|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Paging Miss Galloway by Susanne Marie Knight
Rating: 3 stars
There's no substitute for a truly traditional regency, with a plucky (and sometimes naive) heroine, gender disguises, on-the-road adventures, and a great deal of comedy just from the situations the heroine finds herself in. I very much enjoyed that aspect of Paging Miss Galloway. On the other hand, though, the characters' ages were really off-putting to me: The hero is thirty-seven to the heroine's twenty. I liked that the hero wasn't a hardened rake, but I'm not sure a hardened old soldier is an improvement. Also - probably as a result of the age difference - I couldn't really buy into the romance itself. The book does a really good of building the story up at the beginning, and a fairly good job of creating suspense at the end - but fails to show the romance progressing beyond lust and a little bit of liking each other. There's one particularly creepy moment when the hero checks out the heroine while she's sleeping. And finally, I thought that the author was reaching too hard she tried to throw both a marriage-because-of-a-will AND a marriage-because-of-compromising towards the end. The "will requirement" conflict isn't even played out.
So overall: I thought the book was a decent traditional regency. But for the $5 price tag there are better stories to read.
