Eleanor Meyers, $0.00, ISBN 978-1393812517
Historical Romance, 2020
Well, of course it’s a lord of London. We can’t expect a romance heroine to get shackled to, say, a lord of Fordwich, surely! That just won’t do. Romance is lovely, but size matters too.
So, Eleanor Meyers’s To Love a Lord of London. It’s the first entry in a series called Wardington Park, and it’s free. Normally, I won’t review free stuff as generous and giving authors probably don’t deserve the skewer, but this one does have a very lovely cover and I can’t resist picking it up as a result. It’s a good thing, therefore, that is one is actually readable.
Also, this one turns out to be three stories in one volume, but instead of being an anthology despite being structured like one, it is marketed as one single story. People that look at the table of contents may wonder why there are three epilogues in this thing, placed at various intervals between chapters. Well, this is the reason why.
The first story is Amy Ott’s.
Amy accompanies her cousin Christa to Anglebrook Manor, with Christa hoping to get the wealthy heir of everything nice in the place, Joseph, to put a ring on her finger. Amy isn’t her entirely by choice, as her cousin is a basic mean girl that wastes little time getting into petty quarrels with Joseph’s sisters.
Naturally, those two gals and our heroine end up bonding.
Also visiting is the Duke of Wardington.
No one had told her anything, but she’d heard stories about the Duke of Wardington . . . and his three sons, the Dawntons. Rouges, all of them. Being from the less fortunate part of London, Amy heard better gossip than what was printed in the papers that the upper-class read. She knew people from gaming halls, taverns, and the like. She knew people—women, who told elaborate, and dare she say, risqué, stories about the Dawnton brothers.
Fortunately, the middle son, Nathaniel doesn’t seem bad at all. Maybe the stories of him being “the worst rake in London” are exaggerations, or he just does really naughty things with women of ill repute and save the polite rogering for women of quality. Who knows, with these people.
After all, the author says this:
Nathaniel, who’d been dubbed the London Lover by the society papers, had been known to have dalliances with women all over the city with whispers of some affairs stretching as far as the countryside.
When she instead presents me a bloke that acts like he’s auditioning for that Bridgerton show, I can only wonder whether a UFO kidnapped him as he was on his way to the party and replaced him with a much more agreeable clone.
Amy and Nathaniel bond over their shared love of Jane Austen’s works, and our heroine soon wonders whether she’s make the cut as his girlfriend.
There’s no dramatic development here like murder or smugglers gone wild, just a lot of conversations about Jane Austen and ballroom soap opera until the predictable proposal from Nathaniel. This one’s alright, but I won’t call it memorable. It’s more of a pleasant interlude.
The next story is about Catherine Croftman, one of the sisters mentioned above.
She’s now in her third season, and as expected, her outspoken nature is the reason why most guys are scared of marrying her. Weird, as I’d think that her parents being super wealthy would convince a few of those blokes to overlook that. Maybe there are many, many heiresses flooding London or something.
Catherine isn’t too unhappy about her status, as she has been secretly seeing Andrew, the Marquess of Clariant and another one of the duke’s sons, on and off. Oh, not for sexy times, as that is something only heroes are allowed to do with impunity—they are close friends from childhood.
Only, she expects him to marry her when she turns 25, because he made a vow to do so when they were kids. Now that she’s about to turn 25, she insists that he must—he must!—as she’s been holding out for him for so long.
Andrew refuses to marry her despite having the hots for her, because once, she hurt him with her words and now he knows that women can’t be trusted, they are all lying hos, et cetera.
Everyone around him tells him to just marry that girl, but no, he will not, he will never, he will definitely not, et cetera, and then he does.
Naturally, he comes off like a ten year-old brat that is mad that the girl he likes had said things that hurt him once upon a time. I’m not sure any relationship of his can last long given how petty and simple-minded he is. Then again, Catherine also comes off as tad not-quite-there upstairs for holding on to a boy’s vow that was made when he was, well, a boy—especially when the little boy in question still seems to think like one despite being supposedly grown up now.
The whole silly drama is resolved by a contrived machination on the duke’s part to inflame Andrew’s jealousy, which doesn’t assure me one bit that these two are mature enough to have a long-lasting, happy relationship.
Finally, let’s meet William Lawson, the Earl of Cartridge. He’s the remaining unwed son of the duke, and he’s also played a part in getting Andrew and Catherine together.
To celebrate his success in plunging two immature people into an undoubtedly dysfunctional marriage, he decides to head off to an abandoned wing to… wait, what does he intend to do again? I reread the scene in question a few times, it looks like he just wants to rejoin the party guests but refuses to take his father’s advice to avoid the west hall. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the west hall is closer?
At any rate, he enters the unlit room and is brained by Jane Croftman, the sister of the heroine of the previous story, with a candle holder for his refusal to listen to his father.
Jane spends the following week certain that she has to flee to Australia or something, or she’d hang.
Because that would be the penalty of what she’d done. She had killed an earl. Well, she wasn’t sure if he was dead or not, but even if he wasn’t, she’d still hang. She hadn’t meant for anyone to catch her. Not now. Not when she was so close to her goal.
And yet, she should have known this life she led wouldn’t last. If she was lucky, maybe they’d simply send her to Australia to serve out her sentence . . . where she truly would die . . . if she didn’t die on the boat there. Being shipped away would be better than forcing her mother to watch her hang in public. Jane couldn’t bear the thought.
The note sat on her dresser.
I know.
You see, Jane is a thief and she was trying to steal the candle holder when William interrupted her. I’m supposed to believe that this high-strung twit that can’t seem to string two halfway-reasonable thoughts together is somehow capable of doing this, but hey, I can play along.
Due to some nonsensical reasoning that is clearly just an contrivance for the author to push Jane and William together, Andrew forces Jane to paint William or something on a regular basis, and soon he wants to marry her because he’s hot for her, but he knows that love is fake and he must never marry any woman that he has the hots for and…
Okay, I quit. I can’t play along anymore. I stop reading at that point, because while the first story may be mundane and not-so-happening, I find myself missing the meh factor as the next two stories become increasingly nonsensical and the main characters more and more addled.
Eleanor Meyers is an author new to me. If I were to make a judgment based on this work alone, I’d say her style is alright, but things really unravel fast the moment she tries to add more “plot”. “Plot” in this instance translates to imbeciles doing their best to make their lives as hard as possible, by making nonsensical snap judgments and hasty, immature decisions.
Normally I’d say more substance is better for a story, but if all these things were to be considered substance, then let’s just stick to fluff.
