AAR

[Schola]

+IHS+

I tried rereading this book and found it just as much of a DNF as it was when I first picked it up. That is, I finished it, but I skimmed over most of the parts where they were attempting to solve the mystery. Try as I might, I simply could not follow what was going on. So I instead focussed on the stories of the hero and heroine, and the heroine's family.

To anyone else who has read it: What do you think of Clarice's brothers?

They were a huge point against the novel when I first read it. They seemed awfully spineless and unimaginative to have let their stepmother bully them into submission for eight years--much more so, if you consider that they needed their younger sister to come home and show them how to, uh, "grow a pair" before they stood up for themselves.
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"To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance." (G.K. Chesterton)

[KayWebbHarrison]

I thought that Clarice was their older sister. Also, didn't their autocratic father raise them to be the way they were, and wasn't he still alive when Clarice first left home? I also think that the stepmother was more or less blackmailing the brothers with threats of revealing their "scandalous" youthful exploits to their prospective brides and their families.

As to the mystery, Clarice and Jack go to London to clear her cousin and his friend, the Vicar (who was more interested in military history than ecclesiastical) of charges of treason, instigated by the mysterious English gentleman, who spied for the French during the Napoleonic Wars. This character has been in the background since the first Bastion book.

I enjoyed the mystery and family elements in this book, the romance not so much; there was very little tension between Jack and Clarice. I liked Clarice, who reminded me of Devil's Honoria.

Hope this helps.

Kay

[Schola]