3.5 stars - fun read, but MB still needs a Britpicker!
I generally enjoy Ms Balogh's plots and characterisations, but nine times out of ten I can only 3.5 stars - fun read, but MB still needs a Britpicker!
I generally enjoy Ms Balogh's plots and characterisations, but nine times out of ten I can only truly wallow in her Regency romances if I can force myself to ignore the presence of so many perpetual Americanisms in their text (in Regency England, with no US citizens in sight, for goodness' sake!).
The story of Ben and Samantha is no different in that way, but the characters themselves are intriguing, and the plot is as entertaining as some of Balogh's best.
I wouldn't recommend anything with so many clich茅s about Romani people to anyone I know who shares that heritage, but it is quite true, unfortunately, that the less than kind beliefs that pop up herein, on occasion, were fairly common in the 1810s - especially among the aristocracy.
The one major flaw, present in every one of her works that I've read so far, that persists in keeping Mary Balogh from ascending the heights of Georgette Heyer as a Regency writer (aside from the occasional textual anachronism that Heyer would never have admitted to her work), unfortunately, is that her Regency novels set in Britain are perpetually filled with American terminology. An overseer would not "do the math", nor would any Englishwoman put her bedtime book on a "nightstand", and those are only two of many examples I've encountered over time.
However, I turn thirty-nine today, so I have used the Amazon vouchers gifted to me to buy the whole Survivors' Club series (all but one, this, in paperback, which, depressingly enough, was actually a good deal less expensive than getting them all in ebook would have been. 拢5 for a novel that has been in circulation for more than a decade is a bit much, I have to say!). So it seems I must be able to grit my no-longer-present teeth against both anachronisms and misplaced Americanisms, to enjoy the stories themselves after all, eh? For the time being, at least.
That said... to whomever it may concern at the lady's publishing house, I have more than twenty years' experience as a beta-reader, freelance proof-reader and editor, and I would be more than willing to offer my services as a Britpicker!...more
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