I've heard that Barbara Cartland is the queen of romance, if not the whole genre then the regency categories. After reading a couple of her books, and seeing a movie based on her book, I have to say I don't see it.
The book is about a young girl who wants to find her sister a husband, because her sister is so beautiful, and she unwittingly asks a marques if she can rent a house from him not realizing that he has people who handle that kind of arrangement or that as a single woman in the 1800s she shouldn't be doing this without a chaperon. Since she's so sweet and inocent the marques agrees to help her, unintentialy getting her involved with swindlers which he makes up for by setting the heroine and her sister in his house with his mother. From there little happens between the h/H, she seems to weak minded and helpless to really be interesting to a man as worldly as the hero, and there aren't any of those little moments where they really connect to make you forget about weak characterization. The ending is really horrible, I had pretty much started skimming by then, and out of the blue the hero declares to his mother that he is going to marry the heroine, to which I literally had to flip back a few pages to see where I missed his telling the heroine this, or even implying he had those feelings, I couldn't find it, but when I read on I realized the heroine was has surprised as I was so I guess it made sense.
I am no literary snob, I love a good romance and the category novels are my guilty pleasure, but that doesn't mean I have no taste or no standards, not only did nothing happen in this book, the characters were just poorly written. The heroine could not speak to the hero without ... every three words, I had to start ignoring them in order to not drive myself crazy, but what I couldn't ignore was how weak the heroine seemed as a result of it. It was not a trait of the heroine either, I mean it wasn't unique to her since the other book I read the heroine did the same thing. From what I can guess Ms. Cartland found this endearing and maybe thought it made her heroines sweet. I am not fan of the modern woman, in fact I am mostly off of contemporary because I can't stand them, BUT I don't want to read about a girl who's too simple minded to speak to the hero like an adult. Further more there was a pointless encounter in the middle of the book with the hero and his mistress that made no sense and added nothing to the plot or character development.
Anyway I am debating about reading another one. It is possible I just picked two really lame books and the rest are good, I did enjoy the movie I watched.
