I have stuff going on in my personal life right now (as do we all from time to time) so I found myself ready to check out of reality for a bit and sink into a safely fictional reality where things end happily. Off to Romancelandia I went to visit Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club and check off the Brain Candy square for bingo. The Arrangement is the second book in the series, and I’ll admit that I was a bit put off by which characters […]
“Fear must be challenged, I have found. It is a powerful beat if it is allowed the mastery.”
I have finally taken my first trip to a Mary Balogh romance. I’m still surprised when I manage to miss an author completely, but it usually means that there’s a well-liked series with good reviews which is complete that I can dive right into. In the case of Mary Balogh that series is the Survivors’ Club which tells the story of seven people who survived great tragedy (whether physical or mental) during the Napoleonic Wars and formed a tight friendship while they healed for three […]
A truly lovely story of family that overwhelms the central romance
This is the third book in the Westcott series. I skipped the first and reviewed the second here. This third book was very good. The overarching theme throughout the series of family and acceptance was at its peak here, and I loved it. I always enjoy a series about a close family, but this takes it beyond the nuclear family to aunts/uncles/cousins, and it’s just wonderful to see people treating each other well. Alexander Westcott was happy with his life as a gentleman, but when […]
Good enough to finish – bad enough to have forgotten already
The premise of the Westcott series (non-spoilers: this is all basically in the cover copy) is that an earl was secretly married and had a daughter, and then he married again and had three more children. Upon the earl’s death the three presumptive heirs find that they are illegitimate and the orphaned child gets a huge inheritance. The first book is about that orphan, and she and her new husband make a bunch of appearances in the following books. I tried to read the first […]
Slightly Slightly
Mary Balogh is a stalwart author in historical romance with whom my experience is very limited. Her Bedwyn Saga appears on NPR’s “Best Romances” list from several summers back, which I am still pretending to tackle in a very time-insensitive fashion. There are a total of six books in the series, and this review is for the first and last of them. If the rest of the books are like the first book, I will probably not read them, but if they’re more like the […]
A Good Novella from the Ever Reliable Mary Balogh
“I don’t think anything inspired me except the necessity of coming up with a story so that I could fulfill my obligation to a contract I had agreed to! I had to dream up a story, and this one popped into my head.” Mary Balogh in the interview following A Matter of Class. Nonetheless, as an experienced, and clearly honest, professional writer, she delivered a sincerely charming historical romance novella. Reggie and Annabelle are lifelong neighbours divided by a waterway as well as the barriers […]
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