Justin has spent the last two decades making his fortune, settling scores, and suffering a prolonged period of torture in an Indian prison. Now, he needs someone to smooth the way for him with the villagers. Someone to manage his household--and warm his bed on occasion. What he needs, in short, is a wife and a matrimonial advertisement seems the perfect way to acquire one.
Their marriage was meant to be a business arrangement and nothing more. A dispassionate union free from the entanglements of love and affection. But when Helena's past threatens, will Justin's burgeoning feelings for his new bride compel him to come to her rescue? Or will dark secrets of his own force him to let her go?
Comment: This month the theme for the TBR challenge is Favorite Trope. This book has a little mix of several tropes I usually enjoy in romances, such as the beauty/beast, mail order bride and marriage of convenience, heroine who needs help, protagonists who can act shy... perhaps it's more of a mix between tropes and plot devices but all together made me really eager to try this book and, as it probably happens with all readers, I imagined certain scenarios in my head of where this might lead...
In this story we meet Helena Raynolds, a woman who replies and accepts a marriage proposal in the newspaper and travels from London to north Devon in order to meet her future husband. Helena is desperate to find a home faraway from London and when she realizes her husband to be is Justin Thornhill, a man who used to be a soldier and was in India just like her brother, her hopes get high she might escape what chases her.
Justin only wanted a wife with no fuss, no courtships and complicated steps so he agreed with his solicitor to put the add on the newspaper. Having been badly burned while in India and living in a place in need of work, with no balls and no parties in the horizon, he hoped his wife would be someone a little older and without much vanity. Helena is beautiful and refined but he still accepts marrying her because he knows she is a woman in need of help and he wouldn't be able to ignore that. Can they find enough common ground to make their marriage work?
If readers were to pile up the elements in the books they read and divide them by likability, regarding this book I'd have a good sized pile with positive aspects.
However, thinking about the set and the final picture, to say so, this book felt a little too bland in the romance aspect. In part it's the fact this could be labeled clean by some people, the protagonists only kiss, but then there are a few passages, a few hints, a few intoned words that suggest differently and I don't think that, in general, cohesion was achieved.
Helena is a likable protagonist and Justin even more so, especially because he has that characteristic of some heroes which is the need to protect others even at their own expense, a factor often mentioned in the plot itself.
I liked Helena and I think the reasons she had, in an historical context, to run and seek protection, even through marriage to a stranger of whom she only required kindness from were understandable and well inserted into the story. It made me think about how people with diseases/conditions not yet understood or correctly diagnosed were treated and how some not ill people were caught in the unknown and mistreated.
I think the setting up of the main plot in Devon and of who Justin is and how Helena makes him come out of shell just by being herself were details the author thought of nicely.
As a whole, the story was fluid enough and captivating to read about, the characters had their own unique features which I liked knowing about as the plot developed. However, when I had to stop reading for some reason it wasn't difficult. At the same time this was a fascinating story, with enough elements on the protagonist's pasts to make them a good match emotionally, there is some vibe or tone here that didn't make me appreciate the book as much as it probably deserves (other readers have better written opinions on why this book is a successful one).
In this book we have third person narrator but we can follow each protagonist's thoughts, often alternatively.
When the story begins - I had not seen this was also labeled "clean romance" - we get from the hero's thoughts that he wants a wife mostly for company and sex. The way things are written, it becomes obvious this would be an important part of the relationship for him (and I could imagine how it might bring them closer somehow) but as the story develops, his hero complex takes precedence and nothing happens between them except kissing.
I can understand the author's choices in how the romance was conducted. But at first the tone was so insistent on a subject that the fact it got practically ignored until the very end felt like it didn't matter. If so, why bringing it to the open? The story could have been focused on Helena's plights the same without it.
This might be a minor detail for some, but for me it affected how I saw what was happening. To be clear, I'm not saying the story should have had sex scenes (although sexual tension could be sexy and clean at the same time) but if that is the way things were, then some details can be misleading or silly in the bigger scheme of things. That's why I said there are some hints and a certain tone in some moments of the story that don't seem to match the rest. I get it but still.
All things considered, this was a good enough story but there's some emotion missing, some notions I didn't see developed as I imagined when I read about the tropes and situations that would be portrayed here. Nevertheless, it's a good historical that touches several details most readers would enjoy.
Grade: 6/10
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