Rating: 
Summary: expected too much
Review: AFTER READING THE REVIEWS OF OTHER READERS I EXPECTED THIS BOOK TO HAVE AN INTERESTING STORY LINE AND IN DEPTH CHARACTERS. TO MY DISMAY THE CHARACTERS CAROLINE AND BRENT WERE UNREALISTIC AND RATHER BORING. I STILL CANNOT BELIEVE THAT CAROLINE COULD DIAGNOSE THE DAUGHTER ROSALYN AS BEING DEAF AFTER ONE BRIEF ENCOUNTER. I FELT VERY LITTLE CHEMISTRY EXISTED BETWEEN THE TWO LEAD CHARACTERS AND FOUND MYSELF SKIMMING THROUGH THE PAGES TWO THIRDS INTO THE BOOK. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE FRENCH SPY/ASSASAIN SEEMED VERY MUCH CONTRIVED, AND DID VERY LITTLE TO IMPROVE THE STORY. I DOUBT THAT I WILL READ ANY FUTURE BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful romance, wonderful characters
Review: All her life Lady Caroline Grayson has known that she botany is her life. Now, after finally breeding a rare lavendar rose, she plans to fulfill her dream to study in New York. When Caroline's father insists that she marry the Earl of Weymerth she is crushed but agrees. Knowing she will ask for a annulment Caroline refuses to make this a marriage in truth. She refuses to consumate the marriage, instead keeping Brent at an arms length. Having just returned from Waterloo, Brent's only wish for this marriage is a woman in his bed and a wife to bear him sons. He hadn't expected brilliant Lady Caroline. Brent and Caroline slowly grow to respect eachother and that respect turns into love. Can Caroline give up her lifelong dream of botany to be a wife? I loved this book, I loved Caroline and I especially loved the brooding Brent. Adele Ashworth is an author to watch and look forward to more of her work.
Rating: 
Summary: Actually, I would give this book three and a half stars
Review: because it was entertaining although I thought the pacing was a little off at times and the dialogue a bit stilted and quite modern in some instances. However, I am always willing to overlook modern dialogue and an over-used plot as long as the author manages to keep me interested for 338 pages and Ms. Ashworth certainly accomplished that. Caroline Grayson is a gifted botanist with the unladylike dream of traveling to America to study botany at Columbia University. However, her dream is shattered when her father announces that she's to be wed to the Earl of Weymerth. The Earl is also being forced to wed in order to obtain back his estate that was sold from under him while he was in the continent battling Napoleon.Caroline sees this a brilliant opportunity to put her plan into motion. She plans to wed the handsome earl and then ask him for an anullment (sp?). To her mind this should be a simple thing to do since she does not care for him and he certainly doesn't care for her. What Caroline never considered was that the Earl might want a wife and that she might end up wanting to be a wife to him thereby giving up the dream of a lifetime. This arranged marriage plot is certainly overused in historicals but in this book the author makes it work. As I understand this was the author's first book so that might explain the sometimes ackward pacing of the story. I disliked the extraneous plot involving an assassin from the hero's past. It seemed that it was inserted into the story as an after thought and did not really mesh with the love story being told. Also, there were many characters like Davis the horse trainer and Caroline's sisters that appeared in one or two scenes and were never to be seen or heard from again with no explanation. Another quibble was having two characters named Charlotte (one was the hero's sister and the other the heroines!) which made it very confusing. Also, the dialogue at times sounded much too modern for a novel set in the Regency period, this is a minor problem but it did jolt me out of the story a few times. Having said that, I have to admit that this was quite a love story and it does not really suffer all that much from the things I have listed above. The romance and the way the author turned overused plot devices and made them unique to her story was able to make up for those shortcomings very well.For example, the hero and heroine recognize their love early on which I found very unusual and the requisite big-misunderstanding is not dragged on interminably.Overall, this was a very satisfying read and I will be looking foward to reading this author's other works. :-)
Rating:
Summary: So Moved I'm Writing This Review From the Floor
Review: Botany? I despise gardening. But 16 pgs later I'm hooked and halfway through I'm pulling my hair screaming "Just let the poor girl make her lavendar rose!" Caroline becomes torn between fulfilling her ambition and caring for her husband and small step-daughter. How can any living female not relate? Are we selfish? Are they? This book has a go at the answers. Brent is compelling as the hero; brutally honest, haunted, honorable and gifted for passionate dialogue that turned my ears red. His relationship with the "plain-looking" genius Caroline is a coup for all girls not born airbrushed. This novel goes leagues deeper than just a romp and had me rivetted from start to finish. Profound. Cathartic. Ashworth's research in botany and history passed muster for this bachelor's in history. Don't let not being a green thumb keep you from this phenomenal book.
