Hello everyone!
The title's about something else.
I have this lovely subscription with Bookbub where they send me an email every night with links to books that are either extremely cheap or free, so when I stumble on a good one I usually snap it up.
It's a really good thing to rely on if you read as much as I do!
I was browsing the selection in my email a week or so ago and stumbled across this one book that piqued my interest because, if done right, a May-December romance is definitely something to read about.
This one could be called a slight exception to the rule, but I did like the author's writing style, so let's dive right into December Heart, shall we?
Written by Merry Farmer, who, as I've since discovered, has a BUNCH of books out and The Silver Foxes of Westminster is actually preceeded by TWO DIFFERENT SERIES. So yeah, I have my work cut out for me if I want to catch up.
But anyway.
The series I started and the book I'll be writing about tonight is all about an older man and a younger woman, aka a man old enough to be her father.
For those of you who can't stomach that kind of thing, you should probably stop reading this review here then, and not pick up this particular series, as that's the general premise of it: what happens when younger women and older men meet, marry, and fall in love? Not necessarily in that order.
Anyway, for this one, we meet Mariah Travers who has a failed engagement behind her where her fiancé has unfortunately died, but equally he was a bit of an idiot and he ran off with a milkmaid while still engaged to her. Yeah, talk about manners. THIS GUY HAD NONE.
Anyway, she's pretty much off the marriage market at the point the story begins, while her sister Victoria is ... just starting out and showing everyone that she's an idiot.
I can see a trend developing.
This sort of continues when the girls' father announces he found a husband for his eldest daughter - a member of the House of Lords, Lord Peter, a friend of his.
Of course dad kind of forgot to tell his daughter she's getting married at the end of the week.
I'd murder him in his sleep, but hey, that's me.
So Peter arrives, in all his white-haired glory, and Victoria shows every reader just what it is to be an ILL-MANNERED young lady in the 19th century. The remarks she drops much too loudly would have scandalized the house cat if they had one, but somehow nobody actually corrects her or tells her to get the heck out of the room if she can't say anything nice.
Back to Mariah, she's still in a state of shock, but upon speaking privately with Peter (away from her ridiculous family) they come to an understanding and agree to wed.
After which there's a bit of a disaster at Peter's Cornish estate, where one of his copper mines has stopped producing (can someone call Captain Poldark? Oh wait, he'd probably be about a hundred at this point in time ... still, he'd give the lot of them a good kick in the rear and got them going!). This means the newlyweds have to hustle to the location, and at this point we're introduced to the other major character in the book.
See, Peter was married before, for about two decades, but unfortunately his wife could never concieve and each miscarriage weakened her, until she died. At that point, childless, his heir was his nephew, William, the son of his younger brother who somehow wriggled out a promise from Peter that he would always care and provide for William. In the case of booting him out on his own, William actually inherits half the estate.
And since William is basically what you'd call an irreversible reprobate, well, that's a problem.
What's also a problem is that he has major debts to pay off, and creditors are now starting to bark at his doorstep because of his uncle's remarriage and potential of siring an heir this time.
At which point we get to see the dysfunctional family dynamic in which Peter can't even stand up for Mariah by cuffing the younger man around his ears or sending him to do stable duty for a time. William is basically horrible to the poor girl, telling her he was here first and she should respect that, yada, yada, yada.
How did nobody remember to tell him he really has NO SAY in whether or not his uncle marries and has children of his own? Like, seriously dude, if you'd been nice, you might have gotten more out of the bargain.
But William is the type of character who just doesn't get a character arc that would lead to redemption. In an effort to somehow make things right, Peter hosts a house party and invites several of his friends over to try and control William, but he also invites Mariah's sister, banking on her parents tagging along.
I could have told him this wouldn't work even WITH the parents.
After a poisoned soup and Mariah on the verge of hysterics (also, side note, girl, you don't need to turn into a banshee a week into your marriage, there are ways to talk things through WITHOUT screaming), Peter's spy friend Malcolm manages to discover one of the footmen who's in William's employ and sabotaging things left, right and center.
William also gets a bit of a trashing from said Malcolm and a lesson LONG in the making. My own foot was itching for an ass kicking!
Of course it's too little, too late, especially with Mariah already pregnant - William charms the socks right off Victoria and kidnaps her under false pretenses of marrying her, and she, being the idiot that she is and too smart to listen to her elders (or betters) tags right along with that!
William's desperate, of course, because he has to pay off an outrageous sum of money or die, but he's twisted the deal so that the creditors kill PETER instead of him. And if you've ever read any Agatha Christie novel you'll know from what Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple both lecture: a murdered striking once will inevitably strike again. Mariah wouldn't have been far behind her husband.
As it happens, the creditors and William all die instead, and then Mariah can go on trying to heal her poor husband's battered heart, since she also learned that, while he was keen on following doctor's orders to make sure his previous wife lived, SHE wasn't, and found ways into her bed until the day she died. There's speculation she might have preferred to die trying rather than live without the child she was obsessed with having, but that's conjecture.
In any event, nine months later, after Peter, Mariah and Victoria have all healed a bit, a healthy baby boy is born and Peter FINALLY has a son and heir!
And will probably have a whole flock of kids around him eventually.
FIN.
This was an up and down for me; on the one hand, some of the characters were just so eyeroll inducing that I kept wondering why I bothered. But on the other, there was something about Peter that just pulled me further in. He was probably the most developed of the characters, with flaws, great attributes, and a deep hunger for being loved that even I could see oozing off the pages. He was pretty much the only spark that really kept me going, and the writing style, which was quite nice to read.
And I mean, there's something about this plotline that just gets to me, so I'll probably be reading more books from this series - and more from Ms Farmer as well!
After all, I'm much too intrigued. And I can sniff at some of the things, but I'm still going to read, aren't I?
Which is basically the whole point.
xx
*image not mine
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