How I Met My Countess [Large Print] [Paperback]

 

 

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It should not surprise romance afficionados that a book by Ms Boyle is a good romance, she has delivered in the past and delivers in this one.

The story is about Lucy Ellison, the improper daughter of a former spy and the Earl of Clifton (Gilby to his friends). They meet when Gilby and Marcus (his half brother) are sent to Lucy's father to be trained in the arts of espionage. Lucy helps with the training of the men and while Lucy and Gilby share some animosity at first, they end up making promises to one another.

But those promises do not come true, and when they meet next, Lucy is no longer the young outcast girl she was, and Gilby isn't the earnest young man either. And the suspense of the book articulates itself over how these two find their way to each other again.

First off, the book is well plotted. Boyle inverted events so that the past the two characters share is revealed after their chance meeting years later. It is not the most original narrative, but it is used so well, that it helps pull the reader in the story. But more than that, the characters are engaging, not so cookie cutter, and the writer makes us feel the contradictions in the characters that give rise to their emotional conflicts. Lucy knows she can't hope to marry a nobleman, but she can't help herself from wishing and when Clifton promises, we understand why she, even as a girl who is not naive at all, believes it. And that she believes it, and that we can believe that she believes, makes her disappointment more touching, more poignant. Gilby is not as well defined, we are asked to kind of buy it on goodwill alone that he makes a jump from his expectations that he needs to marry well and his conclusion that he will only marry for love, but he is still an interesting character, because the author refrains from making him another version of the stereotypical rakish alpha male. She allows him to be open and explain his emotions. And she does it all throughout the book instead of the usual waterfall of male emotional revelations at the end that plague similar novels.

It is great that Boyle manages to have her main characters become so different within the same book and yet make the transformations appear like the natural consequence of the events that have unfolded onto the characters. She also resisted to use a plot device that is used way too often, instead going for the less frequented path, and yet everything fits perfectly in the plot.

The author also writes at a leisurely pace, with an intrigue that is closer to home, and without revealing too much, the stakes are not as high as sometimes they are in this kind of spy-suspense-historical-novel, but they are more precious to the characters. The intrigue is there but does not take the front burner, it leaves that to the characters and their emotional ties. I liked the secondary characters very much, and they really added to the story because they fulfilled their roles and managed to be endearing without the author forcing us to love them by trying too hard to make them quirky.

A solid romance, a credit to the genre.

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