Sheila SimonsonRecensioni

This was a winner. I really enjoyed it. The first person narrator is Lady Elizabeth, an enormously talented and dedicated astronomer, who has reached the advanced age of 28 without marrying. She's the eldest of eight girls, and her father, the earl, has just died. His title and property have passed to the son of his black-sheep younger brother. The new earl, Thomas Conway, is a survivor of Waterloo, so severely wounded that he has only a few years to live. Surgeons have been unable to remove all the shrapnel from his body, and there is a piece lodged near his spine that will eventually kill him. You know what's going to happen!

I liked Elizabeth and Thomas very much, and enjoyed Elizabeth's witty narration. Lively, cheerful, funny and not too long. Recommended.

Terrific book.

Lady Elizabeths father Lord Clanross has died leaving the title to a relative.This is not much of a concern to her as she is an independent woman with her own establishment.

She plans on continuing to live her own and life and pursue her passion for astronomy.And of course there are her two wild younger sisters to take care of.

When he finally arrives he is nothing at all what she anticipated,being a very ill man ravaged by the war injuries he suffered in the Peninsular war.

Not realizing this Elizabeth dismisses him as just weakling of a man.

But when he suddenly gets sick she decideds she is the best person to help care for him and they form a friendly relationship.

The heroine was a bit too mature,almost boring for my taste.She was supposed to be 28 years old but could just as easily have been twice that age.I kept waiting for her to do something,anything that would make her a bit more lively.

The hero remained a bit of a mystery throughout the most of the book,since the story is told in first person through the eyes of the heroine. So we dont get his thoughts on thing. Thats not so very common in historical romances nowadays.

I didnt really feel there was much of a romance as the heroine gets engaged about halfway into the book...but not to the hero. But to his best friend.

They do realize they dont suit and break the the engagement

I think the author wanted to write a book along the lines of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. But while there is a lot of visiting and everyday life being described in the book it doesnt really advance the story,instead I felt it bogged it down.

The author also uses a lot of old fashioned words. I swear when I read the sentence "she writ me" I honestly thought it was a typo. It annoyed me.

There is also "heroick" and "connexion" to mention some others.

I give it two stars because altough I didnt care for it,the writing wasnt bad per se and there were no glaring historical inconsistencies.In short it was a bit bland. Not bad,not overly good.

Just ok.

If you want to read a book that also has an independent heroine and reminded me a bit of this one (sans sick hero) I suggest [b:The Country Gentleman|977067|The Country Gentleman|Fiona Hill|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nocover/60x80.png|961963] by [a:Fiona Hill|184214|Fiona Hill|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1255236291p2/184214.jpg]

Another Walker regency novel, well-written with an excellent plot and historical details.

first-rate Regency, part of the Walker hardcover series

Solid, delightful Regency.

Lady Elizabeth loves her telescope. Her fascination with the skies is tolerated but not encouraged by society. She's well on her way to spinsterhood.

Then her father's heir, Tom, shows up. He's ex-military, in poor health.

Their suitability is obvious from the start to everyone but them. After numerous missteps and roundabouts, they finally find their true love.

A sweet tale.

Read this thinking I had read it before but I hadn't. It was a very nice read and Simonson is a great Regency author with too few books to her name. However, ii's not a Keeper for me.

Not really a romance, but well written. Lady Elizabeth's Comet was much better. 3.5/5 stars

After her husband and baby daughter die within days of each other, Emily Foster decides to take in other people's children, both to supplment her income and provide her son with company. The children she settles upon are Amy and Tommy Falk, whose mother has lately died and whose father is a career officer. Colonel Richard Falk is injured and exhausted when he first meets Emily, and they make poor first impressions on each other. However, she likes Amy and Tommy at first sight, and so agrees to take them on. Their acquaintance grows through his letters, filled with imaginative and funny stories, and Emily's letters back about his children. But there's a war on, and Richard's half-brothers seem to be trying to kill him, and so Richard and Emily meet only rarely, often when Richard is desperately ill.

