Review: A Little Bit Of Everything
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 1, 2013
A nice collection of stories.  The Elsingham Portrait is a time travel novel.  Now, I don't care for time travel stories, but I found myself completely immersed in this one despite misgivings about reading it.  The h is having a miserable time of it, enduring a really bad day (complete with rain) wandering around New York City when she decides to go to a museum.  She looks up at the portrait of a really beautiful woman who lived 200 years ago.  The next thing she knows, she is the woman in the portrait, living her life in England.  She has been transported (unexplained to us or to her) back in time.  Now she must deal with the fact that she is living in the body of a English lord's wife- who btw- is very upset with his less-than-perfect wife.  It is a great story to get lost in if you can just suspend all belief in what is "normal".Angela is the sequel to Portrait.  In this story, a very nice man from Portrait gets his own story, and gets another chance to get the girl.  The h and H from Portrait, his neighbors, also return briefly in this novel.  Nice story about nice characters, but lacking the suspense of Portrait.Delicate Situation is the story of a really nice girl.  She is so generous in fact that she puts own well-being in peril to come to the aid of two orphans.  She really needs the H's help in order to save the day, however, she is also a very strong, resourceful person in her own right.  Are her fine qualities including courage and goodness enough to win the H's heart, and is his heart worth winning?Reformed Rake is a sequel to Situation, continuing the story of the H and h from where Situation leaves off.  Much of the book (too much) deals with the fact that the H is selfish and immature- often unkind to the h who needs a lot of patience to put up with him.  Disappointing sequel.  I would have to agree with another reviewer who stated that Chater was not at her best while writing sequels.As in the Kindle versions of her other works, you can expect typos such as a "1/4" appearing in place of a letter, and other errors.  Confusing, but you can figure out what was intended.  It is unfortunate that more care wasn't given to proofread the Kindle versions before offering them for purchase.  All four of the novels in this collection are clean, as are the other Chater novels I have read with the exception of Emerald Love (which contains rape scenes).  Chater is not the most profound writer you will come across, but most of her novels are worth reading.