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The Silverton Scandal (2003)

by Amanda Grange(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0709073410 (ISBN13: 9780709073413)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Robert Hale Ltd

review 1: A light, clean love story, suitable for younger audiences.However, the characters were predictable and uninspiring. Yet again, we have a Byronic hero and I am growing tired of reading about the "mysterious, secretive, aura exuding, withdrawn" and very, very effeminate male character in these Victorian romances.As for the female character, she has no distinguishing traits apart from loyalty to her younger sister (some parallels with Sense and Sensibility here) and persistence, maybe. We are supposed to believe that the male character falls in love with her because of her "courage" yet this is hard to see. A little more character to the main character wouldn't have gone amiss.The author describes situations that are hard to imagine. For example, how does a man walk "with the... more predatory grace of a jungle cat"? A woman in stilettos could walk like a jungle cat, but a man... The author then describes how the male character thinks of the heroine "...with her nondescript brown hair and ordinary brown eyes. She had nothing to mark her out as being unusual.................... And yet her eyes were not quite brown. They were closer to hazel, with golden specks." - And I thought, so what? I fail to see the attraction here.The culmination of the plot - the heroine's great angst because she thinks that he only offers marriage to save her reputation, and not out of love - is just ridiculous. Would marriage with a man who has given her "smouldering gazes, lingering looks, husky voices, and stolen kisses" throughout the novel be "unthinkable" because, of all things, LOVE is an object? It's not entirely her fault either, because the male character is also an uncommunicative, effeminate wuss. So, finally, the misunderstanding between the two is the hardest thing to sympathise with.
review 2: I picked this up as a freebee and was pleasantly surprised. The characters are likeable, and behaved like mature reasonable adults, mostly. I liked them both immensely. The suspenseful plot added a whole lot. It was even plausible!The misunderstanding at the end was too much, and brought the story down in the rating a bit. That and a tendency of Grange to let the angst get a tad overdone. It wasn't overblown so much as a continual watered down rumination when her characters should have been acting instead of thinking the same thoughts over again.Still, I look forward to finding other books by this author. less

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