"Polite society has its rules for marriage. But for Ella Quinn's eligible bachelors, their brides will show them that rules are for the faint of heart..."Phoebe Stanhope is not a typical Lady. As feisty as she is quick witted, no one can catch her, especially when she is driving her dashing phaeton with its perfectly matched horses. And unlike her peers, experience has guarded her against a growing list of would-be suitors. But when she encounters Marcus Finley, what she fears most burns deep within his blue-eyed gaze...
"For Lord Marcus, the spark of recognition is but a moment in the love he has held these many years. Not that he's returned to England, all the happiness he desires rests on Lady Phoebe never finding out that he was the one who turned her heart so cold and distant. He must work fast to gain the advantage--to convince her what she wants is exactly what she denies--but in order to seduce her into his arms, he must be willing to give up more than he can control..."
This book was a very sweet, thoughtful Christmas gift from my husband. Fully aware and supportive of my (slight) addiction to period romances, he saw this cover and felt it would be my perfect cup of tea. He's not a big reader at all, so the fact that he went and physically shopped for a book for me at a brick-and-mortar store was a shock. That this book actually happened to be the first in a series was a lovely surprise. I was new to Ella Quinn, but looked forward to diving into this book.
I am currently about a quarter of the way through this book, and it's taken me quite awhile to reach this point. One would think I'd have been all over my "to be read" stack during this pandemic and the ensuing quarantine, but, alas, my mind has been too preoccupied and my downtime too filled with an ever-increasingly mobile, rambunctious little boy! I was excited to dip back into my reading of this book because the first several chapters gave such promise. However, I simply had to put it down after cruising through only a few more pages because I knew I had to start this review.
Quinn's style is not what I am used to. To be fair, I'm sure a lot of my other favorite authors have a more relaxed style of writing, so this is probably why I sometimes find the dialogue and narration a bit grating and overdone. It reads like a Jane Austen novel. This is both good and bad. For the average reader of romance novels, this may not drag her in as easily as another book might. Even for someone with my background in literature, some of the turns of phrase were still a tad awkward and (almost) overworked. I've lost count of all of the different characters and I'm not even 100 pages into the book. I understand Phoebe has a large family, but there is very little presented in order for the reader to more easily separate them in her mind's eye. It's almost as if many of them already had their own novels and one is expected to know about their personalities and backstories. I feel like I'm missing something! Many of them are already happily married with allusions to wonderful love stories and happy romances of their own. If they're not developed more and don't serve more than to just pop in and give their private opinions of what's going on with Phoebe, then I don't feel like they're really necessary. It understand that it's a style of writing (again, very Austen-esque) to bounce from perspective to perspective, opinion to opinion, and character to character, but it's just drags this out and takes away from the actual development of Marcus and Phoebe's relationship. I want to be invested in them and not the other subplots going on well in the background. If these were grand supporting characters (a well-developed best friend and confidant, perhaps), then I might've cared more and seen the benefit to their perspective a bit more. Even if these were characters who did, indeed, have books of their own and I already knew their stories and their personalities, then I might have placed more stock in their opinions. As I've already mentioned, this is the first book in this series, so that is simply not the case here. I love it when characters are brought back in other stories and this could have worked well here if Marcus and Phoebe's wasn't the first story in this series.
Then there was the matter of just how closely Phoebe and Marcus were related by marriage. I don't think I've come across quite such a close relation-by-marriage in a romance novel before and, though no blood was technically involved, something just made it feel a bit odd to me. I cannot locate the specific law or when it was abolished, but I swear there was something in English law that forbid marriage or relations with one's in-laws--I think having this in the back of my mind the entire time made the plot rub me the wrong way. I could be wrong and it could have been perfectly legal, but I do believe I read something to that effect during one of my British literature and history courses.
Now to address the fact that Phoebe didn't recognize Marcus. This was all well and fine. Time changes people, and the human memory is flawed. Not to mention I'm sure that his time away would have altered Marcus emotionally, mentally, and physically. I felt it far less believable when he was pointed out and identified as Lord Marcus from across the room at a party...and then she somehow didn't notice it was the same man who'd just been identified as Lord Marcus when she encountered him in the library? What? It was just odd and unbelievable. I understand what Quinn was going for, but it seems to have missed the mark just a little bit.
I'm going to try to plod along. I hope for more than just superficial chemistry between Phoebe and Marcus. I want to see their fire in Phoebe to which the teaser and beginning alluded. I want to see more romance and passion. I really hope this book doesn't fall flat and it focuses more on the main characters than it has up to this point.
***
I began writing this review on 08/15/2020 and I finished the book a few days prior to completing this review on 11/29/2020. Christmas would mark this book being in my possession for precisely one year, so I was very near to that mark before I was able to complete it! I wanted to love this book -- really, I did. I think the biggest hurdles I had were the language and the sheer number of characters. The formality of the dialogue made it a bit more straight-laced than I was used to, and some of the colloquialisms were foreign even to me -- someone who is well-versed in this genre, as well as contemporary and classical British literature! It is no exaggeration to admit that I struggled at some points. I just didn't have the same amount of fun I normally do when I read a great romance novel. The characters...there were so bloody many of them! I get that Phoebe had a lot of siblings and she was the last of them to be married off, but I lost track and never really got a good sense of who was married to whom when it came to her twin sisters. There were so many of them that I didn't get a sense of their personalities and they added so very little to the plot. Again, I feel like I would have appreciated them more had they had their own stories and this were not actually the first book in a series! I felt like I was missing out on something the entire time. Each of them seemed to hint at great backstories (even her aunt and uncle did!), but I had no knowledge or reference from which to appreciate the insinuations or understand the character development. I simply must be missing something here... If this is not actually the first in a series, or if some standalone novels were intended to come before it, then I wish it would have been mentioned somewhere (or maybe this one shouldn't have been labeled the first in the series).
There were aspects I did like. I think Phoebe and Marcus had great chemistry. I enjoyed the plot twists as a villain was introduced. It gave the plot much more depth in the latter half of the book than the beginning. It all seemed to wrap up rather abruptly, however. This can be taken one of two ways: I was pleased that I'd finished reading this book which had taken me so long to finish, but I felt like the ending didn't quite do the characters thorough justice. The climax hit (no pun intended -- I promise that's not a bad romance novel joke), and that was that.
This book is not for the casual reader of romance novels. It's far less lighthearted than I normally enjoy. The points of view and language are quite difficult to follow, as are the myriad of secondary and tertiary characters. I doubt highly that I will read any others in this series.
My husband, who, if you will remember, purchased this book for me, saw that I was finally near the end and he asked me what I thought. I so loved the hopeful look in his eyes when he asked that, but I told him the truth. This book really should have been right up my alley. The genre and time period were spot on...there was just something about the writing that made me struggle to lose myself. Some of the phrasing went way above my head. This author is just not for me, but he couldn't possibly have known that -- I didn't even know that until my reading of the book was well underway. I sincerely appreciated his thoughtfulness, but maybe I'll give him a list of my favorite authors from here on out.
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