After reading a bunch of thoroughly mediocre romance novels, which aren't even worth bothering to savage, I have finally stumbled on one I utterly adore - Lisa Kleypas'Love In the Afternoon.
I am so so so in love with it and its protagonists and the set-up and the setting.
Set in the 1850s, the premise would normally not be my thing - Beatrix Hathaway did not like the arrogant, proper Christopher Phelan, but that changed when Christopher's regiment was sent to the Crimea, and Beatrix's shallow friend Prudence, who Christopher was sort-of courting before the war, showed Beatrix his letters. Shallow friend has no desire to write back, but Beatrix feels both pity and a sense of connection and so she writes back, pretending to be Prudence. And Christopher, who merely wrote to Prudence so he could write to somebody, ends up falling in love with the writer of those letters, by the end of the war his only link to sanity. I really dislike Cyrano de Bergerac set-ups, but gave this a chance because I love Victorian romances, especially ones that deal with the Crimean War, plus the one Kleypas book I read before, I adored.
I am so glad I took a chance! Very little of the book is spent on the 'she pretends to be Prudence' thing - that is merely a set-up for a wonderful, moving story about a pretty incredible woman who is actually wounded, and a really wounded man who is actually pretty incredible. I am seriously so in love with both Beatrix and Christopher.
Plus, mmmmm, the amount of h/c in this book is out of this world. I love it to bits!
I really must read more Kleypas.
I am so so so in love with it and its protagonists and the set-up and the setting.
Set in the 1850s, the premise would normally not be my thing - Beatrix Hathaway did not like the arrogant, proper Christopher Phelan, but that changed when Christopher's regiment was sent to the Crimea, and Beatrix's shallow friend Prudence, who Christopher was sort-of courting before the war, showed Beatrix his letters. Shallow friend has no desire to write back, but Beatrix feels both pity and a sense of connection and so she writes back, pretending to be Prudence. And Christopher, who merely wrote to Prudence so he could write to somebody, ends up falling in love with the writer of those letters, by the end of the war his only link to sanity. I really dislike Cyrano de Bergerac set-ups, but gave this a chance because I love Victorian romances, especially ones that deal with the Crimean War, plus the one Kleypas book I read before, I adored.
I am so glad I took a chance! Very little of the book is spent on the 'she pretends to be Prudence' thing - that is merely a set-up for a wonderful, moving story about a pretty incredible woman who is actually wounded, and a really wounded man who is actually pretty incredible. I am seriously so in love with both Beatrix and Christopher.
Plus, mmmmm, the amount of h/c in this book is out of this world. I love it to bits!
I really must read more Kleypas.