perhaps he always has been, but he’s not quite ready to be open with her. Probably a mistake, but it’s very much in keeping with his character.

But in London Rebecca discovers that he saw his mistress again after he was married, and that is the final straw. She takes off with yet another new character to live apart from Jason, and she won’t even tell him where she’s going. And because he loves her and can’t bear her to be unhappy, he lets her go and even ups her allowance so she can afford to keep her horse.

This is the point at which any half-sensible hero would have come clean about his feelings. Something along the lines of ‘I love you and surely we can work this out without you leaving? Let’s talk about what might work.’ But of course talking is too simple, so we have to suffer through the whole separation thing before the author conjures up a tediously silly and overwrought subplot to bring the hero charging to the rescue.

By this time, he’s finally discovered that – oh noes! He was wrong about the whole bleeding thing so maybe his wife is innocent of wrongdoing after all. He’ll have to grovel and (at last!) tell her he loves her. But she’s constantly rushing round after other people and it’s hard to get a moment alone with her, and when he does, he decides the time isn’t right for grovelling, so we have to suffer through yet another tediously silly and overwrought subplot before he finally gets to grovel. It’s probably not a sufficiently grovelly sort of grovel, considering the hell he put her through, but it does the trick, since (fortuitously) she’s in love with him too. And that’s another thing some reviews take issue with, but since he’s actually very nice to his wife, apart from the whole abandonment and mistress thing, I can see where she’s coming from.

So for me, the main plot worked pretty well and I think the author did a good job of making both hero and heroine (mostly) likeable and understandable. My only real complaint is the plethora of plot-device extra characters who were wheeled on in the second half, and those tediously silly and overwrought subplots. There was also far too much space given to the minor characters, especially the garrulous governess and piously lazy clergyman (not amusing enough) and the annoyingly precocious child (not cute enough). All in all, about a third of the book and half the characters could have been dispensed with, without great loss. There are a few Americanisms, but nothing to frighten the horses. Too much talk of sexual matters for traditionalists, but I enjoyed it. Four stars.

Review: Lady Hathaway’s House Party by Joan Smith (1980)

A broken marriage is a really difficult setup for an author to tackle, but I felt it worked really well, and the focus was very much on the principal couple, as it should be, rather than the minor characters or the subplots.

Here’s the premise: society sophisticate Oliver, the Duke of Avondale, had astonished the ton by marrying country mouse Miss Belle Anderson, a girl of no particular beauty, connections or fortune. Despite their very different backgrounds, he had clearly been besotted with her, for no obvious reason, yet as soon as they had married, he had stopped trailing round in her wake and gone back to his old habits, and within a month she had run back to the seclusion of her father’s house. They agreed to a formal separation, and there was talk of divorce. And then Lady Hathaway inadvertently invited them both to her house party…

I confess, I found it implausible that Belle would agree to go to a house party at all, since she’s barely left her father’s estate since leaving her husband. But there’d be no story without that, so let it pass. Oliver is not quite so reclusive and Lady Hathaway is his cousin, so that part is more plausible. And despite Lady Hathaway’s best intentions, the two meet accidentally and quite unaware that the other will be there, and while Belle is enjoying a moment with her cicisbeo. However, the two manage not to flounce (because, again, there’d be no story if they did), and the stage is set for an extremely awkward house party. He thinks he’ll just have a nice chat with his wife, perhaps recreate a pleasant moment from the early days of their marriage, and she’ll come back to him. But she’s edgy and snippy, and things go off the rails pretty fast.

We learn quite early on (because the author tells us) why they fell out. After a fairly intense courtship, when he followed her about like a puppy, once married, he assumed she would immediately adapt to the rather vapid and dissolute society life that he was used to, spending time with his gossipy friends and pursuing her own interests, mostly without him. She was hurt by the disappearance of the charming pre-marriage man who wanted to spend time with her. She disliked his friends and fell in with a crowd of lower gentry types, who went off in big groups to look at museums and watch balloon ascensions, things she would have liked to do with her husband. He bought her expensive, showy presents that she disliked. He was insulted that she rejected these attempts to please her.

And all of that (and more, because there’s a reason why Belle left so abruptly) has to be resolved before they can get together again. Their altercations are marked by bitterness and downright rage, which I found unusually intense for a book of this era. Anyone expecting a lot of light-hearted banter will be sorely disappointed. The pair find it difficult to talk to each other in any way that doesn’t end (and sometimes start!) with hostility. And yet right from the start, it’s clear that Oliver, at least, is determined to win Belle back. One has to wonder why on earth he didn’t go to her father’s house, where she was hiding out for the best part of a year, but still, he didn’t, so this is his best opportunity to talk to her. But every time he tries, they end up fighting.

