Customer Reviews

Rhyme And Reason (Zebra Regency Romance)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Forget the story in this book - though, actually, it's pretty confusing in parts and could have benefitted from an honest and very critical editor. What really turned me off was the sheer impossibility of so much of what Ferguson writes about. It's perfectly clear that she doesn't know very much about the habits and customs of the Regency period.

Young ladies did not go about unescorted or unchaperoned. So Emily's visits to the bookshop could not have gone unnoticed. She would have had to have, at the very least, a maid with her everywhere she went. More likely, there would have been some female relative or paid chaperone living with the family; two unmarried women would simply not live with their father without a female companion of some type.

The forms of address are wrong: only Emily is Miss Tallcot. Her sister is Miss Miriam Tallcot, or Miss Miriam.

Women were not supposed to know any slang terms. So, even if Emily did know some of the terms in popular usage, she would never have revealed that fact, far less use such language in conversation.

If Emily's father had owned his own shipping line, then he was in trade and would have been shunned by the ton. Likewise, it's fanciful to imagine that Wentworth would have managed the publishing company himself. It just wasn't done.

There is no way that Emily could have been her sister's chaperone. Both are unmarried young ladies; both would have been required to be chaperoned by an older matron, some relative who was a married woman or a widow.

People simply did not use each other's first names in public; even in private, it would have been unheard of for a lady to use the first name of a gentleman who wasn't very closely related to her. So Emily and Damon would not have called each other by their first names, nor would any other characters.

Damon is unmarried, and apparently has no female relative acting as chatelaine in his country house. Therefore he simply could not have held the house party as described in the book. He could certainly invite male companions to his home, but no women; not without a respectable hostess.

And, most of all, Emily and Damon could never have been alone together in the way Ferguson writes them as being throughout the book. Even on the very first occasion, when they'd gone out into the garden at someone's party and were alone, once they were discovered - as they were - it wouldn't have been treated as nothing out of the ordinary. Emily would have been completely compromised and Wentworth would have had to marry her or be considered beyond the pale. Yet Ferguson has them seeking places to be alone and to kiss the whole time, as if no-one else would notice or bat an eyelid. Emily would have been ruined, and would either have been sent away by her father in no short order, or Tallcot would have called Wentworth out.

I just couldn't get beyond these inaccuracies, and more, to accept the story on face value.

This is one of my favorite regency stories. I have read it several times in the past and will read again in the future. I just hope that they make it an eBook.