When her stepfather suddenly dies, Valeria Segrave finds she must take charge of her grieving mother and the vast estate which now belongs to her six-year-old half brother, the new Earl of Maledon. Though capable, Valeria is frustrated to find each day brings a new struggle as she tries to establish her authority with servants, stewards, and solicitors --all men. As a young woman with no blood relation to the earl, they are all too ready to dismiss her. Much to her chagrin, she must rely on the assistance of her stepfather's distant kinsman, Alastair, Lord Hylton. He is handsome and noble, and Valeria senses under the veneer of his gentlemanly behavior that she never measures up to his expectations of a refined lady. In light of that, accepting his help and feeling under a burden of gratitude to him is almost unbearable. Even when Valeria leaves the country estate for the glittering London Season, where she gets into a series of escapades, Lord Hylton is always there to witness, criticize, and correct her behavior. But if Alastair insists on engaging in a battle of wits and wills with the lively Valeria, she'll stop at nothing to prove that he's met his match.
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This just really wasn't my cup of tea. It started out interestingly enough, but I didn't feel that it went deeply enough into the characters to make them truly interesting. There are tons and tons of details about the setting, even to the point where the setting is important enough to interrupt the characters mid-conversation to explain (which is really annoying after more than once or twice.) There are a couple of statements that were theologically neutral enough to be easily interpreted the wrong way, and in spots like that I wanted more explanation but didn't get it. Add to that the author's idea that six or seven unrelated phrases strung together can make a sentence, and the reading becomes a chore. This sentence structure is especially annoying in dialogue, where vocal acrobatics would not accomplish a logical rendering of some expressions. (One of my favorite bits of advice to new writers is that they should read the story's dialogue aloud to make sure it sounds like a real conversation.)
And then the characters. Alastair is the most layered, and I liked him best. The mother, who learned to hold up her head after unexpected bad news, was another likeable character. But I absolutely could not see what he liked about Valeria after the beginning. She went from being her mother's financial advisor to being a little ninny who almost cried because a riding habit wouldn't be ready for her the next day because she wanted to make a smashing London debut. After becoming a pettish child overnight, she suddenly wakes up and realizes she shouldn't have a bad attitude, and then is ready to be all chummy with her stepfather's disgraceful mistress. Umm...no, that wouldn't happen unless she's bipolar or nuts. So I became really disenchanted with Valeria by the end of the book.
Oh, well. I always feel sad when I dislike a book so much that I have to give a bad review. :(
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