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Title: The Lady Chosen by Stephanie Laurens ISBN: 0-06-000206-9 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.34 (35 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Stephanie Laurens burns up the pages...
Comment: Stephanie Laurens burns up the pages in her latest release THE LADY CHOSEN, first book in her new series entitled "WELCOME TO THE BASTION CLUB".
Ex-military men brought together by various circumstances and all needing to marry form the Bastion Club as a place of refuge from the demanding ton. This story is of Tristan Wemyss, Earl of Trentham who needs to marry in order to inherit his wealth. The men of the Bastion Club buy a home for their club in a quiet neighborhood and Tristan oversees the preparations. He first encounters Leonora Carling in her gardens. At first he watches her, admiring her from afar, and then meets her and finds himself immediately immersed in a mystery.
Leonora Carling, a woman past marrying at the age of 26 years old, is both lovely and intelligent. Someone has been trying to break into her home and other homes that share a wall in the neighborhood. Tristan and Leonora, with a common goal of catching the culprit find themselves tracking leads together. In doing so, their fiery attraction sparks and ignites.
The story takes a turn as the couple explores their newfound attraction and their affair finds themselves in all sorts of compromising situations - most notably on a Mahoney desk! Tristan is in hot pursuit to have Leonora as his wife, his "Lady Chosen", however she resists and refuses his offer of marriage. She long ago had set aside any plans for marriage and cherishes her independence and freedom to act as she wishes. Surrounded by academic men who rely on her to run the household, she has become set in her ways and marriage ideas put to rest long ago - until Tristan. But Tristan is not one to not get what he wants, and he wants Leonora.
The story clearly jumps from a mystery to a passionate affair quite abruptly. The focus of the story pivoting suddenly in this manner is almost like reading two stories in one. Once the love affair consummates the mystery of the break-ins, so crucial in the first few chapters, falls to the wayside. Ms. Lauren's deftly picks up soon after, but a meshing of these two storylines or at least a more subtle turn would be my only complaint to this wonderfully entertaining story.
Stephanie Lauren's has written a sizzling and sexy story of passion and love. The characters jump off the pages, and their attraction undeniable. I'm looking forward to the next in this series, due on September 2003, entitled A GENTLEMAN'S HONOR which will tell the story of Anthony Blake, Viscount Torrington and his bride.
**Cynster fans will be surprised and delighted to see a brief appearance by Devil Cynster himself in LADY CHOSEN.
Rating: 4
Summary: Good read overall, but it needed more emotional tension.
Comment: This book follows the same format that the Cynsters series. There is nothing wrong with that, I loved the Cynsters, but the formula of the strong, independent woman who doesn't want to get married, even when she is head over heels in love with the hero, and the "always perfect", confident alfa male needs some renovations, because it is getting a little old.
I think the book needed some more drama, more conflict between the main characters. Other than her refusal to marry him, and him trying to convince her, there was no real emotional conflict. No misunderstanding, no longing, nothing to keep them apart, nothing that would melt your heart.
The best parts of the book for me were the love scenes (this are always hot, in the true Stephanie Laurens style), the brief appearance of Devil Cynster (I hope the rest of the Cynsters continue to appear in this new series), and the scenes were Dalziel appears. I think he is a character with a lot of potencial. He reminds me of Jo Beverley's Rothgar. I would like to read his story. He seems to be a misterious and fascinating character.
All considered the book was not bad, it is well written and believable. Maybe it's just that I expected more of one of my favorite authors.
Rating: 2
Summary: Disappointed with my first Stephanie Laurens
Comment: This was my first Stephanie Laurens book. Although I did like Ms. Lauren's clear writing style and evocative love scenes, I was a bit disappointed overall in both the story and the characters of the first of the Bastion Club Series, a premise I had high expectations about - seven bachelors negotiating the mine field of Regency London while looking for acceptable wives.
Actually, my expectations of reading about this Bastion Club provided my first disappointment. Something that I had looked forward to was the interaction between these seven gentlemen sworn to help each other in their individual quests to find wives, yet this episode's hero, Tristan Weymiss, never involved the Bastion Club in his pursuit of the strangely reluctant Leonora Carling. If not for the prologue where the entire situation was explained and set into motion, the Bastion Club and six of its seven members would have been completely ignored altogether.
