Review: Improbable (spoiler alert!)
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 28, 2014
The characters are basically 21st century people, stuffed into 1822. The premise is that the heroine, Lady Patience, is chaperoning 4 American girls headed to England to find titled husbands. However, there are too many non-historical acts to make this one really enjoyable.1. In 1822, girls did not leave America to marry into the nobility of England. It was only 7 years after a war in which England just about wiped out America as a nation, and Americans were still pretty bitter. It was another 50 years before marrying a titled Englishman became a trend.2. Even when American girls DID go to England, they didn't go with a girl barely older than themselves, whom their families had only known for a matter of months. Their mamas went with them.3. To be Lady Firstname, a woman would have to be the daughter of an Earl or Duke. Her aunt is referred to as Lady Lastname, but that's a title for a wife of a nobleman, and the aunt is unmarried. The author doesn't seem to have a good grasp on British titles, rather a handicap for writing a story about marrying a British nobleman.4. The author simply can't keep track of when anything happened. She says the hero's mother abandoned him when he was 10 and she was 25. Later, his father talks about blackmailing her into marrying him instead of the man she truly loved...how they didn't consummate the marriage for a year. To have given birth at 15, she would have to have conceived at 14 or 15...which meant she married at 13 or 14. The father blackmailed a 13 year old into marriage? A 13 year old was having a wild passionate love affair? She didn't tell her parents that she was being blackmailed? Her parents let her marry at 13? Preposterous.5. It may be a minor point, but don't introduce animal characters that disappear without warning. Animal lovers remember animal characters. If you're not going to have them do anything to add to the story, just leave them out. And if you want to have a dog and kitten on the ship, at least explain that they're not just abandoned at the end of the voyage.6. Proper behavior was formal behavior. I really have my doubts that even in America, girls would have thought it was acceptable to propose matrimony to men they'd just met, because the man had a title. Nor would a man have proposed being a kept woman to a girl he had just met. Nor would girls be leaping into bed with men during an Atlantic crossing. Society had a strict code: if girls misbehaved at their first ball, that was that- your reputation was ruined, and you slunk away. The author describes the outrage as enough that the heroine is given the cut direct by her mother's best friend. A cut direct indicated behavior so heinous that a polite person could not admit knowing that person. It wasn't something that could be undone in a matter of weeks, because the girls were tutored in proper behavior. One of the adults says that they can give a ball to re-introduce the now well-mannered girls to society, because everyone will come to see what the girls will do next. Uh, no. Polite society didn't forgive, once outraged. No one would have given the 'ill-mannered Colonials' a second chance.7.The hero and heroine are forced into marriage because of traveling to Gretna Green together to try to retrieve one of her eloping girls. Society is so outraged by this that the only possible remedy is for them to marry; it would spoil the girls' chances at good marriages. But having 2 of the girls marry pregnant wouldn't spoil the other two's chances? Having a chaperone who let 2 of the girls get pregnant within a month or two of having them under her care wasn't a scandal, but having a chaperone who traveled alone with a man was?8.  A man making an Atlantic crossing caring for an infant all by himself? Seriously? He didn't consider hiring a nursemaid? Just how did he learn so much about infant care, as a sailor who had no younger siblings, nor nieces/nephews?9. The heroine's exceedingly proper aunt  is enlisted to salvage the girls' reputations by covering them with her own...but by the end of the book she has a lover, too?You get the idea.