Kleypas is a masterful writer, and her latest offering will be welcomed by fans old and new.
A Welsh grocer’s son has built a retail empire in London, but an infatuation with the daughter of an earl threatens his self-control.
When the protagonists of a romance novel cement their engagement within the first three chapters, readers can look forward to hundreds of pages of obstacles and miscommunications before the knot is tied. The second book in Kleypas' The Ravenels series (Cold-Hearted Rake, 2015) is no different, with dark secrets, troublesome relatives, and misadventures keeping Lady Helen Ravenel and Rhys Winterborne apart. But Kleypas has taken a tired trope and made it irresistible, with glittering prose and characters the reader longs to befriend. When the clumsy Welsh tycoon kisses his fiancee for the first time, she takes to her bed with a migraine. Her concerned family tells Rhys the engagement must be broken off. But Lady Helen refuses to let him go, courting scandal by coming to see him in the offices above his department store. Rhys observes her shabby clothing and assumes she’s rekindling their engagement because her family needs money, but Helen convinces him that though her family had become impoverished, the recent discovery of minerals on their estate has fixed their financial problems. He seizes the chance to compromise her virtue so her family won’t be able to prevent the match, and Lady Helen undertakes to convince her family that she really does want to marry him. As the novel progresses, layers of social polish are stripped away to reveal that both Rhys and Helen have been painfully lonely their entire lives, and they must give up other loyalties in order to be true to each other. The novel’s parade of complicated characters is set against a compelling backdrop of Victorian England, with all the fashion and technological changes of the era.
Kleypas is a masterful writer, and her latest offering will be welcomed by fans old and new.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237185-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
PERSPECTIVES
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hannah, after eight paperbacks, abandons her successful time-travelers for a hardcover life of kitchen-sink romance. Everyone must have got the Olympic Peninsula memo for this spring because, as of this reading, authors Hannah, Nora Roberts, and JoAnn Ross have all placed their newest romances in or near the Quinault rain forest. Here, 40ish Annie Colwater, returns to Washington State after her husband, high-powered Los Angeles lawyer Blake, tells her he’s found another (younger) woman and wants a divorce. Although a Stanford graduate, Annie has known only a life of perfect wifedom: matching Blake’s ties to his suits and cooking meals from Gourmet magazine. What is she to do with her shattered life? Well, she returns to dad’s house in the small town of Mystic, cuts off all her hair (for a different look), and goes to work as a nanny for lawman Nick Delacroix, whose wife has committed suicide, whose young daughter Izzy refuses to speak, and who himself has descended into despair and alcoholism. Annie spruces up Nick’s home on Mystic Lake and sends “Izzy-bear” back into speech mode. And, after Nick begins attending AA meetings, she and he become lovers. Still, when Annie learns that she’s pregnant not with Nick’s but with Blake’s child, she heads back to her empty life in the Malibu Colony. The baby arrives prematurely, and mean-spirited Blake doesn’t even stick around to support his wife. At this point, it’s perfectly clear to Annie—and the reader—that she’s justified in taking her newborn daughter and driving back north. Hannah’s characters indulge in so many stages of the weeps, from glassy eyes to flat-out sobs, that tear ducts are almost bound to stay dry. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild/Doubleday book club selections)
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60249-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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