meganbmoore (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
meganbmoore) wrote2009-05-26 01:34 pm
meganbmoore) wrote2009-05-26 01:34 pm
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A Summer to Remember by Mary Balogh
After being abandoned literally at the altar, Lauren Edgeworth decided that marriage was Not For Her. Not that she really thought it was for any reasons but family obligation to start with. When Kit Butler’s brother Jerome died, he not only inherited his place as family heir, but also Jerome’s fiancé, Freyja, who threw Kit over for Jerome several years earlier. To escape the marriage his parents have arranged, Kit decides to go home with a fiancée, and his friends bet him that he could never convince Lauren, the controlled Ice Queen of society, to marry him.
All the fiancée dumping reminds me of several Jo Beverley books where several of the heroes were courting or betrothed to this one perfectly nice woman, only to eventually dump her for their heroines. By the time her book came around, I was almost ready to like it and whoever she ended up with on principle. I’m also really not fond of the “courting on a bet” trope, but that is thankfully done away with quickly, and instead Lauren agrees to pretend to be Kit’s fiancée if he’ll let her have adventures that she can’t have as a controlled and proper lady.
I like Lauren because I like icy and obsessively proper and controlled heroines, and I like how her propriety comes from her being determined to be properly thankful to her stepfather’s family, who raised her after her mother and stepfather abandoned her. Kit took me a while to warm up to, both because of the betting thing and because he’s something of a combination between a typical angsty hero home from war and a typical playboy hero.
They both have a lot of angst (and the root of Kit’s angst is more interesting than it originally seems), but the story itself isn’t overly angsty, which is a good combination. The book is a prequel to Balogh’s long-running series about Freyja’s family, the Bedwyns, but is also apparently a sequel to One Night For Love, which I have but have not read, as I didn’t know it came first.
All the fiancée dumping reminds me of several Jo Beverley books where several of the heroes were courting or betrothed to this one perfectly nice woman, only to eventually dump her for their heroines. By the time her book came around, I was almost ready to like it and whoever she ended up with on principle. I’m also really not fond of the “courting on a bet” trope, but that is thankfully done away with quickly, and instead Lauren agrees to pretend to be Kit’s fiancée if he’ll let her have adventures that she can’t have as a controlled and proper lady.
I like Lauren because I like icy and obsessively proper and controlled heroines, and I like how her propriety comes from her being determined to be properly thankful to her stepfather’s family, who raised her after her mother and stepfather abandoned her. Kit took me a while to warm up to, both because of the betting thing and because he’s something of a combination between a typical angsty hero home from war and a typical playboy hero.
They both have a lot of angst (and the root of Kit’s angst is more interesting than it originally seems), but the story itself isn’t overly angsty, which is a good combination. The book is a prequel to Balogh’s long-running series about Freyja’s family, the Bedwyns, but is also apparently a sequel to One Night For Love, which I have but have not read, as I didn’t know it came first.