A Regency Invitation (Mills & Boon Special Releases) [Paperback]

It seems that a new fad has cropped up among Regency authors. Instead of thematic short story collections, we're starting to see collections more entwined than that. Whereas in the past, there might be an anthology of stories about Christmas, with nothing else connecting them, now we see books that attempt to be more cohesive.

One way to do this is to select a single plot and hand it to several authors. An example of this is It Happened One Night, where we get four stories of old flames running into one another unexpectedly in an inn. Books like this are slightly more connected thematically than just "stories involving Christmas", but they still offer a set of unconnected stories.

Another way to do this is for a group of authors to get together and form a container story. The first example of this that I encountered was The Diamonds Of Welbourne Manor: Justine And The Noble Viscount\Annalise And The Scandalous Rake\Charlotte And The Wicked Lord (Harlequin Historical Series). A book like this is created when the authors concoct a setting and an overarching story, and then each tells a story within that context. The Diamonds was, in my view, a less-than-successful attempt at this, largely because the voices were not consistent. The real challenge in a "braid" of stories like this is to make sure that when Author #2 writes about Author #3's heroine, she's writing about the same person -- that the character in question behaves in ways that are consistent with how she behaves in her "own" story. it also helps if the over-arching story is interesting. Diamonds failed on both suits.

As a result, I was somewhat reluctant to try another book like this. However, I am a fan of Elizabeth Rolls' novels and I have liked a few of Nicola Cornick's works, so I decided to give it a try. The setting for this book is a house party, and there are three separate short stories in the book. In addition to using the common setting, and each other's main characters as minor characters in their own stories, these authors added in a mystery that unfolds over the course of the three stories. To my surprise, this book actually works pretty well.

Now, the stories themselves are uneven. In order, they are:

The Fortune Hunter--Nicola Cornick
This story has the most cliched of the three plots. The hero and heroine are not particularly interesting as people, but it's well-written and introduces the larger story quite nicely. 3 stars.

An Uncommon Abigail--Joanna Maitland
This is my least favorite story. There are many implausibilities that I had a hard time overlooking. For instance, when her younger brother, whom she knows to be irresponsible and thoughtless, fails to come home from a visit when he said he would, the heroine decides that he must have been kidnapped, despite any plausible reason to believe such a thing. Then she manages to convince another character that this must be true, even though this second character is well-acquainted with the people who would have to have been the kidnappers, and there is no reason given why this character went along with the kidnapping theory at all -- except of course that had she not done so, there would have been no story here. And then at the end, when the heroine finds out what happened to her brother, she seems uninterested in even seeing for herself whether he is okay. (No, he wasn't kidnapped. But for someone who was so sure he had been, sure enough that she risks her reputation in an attempt to track him down, it was strange when she was suddenly willing to take someone's word for his well-being.) Worse than the plot holes, I found quite a lot of the interactions between this heroine and her hero to be tedious and boring, which makes sense because I never liked her and he was inconsistent in his actions and thoughts. 2 stars.

The Prodigal Bride--Elizabeth Rolls
This was quite a good story. Joanna Maitland did a great job of foreshadowing this tale in her story. (In fact, I think she did a better job of that than she did of telling her own story.) Both the hero and heroine were plausible and sympathetic, the villain had been growing ever more villainous throughout the two earlier stories so that the revelations of his machinations in this one seemed reasonable, not manufactured for the sake of the plot. This was the best story in the book. 4 stars.

The reason I gave the book four stars overall, instead of the average rating of the stories, is because the three authors did a bang-up job of managing the common threads of the book. When a character did something in one story, it always seemed in character for how she (or he) appeared in the other two stories. The villain was developed carefully through the three tales, and the reactions of everyone involved to the revelations about him at the end of the book were totally in line with the previous views of him we'd had. Unlike Dimaonds of Welborune Manor, where the same character seemed to be different women in the different stories, these three authors clearly worked with one another to make sure that "what I write about your heroine" would be consistent with "what you would write about her yourself". The cooperation paid dividends with the result of three stories braided together into something bigger than themselves, and made this book seem like very much more than just three stories stuck together with a random framing device.

I'll happily read any other anthologies along these lines that these three authors decide to create.

I ADORE Elizabeth Rolls and all her Characters are like family, I was completely torn at the beginning of her story and was so relieved at the outcome that I had trouble sleeping I was so excited! The other two stories were pretty darn good too and I actually enjoyed how they were all intertwined and worked as a whole plot. Great job authors! Can't wait for the next time you all get together and collaborate!