Review: Great Stories Lousy Proofreading
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 11, 2014
"Angela" was excellent.  "A Delicate Situation" and its sequel, "The Reformed Rake", were also excellent.  I love all of the books by Elizabeth Chater that I have read . . . I am not a lover of time travel so the first one, "The Elsingham Portrait", was the least favorite of the 16 novels in her four collections.  All of the other 15 novels would be a close tie as my favorites.  I recommend all four collections!The story lines, characters and character building are excellent. I am assuming the books were originally printed long before the 1990's. The detailed facts are certainly far more accurate during the time period of the 1700's-1800's than many books written and printed now . . .if you are interested in those points. Excellent punctuation and grammatically-correct-writing abound, which is hard pressed to find in many of today's novels. I also thought all of them were written with "a bit" of traditional English used during that period and in the locations the novels take place (Great Britain). I would have given them all 5 stars, including all of the Elizabeth Chater Regency Romance Collection's #1, #2, #3, & #4 . . .EXCEPT  FOR THE PROOFREADING:  errors were missed when put in the Kindle format.  It is rather disheartening when there are twice to three times the number of errors than pages in the book.  It is not the author's fault; the fault lies with whoever published and then proofread it in Kindle format.  Had all of the 16 books not been so delightful in every way, all of the collections would have gotten 1 star.I persevered, however.  It took me much longer to read them because of the errors.  I have read all of the collections and will stick with the 4 star ratings.  The higher rating because the author had absolutely nothing to do with the proofreading!  The stories, writing of them and characters far outweigh the miserable job of the publisher's proofreader/formatter.  I hope they weren't paid for their work!If you love old fashioned romance, when a kiss is enough to make your heart skip a beat, not to mention entangling character interaction as a part of your Regency Romance experience, then don't let the proofreading/formatting problems keep you from reading these books.  They are well worth the time and effort and a real bargain for four books each . . . they are NOT novellas!Elizabeth Chater was truly a "3-kg diamond in a platinum setting" of an author.