Tag Archives: Blackshear

A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong by Cecilia Grant

book review February 2, 2015 Leave a comment

I really like Cecilia Grant’s Regency romances, so I snapped up this novella over Christmas. She is a very strong writer and I buy or borrow everything she writes. In particular, she has a facility for changing tone and style according to the story she is telling. In this case, that means a light and droll spirit for a Yuletide sliding awry. A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong is a prequel novella for Grant’s Blackshear Family series. I read the books out of order and would recommend each of them.

Uptight and cautious Andrew Blackshear is traveling at Christmas to buy a gift for his engaged sister. Stopping by a gentleman falconer’s home to purchase a pet, he is taken aback to discover himself overwhelmingly attracted to the delightful daughter of the house, Lucy Sharp. Eager to attend a house party, Lucy overrides Andrew’s stuffy objections to the unseemliness of traveling alone together and they head out, falcon on hand, to drop Lucy off at the event on the way to Andrew’s family holiday. As is the way of things with road trips in romance novels, anything that can go wrong does. Stranded by weather and carriage trouble, Andrew and Lucy find themselves spending more time together and in much closer quarters than they had expected as they rely on the kindness of strangers for accommodations. Lucy uses logic and savvy to quickly and quietly dismantle Andrew’s priggish tendencies. He had unknowingly been on his way to a happier future from the very start.

Each of the siblings in the Blackshear books wrestles with expectations of their own behaviour and the restrictions society has taught them. Theirs is a fractured family and it is only by standing up individually that they are able to come back together. A Christmas Gone Perfectly wrong predates the family scandal which is crucial to the other books in the series and allows another view of their starchy eldest brother. Andrew and Lucy made a lovely pairing and Grant shows, as she does in the other books in the series, how a good match can help people find a balance in their lives. Grant also does very well in creating the historical atmosphere that some of these books take more seriously than others. Her Regency feels real.

The Blackshear Family series:
Book .5 – A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong
Book 1 – A Lady Awakened
Book 2 – A Gentleman Undone
Book 3 – A Woman Entangled  – I write about romance novel sex in this one.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful which includes the aforementioned observations.

A Woman Entangled by Cecilia Grant

book review November 6, 2013 Leave a comment

It’s time to talk about sex in romance novels. Not in a prurient way, but in terms of how it works for the story and how it can enhance, or diminish, the portrayal of the relationship.  The candor begins after the jump, if you want to head straight there.

A Woman Entangled by Cecilia Grant is the third novel in her Blackshear trilogy.  I have read books one, A Lady Awakened, but don’t really remember it, and two, A Gentleman Undone. The second novel ended with a scandal and book three, A Woman Entangled, addresses the aftermath that occurs when your brother marries a courtesan and your own reputation is scathed by association.

The entangled woman of the title, Kate, thinks Elizabeth Bennet was an idiot to turn down Mr. Darcy when he first proposed as Pemberley would have been more than enough to make up for an unhappy marriage. Kate is beautiful and practices being fetching in the mirror in hopes of leveraging her loveliness to make an advantageous marriage. She thinks this will redeem her family from the isolation it endures because her father had the audacity to marry against his parent’s wishes. Family friend and her father’s protegé, Nick Blackshear, has been in love with Kate for three years. He hasn’t the pedigree to please her, and his family has its own recent scandal to contend with, so he has told himself he is over Kate, even as he watches her to see the kind and thoughtful woman she hides beneath her carefully presented surface.

Kate and Nick move towards their happy ending by dealing with their own individual issues. The story is believable, their motivations logical, and I was glad they reached the happy ending. Cecilia Grant is an excellent writer in terms of both style and structure. Unlike the narrative distance run of the mill historical romances often create, a kind of demi-camp reality somewhere between the 19th century and now, Grant anchored her story in appropriate mores and conduct, until…

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