There are some lighter moments, fortunately. Belle’s cicisbeo, Arnold Henderson, who’s been quite happy to squire her about and enjoy a delicate flirtation, is horrified to meet her husband. He had planned ‘to walk and sit and ride and talk with her, to dance and flirt discreetly and entertain her, and it was not only extremely difficult but actually impossible to do so with Avondale glowering at him with murder in his eyes. Avondale was a big man, for one thing, a good three inches taller than himself and a couple of stones heavier, in all the right places. Shoulders like a dashed door, and of course he was a famous boxer, in an amateur capacity.’ Poor Arnold spends the entire house party avoiding Oliver like the plague, in the hope of not getting knocked down by him, and his efforts are highly entertaining. Then there is the gossiping Lady Dempster, who ignores all the rules of politeness in order to find out what is going on between Belle and Oliver.

Meanwhile, Oliver has turned his charm on Belle and taken her riding, which is the right thing to do. She’s halfway to being won over, until a certain lady arrives from London, and everything falls to pieces again. The whole book is like this… two steps forward and one (or two or three) steps back, as the two fight their own anger to get on terms again, as they both want. Sometimes it’s external events which throw them into a tizz, and sometimes it’s their own stupidity or just an infelicitous word or two. Always it’s Oliver pressing forward towards a reconciliation and Belle hesitating and pushing back. The dialogue between these two is perfectly judged. Joan Smith has always had a skilled hand with that, but here she is absolutely superb, and every encounter between the two combatants (word used advisedly) is compelling, with the comedy moments brilliantly interspersed.

It’s not exactly a spoiler to tell you that everything works out in the end, although I really hope that Oliver can control that temper of his, or everything will fall apart again. A fascinating look into what happens when two people from different worlds fall in love but fail to communicate sensibly. Five stars.

Review: The First Snowdrop by Mary Balogh (1986)

Well. A difficult book to review because there’s so much wrong with it, as a multitude of scathing reviews attest, and yet it had its moments, and the author managed to hit her trademark emotional highs. I can forgive a great deal when a book makes me tear up.

Here’s the premise: Alexander Stewart, Viscount Merrick, heir to a dukedom, is on his way to London to finalise his betrothal to Lady Lorraine, daughter of a marquess. He’s caught in a snowstorm and seeks shelter at the nearest habitation, a large house containing only one female servant, Anne Parish. He orders the servant about, and considers quite seriously whether to bed her, but only backs away when he realises she is innocent and that might result in a great deal of tedious squawking. He really is an arrogant, entitled jerk at this point.

The next morning, he discovers his error. She’s not a servant but the unassuming sister of the owner, who returns mid-morning with the vicar, finds Alex in residence and sets up an even more tedious squawking. His sister has been compromised, he says, and he expects Alex to marry her pronto, and so does the vicar. And Alex tamely does so, even putting some effort into being charming to Anne, so that she’s quite convinced that he’s fallen in love with her. Not so, for as soon as the wedding is over, he takes her to Redlands, a much-neglected minor property of his, and dumps her there. But not before telling her in the harshest terms that he thinks she’s trapped him into marriage. Oh, and also not before bedding her, and discovering the passionate woman within. Lovely guy.

Let’s just unpack some of that. First of all, there’s really no need for him to marry her at all. He’s the heir to a dukedom, after all, and she’s lower gentry, at best. Besides, he’s already committed to the lovely Lorraine, not officially betrothed but with a clear understanding. Further, nothing actually happened between Alex and Anne, and no one knows about it except the brother and the vicar, and are they really likely to tell the world? Hardly. So by far the most sensible answer is for Alex to simply apologise for mistaking her for a servant, but refuse to marry her. After all, he would have died if she hadn’t taken him in, and that would be slightly unreasonable, merely to preserve her reputation.

Secondly, what is Alex thinking of to propose with politeness and even charm, and then turn on Anne so viciously? Where are his gentlemanly manners? She’s his wife, for heaven’s sake, and even though she isn’t the wife he wanted or expected, what’s done is done, and he could at least be courteous to her. But no, he refuses to let her leave Redlands for any reason, taking up with a mistress in London and to all intents and purposes ignoring Anne altogether.

She has a bit more gumption, so after a weepy phase, she picks herself up, and gives herself, the house and the garden a makeover. I always disapprove of the ugly-duckling-to-swan routine, so beloved of romance books, as if a plain, dumpy girl can’t be loved for herself, but here we go again. She loses weight, and allows her maid to turn her into an elegantly fashionable lady. And lo and behold, she’s beautiful! Who’d a thunk it?

