I’m a wildlife biologist by
profession. I have two dogs and a cat
and my fondest wish is to own a small acreage someday so I can have a few
Llamas, chickens, horses and a whole bunch more dogs. So it will be no surprise that throughout all
the Hathaway books I’ve felt a certain affinity with Beatrix. The way Kleypas
wrote her in all the earlier books was great – funny, kind-hearted, naturally
wise and self-contained, and not in a boring way like Win. I was really looking forward to this book.
So, I was pretty much setting
myself up for disappointment. Not that I
was too disappointed but I really wanted it to be AMAZING and it was just good.
The match chosen for Beatrix is Christopher Phelan, a conventional and rather
shallow young man who is changed by two years in the Crimean War. In fact one might say that he’s a wounded
animal - like all the animals Beatrix takes in.
And that right there is where a little bit of the disappointment comes
in – an obvious and somewhat un-fun choice for Beatrix. A fun choice might have been a rakish, urbane
fellow who is reformed by Beatrix’s whimsical nature and learns to embrace
nature and dirt? I don’t know - Lisa
Kleypas is the mistress here and she probably knows best but I didn’t love that
this book ends up being quite a bit darker than the others in the series. Kind of a bummer for fun Bea’s story.
There was also a shade of
disappointment in that I really want the characters I love to be pursued and
courted and wooed and adored and that’s not quite how this book rolls. The two develop a bond when Beatrix responds to a letter he's written to her frivolous friend, Prudence. His letter cries out for response but Prudence can't be bothered so Beatrix does so in her stead. They continue to exchange increasingly personal letters, and fall in love with Christopher never knowing it is not Prudence writing to him. Upon his return he struggles with the demons that plague him from the war and resolves to find and marry Prudence while Beatrix agonizes. Eventually the subterfuge is revealed and while Christopher loves Beatrix, he’s too tied
up in his inner struggles to really pursue her and in fact he tries, for
her sake, to refuse to marry her. The
main pursuer here, the one who pushes the relationship forward and does most of
the hard work, is Beatrix and that wasn’t what I wanted for her.
Don’t get me wrong, Christopher is
definitely appealing, and the way he (eventually) loves Beatrix is
heart-meltingly adorable. In fact, (and here’s disappointment #3) the more
annoying of the pair is Beatrix who for most of the book acts rather juvenile. I found myself irritated with her pushy
chatterbox routine more than once. It
struck me that, like Cam, Beatrix might work better as secondary character then
she does in her own book hence even more disappointment.
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