A beautiful edition, but very much a "lesser" Trollope. Too short, too direct in its plotting. Just a little too thin for me. ( )

I suppose I can say he did a good job with this because I found myself thoroughly annoyed with almost everyone in this shorter work. Michel Voss, bossy and petulant, George, equally petulant and stubborn, and Marie, making pretty much everyone miserable. It's a rather simple little love story, made much more complicated by everyone working at cross purposes to each other.

This also had only three LibriVox readers and all wonderful. I never once squawked out a mispronounced word and there was nothing in the way of badly put on accents. Yippee!

Second cousins by marriage George and Marie grow up together at the inn at Granpere and fall in love, but are separated by George's father Michel (for shadowy never fully explained reasons). George is sent away to run an inn in a town a few hours away and fails to communicate with Marie for an entire year. Thinking she has been forgotten, Marie reluctantly agrees to marry Adrian, a linen merchant from Basle. George finally pulls his finger out and then Marie tries to break off her engagement.

That is really the whole of the plot pf this (fortunately short) novel. Trollope clearly was an early practitioner of the "this could all have been avoided with one frank conversation" romance trope. The character of Michel (apart from Trollope's insistence on his love for Marie being demonstrated in persecution and verbal abuse) was well-done and the ending, where everyone is desperate to get rid of poor Adrian was very funny. George was a bit grumpy to poor Madame Faragon and uncommunicative to every one else. Otherwise repetitive and made me want to shout "Why don't you just say what you think?" at the characters all the time. ( )

This is the last of Trollope's experiments in shorter novels with continental settings, and I'm just as happy. Like the other two (_Nina Balatka_ and _Linda Tressel_), this contains some excellent character studies, but I miss the inclusion of a larger picture of some aspect of society. ( )

everyone in this novel is their own worse enemy, never saying what they want, what they mean, just assuming others think, want understand the same. but maybe that's the way we are. ( )