This is a story that takes its time, covering three years of Emily's quiet domestic life and Richard's dangerous one. I enjoyed the length of it, but was annoyed at what seemed to me an uneven plot. The first third is all Emily, and then there are long stretches where she doesn't appear at all, or is mentioned off-handedly, as Ricard tries to survive the lurid melodramas his half-brothers and Napoleon are enacting. In fact, I was a little impatient that so much time was spent on the surrounding characters. We get whole chapters of Richard's friend Tom Conway (hero of [b:Lady Elizabeth's Comet|2908100|Lady Elizabeth's Comet|Sheila Simonson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1257779204s/2908100.jpg|2935256]) or his sister Sarah and her husband. I like Sarah and Robert, but I'd have much rather had a few more conversations between Richard and Emily in place of them. As it was, Richard and Emily only talk in person a few times "on page", with the remainder of their relationship relegated to a summary of afternoons together and correspondence we never see. I didn't get much of a feel for what they knew about each other, or liked about each other.

Still, what I got, I liked. There's a good deal of plot here, although too much of it happens off-page (Richard is repeatedly attacked, but we never see it happen and only hear about his injuries afterward; an odd narrative choice). The dialog is natural, the characters understated but well-drawn. It's nowhere near as good as Simonson's first two books, but those were excellent, and this is just enjoyable.

Very possibly the most enjoyable Regency romance I have read yet. All the usual genre tropes are here: the sensible heroine in her late 20s, her troublesome but amusing family, the strong-willed man who enters her life through uncontrollable circumstances. But Simonson makes her characters breathe and feel as no other regency writer I've read. The story is told in the first person, and we are placed into the mind of a woman in the nineteenth century--a very intelligent and educated mind, but one nevertheless of her period, with the period's prejudices. It is painful to realize that even Lady Elizabeth, who has spent her twenties peering through a telescope rather than marrying, has ingested the poisonous idea that an intellectual woman is unnatural. She is unusual to the modern reader in other ways: she has little interest in her younger siblings, and in fact doesn't know them well or provide for their education, despite their dependence upon her. The usual cliche of a hero realizing his love for a heroine by watching her tender care toward children or the sick doesn't hold true here. And to readers used to Heyer's sexless maidens, Lady Elizabeth's thoughts are quite inappropriate--though not passionate, she has an eye for handsome men.

I was surprised to find such character development, emotional depth, and complex interpersonal relationships. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has liked Austen, Heyer, or any of the many regency writers--so long as they're not hoping for a paint-by-numbers story.

Julian Stretton was shipped off to live with his grandparents at a very young age. Years later, while recovering from being badly wounded at Waterloo, he recieves word that his father and older brother have died within weeks of each other. He is now Lord Meriden. He has seven younger siblings to take care of, and a histrionic step-mother to deal with tactfully. Luckily, he also has the assistance of the children's cousin, Jane Ash.

There isn't much of a plot to this story; it is entirely about the characters and their interactions with each other. But we get rather more nuanced moments than in Heyer, for instance. Heyer mastered all the details of the Regency, but somehow her Society always seemed like a role-playing game, with specific slots for each person. The step-mother is classic--always retiring to her rooms and using her tears as weapons. But then, while talking about her manipulative hypochondria, Jane says, "Five stillbirths" and Julian, about to say something cutting, stills. Or Will, who nurses Julian back to health but gets stiff and angry when Julian becoms a lord. Not everything is as cut and dried as in Heyer. Class is not the determiner of character--the lower class doesn't have country wisdom; the upper class isn't naturally prettier and smarter. Simonson is clearly aware of some of the darker aspects of the Regency period--she understands where the money comes from, for instance.

The characters are wonderfully drawn, and their relationships are no less engaging. Julian is kind and empathic with his new-found family, and most of the plot is about his rehabilitation of them. But when thinking about why she fell in love with him, Jane realizes it was not his kind actions or way with children--it was his sharp tongue and sarcastic quotations. What a terrible person I am! she thinks, yet the reader utterly understands. His proposal is one of my favorites--the scene is so perfectly described.

Now that I've read one of her regencys, I absolutely must track down Simonson's others.

Romance series generally follow a pattern: each book follows a sibling or friend of the previous book, and marries them off in turn. Couples from earlier novels generally have walk-on parts, spending just long enough on-page to let the reader know that they are deliriously happy and have plenty of babies.

This is not that kind of series.

