#westcotts

Someone to Honor by Mary Balogh (review)

If I had to describe this book in a nutshell, I would call it a quiet romance… quiet, but full of real and even intense feeling, despite the main characters’ reserve. Both Abigail and Gil have learnt through adversity to hold their feelings inside, albeit in different ways. Abby comes across as gentle, calm, restrained and ladylike but not unfeeling. Gil’s mask is sterner, more like granite, and he can indeed come across as unfeeling; he’s certainly capable of expressing anger and frustration, but rarely shows the softer emotions.

The book moves slowly, with little romantic development during the first half. The unspoken, almost unrecognized attraction between Gil and Abigail simmers well under the surface; most of their time and attention are taken up with Abby’s brother Harry, finally returned nearly two years after suffering terrible injuries at Waterloo, and still recovering. 

In other hands, or with other main characters, this would be a dramatic story. And Balogh is more than capable of writing dramatic, passionate love stories, as her backlist can attest... [But] it’s neither drama nor wild passion that makes Someone to Honor so appealing; instead, it’s the quiet, often unspoken but deeply-felt bonds of familial and romantic love. Like most of the families Balogh portrays in her novels, the Westcotts are above all a family. That family strength and loyalty, along with Abby and Gil’s developing relationship and Gil’s intense love for the child he hasn’t seen since infancy, make Someone to Honor a heartwarming and thoroughly satisfying novel.

Someone to Hold (Mary Balogh)

I’ve said this before: Mary Balogh is one of my all-time favorite historical romance authors. I’m really loving her new Westcott series, which began with Someone to Love, featuring former orphan Anna Snow, who is in reality Lady Anastasia Westcott, only legitimate child of the Earl of Riverdale, and the heir to his fortune.

Someone to Hold is the second book in the series. It tells the story of Anna’s half-sister, Camille, the eldest of the Earl’s acknowledged children, who discovered only after his death that they were illegitimate, due to his secret first marriage. Understandably, Camille responded to the news with anger and then despair and self-pity — particularly because her fiance ended their betrothal rather than marry a bastard.

As Someone to Hold begins, though, Camille is beginning to move past her despair enough to try to build a new life on her own terms.