It was delightful, suspenseful and descriptive. Like many of Stewart's book, it features a heroine on vacation in a beautiful location (this time in France), where she stumbles upon mystery/adventure/romance. The heroine, Charity Selbourne, starts by helping a lonely boy and gets drawn into a mystery surrounding his rather hot father. Good times.
And on a random note, it sometimes bothers me in older books when the women don't know how to drive. That's not the case in this book! There's a few great car chase scenes where Charity mans the helm. She's not annoyingly plucky and definitely not stupid. She's a realistic and enjoyable character.
Confession: by reading this book, I wrote one of my rules. Madam, Will You Talk? features a widow, which I generally tend to avoid like the plague. I can't stand all the typical situations: either the widow (or widower) can't handle the grief or guilt associated with falling in love with someone else, or her marriage was awful and she's never truly experienced LOVE. But I broke my rule for Mary Stewart and was rewarded. Since this isn't a character-driven novel, but rather a plot-driven one, we don't get hung up on her former life. The widow's first marriage was fine but she didn't suffer from all the heartrending grief of falling in love a second time with the hero of this book (who I shan't reveal) and therefore being unfaithful to her dead husband, etc.
Okay, enough ranting. This is a good book when you need to be distracted and fall into another era. It even earns a re-read rating!
Rating: 8.5/10
1 comment:
Yay! I love this one. The car chase scenes are the best. And Charity also has great clothes--for some reason I can just see her posh self in a fabulous dress speeding down a French country road in a little convertible (actually I can't remember now, it might not have been a convertible, but it was definitely a little sports car of some kind).
:)
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