The Clanrosses from [b:Lady Elizabeth's Comet|2908100|Lady Elizabeth's Comet (Clanross, #1)|Sheila Simonson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1257779204s/2908100.jpg|2935256] and the Falks from [b:The Bar Sinister|2616896|The Bar Sinister (Clanross, Prequel)|Sheila Simonson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1261150964s/2616896.jpg|2641551] are back, and they make up the majority of the novel. Elizabeth's younger half-sisters' romances and intrigues provide the driving force of the plot, but the older, already married characters are the ones I (and I think the author) was most interested in. They have so much left to negotiate and figure out, for themselves and as a couple, and watching them work through it was really fascinating. And I really enjoyed the way history is portrayed in these books--there is real danger from the poor people, who have real grievances, and the censorship of the written word actually seems very threatening here. That said, there isn't really a narrative arc in this book--no build up and then a climax, I mean--and so although my affection for the characters kept me interested, the events themselves are rapidly fading from my memory.

The ending was too abrupt.

I'm a big Sheila Simonson far, both her regencies and her mysteries. This regency just didn't measure up to her other Regencies. I think the book was just too short. There was not enough detail about how how Jean and Sandy fell in love and not enough detail about how their mismatched stations would affect their lives going forward. I think the latter was the most dissatisfying. Even though her family were happy with the match, the book just ends abruptly when I think it got to the most interesting part -- how would they make it work. Just reread the book again and I would not change this critique at all.½

I thought that if I was able to get into any romance novel, it would be this one, with its antisocial weirdo astronomer heroine in Regency England. In the end I thought it was okay, but kind of flimsy and cheesy. This may say more about my feeling about romance novels than about this particular book. But I was really hoping this would be smarter.

A widow with a young son to raise, Emily Foster was determined to maintain some independence in the face of her well-meaning but rather controlling father, Sir Henry Mayne. When Captain Richard Falk, himself a widower with two children, responds to her advertisement offering to care for young children, she overcomes her distaste at his brusque manner. After all, not only will the added income be most welcome, but young Emilia (Amy) and infant Tommy will make the ideal companions for her own son, Matt.

As Capt. Falk heads back to the Peninsular Wars, Emily settles into a new routine, gradually coming to love her charges and - through the letters they exchange - their father. But a surprise visit from Lady Sarah Ffoulke-Wilson reveals that Richard is the illegitimate son of the dowager Duchess of Newsham, and Emily is soon caught up in the current Duke of Newsham's nefarious plots against his half-brother, and his children...

Although I enjoyed the reappearance of characters like Thomas Conway and Lord Bevis, first seen in Simonson's Lady Elizabeth's Comet, I found that overall I wasn't that impressed by The Bar Sinister. A number of characters felt rather like types - the bastard son of nobility, the diabolical duke, and so on - while some of the plot developments were improbable. I understand that Simonson had to find a way to bring the hero and heroine together, but I just wasn't convinced that a woman as comfortably situated as Emily, would need to take in other children. I was also disappointed that there was so little interaction between Emily and Richard, who spends most of the novel off at war, and wasn't really convinced by the romantic conclusion, which feels like nothing so much as a tacked on afterthought.

I'll probably still read Simonson's fourth and final Regency, Love and Folly - which completes the three-book story arc begun in Lady Elizabeth's Comet and continued here - but I have to say that this one was a disappointment.

Absorbed in tracking the "dark nebulosity" she had discovered in the course of her astronomical work, Lady Elizabeth Conway - the independent eldest daughter of the Earl of Conway, still unmarried at twenty-eight - finds her quiet routine interrupted by the arrival of a distant and unknown cousin, the heir to her father's title and estates. Although she does not immediately take to Clanross, whose stiff manner, and criticism of the education she is providing her two young half-sisters, sets her on edge, Lady Elizabeth soon comes to appreciate the better qualities of this most unexpected relative. Unlike the charming Lord Bevis - her erstwhile suitor, who arrives on the scene determined to resume their courtship - Clanross respects and admires Lady Elizabeth's work. Will she see where her heart lies in time, or will she surrender both vocation and true love...?

