Book Review: Emma (The Lore Chronicles)
Emma (The Lore Chronicles): A Gothic Regency Short Story by Kathryn Le Veque
4 stars
Category: Adult
Note: Short Story length. I read this as included in The Midnight Hour: All Hallows Brides anthology.
Summary: After a carriage accident leaves her orphaned and scarred, Emma Fairweather finds she needs to earn her way through life as a maid. She hears about a placement for a maid at Blackmoor manor and finds herself trudging through the wasteland moors to a run-down manor where she finds the young lord of the manor on his deathbed, having wasted away in depression after his own tragedy.
Comments: Hunting through her other books to see if there was a continuation on this lovely short deliciously dark regency romance, I see the author is mostly interested in writing about medieval knights with muscled chests on the front covers, and sadly this book is actually a departure from her norm. I’m not sure if I’d really call it gothic since it didn’t have anything actually ghostly or chilling in it. I did love the atmospheric setting in both the prologue and the main body of the story. The prologue was fun with a tourist woman named Lee who visits Blackmoor manor in modern time as a tourist attraction to see a famous painting. She gets into a conversation about it with a man who introduces himself as Asher Russe. Then the story jumps back into regency where tragedy befalls the young lord Asher. And then it jumps several years later to follow Emma as she travels the moor to find a maid position at Blackmoor manor where Lord Asher has fallen into severe depression, all the servants have left, and the mansion has been left to rot. It’s up to Emma to breathe life back into him, and find that they aren’t alone in their tragedies. I loved the friendship that blossomed in their conversation and would have loved seeing where their story might go to. The largest problem with this story is that it feels more like just the sample to a larger book. It felt like we had just passed the introductions and were about to really start the story when I hit the list of other books the author had written and the author bio. So, I came here to see if that might have actually been the case since I had just read it in The Midnight Hour: All Hallows Brides anthology. But other reviews say the same thing. I did like the touch that the de Russe family in this story are descendants of the family in her medieval knights books. There is also a mention of the Fang manor which presumably is the family home of the clan from her Scottish werewolf warrior series. Another thing that bugged me that I was hoping would eventually get touched upon was how did the modern set prologue fit with the regency set body of the story? I was expecting for the tourist woman to be a reincarnation and for the Ash who met her to be the same one from the Regency part though cursed to live until he could set things right with her. But apparently my imagination is a bit too fanciful for this non-fantasy story since they never came back into it.
4 stars
Category: Adult
Note: Short Story length. I read this as included in The Midnight Hour: All Hallows Brides anthology.
Summary: After a carriage accident leaves her orphaned and scarred, Emma Fairweather finds she needs to earn her way through life as a maid. She hears about a placement for a maid at Blackmoor manor and finds herself trudging through the wasteland moors to a run-down manor where she finds the young lord of the manor on his deathbed, having wasted away in depression after his own tragedy.
Comments: Hunting through her other books to see if there was a continuation on this lovely short deliciously dark regency romance, I see the author is mostly interested in writing about medieval knights with muscled chests on the front covers, and sadly this book is actually a departure from her norm. I’m not sure if I’d really call it gothic since it didn’t have anything actually ghostly or chilling in it. I did love the atmospheric setting in both the prologue and the main body of the story. The prologue was fun with a tourist woman named Lee who visits Blackmoor manor in modern time as a tourist attraction to see a famous painting. She gets into a conversation about it with a man who introduces himself as Asher Russe. Then the story jumps back into regency where tragedy befalls the young lord Asher. And then it jumps several years later to follow Emma as she travels the moor to find a maid position at Blackmoor manor where Lord Asher has fallen into severe depression, all the servants have left, and the mansion has been left to rot. It’s up to Emma to breathe life back into him, and find that they aren’t alone in their tragedies. I loved the friendship that blossomed in their conversation and would have loved seeing where their story might go to. The largest problem with this story is that it feels more like just the sample to a larger book. It felt like we had just passed the introductions and were about to really start the story when I hit the list of other books the author had written and the author bio. So, I came here to see if that might have actually been the case since I had just read it in The Midnight Hour: All Hallows Brides anthology. But other reviews say the same thing. I did like the touch that the de Russe family in this story are descendants of the family in her medieval knights books. There is also a mention of the Fang manor which presumably is the family home of the clan from her Scottish werewolf warrior series. Another thing that bugged me that I was hoping would eventually get touched upon was how did the modern set prologue fit with the regency set body of the story? I was expecting for the tourist woman to be a reincarnation and for the Ash who met her to be the same one from the Regency part though cursed to live until he could set things right with her. But apparently my imagination is a bit too fanciful for this non-fantasy story since they never came back into it.
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