A Countess Below Stairs

This book is formulaic. It's fairly predictable. The characters veer towards one-dimensional and there's hardly any character development throughout the story.

And yet, I loved it.

I can't explain it, but A Countess Below Stairs just has some unexplainable charm that caught me off guard.

The way I like to think about it, is that the book feels like almost like the embodiment of Anna Gravinsky, the main character in this story. She's every bit of a Mary Sue as you might imagine (innocent, beautiful, nice to everything and everyone, somehow gets into everybody's good books), and I typically despise Mary Sue characters with a passion, but I just can't find it in me to hate Anna. Anna is almost like that wide-eyed little girl that never quite grows up and who sees the world around her as in a fairy tale, and that's exactly what this book is like. The story has that sort of child-like simplicity and wonder to it that even though you know how things are going to go down before you're a few chapters in, you just somehow can't help that soft spot you have for it.

Not to mention, Ibbotson's writing is a delight to read after having waded through so many commercial romance paperbacks before this. There is none of that insta-lust (not a single mention of nipples, though I can't say the same for breasts) and the plot isn't so completely absorbed in the burgeoning sexual tension between the two main characters. The chemistry that springs up between Rupert, Earl Westerholme, and Anna, Countess Gravinsky, is actually believable (although I would by no means call anything about this book ‘realistic').

Don't come into this book expecting realism, historical or otherwise. You're not going to find it here.

All in all, A Countess Below Stairs was an extremely feel-good book for me despite its shortcomings and I enjoyed it thoroughly. This was the first time in a long time that I ended the book with an, “Aww!” because I wanted more, and heaving two long sighs consecutively because the child in me wants to continue reveling more in the innocent, bare-faced positivity that permeated the whole book.

The interrupted wedding scene at the end was a downright riot. Even if my experience with the book had been bad (which it wasn't), that scene alone would've made up for it all. I've never seen a better parody of Jane Eyre. I had an inkling that shit would happen, but this was far beyond anything I had been expecting, and I gotta give Ibbotson mad props for that.