Yes, I know. I am going to have to spend more time searching for books I might like. The question is how and where? I signed up for 3 months of Kindle unlimited for just $.99, so I have a million books to discover. However, the last time I tried KU, I found it hard to find books I wanted to read... We'll see how I far this time. But this week, we're still reading an author who is well known to me, and you, if you've followed these installments for the last year.
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.
Charity Girl by Georgette Heyer B
This is a pleasant, light novel. Not one of her comedies, nor one of her more serious novels. It falls somewhere in the middle.
Ashely Desford is the eldest son of the Viscount Desford, a young single man about town with easy manners, a sense of humor and honor attends a local ball, and gets into a conversation with the niece of the owner of house who had not been allowed to attend the ball, as pictured on the cover above. This niece, Charity, is otherwise known as Cherry. Her mother is dead, and she has more or less abandoned by her father, being been left in the care of a boarding school, and when he failed to pay the bills, and was thought to dead, she was taken in by an aunt, who, along with her cousins, is used much like a servant. She is very unhappy, and the next day runs off to London to search for her Grandfather who a very unpleasant man, who had disinherited her father for marrying her mother.
Desford comes across her trudging along the road, and feeling sorry for her, takes her in his carriage to London and her grandfather's house only to find it closed up. He feels responsible for her, but wat to do? This being Regency England, an unmarried girl's reputation can be ruined by being seen alone with a young man, and he certainly can't take her in until he finds her grandfather, so he takes her to the house of his childhood best friend, Hetta Silverdale, and asks her to take her in while he tracks down her grandfather. She does, and Cheery, always grateful to kindness and willing to please becomes a favorite companion of Hetta's mother, though Hetta knows that her mother will grow tired of her in time, as she always does, so that Cherry can't stay forever. In the meanwhile Desford travels the countryside, eventually tracking down her grandfather, though it takes the better part of two weeks to do so...
This is just be barest outline of the story. There are lots of little issues, and, as always interesting characters that make this story interesting, though nothing too surprising happens. You will almost certainly guess how it ends, but will still enjoy the road to the ending.
The Foundling by Georgette Heyer B
Our protagonist is a 24 year old orphaned duke. He was a small and sickly child, and everyone around him did their best to keep him alive. His uncle looked after his estate and raised him, and though faithfully looking after the son of his brother, pretty much expects his charge to do what he says. And he does, including proposing to the young lady that they had been prepared to marry by her parents. What his uncle and his retainers fail to recognize is that he has grown to be a healthy young and pleasant young man. Because of this, all his old retainers still smother him with attention, not letting him do anything on his own. This is driving him crazy.
He goes to London and while visiting his cousins, learns that one of his cousins is being blackmailed for breach of promise. Since the blackmailer, the "uncle" of the young woman he wrote the letters to, has never met his cousin, our young duke decides to slip away from his smothering retains, to live the life of a common person for a while, and impersonate his cousin to somehow get the incriminating letters back. Well, as you can imagine, this adventure leads to many more adventures, including being kidnapped and imprisoned. But our duke manages to mostly overcome all these adventures and misadventures all on his own, growing up and growing in confidence in the process.
We have the usual cast of interesting characters. The title character, the foundling is a young woman who is so beautiful that just about every young man instantly falls in love with her. The problem is that she is both very pleasant, and very simple. She can be talked into about anything with the promise of a purple dress. Indeed when the blackmailer has her meet the duke when he shows up a the remoter tavern they are living in, she says exactly what her "uncle" had told her to say, even though she recognizes that the duke isn't the young man who proposed to her. She then flees to the duke, forcing him to look after her while searches for someone honorable to take her in. The duke also meets a very free spirited young man, who, while running away from home, was robbed. He takes him under his wing as well, though he also cause him many problems. And then we have the blackmailing "uncle," a smooth talking con man and criminal who always seems to land on his feet no matter that his schemes always go wrong.
This is another of her lighthearted stories, comic, but not as clever and witty as some of her other ones. A good one, but not, in my mind, quite top-tier.
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