
I'm a fan of all things paranormal; give me a monster of some sort and I'm a happy girl. But sometimes I want the fantasy of a trip back in time, you know, to a place where people use words like 'pantaloons' and 'haberdashery'. Lisa Kleypas always delivers that sense of escape for me, and her Wallflower Series is a particular favorite.
The series is centered around a group of very different young women who have one thing in common: they've all failed to land a husband. They're wallflowers, thrown together ball after ball watching other women secure matches with the finest men in London society. Sick and tired of their plight, the self-proclaimed Wallflowers unite, become unlikely friends, and pool their resources to help each other make matches. Hilarity ensures. The women are wily and determined, and eventually, of course, each one is successful.
Every book in this series is a great read and a beautiful romance, but I must confess I'm fondest of It Happened One Autumn. The heroine, Lilian Bowman, is my kind of gal. She's not beautiful. Perhaps not even conventionally pretty. She's smart, pushy, and vivacious. And she's got this crazy nose on her. She would have taken over her father's booming perfume business except for the fact she's a woman in the wrong century. Her match, Marcus, Lord Westcliff is a yummy hero; the kind of man that buttons every button, ever so proper, and makes a woman just want to rip his shirt off. *Sigh* Kleypas does an amazing job of exploring gender roles as well as social hierarchies in this time period, the mid eighteen hundreds, as Lillian belongs to 'vulgar' American New Money and Marcus is an English aristocrat, blood as blue as it gets. These books are good stuff, and I highly recommend them. Five mugs.
The series is centered around a group of very different young women who have one thing in common: they've all failed to land a husband. They're wallflowers, thrown together ball after ball watching other women secure matches with the finest men in London society. Sick and tired of their plight, the self-proclaimed Wallflowers unite, become unlikely friends, and pool their resources to help each other make matches. Hilarity ensures. The women are wily and determined, and eventually, of course, each one is successful.
Every book in this series is a great read and a beautiful romance, but I must confess I'm fondest of It Happened One Autumn. The heroine, Lilian Bowman, is my kind of gal. She's not beautiful. Perhaps not even conventionally pretty. She's smart, pushy, and vivacious. And she's got this crazy nose on her. She would have taken over her father's booming perfume business except for the fact she's a woman in the wrong century. Her match, Marcus, Lord Westcliff is a yummy hero; the kind of man that buttons every button, ever so proper, and makes a woman just want to rip his shirt off. *Sigh* Kleypas does an amazing job of exploring gender roles as well as social hierarchies in this time period, the mid eighteen hundreds, as Lillian belongs to 'vulgar' American New Money and Marcus is an English aristocrat, blood as blue as it gets. These books are good stuff, and I highly recommend them. Five mugs.