Clever, sexy, fun and breathtakingly romantic.
The latest from RITA award recipient (The Bridal Season, 2001, etc.) and Minnesota resident Brockway.
After Avery Quinn, his father’s brilliant protégée, saves him from an unwelcome marriage, Giles Dalton, the Marquis of Strand, feels honor-bound to help her infiltrate the male-only British Astronomical Society and gain credit for her discovery of a comet, despite his deep reservations about the plan, including his attraction to the girl. It’s been years since Giles visited Killylea, his estate in Cornwall, and he’s not terribly thrilled to be bringing his bride-to-be with him on this trip. Sophie and her father have entrapped him in an engagement, but as wrong as the match seemed in London, it seems even more so in his beloved Killylea. Resentful yet resigned to the marriage, he is amused and surprised when Avery, the eccentric, brilliant scholar who lives on the estate, manages to trick Sophie into calling off the engagement. Avery is too educated for the working class yet too common for any hope of marriage within the nobility. Giles has resigned himself to taking care of her for the rest of her life, allowing her to pursue her studies on the remote estate. However, Avery is determined to take her academic achievements to London and earn credit under her own name for the discovery of a comet— a complicated endeavor, since the Astronomical Society is male-only. Leveraging Giles’ gratitude, she convinces him to take her to London disguised as a man and introduce her to the right crowd in order to earn entry to the august institution. Giles is just audacious enough to take on the mission, and he has a few plans—and secrets—of his own to sort out. He’s spent years cultivating a reputation as a dandy to hide some covert activities, but perhaps the time has come to let his true nature, and his heart, be known. At least to Avery. Brockway is a master of the wounded alpha hero. She delivers a unique, engaging historical storyline with fun, intriguing elements and with a delicious arc of two star-crossed misfits who share a deep love and deserve an exceptional future.
Clever, sexy, fun and breathtakingly romantic.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4778-0858-0
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A have-your-cake-and-eat-it romp, done with brio and not a syllable of moralizing. Newcomer Kinsella has a light touch and...
Another bright young thing from London with a bad habit: shopping.
Rebecca Bloomwood is a financial journalist of sorts, offering sensible advice—which she seldom takes—in the glossy periodical Successful Saving. But she herself can’t resist a designer sale, the more useless and expensive a garment, the better. In fact, Rebecca harbors an irrational wish to be run over just so the world can see her new bra with embroidered yellow rosebuds and gorgeous matching knickers. Her pitiful salary, though, doesn’t allow for extravagances like these, and her overdraft allowance has been exceeded by several thousand pounds. An officious accounts manager named Derek Smeath sends increasingly less polite dunning notices every day, and her tall tales about broken legs and dead dogs and even a recent conversion to evangelical Christianity are failing to deter—or amuse—him. Meanwhile, perky flatmate Suze, the daughter of fabulously rich and indulgent parents, is little help, although she does fix Rebecca up with her equally wealthy cousin, Tarquin Cleath-Stuart. Dreaming wistfully of marrying money, Rebecca tries to impress the dull but sincere Tarquin by inventing a charity that provides violins for impoverished children in Mozambique—and is mortified when he immediately makes a donation of five thousand pounds, scribbling a cheque that she has to return. But there’s another man in her future: handsome Luke Brandon, a financial genius who devised a fund-switching scheme that seems to have deprived her parents’ neighbors—a well-meaning but slightly dotty old couple—of their nest egg. Outraged, Rebecca publicizes their plight on a morning TV show. Then Luke, a smooth operator in more ways than one, explains all—and beds her on their first date. But he won’t be the only one charmed by Rebecca’s wit and style.
A have-your-cake-and-eat-it romp, done with brio and not a syllable of moralizing. Newcomer Kinsella has a light touch and puckish humor.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33548-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
IN THE NEWS
Flamboyantly written, if a little too conventionally peopled and plotted.
A treasure hunt leads a young girl to discover her mother’s darkest secret.
In 1936, 9-year-old Alice has been consigned by her mother, Selina Lennox Carew, to the care of her Lennox grandparents at their ancestral stately home, Blackwood Park. The reason for this custodial arrangement is Selina’s trip to Southeast Asia with Alice’s cold, distant father, Rupert, who needs to visit his ruby mines in Burma. Alice is kept abreast of her parents’ travels through her mother’s letters, delivered by longtime family servant Polly. Alice is also directed, by Polly, to discover clues set by her mother, leading the girl on a treasure hunt that helps lift her out of her depression. Alice’s Blackwood sojourn alternates with chapters set in 1925, when young Selina, age 22, is setting the London tabloids ablaze with her antics as one of a cadre of Bright Young People, devil-may-care upper-class flappers and their escorts. But everything changes when, on a madcap treasure hunt of her own, Selina meets Lawrence Weston, a struggling portrait painter and aspiring photographer. The two are drawn inexorably into an affair. Selina's choice of a passionless marriage to Rupert over life with her soul mate, Lawrence, is the fateful decision on which the novel turns, and her rationalizations will be a little too pat to satisfy most readers. Nor will readers be long baffled by Alice’s hunt—given the 1925 backstory, the solution to the puzzle is obvious almost from the start. But genuine surprises do await, even if they entail punishing Selina, after the manner of post-Code Hollywood melodrama, for her breach of class boundaries, disregard for propriety, and unladylike smoking and drinking. The characters verge on stereotypical although there are no true villains and only the domestics lack flaws, particularly Polly and Mr. Patterson, the gardener who introduces Alice to the redemptive joys of nature. However, Grey’s use of sensory detail, enlivening the most mundane of scenes, redeems this novel, too.
Flamboyantly written, if a little too conventionally peopled and plotted.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-06679-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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