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I came across this on one of my library-shelf-scanning forays. Since I’m a 25-year Austen & Heyer fan as well as a Christian, I thought “Yowza! Jackpot!” or words to that effect. Now, I know Austen was a genius and Heyer stands alone at the top of the Regency Writers Pyramid, but this still wasn’t quite what I expected. For one thing, it isn’t amusing–at least, the humor is not of the sort one would think to find from someone whose target audience see themselves as possessing “Jane Austen Souls”–since Miss Austen’s genius, as her biographers point out, was primarily a comic genius. (I suppose some of the intended ‘amusing bits’ in this book might just not have clicked with me personally–I suspect the falling-out-of-the-boat scene might have been intended as one, but it just made me want to leave the heroine floundering in the water. regardless of whether or not she could swim.)
I also had problems with the author’s word selection: some of her choices just seemed…strange. For example, there were sentences such as “You both look as fearsome as ghosts”–this was addressed to two people who were agitated and distraught. Fearsome means, most commonly, something that causes fear; less commonly, timid. Neither of these seems to fit the given situation.
Later, the heroine jumps inelegantly into a carriage, and then admits “When I was younger, my mama decried ever teaching me to be a lady.” Decry means to (often verbally) express disapproval of something. Does this mean her mother resisted teaching the heroine to be a lady? This does not seem compatible with what we are told of the poor woman.
There are many more puzzling sentences throughout the book, and usually I was able to attribute them to an attempt to create an historically authentic vocabulary without, perhaps, sufficient familiarity with proper definitions. (Channel for an instant Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.”) There was one word, however, that did not fall into this category, and so was, for me, the most baffling of all: the author’s repeated description of the hero’s eyes as ‘swirling’. I never did figure out what she meant to convey by this. I’m afraid all it conjured up in my mind was something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, when a character is struck on the head and afterward has his eyes rolling around and around while little birds fly in a circle over him. I feel tolerably sure this was not the author’s intention.
So, all in all, a disappointment for this particular reader. I probably would not have persisted till the end, except that I thought Mrs. Burkard deserved an ‘A’ for her effort to fill a genre-gap, if nothing else. Maybe she will inspire others–or maybe, since she has obviously pleased a great number of readers, what she writes is precisely what she intended to write, and I should just go and soak my hyper-critical nit-picky head!

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