I've read waaaay too many regencies. It's a favorite genre with me. My favorite of all is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. No surprise there. Our knowledge of the regency era and its peoples is limited to diaries, news articles, ship and other manifests of trade, DeBret's (a sort of manifest of the peerage), travel log books and accounts, fashion magazines, newspaper gossip columns and the works of authors of that time. Such as Austen.
This is a plus in giving writers bare bones to flesh out. It's a problem in giving rather little to work from. Maybe that's why we see so much fan fiction, stuffing regency plots and characters into modern story frames younger writers are more confident with, adding in zombies, valley girls, and horse and puppy farmers (and yes, I confess I've sampled some of these oddities. Can't say I finished them.)
I abandon regencies for months and read other stuff. Then I get this yen to go find something back there again. I sit in a chair taking chemo for hours (well, OK, so it's only 3 hours, but it can be as much as 6) every couple weeks, so I read a lot. Especially the last 4 1/2 years. But I always have read overmuch. Housework? I'll finish this book first. Paperwork? Can't sleep? I'll just finish this article... So I bounce from the regency period, to humor, science, classics (English major. How'd you guess?) to Brit lit to quirky fairytale rewrites even a couple weird paranormals I wouldn't recommend. But all the while I bounce back to regency romances.
All this is to explain why my ratings get tougher with age. And why I'm a sucker for a new twist or at least something I don't see often attempted. To add a twist, it seems, the writer has to be a true daydreamer with the imagination of a 12 year old-the what if kind that plays with plot essentials and jiggles the puzzle to test new outcomes, and see what's really essential.
Humor is a big help if you plan to take such risks. I'm the laugh out loud sort, and people around me generally want to know what I'm reading. This story was laugh out loud funny in a few places. The poor heroine and her pets! For one.
The story is as old as Jacob and Esau. There are beautiful twins. Identically beautiful. Their mother favors the frivolous fashion conscious one, who's of course angelic and demure, with an odd confidence that doesn't quite fit her public persona. The father is a politician and favors his quick witted politically minded daughter, who should have been a boy, in his opinion.
The girls set their caps for the same duke. The twist is, who gets the happily ever after and how? Will it be the socially savvy twin who borrows her sister's stuff and lies to make sure she shows to better advantage? Or will it be the often too forthright bluestocking whose shyness mars her social confidence and who disdains her sister's shallow character, often publicly (which in my mind does not fit with her shyness)?
The twins bicker like sisters would. They also do odd turnabouts, and worry that one of them will be unhappy or mortified, or even dead. There. I trust I've piqued your curiosity. The novella is reasonably priced. And it's one of those rarities - a lazy 3 hour read that manages to convey a satisfactorily complete tale, with strong characters, surprising plot elements and it leaves you and the characters you've come to care about smiling.
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