I’ll be honest: The only way I got through this book was by assigning myself a minimum daily quota. I’d get home from work, look at the book, groan, pick it up, and get through that daily chapter before setting it aside with relief. It wasn’t bad; it wasn’t anything nearly so interesting as bad. But it was incredibly dull.

What does it come down to? The fact that that everything – plot, characters, setting, writing – is generic and one-dimensional to the hilt. We have a beautiful widow who wants to get away from her stepmother by becoming a chaperone to two American girls, and who falls for their cousin, a rake who has depths hidden by his handsome, charming exterior. They mince around each other, fighting the attraction for various generic reasons, but she resists, so he nobly desists. Then she succumbs, and he gladly plumbs. Somewhere between then and the ending there are several limp subplots, a herd of tepid secondary romances, and the widow and rake live happily forever in a life of saccharine perfection.

I can’t fault Ms. Camp for the clichés. But I can fault her for writing a story so mundane and so average I’ve run out of words to describe it. Oh, the story is rational enough, and the characters communicate well. But they do so in such tedious detail, in such mind-numbing fashion, that any interest on my part quickly dried up. It took me almost three weeks to plod through this book. For someone who can run through books in three days, or sometimes three hours, that’s a really long time.

I’ll give the author this, though: One of the hoariest clichés in the canon rears its very ugly head, but Ms. Camp treats it simply and realistically, and I bought it – more or less. It’s still hackneyed, and it still made me roll my eyes, but the explanation is much less contrived than others I’ve seen. This is the only instance when Ms. Camp’s understated style works in favour of the story, allowing the circumstances to speak for themselves and appeal to the reader’s good sense.

My best guess is that A Gentleman Always Remembers was intended as a Manners & Bonnets ensemble story with very light comic elements, perhaps in the style of Georgette Heyer. Unfortunately, I found the characters boring as hell, the comedy not even faintly humourous, and the prose dully competent. The book was a chore to read, and from the author of some darn good books, that is sad.