Customer Reviews

The Gilded Knight (Zebra Regency Romance)

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Widowed Nell Simmons hasn't had an easy life. She recently lost her husband (though she did not love him), and her daughter is often sick. To make matters worse, the new owner of her estate is about to remove her from the premises.

George Blake inherited Meadow House, but he sends his younger brother to do the dirty work. Charles, the younger brother, hates the idea of asking the widow to leave. Last time he met Nell, he fears he did not make such a good impression on her. When Charles meets Delphine, Nell's sickly daughter, the task of removing them from the house becomes nearly impossible.

Charles feels drawn to Nell and Delphine in ways he never imagined. And Charles is nothing like the man Nell remembers. He is warm and thoughtful, and her staff falls in love with him. Can she find love as well?

I really enjoyed "The Gilded Knight." I think it's Donna Simpson's best novel since her debut. "Lord St. Claire's Angel" is my favorite book by Donna Simpson, and this one comes close. The story is very sweet, almost sad sometimes, but definitely touching. You learn to love the characters, and I think the ending is one of the best I've come across in a long time.

If I had one problem with the book, it would be that it hung around in one place for too long. The setting didn't change, the activities hardly changed. But the characters and their problems are so absorbing, you hardly notice.

If you're looking for a sweet, fulfilling love story, look no furthur.

Nell Simmons is now a widow, with a very sickly daughter, Delphine, and no longer has a right to live on her dead husband's estate. The new Viscount, having waited long enough in his opinion, wants her gone and the house available for his residence. To that end he sends his wastrel brother Sir Charles to remove her and Delphine with all possible speed. In fact he forces Charles to do this, as Charles is badly in debt due to his ruinous lifestyle of gambling and drinking. Charles has also been the butt of much cruelty through his club foot and been thwarted in his ambition to be in the army.
Thus our stage is set.
This is a well written, interesting and moving romance. Interesting, in that it upends our usual ideas about this type of situation. For usually the widow with a child being forced from her home has all our sympathy and the man evicting her is cast as a villain for so doing. However, during the course of the tale, we discover such not to be the case. The new viscount has waited for her to leave, she is not destitute, she has a perfectly good home to which to remove, she has a good income. Nell is being unreasonable, but I don't think, desptite this unreasonableness, that her thoughts and actions are unbelievable, maybe foolish ... She seems to have been under great mental stress and is only just beginning to emerge from beneath her husband's heavy handed treatment. She has been clinging to familiarity and cannot see out of her well worn groove.
Similarly, Charles is also jolted from his pattern. As he leaves London, we can see his dissatisfaction with his ruinous, pointless life and once at Meadow House he is able to do more than moan. He is already rejecting that and wants to change. He is seen as looking back upon his childhood pain and understanding it, he is putting that bitterness behind him.
Both he and Nell are wounded characters who are struggling to burst from the past and their steps forward are made more surely by their developing relationship. For they are undeniably attracted to each other almost from the first.
Only Nell's reaction to discovering Charles' reasons for acting for his brother is overdone.
A beautifully realized romance.

Maybe this book is a victim of over expectations on my part. I love Donna Simpson's work and she is one of my favorite romance authors. Lord St. Claire's Angel (Zebra Regency Romance) is one of my favorite books ever. So maybe my less than enthusiastic reaction to The Gilded Knight is more my fault than Simpson's. I found it slow, and I didn't care as much about the characters. For me, it was not a compelling read, and it was easy to put down.

But... even Shakespeare had his off plays. I would still consider reading The Gilded Knight again (perhaps in a few years) to see if my first read opinion stayed the same. Hopefully, The Gilded Knight will improve as I age.:-)

Lovers of Regency romance generally know what to expect and their satisfaction in reading these stories is based on the fact that there is comfort in knowing how the plot and characters will work. In this book, nothing is like the typical regency, neither plot nor characters. A few comments:

Firstly, it took me a long time to warm to the hero and heroine and I even question calling them that. For a start, neither is instantly likeable, neither has traits to make them appealing and they do not behave in a formulaic way thus confusing and challenging the reader to stick with the story.

