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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Imperious peer sponsors irrepressible ingenue.,
By A Customer
This review is from: My Lord Guardian (Hardcover)
Review Length: About 450 words.This book has haunted me for years. Although I first read it in the mid-1980s, I promptly forgot its title and author. It has taken me YEARS to find it again. I am very glad I did. Given that Andrew Innes, Marquess of Lyle, is handsome, haughty, and highhanded (all "cold eye and soft, acrid tongue"), a better title for this engaging chronicle of a Regency ingenue's first London Season is The Importance of Being Arrogant. (If this were a 1950s movie, HIS part would be played in all its smirking, scornful glory by that velvet sledgehammer James Mason!) His sudden ward (now THERE'S a good title) is the orphan Sydney Archer, whose "finishing" he undertakes in keeping with his promise as her father's friend and commanding officer. He is happy to help, but Miss Archer turns out to be a bookish country miss with the soul of Artemis, no comparison to Drew's almost fiancee Lady Romney, an elegant work of art he always expected to marry despite his inexplicable failure to propose. He dislikes the lass on sight. The reclusive Lyle sequesters himself in his country-house-turned-seminary, stalking out of his study occasionally to measure Miss Archer's progress, leaving her instruction entirely to Lady Romney's sweet but foppish brother Cedric Maitland, whose main difficulty is getting the outspoken ward to contain her temper, and stop hugging everyone. Then Lyle's timid aunt Prue arrives with her shy daughter, and the lessons intensify to meet the rigorous demands of the social whirl for which they must soon depart. His Grace can hardly wait! He wants these ladies GONE so his peace can come back; yet weeks after they leave for Grosvenor Square, Lyle is on the highroad barreling so eagerly for the city he loathes, it completely slips his crowded mind to stop in at Lady Romney's Chiswick estate. I would not call this book flat or dull (it is jammed with details of where the Ton meet, mingle, shop, frolic, and scratch their intellectual itch), but there IS an odd stillness about it. Like the eerie quiet before a storm. It is not....vivid. The only flash and sparkle finally surfaces with the troublemaker of the piece (he's not menacing enough to be an actual villain), and you'll laugh when you read his name. What I WOULD call this book is annoying (for the same reason I gnashed my teeth reading Lady Leprechaun and The Mischievous Miss Murphy): I hated the peer. As I wrote regarding A Difficult Disguise, I am up to HERE with proud aristocrats' taking wicked glee in causing an innocent girl rough pain. At least the wit and mischief of THAT author's book partly made up for the offensive lord; however, there's no such consolation here. This is not romance. This is abuse masquerading as courtship! The delicious comeuppance of the nobleman, humbled and reformed by the beleaguered gentlewoman from whom he is chagrined to discover he cannot, or will not, disentangle himself is what makes this genre work. It is a scene that makes 170 pages of wincing worthwhile----when there IS such a scene. When there is NOT such a scene, we readers are left wondering what the lady sees in the smug, insufferably disdainful nobleman who never speaks to her except to sneer or goad. For all Miss Archer's wit and warrior spirit, I expected better taste! Still, I couldn't get this couple out of my mind.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Imperious peer sponsors irrepressible ingenue.,
By A Customer
This review is from: My Lord Guardian (An Avon Regency Romance) (Paperback)
Review Length: About 450 words.This book has haunted me for years. Although I first read it in the mid-1980s, I promptly forgot its title and suthor. It has taken me YEARS to find it again. I am very glad I did. Given that Andrew Innes, Marquess of Lyle, is handsome, haughty, and highhanded (all "cold eye and soft, acrid tongue"), a better title for this engaging chronicle of a Regency ingenue's first London Season is The Importance of Being Arrogant. (If this were a 1950s movie, HIS part would be played in all its smirking, scornful glory by that velvet sledgehammer James Mason!) His sudden ward (now THERE'S a good title) is the orphan Sydney Archer, whose "finishing" he undertakes in keeping with his promise as her father's friend and commanding officer. He is happy to help, but Miss Archer turns out to be a bookish country miss with the soul of Artemis, no comparison to Drew's almost fiancee Lady Romney, an elegant work of art he always expected to marry despite his inexplicable failure to propose. He dislikes the lass on sight. The reclusive Lyle sequesters himself in his country-house-turned-seminary, stalking out of his study occasionally to measure Miss Archer's progress, leaving her instruction entirely to Lady Romney's sweet but foppish brother Cedric Maitland, whose main difficulty is getting the outspoken ward to contain her temper, and stop hugging everyone. Then Lyle's timid aunt Prue arrives with her shy daughter, and the lessons intensify to meet the rigorous demands of the social whirl for which they must soon depart. His Grace can hardly wait! He wants these ladies GONE so his peace can come back; yet weeks after they leave for Grosvenor Square, Lyle is on the highroad barreling so eagerly for the city he loathes, it completely slips his crowded mind to stop in at Lady Romney's Chiswick estate. I would not call this book flat or dull (it is jammed with details of where the Ton meet, mingle, shop, frolic, and scratch their intellectual itch), but there IS an odd stillness about it. Like the eerie quiet before a storm. It is not....vivid. The only flash and sparkle finally surfaces with the troublemaker of the piece (he's not menacing enough to be an actual villain), and you'll laugh when you read his name. What I WOULD call this book is annoying (for the same reason I gnashed my teeth reading Lady Leprechaun and The Mischievous Miss Murphy): I hated the peer. As I wrote regarding A Difficult Disguise, I am up to HERE with proud aristocrats' taking wicked glee in causing an innocent girl rough pain. At least the wit and mischief of THAT author's book partly made up for the offensive lord; however, there's no such consolation here. This is not romance. This is abuse masquerading as courtship! The delicious comeuppance of the nobleman, humbled and reformed by the beleaguered gentlewoman from whom he is chagrined to discover he cannot, or will not, disentangle himself is what makes this genre work. It is a scene that makes 170 pages of wincing worthwhile----when there IS such a scene. When there is NOT such a scene, we readers are left wondering what the lady sees in the smug, insufferably disdainful nobleman who never speaks to her except to sneer or goad. For all Miss Archer's wit and warrior spirit, I expected better taste! Still, I couldn't get this couple out of my mind.
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