Universal Book Link

Available at Amazon only
Free with Kindle Unlimited

The Disgraced Bride*

Story Arc Good; Language Use Distracting

This story combined ideas that are quite often seen in Regency romance but rarely together. There is a spinsters’ guild; spinsters and avowed bluestockings definitely seem to be recurrent themes in Regency lately. The heroine is suffering in society because of the downfall of her father. She still hopes to marry, so she goes to London in hopes of finding a suitor. The hero did have some involvement in her father’s nasty business, but he feels sorry for the heroine, as he knows that she is at no fault but is being punished for it, and he wishes he could do something to help ease her way in society.

I found the writing in this book to be a little stilted, particularly the dialogue. I can tell the author is striving to make it sound like historical speech, but not only were some phrases awkward, the characters unfortunately all sounded alike in mimicking this variant of historical-like speech. I also found it confusing that two of the female characters were named Emma and Emily, one of them the heroine and the other being the head of the spinsters’ guild. There were some issues with grammar, punctuation, and usage (beyond the UK spellings), but nothing that was overly distracting. I found that I actually liked the arc of the story, but I was put off by the very unnatural-sounding language.

%d