We're still down that rabbit hole...
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Toll-Gate by Georgette Heyer BYes, it's another Georgette Heyer Regency story, only this time it's a mystery adventure story set shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, i.e. around 1816 or so. The story concerns one ex-captain in an elite British regiment, one Captain John Staple. He is the second son of a landed gentry and as such took up soldiering as a profession, and had a great time doin so during the wars. However, he finds peacetime soldiering didn't appeal to him, so he sold out and is now roaming about, getting into and out of strange adventures.
In this story, he arrives at a toll-gate on a rainy night while traveling home from his brother's country estate. He finds that it's manned by a frightened youngster. It seems that toll roads are not a new thing, and travelers on this road had to pay to use it, enforced by toll-gates along the way. In any event, he learns that the youngster's father had gone off for an hour or two, but had yet to return. The youngster finds himself alone in the night, so Captain Staple decides to spend the night in the gate keeper's cottage, to keep the frightened boy company and get himself out of the rain. He expected the father to return before morning. But he doesn't, leaving his son in the lurch, manning the toll gate by himself. What Captain Staple would've done next is an open question, because while playing the part as the toll-gate keeper that morning, he meets a beautiful lady in a carriage at the gate, and, of course, falls in love with her. He then stays on pretending to be the cousin of the true gatekeeper in order to get to know her. She turns out to be the daughter of the local gentry who is slowly dying. He also feels that he should try to solve the mystery of what has happened to the true gatekeeper.
In the course of the story we get to meet a colorful assortment of characters, booth good and bad, as Captain Staple sets out to solve what turns out to be several the mysteries, while at the same time courting, and protecting his true love from some very unpleasant characters who are staying in the house of the dying gentry. The story is told in the dialect of the times, and the slang of the rather raffish characters we met. I could've spent hours looking up all the slang terms she used in my copy of the Dictionary of Historic Slang if I had cared to. I did not. I just went with the flow. It works just as well.
All in all, an entertaining book. This one is more of a historical mystery and adventure than a romance. I'll no doubt be returning to Georgette Heyer in the future, as the two I've read have been entertaining and are readily available from the library whenever I need something to read.
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