The Fairytale Trilogy, Lynn Collum
I'm fairly sure this trilogy has an official name, but I don't remember it, so we're just gonna call it "The Fairytale Trilogy."
These three books, by Lynn Collum, are Zebra Regency romances, which, if you're not fortunate enough to be familiar with them, are these little bite-sized Regency romances that you can generally read in one gulp and which are generally very entertaining but don't hold up well under scrutiny or rereading. These three actually withstand the test of time somewhat (I'll go into this later), I think at least partly because they are unashamed fairy tale retellings and also because they are good. The trilogy follows three friends from boarding school as they meet the loves of their lives and manage their way through fairy-tale plots to arrive at their happy endings.
Miss Whiting and the Seven Wards is easily my favorite of the three. It follows Miss Sara Whiting (Snow White) as she heads home from her disbanding school to meet her stepmother, Lady Lucinda. Shortly thereafter Sara discovers she has inherited a rather large sum of money, and her stepmother decides to get rid of her in order to inherit said money. Unfortunately for Lady Lucinda, her manservant just dumps Sara in the river and calls it a job well done, so when Sara washes up very much not dead at the cottage of the seven Ward brothers, Lucinda's plot is derailed. It turns out that the boys have troubles of their own: their mother, whose name the cottage is in, has died, and the earl is trying to evict them. It turns out Sara looks very much like their mother, enough to fool the earl and his friend, Sir Evan Beaumont, who turns up to investigate.
And you know what, Lady Lucinda is cackling and unrealistic, but she's a lot of fun. The plot is pretty contrived, but a lot of it comes out of the head of a twelve-year-old boy so I'll cut it some slack. The romance is genuinely sweet and adorable, and so are our heroine and her hero. It's a silly book but it's a dear one, and one I come back to over and over again.
The second book of the trilogy, A Kiss at Midnight, is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. Lady Rosamund Dennison (Lady Rose to her friends) returns home to find that her father has promised her to an ugly old earl in exchange for... money? It's somewhat unclear. Anyway, Rose goes riding in a fit of anger and falls off her horse, which knocks her out for a few hours. When she wakes up, she decides-- somewhat inexplicably-- to pretend to still be in a coma. Meanwhile, Our Hero Garth Fenton is undercover as a butler in the Dennison house. He's really a viscount looking for an old family heirloom that his father suspects Lady Rose's brother has stolen. He figures out that Rose is faking her coma and the two of them go in together to try and find the heirloom and get Rose out of the house. HEA.
This one I like less because it's really implausible. Which is weird, because it's really no more implausible than Miss Whiting and the Seven Wards (and maybe less so), but maybe it just feels more implausible because I don't understand the reasons behind Rose's decision or the need for Garth to fake being a butler. I mean, they're explained, they just... don't make sufficient sense to me. Also, Rose seems very impulsive and not good at thinking of others, and Garth's character is very weird to me, I don't know. They're definitely not as fun for me as Sara and Evan from the first book. This is narrowly my least favorite book of the trilogy.
Then there's When the Slipper Fits. Obviously a Cinderella retelling, this follows Miss Luella Sanderson home to her... aunt? I think? I was never clear on the relation. Anyway, this being a Cinderella retelling, she's treated like a servant and sent to work for her aunt's brother, Addison Banks, who lives in a nearby cottage and is a balloon scientist (!!!!). Ella and Addison bond almost immediately, and he starts to treat her like a daughter. Meanwhile, Gabriel Crowe, Earl of Shalford, has to find a wife by the end of the month for implausible reasons, and the Cinderella plot is on.
This book edges out A Kiss at Midnight because of Addison Banks, who is AMAZING. Seriously, he's wonderful, I love everything he does. I also really like Ella and her relationship with Addison; the pair have a very close bond and treat each other very much as father and daughter. Unfortunately, Our Hero is not nearly as interesting. Shalford is a cardboard cutout with very little about him that interests me, apart from his affection for his brother and sister. To be honest, I thought his brother was a much more appealing character, despite having much less pagetime and no POV. But Shalford is irritating, and I was hoping that Ella's aunt would get some comeuppance (she did not), and Shalford's father's about-face at the end of the book was abrupt and not at all believable. Alas. But there is Addison and Ella, and they make the book for me.
