eduardopaurinotto

I liked the premise of this book: A beautiful lady of the nobility falls in love with the stableboy on her family's estate. This is a fantastic plot-line because of the class issues it deals with. Generally, it is the aristocratic man who falls in love with someone below his station, however in this scenario, it is the woman who falls in love with the man "below her station." After the initial setting up of the story, however, things began to fall very flat for me. I felt like Kleypas didn't really have anywhere to go with the impasse between Aline and McKenna, so she shifted to the story of Aline's sister and developed that instead. Aline's ridiculousness was the one thing which kept the HEA from moving forward, and it got annoying. The lack of complexity in the relationship kept things stagnant. It seems very much like a Catherine/Heathcliff type of romance to me with a whole of a lot of needless angst, but there didn't seem to be much development within the relationship itself. Some things I liked: Livia and Gideon's story, the housekeeper, Stony Cross, Kleypas' mention and dealing with the "culture clash" between American culture and British culture, Marcus

2022-08-29 23:06