This is going to be a pretty critical review. You should know that most other people really liked this book, and this author:

Other reviews:

Book Smugglers, 8 out of 10

Gossamer Obsessions, high B

TGTBTU, LauraD, B

TGTBTU, Shannon C., A-

TGTBTU, Lawson, B

Amazon.com, 4 stars with 17 reviews

Goodreads, 3.7 out of 5, 117 ratings, 32 reviews

All About Romance, more on my wavelength with a C+

I had heard good things about this historical romance author and decided to read her debut, Compromised (Berkely Sensation, March 2008). Since Compromised, Noble has published Revealed (a RITA finalist this year) and Summer of You (her website with excerpts and purchasing info is here).

It’s 1829 and the Alton sisters return to London with their ambassador father and stepmother after years abroad. They will have their Season, finally, but the family’s hopes are pinned on Evangeline, demure and lovely, rather than Gail, tall, assertive, and bookish. Gail, not interested in gowns, balls or betrothals, rides out one morning and ends up in a lake after a horse crash with Maximillian, Viscount Fontaine. They clash: he’s overbearing, she’s impulsive, and each blames the other for the mishap.

They meet again during the girls’ debut ball, when Max is caught kissing Evangeline in the conservatory. Max is under pressure from his father — with whom he has a very strained relationship — to find a wife within three months or be disinherited. He ends up betrothed to Evangeline … but there’s that prickly sister to deal with.

The author is going, tone-wise, for very light and humorous, kind of Julia Quinn lite. The Alton family dynamics I think were supposed to be reminiscent of Austen’s Bennets (the beautiful, sweet sister, the brash sister, the scheming mother figure, the slightly out of touch but loving father figure), but the portrayal of the parents veered from comical to menacing and back. By the end of the book, the loving father had become stern and implacable, and the untrustworthy stepmother had somehow become the sisters’ ally and friend. This woman, who was obsessed with “good Ton” for the entire book, turns around at the end and says “gossip isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on” when the author needs a deus ex machina to help the girls escape to get married in Scotland.

I found the characterization of the hero wholly uninspired. He was so generic I can’t tell you a thing about him. I felt like the author threw in every cliched hero description and they didn’t gel: sometimes he was “steely”, sometimes he sported a “lopsided grin”, etc.. He wasn’t quite a rake, wasn’t quite troubled, wasn’t quite suave or sexy. He was not very bright, and not able to control his own life at any point in the story. He was just … there, kind of like a ghost of heroes past, leaving a wan impression on me as a reader.

I have become comfortable as a historical romance reader with a certain world I identify as “Regency”. I know it bears little resemblance to the real Regency England, but I have certain genre expectations. Some of these are that the heroine doesn’t call a strange man by his first name, say things like “bullshit”, sneak into the home and enter the bedroom of a man engaged to her sister, grab the reins of a stampeding horse, etc., etc. And a man doesn’t call a lady he has just met “Brat”. I found those things very distracting.

The writing wasn’t to my liking either. Just for fun, I did a Kindle search of the word “obviously”, and I got SEVEN pages of Kindle results. Some characters liked it so much they used it twice in one sentence!

And there are exchanges like this:

[Max:] “what do you mean, you finally received “a really good kiss’?”
Gail rolled her eyes. “I was so hoping you missed that.”

Or this:

[Gail:] “Where do I stand with you, Max? Where the hell do I stand with you?”

Putting aside that neither is the sort of thing I would expect to come out of a Regency heroine’s mouth, I don’t feel that the same person would say both those things. Sometimes, Gail sounded very YA, as in the first quotation, and other times, very contemporary, as in the second. It didn’t work for me.

Compromised just didn’t stand out from the pack for me. There are so many authors I want to read, and so many backlists I have to conquer. Unless a later book by this author gets rave reviews, I think I’ll be moving on.