Reviewer: Rowena No Regrets by Michele Ann Young
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Sourcebooks Casablanca
Publication Date: October 1st 2007
Genres: Historical Romance
Pages: 384
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Caroline Torrington is large, and she wears glasses. Beside the beauties of her day, she feels dowdy and unattractive. Since the death of her father the Vicar, she and her sisters have fallen on hard times.
Meanwhile, Lucas, Lord Foxhaven, a noted rake for his wild and reckless behavior, is once again in dispute with his father, who won't give him his grandmama's fortune unless he marries Caroline Torrington. Lucas and Caroline arrange a marriage of convenience and go off to London for the season.
Little does Caroline know that her voluptuous body is driving Lucas to distraction. Each time he pulls back, Caroline thinks that he is disgusted by her body.
In the midst of this deepening mutual attraction and misunderstanding, Caroline gets embroiled in a scandal and is kidnapped. Lucas comes to her rescue and in a dangerous escape they discover they are each other's true love.
Okay, I finished this book on Sunday and I just haven’t really figured out what to say about this book. Was it good? Yeah, it was. Would I recommend it to my friends? Maybe. You see, the reason it took me so long to write this review is that there were things I liked about the book but there were also things that drove me absolutely crazy about the book. Like, all of the misunderstandings. This book was frickin’ overflowing with misunderstandings and while I can appreciate a few misunderstandings to liven up the plot, dude…when all there is, is misunderstandings…well then it just gets so frickin’ old and so hot dang annoying.
I enjoyed the writing style, Michelle Young used while writing this book because it was easy to follow but I just couldn’t get over ALL of the misunderstandings. Let me see if I can explain how irritating these misunderstandings were.
In the beginning of the book, we have Lucas (the hero of the book) dragging his childhood friend and our heroine, Caroline Torrington into a room, locking them in there so that he can ruin her reputation. The way he did it, on horseback, riding his horse all the way into that man’s house drove me batty. I didn’t think it was cute or romantic, I thought it was stupid. So after a few minutes or however long they were in the room, Lucas persuades Caro to marry him and off they go with an agreement that they’ll be married in name only and Caro will get a season for her and her sisters and Lucas will get his Father off of his back.
They get married and go to London where Caro proceeds to make friends and plans to attend this ball and that ball and blah blah blah. She makes friends and she goes about her business getting to know the London folk. Lucas, on the other hand, has all of these “secret” business affairs to attend to and he proceeds to attend to those business affairs whether Caro wants him to or not. He doesn’t want to be married and he for dang sure doesn’t like his father, but he needed to get married to Caro in order for him to keep his allowance so that he can pay for his secret business affairs.
Caro thinks he’s keeping a mistress and even though they’re married in name only, she’s still hurt over it. Like it would matter anyway since, in her eyes, she’s a big girl who wouldn’t be able to catch the eye of someone as handsome and charming as Lucas. Lucas, on the other hand, loves Caro’s voluptuous curves and wants her so bad but the timing is never good and well, something is always popping off and he feels like a cur for trying to take advantage of Caro’s trust.
Oh please, she melted in your arms every time you touched her and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know she was digging you just as much as you were digging her.
But I guess these two are dumber than rocks because they didn’t know a hot dang thing.
Lucas is off doing business when Caro causes a scandal and Lucas gets so pissed off at her that he sends her back to their hometown where her sisters are, I forget what the town was called but yeah, that place. But instead, she goes to Paris with her cousin, some dude that is trying to marry her so that he can get his hands on her inheritance, the inheritance that she didn’t even know belonged to her.
So many things pop off that made me roll my eyes but believe it or not, I still enjoyed the book. It wasn’t the best book that I’ve read in a long time but I still liked it. I wasn’t sorry I read it even though the misunderstandings kept coming even until the last chapter and by the end of the book I was ready to kill Caro and Lucas. But yeah, it was still alright.
Grade: 3 out of 5
great review Isabel… but I’m staying away from this book with a ten feet pole 😛 I’m getting tired of misunderstanding and dumb heroes that need to feel noble.
Hey Nath- I didn’t review this one, Rowena did. I just posted it for her cause I’m an awesome friend like that. ha ha.
I read this one a while ago, but just have been a bit uninspired in terms of actually writing the review for it! I ended up grading it about the same. Having said that, I didn’t mind the opening and closing scenes. It seems to me that that would be quite shocking behaviour in the ton. So often rakes don’t really turn out to be rakes. In the end, this one wasn’t really either, but the gesture itself was quite over the top.
I liked the opening scene as well, but felt the exact same way about everything else.
This whole throwing in misunderstanding thing to up the tension is getting old and if it isn’t written right it totally ruins a book- which just happens with the latest one I read as well. Shame because the characters in both books had so much going for them otherwise.