Review 2324: Wonder Cruise

Just a little note to say that my biography index page has been selected as one of the Top 30 Biography Blogs on the web by Feedspot. I received a nice email from the founder, Anuj Agarwal, informing of this.

I don’t usually read romance novels, but a few reviews made Wonder Cruise sound like it was more than that. I received the book, to see that it was being marketed as a romance. However, it turns out to be an untraditional representative of the genre.

Ann Clements is a naïve and inexperienced 35-year-old. Before taking a tedious job in a London office as a typist, she lived with her brother, a strait-laced and judgmental rector, and his dull family. Ann dresses dowdily and goes back and forth between her boring job and her dreary lodgings.

Then she wins a sweepstakes—half of a six-hundred-pound winnings from a bet on a horse made by her office mate. All that morning something had been making Ann think of a Mediterranean cruise, so before she loses her nerve, she books passage, after encouragement of her boss.

Her brother Cuthbert vociferously disapproves and even says Ann should give the money to her niece. When Ann is finally on board, she finds herself to be afraid of almost everything. She is seasick, has brought the wrong clothes, and is afraid to do something wrong. Her dining mates are dreadful, but on her first night she meets Oliver Banks, a man she met briefly the day she won the sweepstakes.

This novel mostly dwells on Ann’s self-development—her emergence from a timid woman who thinks she is already old and past chances of happiness to someone who is much more open and wants a chance at happiness.

It’s hard to explain why this novel is not a standard romance without giving too much away. I’ll just say that it takes some unexpected turns.

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Review 2308: One Afternoon

One afternoon Anna Goodhart, a widow in her mid-thirties with three daughters, runs into Charlie, a young actor whom she met years ago at some event of her husband’s. He invites her to a party. She agrees to go but almost backs out. However, she goes and they soon begin an affair. Although she doesn’t expect it to last, she is wild with joy and makes no secret of their relationship.

This is the story about a woman who begins to rebuild her own life after her husband’s death, to realize things about her marriage, and to identify what she wants her life to be. Although attitudes had begun to change for women in 1974 when this book was published, it reads like a much more modern novel. I was surprised how the people in Anna’s life, with a couple of exceptions, take her affair and her subsequent decisions.

This is a lovely book filled with mostly kind people. It explores memory and how it tangles with reality as well as the complexities of love.

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Review 2210: It Ends with Revelations

It’s going to be hard to convey a sense of this book without revealing a side to it that doesn’t arise until well into the novel. I will say that for 1967 the novel deals with a key issue in a surprisingly enlightened way, even though it may make modern readers cringe a few times.

Jill Quentin is the wife of Miles Quentin, a distinguished actor. Miles is opening a new play in a spa town during a summer festival. This play was already produced on television, but adapting it for the stage is proving difficult. In particular, Cyril, the actor playing the boy in the play, is not doing well despite having played the part on television.

Smith’s descriptions of the details of the play production as well as Jill and Miles’s relationship are interesting. However, the plot gets going when she befriends two teenage girls, Robin and Kit Thornton, who are staying with their widowed father in the same hotel.

I don’t want to say more, really, except that the novel involves a choice for Jill between romantic love and the love of a deep friendship and asks how important loyalty is in marriage.

I generally liked this book, but there was a point before some revelations when I felt that if it was a more modern book, it could be going somewhere creepy. However, it was not.

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Review 2176: The Duke’s Children

This last of Trollope’s Palliser novels begins with the unexpected death of the Duchess of Omnium, Glencora Palliser. This event begins a series of incidents that makes the Duke even more unhappy.

First, he learns that his daughter Mary has fallen in love with his son’s friend Frank Tregear while Mary and Glencora were traveling in Italy. Apparently, Glencora approved of the situation even though Tregear has neither position nor fortune. The Duke feels that Tregear does not have a position fit for his daughter, so he refuses permission but is upset that Mary is so unhappy.

Then Lord Silverbridge, his oldest son, tells him he has decided to run for Parliament—on the Conservative side, when the Pallisers have been prominent Liberals for generations. This despite the fact that Silverbridge doesn’t seem to have any strong political beliefs at all. However, the Duke is very pleased when Silverbridge tells him he would like to marry Lady Mabel Grex.

Lady Mabel has known Tregear for years, and they pledged to love each other. But neither of them has any money, so Mabel recently released him, only a few months before he met Mary. Although she has had several proposals of marriage, she cannot bear the idea of being married to any of those men until she meets Silverbridge, whom she sees is kind. However, when he proposes to her, she doesn’t want to be too hasty, so she turns him down.

