Review: Promising Premise, Dreadful Execution
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 27, 2013
I thought about giving it 3 stars ('It's OK'), but it would only be OK if you like scrupulously clean romance with lots of berry picking, tediously long-winded and very stilted dialogue, constantly changing POV, and a romance that relies very heavily on a cast of secondary characters to bring about the HEA.The conflict in this story was based on the h being off-limits to the H because she was his sister's best friend, and the sister of one of his closest friends.  Very thin.  After all, in this period, one could - and often did - marry one's first cousin.  Add to that that the h was no green girl in her first Season but a solid 20 year old, and the H was a Duke and by no stretch of the imagination a rake or even a rogue, and any possible objection to the h making such a match just beggared disbelief.The H's sister's marked propensity for using the word bugger - which, even today, is highly offensive to the well-mannered members of English society - given it's actual meaning, was another extremely grating convention employed by this author.  I could have lived with the mistakes in the editing, and could have even forgiven Miranda's (the h's best friend and H's sister) use of the offensive word once or twice in extreme moments of irritation, but it was used so frequently - and without any hint of objection or reprimand from the H or the girl's mother, that it actually served to destroy any hope of me suspending my disbelief and undermined any credibility I might have been able to place in the story or its characters.The long-winded monologues delivered by the h's aunt to the young ladies present at the house party around which this story is set, were not only repetitious and boring, but did absolutely nothing to drive this story forward.In my humble opinion, a promising premise was terribly mangled and strangled to death in the execution of the story telling.  POV - which changed so often, even to secondary characters - and without warning, was the only action in this book unless you count strawberry picking.  There certainly didn't appear to be much doing of anything other than the preparation of a dye to stain teeth; filching some clothes while a man swam in a pond, and the h sewing together the articles of clothing in the H's wardrobe and the skirts of her gown to his bedlinens.Oh - and the wedding ceremony was relayed to us verbatim, drawing out the agony and trying my patience to the limit.  I do wish some authors would remember that 'less is more' - it is far kinder to the reader and greatly enhances the experience of a story.One of the things I truly like in an historical (preferably Regency) romance is being drawn into that world and the daily lives of the people therein.  This story lacks that magic.  It lacks the wit and elegance of the period, and there was no attempt by the author to build us a world we could believe in and enjoy.If you like good Regencies that are true to the genre and the time period, this is not the book for you.If you like a good romance that engages your emotions and exercises your pulse, elevates your hopes and stirs your passions, this is not for you.If you need to take sleeping pills to nod off at night and have no desire to escape to another world, even if it is only in your imagination - this will do the trick, and probably pretty quickly.