Second, if you do stick with the book to see how skilfully the author makes such an unplausible scenario come to an acceptable conclusion, you will find this a satisfying read. Others have described the plot so I would just like to say that this one goes against the grain of the genre in that the hero must carry out the dirty work and thus does not enamour himself to the heroine.

Third, both the hero and heroine have many faults and it is only by admitting them to each other that they are able to move beyond what appears to be a stalemate set-up. Sir Charles is a wastrel in the fullest sense of the word and although basically a nice man, has allowed an unhappy childhood to colour much of his life, opinions and actions. The heroine, Nell, was married off young to an older and indifferent husband but over-compensates through devotion to a somewhat sickly child. She nearly allows herself to be subsumed to the child which, of course, is of no benefit to anyone including the child.

Hats off to Donna Simpson for this story because she brings it to a satisfactory (if not entirely happy) ending by carefully growing her characters in what at first appears to be unfertile ground. I can't say it was a happy read but I do relish the "difficult" Regencies wherein the lead characters must suffer a bit and use introspection to achieve happy conclusions. Well done and recommended for those who would like something out of the usual mould.

I have only read one or two of the author's others books, but after reading her latest, I will be exploring some of her other writings. This story was exceptional in how it presented the reasons why the two main characters were drawn to each other, and how the relationship helped both of them face past issues and mature. Sir Charles and the widowed Nell seemed to be a mis-matched couple at first, since they were on adversarial sides. Charles was sent by his hypochondriacal brother to evict Nell and her invalid child,Delphine, from the ancestral home. How Charles falls in love with Nell and grows to love her daughter as his own child is a touching story. Each of the main characters has flaws, like in real life, but they also have strengths that they didn't know they had. Charles had lived a life of gambling and drinking, without a purpose. It was difficult to show the progression of his maturing in such a short book, and I would have liked to see this story be in a longer format to fully develop things more, but the author was very successful in making me believe that the wastrel could turn over a new leaf. Delphine was a sweet character, and I also liked the personalities of the servants. An excellent book--one that is going on my keeper shelf.

I found this story to be incomplete at best and slow moving. Almost all the action takes place at Nell Simmons home in the country at the estate home she must vacate since her husband had died 8 months before and the new Viscount wanted to take proper ownership of the house. Well, it is his home and not hers (which is a fact she conveniently ignores). Nell was not destitute; she was well off and had another home to go to sort of in London. Donna Simpson does not really make her reasons for refusing to go understandable. She was unhappily married, did not have many happy associations with the home so leave! It was also almost criminal to stay in the country and deny her sickly daughter the London doctors who one would presume were better. Her country doctor was old and always giving dire outcomes for her pretty, 9 year old daughter. As a mother, would it have have been her responsibility to get her daughter the best care possible? That leaves Charles. Lame since birth and taunted by just about everyone growing up, he has not made much of his life, he just drinks and gambles. His small allowence paid by his brother George is not adequate to cover his gambling losses. George says he will pay these debts if Charles can convince Nell to leave the home so George can move in. When Nell finds out Charles would have had his debts paid for this service, she gets very angry. But why? She already knew Charles came to evict her but he never did. If fact, he was a nice guest and very helpful. So what if he would get is debts paid? Why she become so frosty is unclear. Having lived her life among the nobility, she would be very aware of how unimportant second sons can be with no income of their own so how else would he get it paid, by working???!!!

But for me, this plodding story fails most at the end. Charles has a revelation that he might be able to work and support himself after all. He has a idea to contact an old friend of his family to ask for a job. Good for him; but does he? The story ends with them deciding to marry. Since Nell has lots of money, does he end up working? Does the little girl get better? Does Nell have another child since she wondered about her ability? Did George, who was unmarried and in mid-30's, die and leave the title to Charles? I think the author could have left out some of the middle draggy stuff and had a last chapter completing the story. Why do so many authors not complete a story? Any writing class has that as a valuable lesson to learn. So in the end, it is a story which was not finished.