Review: When was this really written?
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 3, 2013
I'm a Janet Mullany fan so giving this book only 2 stars makes me feel a bit unfaithful to her, but, really, it's not very good.  Mullany excels at Regency romps likeThe Rules of GentilityandImproper Relations.  These romps are witty and funny (sometimes LOL) and very entertaining.This Phoenix story is, I believe, meant to be taken seriously.  At least I didn't find anything funny in it, except for maybe strange-funny stuff.  It struck me as being an old-school 80s or 90s HR with a jerk of a hero, coincidence and serendipity necessary for the plot to evolve, all at the same time straining the reader's patience and credulity.  As a matter of fact, I suspect (but do not know) that this may have been one of Mullany's early unpublished attempts at writing an HR which she dug out and perhaps polished a bit for publication in 2012.(The rest of this review could contain some SPOILERISH information.)The main characters could have been interesting.  The heroine is a pickpocket whose one-time sexual encounter with a man about to leave for the Napoleonic War results in a baby girl.  She finds herself in desperate straits after giving birth and goes to leave the baby with its father (who's back from the War already, go figure).  The man, conveniently enough, has never seen her face and does not recognize the woman who leaves the baby with him.Then the heroine goes on to become the mistress of a wealthy, kind old gentleman and she learns manners and social deportment and gets a bit of an education from his library.  When her protector dies, she's in financial troubles again and is blackmailed into impersonating another woman.  This woman was a former almost-fiancee of the hero ex-soldier now earl and he, for who knows what reason (stupidity?), cannot tell that this is an impersonator, not the woman he had once proposed to and almost married.Things just get more and more unrealistic and silly as the story goes on.  There's attempted murder, abduction, lots of misunderstanding, etc.  The writing is choppy and the plot does not flow well.  The 6-year-old daughter is unnaturally mature and not at all cute and I couldn't even warm up to her.  (Who doesn't love children, I ask.  I guess that would be me.)  The hero's mostly a jerk who misinterprets as many actions as he possibly can.  The heroine needed to share more info with the hero and, of course, doesn't so that he can continue to behave like a jerk.So I'm hoping that this was an unpublished oldie that Mullany decided to share with her readers while she's working on a new novel.  It's just not good enough to have been freshly written.