Much to her later regret, Silverbridge, who thinks Mabel has been unkind, meets Miss Isabel Boncassen, the daughter of a prominent American of inferior roots. After a series of misunderstandings, Silverbridge decides he prefers Isabel.

The Duke remembers how his Glencora had been in love with another man when she was talked into marrying him, and that had worked out well. But Mary isn’t yielding, and soon he has two children of whose choices he disapproves.

I found this novel a fitting end to the series, although I was sorry Glencora died. The Duke seems to become closer to his children as a result, though. The interchanges between him and his two sons, Silverbridge and Gerald, are well handled, and it is nice to see all behaving affectionately. I have to admit that I preferred Lady Mabel to Isabel, who doesn’t have much of a personality until the end. However, I enjoyed this series very much.

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Review 2146: Country Dance

In the mid-19th century, Ann Goodman is a young woman whose shepherd father is English and whose mother is Welsh. At the beginning of this novella, Ann lives in Wales near the English border. Although she speaks and understands Welsh, she’s been raised by her father to despise the Welsh. She is promised to Gabriel Ford, an English shepherd who is jealous of her.

Ann has been living with her cousins for 15 years when her father summons her to the English side of the border to help care for her ailing mother. At that time, Gabriel gives her a journal so she can write what she is doing and he can check up on her. Ann faithfully records her life, giving us great insight into farm life at the time.

Ann’s father works for a Welsh farmer, Evan ap Evans. Evans begins to pay attention to her, but she avoids him or is rude to him and says she hates Welshmen. When Gabriel comes to visit her, Evans speaks an endearment to her in Welsh, which makes Gabriel break up with her.

After her mother’s death, her father sends her back again to her cousins—in fact, never shows her any affection—and Gabriel attempts to court her. But Ann is angry that he wouldn’t take her word that nothing was going on with Evans, and also that when Evans tried to put things right, Gabriel attacked him.

As Ann relates her everyday activities, a feeling of dread grows in the reader. It’s no surprise to us that things go badly wrong, because the Introduction tells us so. But Evans, the author not the shepherd, gives this simple story depth by bringing in Ann’s ambivalence about her Welsh/English mixed heritage. This is a deceptively simple, sparely written story that I enjoyed reading for this month’s Reading Wales

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Review 2098: Yoked with a Lamb

After reading several Clavering books, I’ve decided that one of her strengths is in depicting a warm family and village life. It comes slowly in Yoked with a Lamb.

The village of Haystown in Southern Scotland is shocked and excited to learn that the Lockharts are returning to the area—all of them, including Andrew, who ran off with another woman several years ago. Andrew and Lucy are trying again and moving back to his beloved home. Lucy Lockhart has asked Andrew’s cousin, Kate Heron, to oversee preparations to open the house.

Although Lucy and the children are supposed to arrive there before Andrew, one day he stops by on his way north. Kate spends some time with him and his good friend Robin Anstruther. She begins to be attracted to Robin when she learns that he also was madly in love with the woman Andrew ran off with.

Kate thinks Andrew has treated Lucy abominably, but as the family gathers, she sees that Lucy constantly finds fault with him and throws his past in his face. She also tends to boss her children around and deprive them of small pleasures for no apparent reason. As Andrew and Lucy try to work out their problems, Kate tries to deal with her feelings for Robin.

I am enjoying the Furrowed Middlebrow reprints of Molly Clavering’s work very much. She was a neighbor and friend of the better-known D. E. Stevenson, but I have found Clavering’s books slightly more substantial.

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Review 2013: Touch Not the Nettle

Touch Not the Nettle is not necessarily a sequel to Molly Clavering’s Susan Settles Down, but it features the same locations and some of the same characters. The Armstrongs get a call from Jed’s cousin asking if her daughter, Amanda Carmichael, can come to stay. Amanda’s husband, Cocky, an explorer, has been lost in Brazil, and Amanda is being driven crazy by her selfish mother, who is demanding that she behave like a widow when they don’t know if he is dead. Although Amanda, rather brittle from her struggles in an unhappy marriage, doesn’t really want to go stay with strangers, she soon finds herself happy to be with Jed and Susan and loving the beauty of the borderlands of Southern Scotland.

Like Susan Settles Down, Touch Not the Nettle contains many descriptions of the lovely landscape and many of the same delightful or irritating characters. It is darker, however, and I’m not sure (spoilers!) how happy I am with the love interest for Amanda, Larry with the angry temperament and drinking problem. The couple’s problems are also too magically cleared up.

Perhaps this is a deeper novel than Susan Settles Down, but it is also more facile, and I didn’t like it quite as much.

