Complicated, Perhaps Too Long, Story

You know a book is going to be complex when it starts with a long and complicated cast of characters. There is definitely much going on in this book, perhaps too much. The book begins with a somewhat surprising confrontation between the heroine and her guardian. I read a lot of historical romance, and I don’t think that the way the heroine acted at this point would be true to the times (unless she was a very unusual lady). I did like both the hero and the heroine. They had elaborate backstories, of which we only learned the full extent as the story went on; this is good, as I don’t like an information dump at the start of a book or in the chapters where a new viewpoint character starts. The author does write some characters in dialect, which I found a little distracting at times. I felt like this book was a bit too long and had too much going on. It could have been condensed for a better read in several ways; for instance, there were multiple scenes which I would consider to be everyday moments, with no conflict, crisis, or climax; if scenes don’t have those elements, they should at least tell us something about the character, or preferably, move the plot along. While the author was good at showing slice-of-life moments, sometimes I thought the descriptions went on for a little too long, which slows down the action of the story. The characters are engaging, though–and I think I have a grasp of the full cast!–so I am interested to see how the series evolves.

Some Good and Not So Good

I am of several minds about this book. I think the author did an excellent job showing the heroine in a light that seemed more realistic to Regency times than contemporarily written Regency romances tend to be. I thought that her reaction to the traumatic event the ball turned out to be seemed realistic for a sheltered woman, no matter how vivacious she had been before. Even the way that she turned down her friend at first for a social call—how it was handled in that scene—seemed very accurate to Regency to me.

There were other aspects, however, that didn’t seem as true to Regency, including how the hero acted when he found out about the incident. Knowing that the heroine’s reputation was on the line, would he really have talked with his friends about it in such detail? He could ruin her so easily by telling such information to a wider group of people. If one word got out…

Other parts of the story felt scattered. The story jumps forward without much preamble, and that was confusing. Besides what happened at the ball, too, it felt like not much really happened for much of the book. In the first third, we get to see the heroine’s reaction to what happens to her, see her reveal the incident to the hero, and get a little slice of life for the both of them. But nothing really happens in the romance department—which I never like in a romance—and, honestly, nothing much happened at all.

One aspect of the book that I did like was the way the author handled the wounded warriors of Waterloo. Two of the characters are former military, the hero and his friend. Both suffered physical and mental wounds from their experience. The hero has a large scar on his face, and the friend has lost part of a foot. The heroine’s friend suggests the heroine come over for a dinner party because that friend is now awkward in society due to his wound. The hero has come back a changed man, becoming what we might call an adrenaline junkie. This was spurred on by his time in the military, but now he can only feel that excitement he had felt in battle when he gambles. The author also took great pains to show some of the aftereffects of war, namely the widows and orphans home that the heroine and her good friend, the sister of the hero, had chosen as their particular charity. These little moments, with the hero, his friend, and the widows and orphans, show part of the devastation of war. For a romance novel, I thought it was realistic. All in all, I didn’t really like the book as much as I should have because I felt like not much happened, but I did enjoy the window onto what happens after the war for a variety of people.

Hero Too Unlikeable After the Compromise

I usually like the books by this author, but I found both the pacing and characters to be off in this book. The inciting compromising incident which sparked their forced marriage took up nearly 40% of the book, not leaving much room for the conflicts and tension in their marriage to fully be explored, played out, and resolved. In that pivotal first scene, the characters actually seem to have a fair amount of chemistry, but the duke pulled back sharply, despite his undeniable attraction to the heroine, once he decided to go through with a marriage rather than ruin the heroine. Maybe it would have been better to have seen some of it from his perspective right after the wedding instead of starting with the heroine’s viewpoint. Instead, he just seems like a petulant child; “I’m not going to be a good husband because I didn’t want a wife.” The heroine was amusing at times, but she definitely lacked a spine. How could proclaim to love him after the way he treated her. And the way she attempted to “woo” him back… ack, rankled my every sensibility as a reasonably intelligent woman. Ick. I also thought that the author did some strange head-hopping in the initial scene. In the ballroom, we were in the heroine’s head in the first chapter when suddenly perspective shifts to a group of young women; the heroine couldn’t possibly have overheard them. I enjoyed the references to Jane Austen and her works, but this book, as a whole, just didn’t work for me.