Review: Disappointing.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 13, 2013
Personally,I found this story quite disappointing.As is often the case in novels such as these,when our hero is wealthy and titled,mamas will try by whatever means possible,fair or foul, to make sure that their darling debutantes are put in the path of our hero.  Such is the case in this story too.Robert,the Marquess of Haverton, who we are told is a very beautiful man,has barely escaped being caught in the parson's noose countless times and so he has decided to hire himself a chaperone,with the help of his mother,the Duchess. He doesn't want a chaperone for himself since he considers himself the epitome of the proper gentleman. He wants a chaperone present for all those young women who seem to be misplacing theirs.The thing is that once Robert has his chaperone,he can barely remember her name,yet when his mother gives him her yearly,'It's time for you to do your duty' speech and mentions the type of woman he must consider,adding that someone like his chaperone would of course not be proper,Robert suddenly discovers he's in love with his chaperone. Also quite suddenly,the Duchess informs us that the chaperone in question is an Earl's granddaughter and her goddaughter, only strangely enough they have never met and Catherine,our chaperone, realizes that the Duchess is her mother's friend and the one who helped her find a governess position when her grandfather passed and his second wife threw her and her mother and siblings into the street. The scene has now been neatly set, and our hero and heroine can move forward, but in this write by numbers romance,we also need a villain, who locks Catherine in a closet, but is found immediately by our hero who then makes a public declaration of love,which to me was the worst part of the book. A scene which normally leaves the reader sighing in satisfaction, left me flat!When I first read the synopsis to the book, I found the premise an interesting one, and although I wasn't convinced by the sample pages I read, I still went ahead and bought the book in hopes that perhaps the author was just slow to get started and that I might miss out on a very fun read once the story picked up a bit, but every time I thought the story was about to get more interesting,it never really did.With a livelier bit of dialogue,more fun,more laughter and more interesting characters, perhaps this could have been an altogether different book.