Review: Didn't quite hit it right, but loved the setting
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 12, 2014
This one was a little bit different. It had lots of redeeming features, but didn't quite fulfill its potential and left me feeling a tad flat.What did I like?- The setting: why is that the only romances-with-corsets seem to be set in England? There is a whole world out there, and I LOVED that this was set in the US, when Society was every bit as ridiculously restrictive as Regency England, but with a melting pot of immigrants and poverty right outside the swanky doors of the elite. I loved that this was the setting for this book.- The plot: I guessed who the baddie was, but not straight away. There were some interesting twists and turns as well.- The pacing and balance: for a historical romance with a murder mystery, this book seemed to balance everything going on really nicely. Not easy to do, and it felt rightWhat didn't I like so much?- Much, much more could have been made of the setting. It felt that apart from a few descriptions of locations (which were really good), not enough was made of the New York Society setting. What was a servant's life like, for example? What about more about the New York harbor docks? What was there was really good, but there could have been more.- The heroine, quite frankly, was a passive idiot, and it drove me nuts. Would she really have been able to support her wastrel father on a maid's salary? (What was a maid's wage in New York then?) She spent half the time being pushed around by the hero, and the other half doing TSTL stuff. It was all very annoying, because the maid playing at Society Lady is a superb idea.- The hero and heroine were intimate far, far too soon. They trusted each other straight away, with no real justification, and they get it on far too quickly. It would have been wonderful to have had much more tension and unrequited attraction before they did the dirty. It threw the pacing and the plot, and I couldn't figure out why they were so attracted to each other because it happened too fast.So, 3 stars. I liked it.I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.