An aside here about the weight thing. The Regency, in fact the whole of history up until perhaps the 1920s, was an age of conspicuous consumption. If you had money, you flaunted it. Queen Elizabeth I wore jewels stitched onto her gowns. The Georgians wore gorgeous brocades and wigs too elaborate to do any actual work in. The Regency saw women in impractical pale muslins, and men in equally impractical white, starched cravats, to prove they had enough clothes to change frequently. The Victorians put their women in vast hooped skirts using yards and yards of material. And all of them saw nothing wrong with eating heartily. You’ve only got to look at the portraits of the era to see the nicely rounded arms and shoulders of the women. Only poor people were thin. But even in Balogh’s later series, she’s still putting out the idea that plump women are less than ideal.

Needless to say, Alex can’t avoid Anne altogether and eventually his ducal grandparents force them together by inviting them both to a house party, where Alex naturally fails to recognise his now beautiful, fashionable wife. Again, he blows hot and cold, ignoring her during the day and bedding her enthusiastically at night. But the duchess has a cunning scheme to force a reconciliation, by making all the young ones perform in a play and… No, let’s not talk about the play. It was all too tedious for words, with a cast of thousands of cousins, about whom the reader doesn’t give a fig. And of course, Alex and Anne inch towards an accommodation and even (surely not?) love.

Naturally, it’s not as simple as that, because Alex is *still* an arrogant, entitled so-and-so. Unbelievable. Here’s the thing, arrogant, entitled hero – if you want to make your wife happy, you have to start by finding out what that might be, not just by assuming you know what she wants. She soon sets him straight on that one, giving him both barrels and then some, and finally, at long last, a tiny drop of humility seeps into his arrogant, entitled head. And it gets kind of emotional, which is a thing that Mary Balogh does exceptionally well. Almost that final moment got my rating up to four stars. Almost.

But he’s just such a horrible hero, I can’t quite forgive him, so three stars it is.

Review: Petteril’s Folly by Mary Lancaster (2024)

This series just gets better and better. At the end of the last book, Piers and April found themselves in an awkward situation which they resolved by getting married. Now, after an idyllic honeymoon, they return to England to face the music, and explain just why a viscount married an ex-thief from the slums of London. Not that anyone knows April’s full history, but they know she’s basically a servant. Now, dressed for her rank, and behaving like a lady, will she be accepted or will the sky fall in on their heads?

Meanwhile, Piers’ valet, Stewart, has been arrested for stealing a baronet’s purse at the local inn, and our intrepid sleuthing duo have to uncover the truth of what happened that night and rescue Stewart from the false accusation. There’s the usual array of suspects, and the question of who’s telling the truth. I have to say that the mysteries aren’t the main reason I read this series, but they’re always enjoyable to see unravelled. This one is particularly satisfying because when the truth is revealed, it’s a case of ‘oh, of course’ and not ‘oh well, I suppose that makes sense’. I felt that if I’d been bothered to think it through, I’d have worked it out.

But really, I’m here for Piers and April. They’re such an unlikely couple, both damaged and needy in different ways, and yet totally dependent on each other. I’ve said all along that April’s transformation from guttersnipe to servant to lady and now to viscountess is not believable in the slightest. Spread over several years, maybe, but that’s not the case here. And somehow, astonishingly, the servants who had known April as a servant fail to recognise her as the new viscountess. Is that remotely credible? I don’t think so. They might pretend not to remember her previous incarnation, but they would certainly recognise her. I’m reminded of the Downton Abbey housemaid who left to become a secretary, married her boss and returned on a visit as a respectable upper-class wife, and she was certainly recognised. There are certainly times when you can’t place someone when you see them in a different context but you generally know that you know them.

But it’s a small point. Given the big leap in the last book which saw the pair married, all their well-wishers must be glad the author didn’t keep us in suspense as to how things are going to go. I can’t see a smooth path from here on, though. Things are still going to be rocky with the family, and I suspect there’s some serious history to April that’s yet to be uncovered. We shall see. But in the meantime, another well-earned five stars for a highly enjoyable read, and on to the next book in this addictive series.

Review: The Meddler by Kate Archer (2022)

I romped through Archer’s first series scattering five star reviews like rose petals, and this series is already going the same way. The author has a wonderfully humorous style of writing not just the upper classes but also the servant class, which adds a whole new dimension to the book.

