Review: Three great tastes that taste great together!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 25, 2012
These three authors are all auto-buy for me; they write wonderful historical romances. They all know how to handle the novella length, too; these three stories are just right, not feeling rushed or crammed into the shorter form.The stories are loosely linked by their location, Doyle's Grange, a stately home used by a variety of different families over the years, and by some minor overlapping of characters. The three stories span the 19th century as three different couples work out complicated relationships and recover from the mistakes and misunderstandings of their past.In "One Starlit Night" by Carolyn Jewel, the main characters are friends who were lovers when they were very young. They have moved on, and yet they realize that they still have a strong attraction between them. I love second-chance romances (hey, I'm living one!), and this story does justice to the difficulties involved in acknowledging those feelings and coming to grips with what went wrong the first time in order to be able to love again/still with a real hope of lasting happiness. There's also a very important and real issue for them to overcome that one doesn't often see in romance, and I thought that was handled very well. An added bonus here is a very find secondary character, a passive-aggressive sister-in-law who I thought was written perfectly."What Happened at Midnight" by Courtney Milan is a powerful story, with an insight into the vulnerability and resourcefulness of women in this period, as well as the clever understanding and use of the legal system that I've come to expect from this author. I loved how the women came to support and care about each other, and how integral that was to the resolution of their difficulties. Men and women having respect for each other and being able to work together on both internal and external problems are at the heart of this love story."A Dance in Moonlight" by Sherry Thomas was the story I was most anticipating in this collection, because it features the "other woman" character from Thomas' recent novel, Ravishing the Heiress, which I really enjoyed. I didn't find Isabelle to be a particularly sympathetic character in the novel, so I was interested to see things from her point of view. The premise of the story might be hard for some readers to swallow; it hinges on the uncanny resemblance between Ralston Fitzwilliam and Fitzhugh, the hero of the earlier novel whom Isabelle has loved all her life. But if you just go with that, the story really works. I really liked seeing Isabelle redeemed; it made Fitz and Millie's happiness more complete, that it didn't have to come at the cost of someone else's in the end. (Honestly, I thought Fitz got off lightly in the novel, so it's good to see that Isabelle doesn't end up paying the price when it was as much his fault as hers.)