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Review 1859: Music in the Hills

Music in the Hills is the second book in Stevenson’s Dering family series. The first book, Vittoria Cottage, is about Caroline Dering. This book has as its main characters Caroline’s sister, Mamie Johnstone, and Caroline’s son, James. The last book, which I read second, is Winter and Rough Weather.

James has returned from service in Malaysia and wants to become a farmer, so Mamie and her husband Jock have invited him to their farm in the borderlands of Scotland, Mureth, to learn farming. Although James settles in well and loves Mureth, he is unhappy, because he is in love with an art student named Rhoda. He proposed to her, but she has been clear that she’s picking her career over marriage.

This novel is mostly about the everyday events and people on the farm and in the nearby village, nearby in terms of straight distance but a bit remote along a hilly, twisty road. In the novel, as in the next, the landscape is an important character. There are two major subplots, however. One is about sheep being stolen from Mureth. The other is about Holly, the niece of Lady Shaw. She’s making a dead set at James, but there’s something about her that Mamie distrusts.

Another lovely book from Stevenson. I haven’t read Vittoria Cottage for a long time, but it makes me want to revisit it.

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Review 1854: The Weather at Tregulla

Una Beaumont (again, the publishers got the name wrong on the cover) is 19 and very much still a sulky teenager. She finds her home in a small Cornish village to be absolutely boring. Her father, Captain Beaumont, had promised her that she could live in London and study to be an actress. However, her mother has unexpectedly died and her money was entailed, so the Captain can no longer afford to send Una. Even her distraught father notices that she is more upset by this than by her mother’s death.

The weather in Tregulla is tumultuous, at least in regard to several love affairs. Una meets Terrence Willows, an artist leasing a cottage in the neighborhood, and his sister Emmeline. Terrence is a bit of a bounder, but Una immediately falls in love with him. Emmeline has the kind of looks admired by Una’s friend Barnabas, and she has in fact moved to the area in hopes of getting him to marry her, even though she hadn’t met him before. She is tired of the chaotic existence of her brother and his friends, but when she thinks of Barnabas, she always thinks of his parents’ estate first. Barnabas, although believing he is cautious, is smitten. Finally, his brother Hugo is in love with Una.

At first, I didn’t think I was going to like this novel as well as I did others by Gibbons. I didn’t like Una, and the novel has several more unlikable characters. However, Gibbons is a great storyteller and satirist, and her characters are believably written. Further, some of them improve, particularly Una.

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Review 1773: A Civil Contract

Remembering back quite a few years to the last time I read A Civil Contract, I didn’t classify it as a favorite Heyer. As I was younger then and more romantic, I was disappointed in its plain and prosaic heroine. Now that I am more mature, I look at it with completely different eyes.

Adam Deveril is a dashing captain who has been serving in the Peninsular wars when he is abruptly called home because his father unexpectedly died. This death makes Adam Lord Lynton and leaves him heir to a huge amount of debt. Although the family has never been wealthy, Adam has had no idea just how his father’s spending habits and mismanagement have put the estate into debt.

Adam thinks there is no solution but to put his townhouse and the family estate on the market. Being a proud man, he ignores his businessman’s recommendation to look for a wealthy bride.

Adam also feels obliged to inform Lord Oversly of the state of affairs, since Adam had been hoping to wed his beautiful daughter, Julia. Oversly acknowledges that Adam can no longer be considered eligible to marry Julia but remarks that he and Julia probably aren’t well suited anyway. However, both Adam and Julia are heart-broken.

Oversly says he thinks he can help Adam. Soon, Adam is surprised to receive a visit from Jonathan Chawleigh, a wealthy but vulgar businessman. Chawleigh suggests that Adam’s financial problems can be solved if only he would marry Chawleigh’s daughter Jenny.

Adam’s pride does not permit him to consider this offer, but he agrees to meet Jenny. He finds her plain, plump, and matter-of-fact as well as poorly dressed. He does not even realize he has met her before, for she is a schoolfriend of Julia’s. Almost against his will, he marries her.

Maybe I’m giving away too much, but this is the story of how a young man learns to throw away his romantic illusions and begin to appreciate his thoughtful, supportive, affectionate wife. Thus, its intent is a little more serious than most of Heyer’s novels, and it also has a great deal to say, off and on, about the state of Europe at the time.

I had to laugh, because this time through I found myself impatient with Adam and Julia’s romantic yearnings and appreciated Jenny’s good qualities and hidden heartache a good deal more. The book is also not lacking in Heyer’s usual amusing dialogue, although most of it is between other characters than the two main ones.

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