Review: Reluctant Bride by Joan Smith (2012)

This is not the book for anyone who is a stickler for historical language or plot plausibility. It is, however, wildly funny, and although I rolled my eyes at something or other on every third page, along would come another laugh out loud moment, and so I just kept on reading. It’s outrageously silly, but it doesn’t matter a bit.

Here’s the premise (such as it is): Lizzie Bladen and her Aunt Maisie are struggling to keep their heads above water at their impoverished and heavily mortgaged family home, while Lizzie’s younger brother Jeremy is away at Oxford. Lizzie decides she’ll have to sell her dowry, a historic and valuable diamond necklace. On route to her uncle, who has offered to buy it, their carriage is overturned by a fast-driving baronet, Sir Edmund Blount, and in the confusion the necklace is stolen. Lizzie and Edmund are at odds instantly, but he chivalrously decides to help them recover the necklace, and thereby sets in train a glorious sequence of ever more unlikely escapades as they chase around the country in pursuit of a wall-eyed man in a green coat who is the chief suspect.

So far, so promising, but the real fly in the ointment for me was that the book I read immediately before this was another Joan Smith effort, called Love’s Way. And here’s the kicker – its plot is almost identical to this one. The heroine (and her aunt!) are in dire financial straits, thrown together with an antagonistic hero with whom the heroine feuds in melodramatic fashion throughout the book. And although this book at least has some indication that the hero is actually falling for the heroine, she never admits to it, and (just like the previous book) there’s no romantic ending just a shrug and I-suppose-we’d-better-get-married air of resignation. So although I enjoyed the whole thing quite a lot, it was rather spoilt for me by the repetition.

There is one element of the story that I found very funny, but purists might take exception to. Sir Edmund, having been a contented bachelor for a number of years, and having no intention ever to marry, has developed the habit of seeking out female company of a certain type when he’s travelling. He doesn’t stray from the moral code when he’s at home where he’s a respectable figure and wants to keep his reputation, but when he’s away from home he likes a bit of how’s-your-father. This leads to some very funny moments when he’s trying to arrange something, or is actually about to embark upon it, when Lizzie interrupts. Naturally, he gets quite cross about this.

In fact, Edmund’s moods are one of the most entertaining aspects of the book, for they veer about quite dramatically in response to whatever is going forward, and whether he sees it as positive or negative, and although Aunt Maisie soon sees what he’s about, Lizzie never does, and fails to notice that Edmund’s moods are increasingly concerned with her attitude to him.

It’s all great fun, despite being ridiculously implausible, but the sense of deja vu keeps it to four stars for me.