Well, this kind of blew chunks (pardon the pun for those who have read it ;D), but I had to give it at least 3.5 stars just for the level of WTFery. Our hero is brokenhearted when the love of his life goes off and marries some grandpa who has money and a title. The dude spends a year whoring, spending and puking until daddy threatens to cut him off and makes him go fix up a dilapidated estate if he wants anything to live on. He’s got a little inheritance but he has to marry and is on his way to propose to some horse faced woman when an accident pairs him with our perfect heroine. (Mary Sue has nothing on this chick). She was going to live her life as a dowdy spinster anyway, so all is good…except for the fact that he still has it BAD for his old love and just hates our heroine with a passion because she’s not her.
I know this wasn’t supposed to be funny by a long shot, but I more or less read this as a comedy due to all the over the top levels of pure rage directed towards the heroine whenever she did something that actually benefitted him or was simply impressive (and you can bet there was plenty). She plays the pianoforte like Mozart, showing up his precious? Hates her. He stays gone for three weeks bumping nasties with his old flame and comes back to changes that would’ve taken him three months to accomplish? Hates her. He sends her off sight-unseen to meet his family and the ton without any support only to find that she changes into a beautiful swan (well, passable swan) and ingratiates herself to his entire family, all his old friends, and even her long lost duke uncle. Hates her. Hates her, hates her, hates her. All the way through the book…all the way to that talked about scene (at almost the very end!) where he is actually disappointed when the heroine survives an accident that almost killed her (and this is when he had started to like her…or recognized that he was being unfair.)
As a nice balance, as blind as he was to the wonderfulness of the heroine, he was equally so to the whorishness of the OW who was all about the money and titles and never missed an opportunity to sleep with everyone in town. He was uber obsessed with the slut throughout the entire story, though he held himself back for the most part…for honors sake. He was big on being honorable. *cough*
The entire book was a constant bombardment of him hating the heroine equally to his loving the OW while keeping his butt cheeks clinched in order to not pounce on her (the OW) in public and, thus, embarrass him and his whole family and ruin his sister’s chance for a good connection during her coming out. But then at the very end, he has a random epiphany where he sees the OW for the slut she is and recognizes that the heroine is the embodiment of all the perfection he had attributed to the skankwhore. Believable, eh?
If quick turn-arounds with nice big bows at the end are your pet-peeve, then this one will throw you over the top. If you can overlook the unrealistic 180 switcheroo in order to wallow through the most obscene level of OW worship you’ll ever come across, then you have good times ahead.
