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1.0étoiles sur 5
Not up to Mary Baloghs usual standard!, Mai 8 2004
I'm a big fan of Mary Balogh's regency romance novels. In fact, I can say without a doubt that she's currently my favourite author of the genre, and so every time I open a book that she wrote, I expect to be swept off my feet by the story I'm reading. And so it's always an extreme disappointment to discover that even your favourite author isn't perfect and can write books that leave you cold.It was the case with The First Snowdrop. Alexander Stewart, Viscount Merrick, was riding back to London, ready to take the beautiful Lorraine as his wife, when a snowstorm forces him to take shelter in a country house. The woman who opens the door to him is plain and dressed like a servant, but she behaves so strangely that he has to remind her that he wants her to give him something to eat. He treats her in a rather despising manner, but when she walks him to his bedchamber, he decides to push his luck and try to bed her. She pushes him away, and he lets her go. Shrugging off the event, Alexander goes to sleep, fully intent on hitting the road back to London in the morning. When he wakes up, he doesn't expect to be told that Anne Parrish, the woman he almost seduced the night before, is no servant, but the granddaughter of a baron. Honour forces him to offer his hand in marriage, which Anne, although stunned by the proposal, accepts. And so Alexander brings his new wife to Redlands, his country estate, quickly consummates the marriage, then leaves her alone, intending never to come back. Anne is devastated by Alexander's disdain for her, and even more so when he tells her he's going back to London and leaving her behind. Left alone in a big and soulless estate, she decides to take care of the house, the garden, and finally her own appearance. When, a few months later, she's invited to a family gathering by Alexander's grandmother, her husband barely recognises her. I had many problems with the premise itself, which made it very difficult for me to get into the story. First, I do not believe that Alexander, a cultivated nobleman, would fail to notice the strangeness of Anne's behaviour on the night they meet, or, as he mentions the next morning, her genteel speech. I do not believe either that Anne would make no effort to correct him when he calls her by her given name and orders her around. And when he tries to seduce her, she barely resists, as if she had no knowledge at all of the consequences - yet we learn later in the book that she's got the education of a lady. My other problem with The First Snowdrop is that I didn't manage to like Alexander. In the beginning, his behaviour is distasteful, but anger could indeed have driven him to be so cold with Anne, and for a good part of the book I kept hoping that he was a tortured hero hiding dark secrets that would be healed by love. It got worse when he met Anne again; she's gone thin, dressed her hair, and he's attracted to her beauty, until he discovers who she really is. He desires her physically, and acts upon this desire, but he still treats her with contempt the rest of the time. Yet it seems that they do feel something for each other; when they failed to admit it before they parted again, it was one misunderstanding too much for me, and I almost gave up on the book; only Balogh's style kept me reading till the end, in vain hope that something would bring light on those characters and make me feel some kind of sympathy for them. I did like Anne some of the time, although her extreme naivete at the beginning of the story, followed by a lot more intelligence afterwards, made her characterisation inconsistent. And I simply couldn't find anything loveable about Alexander. It seemed to me that he cared only for appearances, and his coldness made it difficult for me to believe that Anne could feel any kind of love for him. In fact, I had to check the cover several times to make sure I was reading a book by Mary Balogh! The First Snowdrop is absolutely not representative of her talent!
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