Or course there's never much doubt of the outcome in Lady Elizabeth's Comet, as any reader of Regency fiction will immediately recognize, but it is still entertaining to witness the heroine's gradual awakening. The second of Sheila Simonson's four Regencies, following upon A Cousinly Connexion, it is written in the first person, an unusual approach that both limits and strengthens the story. It takes a while to warm up to Lady Elizabeth, who is a much more self-contained character than the usual female lead in a romance such as this, so the first-person narrative is helpful, in forcing the reader to identify with her perspective. But it also make Clanross more of a mystery, as he would have been to Lady Elizabeth, and prevents the reader from really knowing him.

I liked that Lady Elizabeth's vocation as an astronomer was an integral part of her character, rather than being an affectation meant (on the author's part) to make her unusual, and I also liked Clanross's political and social views. These may have sometimes felt a little too ideal - Clanross values intelligence in women, and wants Elizabeth to continue her work, he speaks up for Irish rights in the House of Lords, and so on - but were nevertheless appealing. All in all, an engaging Regency romance, one well worth the time of fans of the genre!

When her Aunt Louisa is unexpectedly widowed, and left in charge of a family of young children, Jane Ash soon finds herself in West Dorset, all but running Meriden Place. As the months pass, she and her Stretton cousins begin to wonder when the new Lord Meriden will arrive. How will he behave to the stepmother who sent him away to be raised by his maternal grandparents, or the step-siblings he barely knows?

Julian Stretton, in the meantime, finds his recovery from wounds received during the battle of Waterloo interrupted by the unexpected news of his elevation, following the deaths of his father and older brother. Unprepared for the duties of a managing a large estate, or the challenges of heading a large family, the new Lord Meriden must navigate some tricky waters upon his homecoming. Luckily, the capable Jane is there to assist him. But for how long...?

Having exhausted all of Georgette Heyer's romantic fiction, I have been looking around lately for a worthy successor - an author of light-hearted, reasonably well-written, and intelligent regency novels. It's a pity that Sheila Simonson only wrote four books in this vein, as I enjoyed A Cousinly Connexion immensely (despite the overly pink cover!), and think her work might be just the sort of thing I've been wanting. With an engaging narrative, appealing characters, and a good grasp of the social milieu in which she is setting her story, Simonson does an excellent job here. I'm looking forward to her next, Lady Elizabeth's Comet!

Okay, its official, Sheila Simonson has to start writing faster! This is the second book in the Latoche County Mystery series and I want more.

Meg and Rob are still circling around each other while doing their jobs, Meg as librarian and Rob as investigator for the sheriff's office.

There are lots of things going on in this one, landslides that take out entire housing divisions, county commission goings-on and a long lost cousin of Rob's who shows up to create some interpersonal conflicts.

I love the way she treats the Native culture and the local politics ring true throughout the story.

Write faster Sheila!

I enjoyed this series. There were a couple slow spots but all in all it was a good read. I was slightly disappointed that the librarian main character never went to the library, I hope that changes in the next book in the series as she actually should start work. This book was her "move to the area and get settled" story. I also love the cop, he's not super gorgeous, not super smart, and not, thus, a stereotype. He's a competent cop with a good sense of his job and thus good at it - a nice change of pace. Oh, and the mystery was fun too - I didn't see the solution coming until late in the story. I'll be looking for the next in the series.

The heroine is an astronomer. Written in the first person.

One of the few romances I saved from a Regency Romance frenzy in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This one is has an improbably intellectual heroine, but is charmingly written, has endearing characters, and is emotionally believable.

I got lost immediately in this delightful story by Vancouver, USA, author, Sheila Simonson.

The action, and there's plenty, takes place in a fictional town and county on the Washington side of the the Columbia River Gorge. Any one familiar with the region will get a big kick out of how well the author renders the people, the politics, and the landscape of a small town confronting big issues.

Readers from beyond the Pacific Northwest will enjoy the well crafted story as newly arrived librarian Meg McLean gets cast into motion after finding something unpleasant hidden in the garage of the old home she purchased.

The ancient landscapes and spirits of the Columbia River Gorge come alive as developers, environmentalists, Native Americans, honest cops and corrupt politicians collide, collude, and confront an increasingly tense, tangled, and intriguing series of crimes.

Simonson has a great eye for detail, a fine ear for dialogue, and a wonderful sense of pacing. The characters are diverse and believable, and the author writes with a light but firm touch that engages the reader's imagination.

Good

A pleasant read, with back story on Tom Conway, and nice interactions between the principal characters.