After a tragic loss, Celia Delacourt faces a life of loneliness and poverty – until her distant cousin, the Duchess of Arnsford, unexpectedly takes her under her wing. Celia suspects an ulterior motive, but is grateful to spend Christmas with family, however remote the relationship – and despite the daunting grandeur of the ducal palace.Celia has braced herself to face the worst Christmas of her … Christmas of her life. But when Jack Delacourt comes home – determined to thwart the schemes of his mother, the duchess – Celia finds a friend and ally. And she begins to wonder … will this be the worst Christmas of her life? Or the best?
*Finalist for the RITA award for Best Regency Romance
“Perfect reading on a cold day during the holiday season while sipping hot chocolate in front of the fireplace!” – Huntress Book Reviews
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I loved this book. It made me feel the whole gambit of emotions and did so without resorting to over-the-top melodrama or ludicrous plot twists. The synopsis makes it sound like a fluff piece, but I found that though the story doesn’t include big, sweeping plot-lines, it does have deep characters with interactions and misunderstandings that are genuine and compelling.
The heroine is a great mix of conflicting emotions. At one moment she’s tough and standing up for herself and the next, she’s vulnerable and emotional. She’s a character that rounded and is inconsistent at times. I love that at one point she even makes a characterization about herself to the hero and in his mind he disagrees with it–just like a lot of people, she doesn’t see herself accurately.
The hero is a little more flat as a character. I don’t think he’s a well-rounded as the heroine, but he does provide most of the comic relief in the story. Before he and the heroine meet, he is aware that his mother is trying to set them up and he decides to push the heroine away by making himself idiotic that he would be unattractive to her. However, while he means to come across as a fop and a fool, she believes him to be truly mentally unstable and treats him as such. There are a lot of great laugh out loud conversations and misunderstandings that are obvious to the reader, but not to the oblivious characters. He’s funny and likable, and a great pairing for the heroine.
His mother is fantastic. She is certainly meant to be the villain of the piece, but she’s really more of a flawed human who is doing what she really feels is best for everyone, but in reality is so tainted by her “good breeding” and arrogance to really do much good. She’s not loving, but she does care about her legacy and making sure that all her hard work lives on after she’s gone. And that desire drives her to do things that are not nice. I hate classifying her as a villain, because she’s not evil, but she is hardhearted and not a likable person.
There is a subplot surrounding the hero’s eldest sister, who is the villain of the first book in the duology, “The Nobody”. I really recommend reading that book first. They are in essence stand-alone novels, but the character development of this character stretches between these two books and this book is even better if read after the first. In the first book, the sister is a copy of the mother in this book, but in this story as she’s dealing with the idea of being a spinster, she begins to change. It’s not a sudden night-and-day shift of character, but she starts to change and become someone better. While she’s a sympathetic villain in the first book, in this book she becomes someone you like and I found myself rooting for her. I still wouldn’t necessarily want to hang out with her, but she has a wonderful character arc through the two novels.
I just could go on and on about how much I liked this book. Plot wise, it is a light book, but character wise, I found it to be really well written. It took what was great in “The Nobody” and expanded on it (while chopping out the melodrama). A definite 5-stars!