In summary, I do love these books dearly. They're flawed, and silly, and implausible, but I love them and always will.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/354308.html. Please comment over there if possible.
These three books, by Lynn Collum, are Zebra Regency romances, which, if you're not fortunate enough to be familiar with them, are these little bite-sized Regency romances that you can generally read in one gulp and which are generally very entertaining but don't hold up well under scrutiny or rereading. These three actually withstand the test of time somewhat (I'll go into this later), I think at least partly because they are unashamed fairy tale retellings and also because they are good. The trilogy follows three friends from boarding school as they meet the loves of their lives and manage their way through fairy-tale plots to arrive at their happy endings.
Miss Whiting and the Seven Wards is easily my favorite of the three. It follows Miss Sara Whiting (Snow White) as she heads home from her disbanding school to meet her stepmother, Lady Lucinda. Shortly thereafter Sara discovers she has inherited a rather large sum of money, and her stepmother decides to get rid of her in order to inherit said money. Unfortunately for Lady Lucinda, her manservant just dumps Sara in the river and calls it a job well done, so when Sara washes up very much not dead at the cottage of the seven Ward brothers, Lucinda's plot is derailed. It turns out that the boys have troubles of their own: their mother, whose name the cottage is in, has died, and the earl is trying to evict them. It turns out Sara looks very much like their mother, enough to fool the earl and his friend, Sir Evan Beaumont, who turns up to investigate.
And you know what, Lady Lucinda is cackling and unrealistic, but she's a lot of fun. The plot is pretty contrived, but a lot of it comes out of the head of a twelve-year-old boy so I'll cut it some slack. The romance is genuinely sweet and adorable, and so are our heroine and her hero. It's a silly book but it's a dear one, and one I come back to over and over again.
The second book of the trilogy, A Kiss at Midnight, is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. Lady Rosamund Dennison (Lady Rose to her friends) returns home to find that her father has promised her to an ugly old earl in exchange for... money? It's somewhat unclear. Anyway, Rose goes riding in a fit of anger and falls off her horse, which knocks her out for a few hours. When she wakes up, she decides-- somewhat inexplicably-- to pretend to still be in a coma. Meanwhile, Our Hero Garth Fenton is undercover as a butler in the Dennison house. He's really a viscount looking for an old family heirloom that his father suspects Lady Rose's brother has stolen. He figures out that Rose is faking her coma and the two of them go in together to try and find the heirloom and get Rose out of the house. HEA.
This one I like less because it's really implausible. Which is weird, because it's really no more implausible than Miss Whiting and the Seven Wards (and maybe less so), but maybe it just feels more implausible because I don't understand the reasons behind Rose's decision or the need for Garth to fake being a butler. I mean, they're explained, they just... don't make sufficient sense to me. Also, Rose seems very impulsive and not good at thinking of others, and Garth's character is very weird to me, I don't know. They're definitely not as fun for me as Sara and Evan from the first book. This is narrowly my least favorite book of the trilogy.
Then there's When the Slipper Fits. Obviously a Cinderella retelling, this follows Miss Luella Sanderson home to her... aunt? I think? I was never clear on the relation. Anyway, this being a Cinderella retelling, she's treated like a servant and sent to work for her aunt's brother, Addison Banks, who lives in a nearby cottage and is a balloon scientist (!!!!). Ella and Addison bond almost immediately, and he starts to treat her like a daughter. Meanwhile, Gabriel Crowe, Earl of Shalford, has to find a wife by the end of the month for implausible reasons, and the Cinderella plot is on.
This book edges out A Kiss at Midnight because of Addison Banks, who is AMAZING. Seriously, he's wonderful, I love everything he does. I also really like Ella and her relationship with Addison; the pair have a very close bond and treat each other very much as father and daughter. Unfortunately, Our Hero is not nearly as interesting. Shalford is a cardboard cutout with very little about him that interests me, apart from his affection for his brother and sister. To be honest, I thought his brother was a much more appealing character, despite having much less pagetime and no POV. But Shalford is irritating, and I was hoping that Ella's aunt would get some comeuppance (she did not), and Shalford's father's about-face at the end of the book was abrupt and not at all believable. Alas. But there is Addison and Ella, and they make the book for me.
In summary, I do love these books dearly. They're flawed, and silly, and implausible, but I love them and always will.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/354308.html. Please comment over there if possible.