Review: Love lighthearted hist. romances? You MUST read this. Seriously. Read this. Just read it.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 26, 2014
Opposites attract and repel, sort of like the poles of two magnets. Oriented the wrong way, they skitter away from each other no matter how hard you try to bring them together. When they turn around, they click together and stay stuck.Before I go on, be warned there's always a danger of developing unrealistic expectations when you read a bunch of gushing reviews of a book. And I am about to gush. So please, read it for yourself without preconceptions. You'll enjoy it more, IMO. (As for getting your money's worth, at $2.99 that's a sure bet. Or get a refund.)If all the happy readers' reviews seem suspicious, I promise this is my honest take. I bought it, read it and liked it. If you check my reviews -- and I've blabbed on ad nauseam about 100+ Historical Romances by now -- you'll see that what I like, I like and why that's so; and what I hate, I hone my review until I've expressed my disgust with humor as best I can.So anyway, here we go (no spoilers):For heartbreaking reasons, the Duke of Montford suffers a lifelong obssession with neatness (we'd call it OCD perhaps). One of his properties is not, he discovers, neatly in place--the one occupied by a blight on his ancestors, a Yorkshire estate occupied for centuries by Honeywells who run a brewery he'd dearly love to put to rights, if not right out of business. Certain shenanigans that go against his grace's neatly parallel grain require him to brave a trip there to sort it out and bring it back into order before he gets on with his life and weds the woman he's selected to be his duchess. His nemesis, he discovers, is a mismatched, wild-haired harpy of a female flouncing around in trousers and offending his highly-evolved sensibilities in ways that leave him off-kilter and disturbed.A. Honeywell, the eldest child of the late proprietor of Honeywell Ale and lifelong resident of Rylestone castle, would rather horrify or offend the duke than cooperate with his investigation of certain irregularities regularly taking place in his leasehold. Having not been born a boy, Astrid foresees having her misfit family tossed out because the property reverts to the duchy now that the male line has ended. This unfairness, as much as the duke's immediate and obvious dislike of her, irks our brash bluestocking no end. But she's just the gal to get the duke's goat while she fights him for the castle, using any devious means necessary.What I loved about this was, among many other things, 1) how the wound-tight, obsessively neat duke and the naturally unraveled and mismatched Astrid meet, take up cudgels and knock each other around literally and figuratively while the antagonists try to fight the chemistry they feel; 2) the unexpected ways scenes play out; 3) the wonderful secondary characters, including the other Honeywells and their employees, the duke's two friends (very intriguing -- and my wish will be granted, they will have their own books); 4) the foot-and-ale race narration (priceless); 5) Aunt Anabel, her wig and the pig; 6) the devolution of the duke and the similar unspooling of Astrid's own strident ways (though she was only trying to do her bossy best for her family); and I could go on but that would delay your reading this yourself, which you should.In sum: if you've wished there were more charming, clever and inventive authors like Tessa Dare in this genre, prepare to rejoice. Now, there is one at least.Note to Ms. Fenton/Foxe: if this is self-published, holy Mother of Christ, this is utterly, gobsmackingly wonderful. That said, you might want to clear up the Monford/Montford spelling inconsistencies; eliminate the reference to him as Lord Montford, not correct form of address, it'd be Your Grace, Duke or Montford; or indirectly as his grace, check more carefully for typos, they're plenty there, and eliminate the blank pages at the end of some of the chapters. Or not.