By GRADE Elementary School Middle School High Schoolīy AGE Board Books (newborn to age 3) Early Childhood Readers (ages 4-8) Children's Picture Books (ages 3-8) Juvenile Fiction (ages 8-12) Young Adult Fiction (ages 12+).BESTSELLERS in EDUCATION Shop All Education Books.I liked this marginally better than Secrets of a Summer Night but a great deal less than It Happened One Autumn. Daisy has charm, the fact that the heroine and hero are both American keeps Kleypas' dialogue both more correct and more relaxed, and the story's better-paced than the Devil in Winter, which put me to sleep. Still, despite all this, the book has its moments. You know a novel has problems when you keep wishing the author would get back to the secondary characters instead of following the H/H around!

That's lazy writing and makes for a poor romance. It's almost like a light-bulb clicks on over her head and boom! she's in love. She goes from loathing to loving him in the space of a few pages: there's no real build-up, no sense of growing esteem, and certainly no sexual tension here (theirs were surely the dullest sex scenes in the quartet of books and I say this despite my dislike of both Sebastian and Evie and DIW in general).

The only characters more broadly sketched, more patently unreal, were the Bowman sisters' egregious parents (caricatures, at best) and Matthew's nemesis (whose name I forget), all three also nothing more than transparent plot-devices.Īnother thing that really hurt this book in my opinion was the excessively rapid change in Daisy's feelings towards Matthew. There was never a moment I cared about his history or believed his feelings never a moment I could even 'see' him clearly in my mind's eye. As a hero, he's a make-weight more than anything else, a necessary plot-device (can't have a romance without a hero, after all), and not a very good one. He felt hollow, sketchy, and uninhabited to me, as if Kleypas changed her mind regarding heroes in mid-stride and dreamed him up at the last minute. Never once did I find him interesting, especially appealing or really very 'real'. She had enough spunk and spirit to register as an individual but her romantic and gentle nature also gave her a vulnerability that felt a great deal more real and was far more appealing to me than the overdone fragility of Evie in DIW. I didn't mind Daisy at all, found her rather endearing actually, and thought her personality was fairly plausible given the fierce pragmatism and intense passion of her older and more dominant sister.

A scandal in spring