MixedAll About RomanceMolly Greeley’s The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh, inspired by the tertiary character in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is a pleasant enough – but not remotely revelatory – piece of historical fiction ... Greeley gives her a highly specific voice which is the highlight of the novel ... Her calm narration and her considerate, goodhearted character make her a heroine easy to sympathize with, if not a boldly inspiring one. As you might guess given such a first person narration, the writing tends to the literary and descriptive, so fans of quick, witty dialogue will be disappointed ... The Pride and Prejudice angle is almost totally unnecessary, other than to act as a lure for Jane Austen’s preexisting reader base ... Had The Heiress offered a longer, more complex story rather than a montage of linear, ever-escalating triumphs for its protagonist, it could have been, if not a revelation, more than satisfying.
Tessa Bailey
RaveAll About RomanceBailey uses alternating-third-person narration for this book very well ... Her powers of description are about average, but there are so many spikes of sharp humor and observation that it doesn’t matter. Her main characters come across as distinct and understandable without the crutch of first-person PoV ... I can’t even take off points from this book for the unrealistic depiction of children – I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much if Laura had been portrayed as the traumatized time-consumer she’d most likely be in real life at her age and with her background ... Tessa Bailey books are very hot, so if you’re the sort of person who prefers romances in which the vagina is referred to as a ‘secret garden’ instead of a \'pussy\', this will not be your book. The heat takes a while to arrive, however, and I was definitely checking the page count at certain points wondering when they were going to ‘do it’, but it comes – and so do Bethany and Wes ... needs no renovations and is move-in ready for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.
