Review: Could have been so much better.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 3, 2013
First of all the meeting between the lead characters is stolen straight out of Jane Eyre and that is a big no-no.  The dialogue was strictly 20th century, most of the characters rather  one dimensional and ,again, I think the writer was paid by the word because there was way too much repetitive introspection.  I ended up skipping big chunks the further into the book I got.  The hero was okay as were some of the servants and the hero's father.  The villains were entirely cartoonish.  The heroine drove me crazy but I really don't like sweet, spunky and dumb women.  Once they realized they were in love, and decided to marry, there was absolutely no reason, even before they got married much less after, for her to withhold her suspicions about his step brother from him.  It would have made sense if the two men liked each other and were close but they hated each other anyway.  Who would have made a better ally than her husband in that case?So, why two stars instead of one (which it really deserves due to the quality or lack thereof?)  Because the basic premise of the book had promise.  If the characters were more complex, the relationship explored more fully, the heroine not quite so dumb and whiney (stop making massively erroneous assumptions based on next to no information,) and the social mores and ostracism the heroine experiences more fully explored, this could have been a good story.