February 6th, 2010 — 3.5 Stars, Book Review, Bride Stealing, Dukes and Earls, Friends, Great Britain, Heiress, J-L, Medical, Mistaken Identity, Regency, Runaway, Soldier, Virgin Heroine
If you're looking for a light happy read though you will like this novel. It's a perfect companion for a long flight or car ride and will keep you entertained.
The romance is a little overblown and the plot devices a little too farcical. There is a whole gamut of standard plots can be found within this romance:
The hero gives up his title and fortune to become a baron’s head groom in a pointless act of revenge against his father. Next our jaded hero falls in love with the artless ingénue. The heroine sucks at female domestic stuff like sewing and refinement. Instead she wants to be a doctor in a time period where that’s impossible… Unless you were a gypsy. There’s gypsies. The hero and the gypsies both approve of her becoming a healer.
A semi-evil ex-mistress turned dowager duchess, having married hero’s brother. A fortune hunting shmuck that pursues the heroine who thinks he’s in love. Our hero finds out he doesn’t mind his fortune and prestige. No, really? He’s happy to take back control and if not lovingly then kindly and open-mindedly looking out for his tenets.
Heroine gets mad at hero just before the resolution because he’s been keeping stuff hidden from her. It’s a pretty ridiculous argument because she’s agreed verbally and nonverbally to his withholding information for the first five sixths of the novel.
What’s nice though is that despite the shortcomings the narrative is extremely engaging. Julie has a talent for drawing you into the story. I was reading it pretty happily. It’s very indulging and fun. Not a runaway success, but highly enjoyable nevertheless. I know, bad pun.
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Buy: The Runaway Duke
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July 20th, 2009 — 3.5 Stars, 4 Stars, Acting, Book Review, Contemporary, G-I, Great Britain, Jane Austen, Love Triangle, Regency, United States of America
Do you hide your Austen movie DVDs so nobody will know you’re in love with Mr. Darcy? If so, then you might also benefit from a trip to Austenland. When Great-Aunt Carolyn dies, she leaves Jane Hayes with a nonrefundable reservation at an exclusive resort… that caters to women (and possibly men) with Austen fantasies.
Did Carolyn do this for Jane to kick her Darcy infatuation or to encourage it? Jane thinks it was done in hopes to give Jane freedom from her impossible daydream, but I think it was meant to help her stop getting in the way of her own Mr. Darcy.
When Jane arrives she’s immediately dubbed Miss Jane Erstwhile and forced to fork over all her modern clothes and gadgets. The first man she meets on the site is Theodore the gardener, his real name is Martin Jasper. He’s there to act as dance instructor, as nobody else was available. He’s tall, good looking, and inspires quite a bit of lust in Jane.
As she meets the lead actors and paying players, Jane dithers back and forth between being really into it and thinking it all a lark. Mr. Nobley is the most Darcy-like of the men and she finds him irritating and (a tad) boring (in the beginning) but undeniably sexy. She makes it her business to pick and poke fun in homes of eliciting conversation and smiles from him.
The novel revolves around her relation with these two men. Each of the chapters starts out with the details of one of her past relationships: how they met, what they did, and why they broke up. Parts of the narrative were frankly bizarre as I was reading it from third person heroine point of view and she sometimes referred to Erstwhile as if the woman wasn’t herself. It was like the author was getting in the way of the heroine.
Will finish by saying the ending was great – and I wouldn’t mind seeing this as a three hour BBC miniseries!
Rating: 3.5-4 Stars
Buy: Austenland
Find and buy more Shannon Hale novels.
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June 23rd, 2009 — 4.5 Stars, Blackmail, Book Review, Comedy of Manners, Counts, Marquis, Viscounts, Dukes and Earls, Great Britain, M-O, Marriage of Convenience, Politician, Regency, Virgin Heroine
One word: charming.
Two words: engaging hilarity.
Three words: sparkling/sparking chemistry.
Most decidedly, Compromised, is a great way to kick off your summer reading. Kate Noble engages readers with narrative that is tongue-in-cheek. Part of the narrative reads third person omniscient and part is third person lead-centric as we are use to in romance. It changes without warning sometimes, but after the first time or two you don’t really notice it. I started to look forward to it actually because it was so funny, not that the lead-centric parts were not, but the omniscient portions offered a look into Regency society and how gossip spreads.
Maximillian (Max) St. John, Viscount Fontaine, the future Earl of Longbowe, is in desperate need of a wife. Not because he needs money, not because he particularly wants one, but because his father is determined to wield the very last bit of his power over his son before he dies.
You’re probably wondering why on earth Max would give in to this ridiculously patented scheme.
He gives in because his father threatens to spread gossip that Max is a bastard child from a time when his wife cuckolded him (which is completely false mind you), sell off everything that is not entailed and will all of the money to distant relations leaving Max without a name, without funds, and with land in perpetual need of expensive upkeep. Wow! That is pretty darn harsh.
Max is determined to make the best of it, but he only has three months to accomplish such a feat. He’s attending balls, musicales, and parties meeting women who are tall, short, blond, brunette, intelligent, insipid, but none of them are for him. In fact, all of the ladies he’s been meeting lack something.
Gail Alton is unfashionably tall and unfashionably intelligent and unfashionably irksome. She prefers to spend her time at museums and in a book. She loves history and languages and horses. Her sister, Evangeline, is petite, blond and practically perfect in every way. They share a loving relationship and neither one begrudge the other anything. However, compared to Evangeline, Gail is basically invisible, which works for her because she doesn’t find conversations about ribbons to be particularly interesting.
What follows is a regular comedy of manners as Max stumbles into a compromising situation with both ladies. Once with Gail while riding through Hyde’s Park and once with Evangeline including a stolen kiss in a conservatory. He ends up engaged to one girl and falling in love with the other. How will this tangled mess unravel?
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Buy: Compromised
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May 25th, 2009 — 2 Stars, ARC, Big Misunderstanding, Contemporary, D-F, Great Britain, Guest Reviews, Pregnant
By: Zarabeth, guest reviewer
I give props to Holly's Inbox
for being constructed using a very unique style of writing; however as a read the whole going through email thing… well there’s a lot of narrative I missed. I wanted more when I had less. That last statement is kind of cryptic so I’ll explain a bit further. It would sometimes take 3-6 days before a new email showed up to share the background behind something that was mentioned.
You really feel like an outsider, because Holly clearly knows what all is being said and what it refers to but as a voyeur to her story, I felt pretty clueless at times. I wish that as a reader I was enlightened sooner. Overall I must say I was not a fan of reading through email.
The romance part was sketchy at best because they weren’t writing romantic love letters to each other. No poetic prose for me to sigh over. Instead of wildly romantic notes it was just the barest, the most vague of details. As a reader, we only know what she tells the other secretary in email so a lot was not very clear it bothered me…
The story came together eventually and it’s definitely a Happily Ever After. It was nice, but the email format not so much. That sentiment is probably redundant at this point, but clearly the formatting wasn’t for me. I hear there’s a book that’s all done with instant messaging style, ttfn (Internet Girls)
, and I certainly won’t go looking for that. The idea of that is just excruciating.
Rating: 2 Stars
Buy: Holly's Inbox
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