Forever Betrothed, Never the Bride (Scandalous Seasons Book 1) #Review

Pages: 311
Publisher: Christi Caldwell
Pub. Date: December 29, 2013
Series: Scandalous Seasons Book 1
Genre: Historical Romance
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Sexual Content: 4 - 5

Blurb

Hopeless romantic, Lady Emmaline Fitzhugh, is tired of sitting with the wallflowers, waiting for her betrothed to come to his senses and marry her. When Emmaline reads one too many reports of his scandalous liaisons in the gossip rags, she takes matters into her own hands.
War-torn veteran, Lord Drake, devotes himself to forgetting his days on the Peninsula through an endless round of meaningless associations. He no longer wants to feel anything, but Lady Emmaline is making it hard to maintain a state of numbness. With her zest for life, she awakens his passion and desire for love.
The one woman Drake has spent the better part of his life avoiding is now the only woman he needs, but he is no longer a man worthy of his Emmaline. It is up to her to show him the healing power of love.

Review

The story is about two children who are betrothed by their fathers, and while she is only 5 at the time, he is 13 and really pissed off about the decision. Lord Drake has always resented his father's high-handed sensibilities and warred against them much of his life. This equated to his warring against the innocent girl he is betrothed to against his will.

Three years after his return from the war, the story begins with the two bumping into one another on a London street. They recognize each other but are not on friendly terms, yet there is something about her that intrigues Lord Drake regardless of his staunch efforts to deny himself any part of her.

She decides it is time to make Lord Drake honor the wishes of their fathers and sets out to entice him in as subtle a way as she can devise and ends up gaining the help of Drake's closest friend (Sin) to get that job done.

In all honesty, and despite my 3-5 stars, I enjoyed this story and the two leads as much as I became more interested in the aside characters: namely Lady Emmaline's brother, and Lord Drake's best bud, Sinclair.

I think that each of the characters were well thought out and came across as believable folk, and the story line, while somewhat abused, still managed to pique my interest for the duration.

However, the 3 out of 5 stars is because while it was a good story with interesting characters, there were numerous GPS (grammar/punctuation/spelling) issues that worked to slow my progress and sometimes pull me out of the story due to confusion or frustration (or sometimes both).

It took me days (or, should I say nights?) to finish due to the surprising amount of grammar and especially punctuation issues that abounded throughout.

It seemed as if our author wasn't quite sure how to use a comma, and so she just winged it and put them wherever -- whenever.

It always surprises me to read Best Selling Author and then find such issues in their work. Again, my idea of Best Seller equates to flawless, enthralling work told in a way that effortlessly takes me to another place/time and locks me in, keeps me spellbound, and is, therefore, a true page turner.

This was, by far, none of those things and yet I enjoyed the story.

Spelling issues ran along the homonym line (fair for fare, etc.), and bad word choices that took the reader out of Historical mode and into 21st Century in a heartbeat. Also instances where the author wasn't thinking clearly, and it showed. One cannot kick down a 'doorway' -- it just isn't physically possible to kick down an open space.

The author might not have paid too much attention to those details, but there were also issues with time/place. H had pulled h to her feet, but then h rises to her feet in the next instance.

This was a free-for-awhile purchase, and I gave it a 4 at Amazon. Some of the reviews coincide with mine: they liked it, but . . .

I especially adored Emmaline and her silly, seemingly naive ways and the simple yet endearing fact that nearly every chapter opened with a brief missive from her to Lord Drake -- words that she wrote while he was at war and that she never had any intention of sending.

I thought it was cute and helped me to like her all the more.

There are numerous sex scenes that start out shockingly bold (and hardly believable for that time period -- a fingering in broad daylight in a public park, for instance) yet are still tame to some extent, so I rated that area a 4 out of 5 due to the graphic nature and frequency of those scenes.

I look forward to reading the other stories in this series, but I do hope that the editing issues are taken care of and I am not forced to have to try and read through an entire second draft again. (It appears as if this one was published in draft and not final mode).

If you are willing to overlook the edit issues, I think you might enjoy reading Forever Betrothed, Never the Bride.