The Lady Chosen (Mass Market Paperback)

Actually, my expectations of reading about this Bastion Club provided my first disappointment. Something that I had looked forward to was the interaction between these seven gentlemen sworn to help each other in their individual quests to find wives, yet this episode's hero, Tristan Weymiss, never involved the Bastion Club in his pursuit of the strangely reluctant Leonora Carling. If not for the prologue where the entire situation was explained and set into motion, the Bastion Club and six of its seven members would have been completely ignored altogether.

The story, in a nutshell, involves Tristan Weymess, Earl of Trentham, who meets his lovely next door neighbor, Miss Leonora Carling, and finds himself drawn into the job of solving the riddle of mysterious burglaries that Leonora and her family have been experiencing. Naturally he finds himself attracted to the self-made spinster Leonora, who returns his attraction; indeed, enough so that she determines to seduce Tristan, or rather, allow him to seduce her. However, once the two lovers have consummated their relationship, Leonora strangely refuses Tristan's request for marriage, and he becomes the pursuer as she tries vainly to run from the bond that's developed between them.

Sadly, I found neither the hero or heroine to be very interesting. Leonora was supposed to be this independent women, yet nothing except her small attempts to solve the mystery herself showed me why this was to be so. She set out to seduce Tristan, and once she'd accomplished this goal, turned into a completely different character; cold, distant and spurning his pursuit to marry her.

As for Tristan, he simply did not stand out as a hero to take one's breath away. We are told on several occasions of the "possessiveness" he feels toward Leonora, but I never quite felt such to be the case. Except for his obvious fury after she is attacked, he really takes no steps that prove to me he has such a protective instinct. We learn very little about his inner workings, and he comes off as rather generic.

I felt as if this were actually two different books pieced into one. The beginning and ending appeared to be about an independent, somewhat reclusive spinster and the straightforward war hero who attempts to help her solve a mysterious burglary, seducing her in the meantime. Then, after finally making it into the bedroom, the two take their cat and mouse game into the ballrooms of the ton, and Leonora seems to become a completely different type of woman. A good portion of the book focuses on her refusal to marry Tristan for reasons that I expected to be sound and perhaps even shocking, only to discover are as bland as the character of Leonora herself.

Which leads me to Leonora's reluctance. For a woman bent on not marrying this nearly perfect man, her reasons, once explained, proved to me far too flimsy and transparent. Apparently, the death of her parents left her with the inability to trust or rely on anyone, and for that reason she felt unwilling to place her trust in a husband. However, nowhere in the story was any inkling given that the death of her parents had caused her undue distress, and once she internally admitted this reluctance to herself, the problem seemed to disappear. I felt like Leonora's refusal to marry was a very thin conflict set up to keep these two lovers apart when really there was no other reason at all.

The seduction of Leonora was done quite well if not somewhat formulaicly, with each interaction between the two would-be lovers jumping a carefully-measured fraction until the ultimate consummation. I liked that Leonora didn't play the coy virgin but rather admitted to her attraction and her desire to have Tristan "initiate" her into the pleasures between a man and a woman. Once she gave into his deal to prove that the attraction between them would not diminish but only increase, she very unashamedly enjoyed the physical aspect of their relationship.

The a-plot, or mystery about the burglaries, held no appeal to me whatsoever. Indeed, I found myself skimming the longer passages that dealt with this completely uncompelling plot which didn't even provide reason enough to inspire the supposed "possessiveness" Tristan felt for Leonora. I didn't care at all who was burglarizing Leonora's home and felt no compulsion for the mystery to be solved. Like Leonora's inner struggle with trust, the mystery felt more like an invented story crutch to throw these two together in the first place. I wondered quite frequently why there were no police officers involved in solving these attempted crimes.

I'm sad that I didn't like this book better because I don't know that I'll continue with the Bastion Club series. Maybe I need to try one of the Cynster books instead.

"Couldn't turn away.
The connections slowly clarified in her mind.
Tristan, she knew, wouldn't turn her away. Wouldn't refuse her.
With him, she'd be safe."

(elementary stuff, that.) OR

"She was where she belonged. In his arms. With love between them." (gak!)

And those are some that actually make sense. In addition, Laurens has developed the habit of reusing and overusing pet words and phrases. The words and their attendant emotions lose their impact and often become downright silly.

Tristan and Leonora are a nice couple, fairly well drawn, especially Leonora, even though I hated that she broke her promise to him. (Yeah, she explains it away as meaning something else, but I didn't buy it.) I'm still not sure how Tristan is different from the rest of the Bastion Club members; they all seemed of a piece in this book. Frankly the setting up of the club is rather boring.

The artist's rendering of Tristan is totally yummy, but the story lacked due to the pitfalls of Laurens' adopted style and her penchant for overly-detailed, almost clinical love scenes. This book pushes Laurens, once a favorite, farther down the list of authors to read...she's nowhere near the top now. If you want to read it, borrow it; don't waste your money.

This first book in the series starts with the establishment and installation of the club next door to Miss Leonora Carling's uncle, Sir Humphrey. And Miss Carling wants to know if the members of the new club are responsible for the disturbances at Number 14.

The story is well told. Laurens does not try to introduce all 7 of her titled gentlemen in this first book; she gives us the overview and then concentrates on the Earl of Trentham, Tristan Wemyss, and his pursuit of Miss Carling.