an unlikely match a regency novel sarah m eden

Too much WTH and 'oh, please' going on in this book. To add to the far-fetched plotlines, the hero had gotten himself engaged to a (different) very nice girl, but luckily said nice girl had the consideration to fall in love with another guy, so our hero was able to convince her to jilt him so he could marry the girl-who-is-no-longer-a-ghost. To make things even odder, in the end (total spoilers here) the hero breaks the curse on the ghost, the ghost's body (which has been magically preserved by the curse) gets her spirit back, but she's forgotten all her memories of the time she was a ghost, including her memories of the hero, but it's okay because eventually they talk and those memories come back (whew!). Finally you throw in a quite evil bit about some characters basically making a deal with Satan involving a human sacrifice of a daughter D:, and that's where I started to think, how many clean romance readers really want this kind of subplot in their romance reading? It just seems like such an odd plot combination to me. This is where things started to go off the rails for me there's a limit to how much disbelief I can suspend.

Then you have the ghost basically hanging out with the hero and his house guests all the time, chatting about life, the universe and everything, and everyone in the house gets used to this surprisingly quickly. This is starting to get a little quirky, but hey, I can still roll with it. Then you decide to have the hero inherit a Welsh mansion that's haunted by a beautiful 400-year-old ghost, and have the hero and this ghost fall in love with each other. That's only going to appeal to a limited number of readers, but that's fine. So here's the deal, and why I'm still shaking my head over this book: First you create a syrupy sweet, clean romance set in Regency times. This one was a miss for me, and holds the distinction of prompting me to create a new 'what the heck was the author thinking' shelf. Lately those have been a bit hit or miss for me, or maybe I'm just getting spoiled by 'good' books and have less patience for fluff (I like that answer because it gives me hope that I'm improving my mind, so I'm going to stick with it). In between (and sometimes during) my thicker and more literary books I have a penchant for sliding in Regency romances and other bits of fluff.

An unlikely match a regency novel sarah m eden