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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Best of the trilogy - but still not really credible, 1 Sep 2003
Phoebe, the awkward one and sister of Diana, the late Marchioness of Granville, is ordered by her father to marry her widowed brother-in-law, Cato. Cato is also the father of her best friend Olivia, and is almost old enough to be her own father. He's distant, cold, very proper and only interested in politics and the war.And yet one day she looks at him and falls in love. So then she has to try to make him fall in love with her - which isn't easy, since she's overweight and awkward and informal and everything, it seems, which he disapproves of. She gets Olivia into trouble and creates chaos in his ordered manor home. And she has neither the talent nor the wish to take over housekeeping. None of her clothes suit her - which is hardly surprising, since they were all made for Diana, who was a completely different shape to her. She's not even, he thinks, all that good in bed, and she doesn't seem to be showing any signs of becoming pregnant. Although I enjoyed this and found some parts of it humorous, I really had problems with the idea of Cato as a husband. In the first book he was very distant and cold and not at all hero-like. And, of course, a man in his mid-thirties, he is married here to a seventeen-year-old and a friend of his own daughter's. Doesn't he feel the slightest awkwardness at the thought of taking Phoebe to bed? And as for Phoebe, I do find it hard to understand why she continued to love Cato, who for most of the book showed no interest in her beyond criticising her. I'm not even sure that he would have found her clumsiness endearing, as he eventually did. So, although on a superficial level I found this book entertaining, I really didn't find it at all credible. wmr-uk
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by Jane Feather
by Jane Feather
by Jane Feather
by Jane Feather
by Jane Feather
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