Under the Mistletoe by Mary Balogh
Dec. 22nd, 2009 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meganbmooreThis is a collection of five Regency Christmas novellas written over about fifteen years, which tends to show at times.
Balogh tends to give her couples a lot of problems to work out, and (in the books I’ve read) builds a lot of the plot around a character growth arc. Unfortunately, she seems to try to cram as many problems and as much of a character arc into these novellas-each about 50 pages of teeny print-with mixed results. Mostly, there’s way too much to try to sort out in the space she has, and with the couple of days each story takes place over.
The first two stories, “A Family Christmas” and “The Star of Bethlehem” are probably the best of the lot, and deal pretty well with the “too many issues to work out” problem by having leads who are already married, and mostly need a chance to communicate. The third, “The Best Gift,” is about a bachelor who asks his niece’s teacher to spend Christmas with them so the niece won’t be lonely, since her parents ran off to somewhere exotic for the holidays. This was a pretty decent one, but way too short, especially once Balogh started inserting Important Social issues. It would have been way better as a full length book. Or at least as a longer novella. “Playing House” has the unique honor of being the first Balogh story I’ve read that I didn’t like, and of having the first hero I disliked*. The story is about neighbors who were in love until they grew apart, and now she’s poor and about to go be a governess and he is Scarred By The Evil First Wife. I can live with that trope when they have a history, instead of his being healed by a pure young thing he pushes around and just met, but he spent most of the time going out of his way to find reasons that everything she did was because she was an evil schemer out to deceive him. No, really, I think he honestly believed that she deliberately starved herself for months just so she could look suitably pathetic when she had to ask him for money. The last story “No Room at the Inn” is about a bunch of travelers who get stuck at an inn due to bad weather, including a governess, a rake, an unhappy married couple, and an unmarried couple about to have a baby. Everyone but the pregnant peasants tries to have their own character arc, which would be fine if there were room for even one of them
Basically, a decent read, but Balogh is way better with full length stories.
*There were a couple I wasn’t fond of, but none I actively disliked. Which, given the men that tend to crop up in romance novels, is fairly impressive.
Balogh tends to give her couples a lot of problems to work out, and (in the books I’ve read) builds a lot of the plot around a character growth arc. Unfortunately, she seems to try to cram as many problems and as much of a character arc into these novellas-each about 50 pages of teeny print-with mixed results. Mostly, there’s way too much to try to sort out in the space she has, and with the couple of days each story takes place over.
The first two stories, “A Family Christmas” and “The Star of Bethlehem” are probably the best of the lot, and deal pretty well with the “too many issues to work out” problem by having leads who are already married, and mostly need a chance to communicate. The third, “The Best Gift,” is about a bachelor who asks his niece’s teacher to spend Christmas with them so the niece won’t be lonely, since her parents ran off to somewhere exotic for the holidays. This was a pretty decent one, but way too short, especially once Balogh started inserting Important Social issues. It would have been way better as a full length book. Or at least as a longer novella. “Playing House” has the unique honor of being the first Balogh story I’ve read that I didn’t like, and of having the first hero I disliked*. The story is about neighbors who were in love until they grew apart, and now she’s poor and about to go be a governess and he is Scarred By The Evil First Wife. I can live with that trope when they have a history, instead of his being healed by a pure young thing he pushes around and just met, but he spent most of the time going out of his way to find reasons that everything she did was because she was an evil schemer out to deceive him. No, really, I think he honestly believed that she deliberately starved herself for months just so she could look suitably pathetic when she had to ask him for money. The last story “No Room at the Inn” is about a bunch of travelers who get stuck at an inn due to bad weather, including a governess, a rake, an unhappy married couple, and an unmarried couple about to have a baby. Everyone but the pregnant peasants tries to have their own character arc, which would be fine if there were room for even one of them
Basically, a decent read, but Balogh is way better with full length stories.
*There were a couple I wasn’t fond of, but none I actively disliked. Which, given the men that tend to crop up in romance novels, is fairly impressive.