Here’s the premise: six noble ladies who have not themselves had daughters decide to each sponsor a girl through the season, choosing someone who would not otherwise have the opportunity and hoping to triumphantly see each girl suitably married. The first girl chosen is Georgiana Wilcox, daughter of an impoverished baron, who is to be brought into society by Lady Mendleton. Like all the sponsoring ladies, Lady Mendelton has a mental image of how a daughter ought to be – sweet, gentle, demure and (naturally) highly accomplished at all the maidenly arts. Georgiana, she discovers, is not like that. Her unconventional upbringing has taught her to ride, but astride, not sidesaddle, she can’t sing, can’t play an instrument, doesn’t paint or draw or net purses. She’s also very direct, and no shrinking violet. Fortunately, she can dance, and she’s also smart, solving a murder puzzle before anyone else and winning a meeting with the Queen.

She’s been brought to London to find a husband, and there’s just one man who’s out of bounds, and that is Lady Mendleton’s own son, Jasper, Viscount Langley, who his mother has hopes of marrying off to Lady Annabelle Rumsford, a marquess’s daughter. Needless to say, Jasper turns out to be just the man to give Georgiana the wobbles, and it seems he might have the wobbles for her too…

Woven through this fairly straightforward romance is a somewhat implausible mystery involving Queen Charlotte, mad King George and the Stuart pretender to the throne. Jasper acts as an agent for the Queen, trying to find out who is passing information about the King’s madness to the newspapers. It has to be said at once that Jasper must be the world’s worst investigator, for he consistently jumps to the wrong conclusions, and never sees the patently obvious solution right under his own nose. For instance, having worked out that the information is spread from his own household and could be emanating from any of the residents, he then decides it must be Georgiana and sets a trap for her by leaving false information where it could easily be spotted, not just by her, but by anyone in the household. When that information is published, he decides he’s got proof that it’s her. Basically, he’s an idiot.

Georgiana’s progress through London society is very funny, especially the attempts to mount a horse fitted with a sidesaddle for the first time, which had me laughing till I cried. I’ve never before encountered a version of the Regency where a lady would drive to Hyde Park in a carriage with a groom bringing her horse, and then mount up in the park. It might have been done that way, I suppose, and it certainly makes for a gloriously public faux pas, but I’d have thought most riders would mount up in the mews behind the house, or the horse might be brought to the door, and then they’d ride to the park.

Can I just mention here how much I dislike Regency heroines who ride astride? I know it makes her unconventional and feisty and independent and all that jazz, but it also makes her outrageously scandalous. Whether you do it sensibly, in trousers, or impractically in a skirt that flies up and reveals most of your legs, it would be a shocking thing to do, as bad as the legendary bad thing of tying your garter in public. Even in a voluminous riding habit, designed to keep a lady’s legs decorously hidden, riding astride would reveal more than any respectable maiden should do. If you’ve seen season 2 of Bridgerton, you’ll know exactly what I mean. And as for jumping onto a horse astride in a ballgown – no. Just, no. And while I’m on the subject, one of Georgiana’s outings to the park (in a carriage, with the horse brought by a groom) has the groom riding her horse. So either the groom was riding sidesaddle or Georgiana was planning to ride astride. Either way, it’s a no no.

The romance isn’t the most sizzling in the world. The couple spend very little time together, and when they do we don’t really get much insight into what attracts them to each other apart from he’s handsome and she’s beautiful. But there are some nice moments of introspection. She’s sensibly trying not to be drawn to him, knowing she has an obligation to make a good match and he’s out of bounds. And he rather sweetly agonises over the right time to make his move. If he goes in too late, someone else might snaffle her, but he has to be sure. It’s tricky, and (frankly) he’s not the sharpest knife in the block, so he dithers a bit, but it was a nice insight. I’ve always known that it was difficult for women – does he like me or not, is he going to offer or not, and if someone who’s just meh offers, do I take him or hold out for the one I really want? But it wasn’t easy for men either!

The climax is pretty over the top, all things considered, with thicko Jasper getting himself in hot water, and Georgiana and half the servants having to rescue him. But it’s all quite neatly done, it brings all that romantic dithering to a resounding end, and it’s very funny, to boot, so no complaints from me. The writing is very readable, although with some Americanisms that triggered my (admittedly over-sensitive) pedantometer. Buckingham Palace was twice called simply Buckingham, which was pretty odd, and wasn’t it still Buckingham House at this point? We don’t have faucets in England, only taps. Dancing cards were a Victorian idea. And the author seems to have an aversion to adverbs, so there’s ‘arriving unexpected’ instead of ‘arriving unexpectedly’.

None of that mattered though, because the whole book was just so much fun that I’m going for five stars again.