Review: Would the author PLEASE get an editor?
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 15, 2012
I'm giving this one a reluctant three star rating.  Some aspects of the story were OK and I didn't find the book boring but the errors drove me nuts and ruined my enjoyment of the story.Here are some of the things I liked about the story:(1)  I liked the hero.  He wasn't your typical cynical overbearing Regency male.  The author gave him a slightly receding hairline.  I have to give her kudos for that.  I believe that's a first ever for any romance hero in any romance book of any kind I've ever read--Regency or modern.  It was endearing and made him a little more real.  The hero cooks and is renowned for his abilities in the kitchen.  Now I've read that in modern romances but NEVER in a historical or Regency romance.  I wasn't inclined to "buy" it at first, but the author did a good job of making it believable.(2)  The heroine was OK.  I wasn't tempted to slap her silly for her behavior as I am with so many heroines.(3) The author got the titles right for the hero and heroine.  Both are the offspring of an earl.  As the daughter of an earl, the heroine would be Lady Sabrina.  The hero, despite being the second son of an earl, would be Mr. Parker.  So kudos for getting that detail correct!(4)  I enjoyed the author using some obscure inheritance laws to make the plot unique.Here's what I didn't like.(1) The editing errors were egregious and ruined the book.  It wasn't just typos, misspellings and grammar mistakes.  It was truly stupid stuff.  For example:  "the creek (sic) of a door"  URRHG!  Are you kidding me?  There were sentence fragments all over the place.  The author used the word "alright" in several places...and "alright" is NOT even actually a real word and certainly shouldn't be used in formal writing.  The author doesn't understand the difference between "may" and "might" and kept using "may" when she should have used "might."  I could go on, and on, and on, but I won't.(2) The exclusive Ladies Academy where the heroine is working as a maid is run by Lady Davies.  Later on, the heroine refers to her as Mrs. Davies.  Then again, further on in the book, she refers to her as Lady Davies again.(3) The author had the characters doing things that simply would not have been condoned during this time period.  One horrible example was having the heroine go around kissing eligible men to see if their kisses had the same effect on her as the hero's kisses.  In the real Regency period there is no way this would have happened.  Her male relatives would have locked her away or married her off before she got to the third man....  Another example is when the author has the vicar working in the mines.  Come on now, get real!  If you can point me to one example of this actually occurring in real life during that period, then I'll accept it and apologize, but I have to say I don't believe there's ANY way this would have happened.  A third example is having a Lady run the Academy.  A woman entitled to be called Lady Davies would not have been running a school in that period.  There are many other examples of this kind of mistake in the book.  I'm just mentioning the ones that bothered me the most.I hoped, as the second book in this series, the author might have learned something and edited her work more carefully.  Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.  The mistakes in this book were even more profuse and flagrant than in the first book of the series.In my opinion $2.99 is too much to pay for this level of amateurish writing.  I can find better quality stories which have been better edited for free on fan fiction websites.It's too bad this author doesn't take herself or her work seriously enough to learn how to do it better...or, if she's that grammar impaired, to hire someone competent to edit her work before publishing it and expecting people to pay money to read it because she does have some talent.  Unfortunately, her other deficiencies in writing obscure that talent.  She needs to quit being so slapdash and take her work more seriously.