Review: Engaging story
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 15, 2013
THE REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT DEAR AUTHOR WHERE I RECEIVED THE BOOK AS FREE REVIEWING COPY.Review:Dear Ms. Dee and Ms. Devon,I always enjoy your historical romances and this book was no exception. The settings seemed believable for the time, and it always feels to me that you do your research, but what I loved the most was the burning tension between the characters from the moment they meet.Everett Gerard is determined to never return to his ancestral home. He takes care of the people who live on the lands as best as he can from a distance, but if it were up to him, he would never see the Abbey again. Unfortunately (or fortunately) as the blurb tells you, it is not completely up to him. A boy claiming to be his son shows up at his estate, and while Miles Kenway, the Abbey's bailiff tries to take care of Ipsial as best as he can, it is clear that Everett's personal attention is required. After several letters back and forth, Everett decides that he has no choice but to visit the family estate in person. When returns, he comes back he immediately begins to clash with Miles over Miles' insistence that the Abbey needs to be repaired and Everett has no desire to do so. Very soon, however, both realize that they want each other.I have to admit that the fast attraction between Miles and Everett puzzled me a little. It is not just the fact that it was so fast, because I thought that the authors showed clearly that initially it was lust, which changed to love later in the story. As much as I dislike Insta!Love, I am okay with Insta!Lust even in contemporaries, and in historicals I am often willing to cut the characters even more slack, because I often think that it was much harder and much more dangerous to look for somebody with whom you form a strong connection rather than just a hook up. No, my doubts were more about the attraction between these two people from different social classes. The story definitely deals with the issue, but I suppose I expected more doubts from both sides. But when I told myself that I want to suspend disbelief, it really was not that hard to do, so I guess it was believable enough.Then there is matter of Ipsial, the nine year old who looks exactly like Everett and supposedly could be his bastard son. I was very impressed with how his character and his storyline were handled. Portraying a child in romance can be a tricky thing, but I think in this story it was done extremely well. Caring for Ipsial brought Miles and Everett closer together and allowed Everett to demonstrate how much of his childhood trauma he actually overcame. I liked that Ipsial was not cute in the conventional sense but more wild and untamed in the beginning of the story and that at the end of the story he did not become a perfect child either. Is there such a thing like perfect child in the first place?Here is how Miles describes him to Everett in the beginning of the story:"Gerard narrowed his eyes at this but didn't speak, so Miles continued, "He steals food on a regular basis and gets into anything he can possibly get into. He's uncivilized, probably unlettered, and some days I doubt whether he' even human." Remembering who he was talking to, Miles dipped his head. "Sorry, sir. The little hellion is improving, I believe. I had been treating him as I would a horse that's been abused, and I think he's slowly coming to trust that no one here means him any harm"I really loved how much patience these guys showed to the boy and how small changes and not so small changes in him felt believable to me by the end of the story. In fact I thought that Everett's dealings with Ipsial showed that he overcame a lot more of the trauma that he encountered as a child than he would be willing to admit. In spite of what happened between him and his father (no, it is not necessarily what you would think happened), he treated the child as he would have wanted to be treated and I really loved the strength of the character Everett showed. The blurb tells you that at some point of the story the Ipsial's real father show up, but I actually thought that it was a little anticlimactic. Opinions may differ on this one, but I never doubted that Everett would behave any differently than he did long before that point in the story came. I was happy and satisfied at the end of the book.