If This Be Magic [Paperback]

Ellen Tanner Marsh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1990

“O! she's warm. If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating.” William Shakespeare

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Warner Books Inc (Mm) (February 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446354058
• ISBN-13: 978-0446354059
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,472,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not magical, January 11, 2009

By 

Melissa (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: If This Be Magic (Paperback)

If this Be Magic is bogged down with too much political intrigue and too little interaction between the leads, keeping this novel from being a good story.

Heroine Townsend Grey meets Ian Moncrieff, Duke of Boyne while she is hunting ducks out on the waterways around her English home. Ian is traveling with his great aunt aboard a ship headed to the Boyne seat in Scotland when she becomes ill. When Ian takes a rowboat in search of a doctor for his aunt, he loses his money to an unscrupulous man and ends up in the same boat with Townsend.

They later are thrown together when Ian and his great aunt visit Townsend's home as they are distant relations. Townsend is totally smitten with Ian, and together they are caught in a very compromising position. At first Ian does not want to marry the young Townsend, she is only seventeen, but when he hears that her dowry includes a landed estate in the Loire valley outside Paris he asks for her hand in marriage.

Ian is half French and longs to go back to France and start a vineyard. He is illegitimate and has only just inherited the Dukedom. Previously he was living the high life at Versailles.

Ian and Townsend marry and very quickly Townsend discovers that her husband does not love her but only married her for her land. They arrive in France and are ensconced in the intrigues of the French royal court. Here the book moved very slowly as Ian and Townsend spend little time together. Ian is searching for the man who betrayed his step father and who also is involved in sedition against the king. Townsend spends her days bemoaning her fate.

Very rapidly events are turning in France but neither Ian nor Townsend heed the warnings. They have a lukewarm romance mainly because Ian is coldly distant and Townsend is childish and naïve. The book never really captured my attention until the last few chapters and that was only because the French Revolution was well under way which was much more exciting than this couple's romance.