The story, in a nutshell, involves Tristan Weymess, Earl of Trentham, who meets his lovely next door neighbor, Miss Leonora Carling, and finds himself drawn into the job of solving the riddle of mysterious burglaries that Leonora and her family have been experiencing. Naturally he finds himself attracted to the self-made spinster Leonora, who returns his attraction; indeed, enough so that she determines to seduce Tristan, or rather, allow him to seduce her. However, once the two lovers have consummated their relationship, Leonora strangely refuses Tristan's request for marriage, and he becomes the pursuer as she tries vainly to run from the bond that's developed between them.
Sadly, I found neither the hero or heroine to be very interesting. Leonora was supposed to be this independent women, yet nothing except her small attempts to solve the mystery herself showed me why this was to be so. She set out to seduce Tristan, and once she'd accomplished this goal, turned into a completely different character; cold, distant and spurning his pursuit to marry her.
As for Tristan, he simply did not stand out as a hero to take one's breath away. We are told on several occasions of the "possessiveness" he feels toward Leonora, but I never quite felt such to be the case. Except for his obvious fury after she is attacked, he really takes no steps that prove to me he has such a protective instinct. We learn very little about his inner workings, and he comes off as rather generic.
I felt as if this were actually two different books pieced into one. The beginning and ending appeared to be about an independent, somewhat reclusive spinster and the straightforward war hero who attempts to help her solve a mysterious burglary, seducing her in the meantime. Then, after finally making it into the bedroom, the two take their cat and mouse game into the ballrooms of the ton, and Leonora seems to become a completely different type of woman. A good portion of the book focuses on her refusal to marry Tristan for reasons that I expected to be sound and perhaps even shocking, only to discover are as bland as the character of Leonora herself.
Which leads me to Leonora's reluctance. For a woman bent on not marrying this nearly perfect man, her reasons, once explained, proved to me far too flimsy and transparent. Apparently, the death of her parents left her with the inability to trust or rely on anyone, and for that reason she felt unwilling to place her trust in a husband. However, nowhere in the story was any inkling given that the death of her parents had caused her undue distress, and once she internally admitted this reluctance to herself, the problem seemed to disappear. I felt like Leonora's refusal to marry was a very thin conflict set up to keep these two lovers apart when really there was no other reason at all.
The seduction of Leonora was done quite well if not somewhat formulaicly, with each interaction between the two would-be lovers jumping a carefully-measured fraction until the ultimate consummation. I liked that Leonora didn't play the coy virgin but rather admitted to her attraction and her desire to have Tristan "initiate" her into the pleasures between a man and a woman. Once she gave into his deal to prove that the attraction between them would not diminish but only increase, she very unashamedly enjoyed the physical aspect of their relationship.
The a-plot, or mystery about the burglaries, held no appeal to me whatsoever. Indeed, I found myself skimming the longer passages that dealt with this completely uncompelling plot which didn't even provide reason enough to inspire the supposed "possessiveness" Tristan felt for Leonora. I didn't care at all who was burglarizing Leonora's home and felt no compulsion for the mystery to be solved. Like Leonora's inner struggle with trust, the mystery felt more like an invented story crutch to throw these two together in the first place. I wondered quite frequently why there were no police officers involved in solving these attempted crimes.
I'm sad that I didn't like this book better because I don't know that I'll continue with the Bastion Club series. Maybe I need to try one of the Cynster books instead.
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Title: A Gentleman's Honor by Stephanie Laurens ISBN: 0060002077 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Married to the Viscount by Sabrina Jeffries ISBN: 0060092149 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Where's My Hero? by Lisa Kleypas, Kinley MacGregor, Julia Quinn ISBN: 0060505249 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: The Perfect Lover by Stephanie Laurens ISBN: 0060505710 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Slightly Tempted by MARY BALOGH ISBN: 0440241065 Publisher: Dell Publishing Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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