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Valerie

by Joan Smith



      Valerie Ford is thrilled to be invited to stay with her rich, eccentric Aunt Loo in her rambling old house. Twenty-one is too young to be on the shelf, but when you are five-foot-ten in your socks, finding a mate is not easy. First. she finds that her aunt is actually a secret writer of gothic novels and wants Valerie to try out all sorts of stunts to see if they work. Second, there are Aunt Loo’s other houseguests. There is tiny cousin Pierre, who is obsessed with women and being thought English, and mysterious poor relation Welland Sinclair, who hides behind an academic stoop and dark glasses. Then Loo wants to hold séances, and things start getting really mysterious - where, for example, has all her money gone?

First written for the US market in 1981, here is the first edition published in the UK and long overdue, as Joan Smith is such a popular writer. At the beginning, I thought that this was just the sort of thing P. G. Wodehouse would have written if he had ever taken to writing Regencies, and there is a lot of humor and amusing happenings to enjoy. It is rather a lengthy book for a linear plot, and it sags in the middle somewhat when nothing new is introduced to the story and only the ending seems to be in sight. Valerie makes an interesting narrator, but her style of narration and many of her idioms do not seem to be terribly in period. Some things in here seem to belong to a later period. But for all that, it is still an imaginative, unusual and entertaining tale, although one that could perhaps do with a little more in the way of romance. Not one of this author’s best, but still well worth reading.

The Book

Robert Hale
November 2007
Hardback
9780709079224
Regency Romance [Early 19th century, Hampshire, England]
More at Amazon.com US|| UK
Excerpt
NOTE: Amazon US link is for marketplace copies only of an older, out of print edition; this new edition is not yet available there

The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2008
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