Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: Well, to me Ms. Grasso has done it again. To Catch A Countess to me was one of the better books that I've read this year. Although I had trouble warming up to Alexander who takes everything said to him as face value..he never gives Victoria a chance to explain herself until the end when he is force to listen. Victoria thinks she's stupid in this story she must say that word at least 100 times. When in reality she is dyslexic. No one outside her family know of her problem. Her sister's put a "L" on the bottom of her shoe so she can tell the difference. Victoria's aunt is the one that arranges the marriage with Alexander and Victoria. He feels he owes the family something for the wrong his stepfather did to the Douglas family. We have the evil stepsister and her sister-in-law who cause nothing but problems for Victoria. Like Victoria's brother-in-law Robert saids "Venetia is the Satan handmaiden." Plus we have Alex's three daughters all born in the same year by 3 different mistress's who Victoria takes into her heart and gives them nothing but love. I love the wand scene with Darcy. The ending of this book brought tears to my eyes. It was so touching. I'm so looking foward to the next book in this series, To Love A Princess
Rating: 
Summary: This is the first Patricia Grasso novel I read
Review: What can one say about a book like this? The only thing I'm glad about is that I paid less than $4 for it because I found it at Wal-Mart. It would have been a rip-off to pay the cover price. The reason this book received two stars was because of its potential, and the plot. NOT the characters. I honestly believed that having the heroine be dyslexic was going to be interesting. I had many scenarios in my head about how it could turn out. In one of my favorite historical romance novels (by Mary Balogh, entitled "Silent Melody"), the heroine is a deaf mute, and the author handled it wonderfully. However, I should have read more than four pages of it before deciding to buy it. In those pages, I had only met the heroine, whom I found very interesting. After that, however, I met the hero, whom I cannot ever consider a hero in the true sense of the word. Now, I realize that not every man in the world is a feminist. In fact, I would say that number is significantly low. However, I firmly believe that if people are going to write about romance in the eighteen hundreds, they can at least choose men who could learn to be open to women as more that property. Call it writer's liberty if you want. The only reason I even finished this book was because of the plot--not to mention my disbelief that the hero and heroine could ever be reconciled. And I still cannot believe that they could have been, and were. Victoria should have left Alexander--perhaps after getting in a few jabs. Or maybe cutting off something important. There is only one book I can see fit to compare this to (Secret Fire, by Johanna Lindsey, whose "hero" I detested), and still this book lacks. To sum up what has been a very non-formal review (and add some new things), my specific complaints about this book were: the heroine was laughed at because of her disability (seeing d's as b's and 6's as 9's, and confusing left and right [i.e., dyslexia]) by EVERYONE--strangers, friends, family, her sisters, and even her husband; one plot-point, that Alexander was illegitimate and did not know whom his father was, which I thought would have taken a higher role in the story, was brought up at the end in an obvious attempt to tie up a loose end the author forgot about; there were a lot of points where the author showed a scene from the POV of the heroine that made her think one thing (i.e., her husband having an affair), but later had the hero explain it in a way that was partly implausible (making me wonder whether the hero was telling the truth, or the author just didn't know how to make it all right); the hero and the heroine's uncle and brothers-in-law made a huge deal about obeying your husband, and although Victoria's attempts NOT to do so were humorous, a lot of the book just didn't make sense; the author has a bad habit of relaying everything the characters were served at a dinner, even when what was served makes no difference in the story (which, actually, it never did--for instance, no one choked on the red soup with the white swirl in it)--one has to wonder whether she needed to stretch the book's word count; descriptions of the intimate scenes were more corny than I've ever seen in another romance novel (including Jude Deveraux, Mary Balogh, Julia Quinn, Lorraine Heath, Victoria Alexander, Stephanie Laurens, Suzanne Enoch, and Karen Hawkins); the supporting characters were just as bad about the "obey" part of being a wife and the wife using everything she can to her advantage, generally so she can "act like a woman"--meaning being underhanded, generally; the author probably realized toward the end of the book that Alexander had never said "I love you" to Victoria, and so had Victoria hovering near death's doorway during her birth to give him a reason to say it; I have to wonder whether Alexander is just cocky and arrogant, or actually stupid; no man should sit on his pride for five months while the woman he loves (even if he thinks she betrayed him by sleeping with someone else) is slanderized, given the cut direct, and stoned by the entire population of London; the author gives so many contradictions and unsatisfactory reasons for those contradictions that I am amazed the book made the presses. I apologize to those who enjoyed this book, but I could not find many good points about it. There were times at which I almost cried, but never the joy of the final reconciliation because in my mind, there never was any. - Margaret L.
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