Rating:
Summary: So Moved I'm Writing This Review From the Floor
Review: Botany? I despise gardening. But 16 pgs later I'm hooked and halfway through I'm pulling my hair screaming "Just let the poor girl make her lavendar rose!" Caroline becomes torn between fulfilling her ambition and caring for her husband and small step-daughter. How can any living female not relate? Are we selfish? Are they? This book has a go at the answers. Brent is compelling as the hero; brutally honest, haunted, honorable and gifted for passionate dialogue that turned my ears red. His relationship with the "plain-looking" genius Caroline is a coup for all girls not born airbrushed. This novel goes leagues deeper than just a romp and had me rivetted from start to finish. Profound. Cathartic. Ashworth's research in botany and history passed muster for this bachelor's in history. Don't let not being a green thumb keep you from this phenomenal book.
Rating:
Summary: An emotionally involving story. Excellent.
Review: Caroline and Brent's relationship and characterization is intelligent, insightful and passionate. It truly "suspends reality"--which is so rare. The book's characters, defined through their individual dialogue and thoughts are intriguing personalities with foibles, wit, and "life's sorrows".
Rating:
Summary: Characters I cared about
Review: Caroline Grayson is a brilliant woman, but she was born in an era that looked down on women. At first glance, her marriage to Brent Ravenscroft, the Earl of Weymerth, looks as if it's doomed to failure. She would rather be studying botany, and Brent has secrets of his own. Watching these two people get to know each other is the charm of this novel. This could have been one of those dreaded Big Misunderstanding novels. But with well-drawn characters, what you have instead is a novel about characters who can't bring themselves to reveal everything at first. There is a subplot that didn't work for me. Also, some of the secondary characters were hard to keep track of -- luckily, they didn't show up in the plot too often. I gave this novel Desert Island Keeper status at All About Romance.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Magic
Review: Have you ever finished a romance novel and thought, this is how it is supposed to be done, this is how I am supposed to feel? I am supposed to feel that I know the main characters intimately, I am supposed to feel their pain, and rejoice at their happiness. That is how I felt when I read the last page of this book and I realized that, unless something truly strange happened and Adele Ashworth starts writing very differently, I will always buy her books, because this is how romance is supposed to be written. Caroline Grayson is not simply intelligent, she is brillant and wonderfully talented with plants. Ever since she discovered her affinity for flowers, she has wanted to study botany with her idol who is a professor at Oxford University. However, when she is cruely dismissed because she is female, she disguises her gender and applies, and is accepted, to study in New York. However, things don't go as planned when her father announces that she must marry Brent Ravenscroft, an impoverished lord who has come to her father to demand the return of property which was improperly sold to him when Brent went off to war. Caroline's father tells Brent that he must marry Caroline in order to get back what was sold, throwing both of them into a relationship that neither desired. Caroline believes, since Brent doesn't want to marry her anyway, that she can simply get an annulment and fulfill her dream by going to New York. Of course, things don't work out quite that way... What follows is a truly touching story about what it means to love and be loved. The pain, excitement, and healing that often goes with falling in love with a person who truly is meant for you. The most amazing thing about this book, and other Ashworth titles like Winter Garden, are the characters. The reader has the joy of watching two people who had planned different futures for themselves, ultimately find happiness and love. Both have emotional scars, Caroline from growing up brillant, but limited by her gender, and Brent from dealing with his family. I was touched when Ashworth described the pain Caroline felt when she had to stand outside classrooms in order to learn more about the science she so loved, enduring comments about her feminity. So often authors tell us that a heroine is intelligent, but so few show it as well as Ashworth. Thank you Adele Ashworth for giving us romance readers such a wonderful and moving story. For those of you who find yourself without something to read, and have not all ready devoured this book like I and so many other have, or for those of you who simply wonder what all the fuss is about, read this book. It's magic.
Rating: 
Summary: An Unbelievably Silly Book
Review: I know the guiding principle of romance publishers is "publish anything or perish," but even so, this book reaches some new level of publishing chutzpah. The "Reader from Boston" is absolutely on target, but I'd like to add the following, abbreviated list of the myriad problems with this book: 1. The hero is unable to be anything but blunt and straightforward. 2. The hero possesses such skills in the art of duplicity and subtlety that he's able to insinuate himself into the highest realms of wartime France's government. A terrible case of split personality? 3. At the time of the story, the hero has been spy for 6 years, has come home while Napoleon is imprisoned at Elba and returned to Europe before Waterloo. This would take about eight years. 4. At Waterloo, the spy magically becomes a field officer, and in the three days of Waterloo almost starves and learns how to live and eat with every sort of human being. Right. 5. Seven years before the time of the story, the hero's sister escapes their abusive mother and flees to America. The hero won't acknowledge the sister or her husband because the sister has hurt him by leaving him, the hero, to the tender mercies of their horrible mother. The hero was 27 years old and afraid of his mother, while he was under cover in France? The timeline for all these events is so out of whack, I don't see how anybody could have missed it or overlooked it. 6. The hero has an illegitimate child by a French whore. The child is dumped on his doorstep and while under cover, the hero sends the child to his estate in England to be raised by servants. No one notices the child is deaf, until the heroine shows up. After one, brief encounter, the heroine deduces the child isn't troubled, but deaf, and within about two and one half months teaches this four year old manners, cleanliness, how to communicate and how to spell and read. Right. 7. The heroine is a genius mathematician who is thrilled because her husband essentially asks her to balance his checkbook? Right. 8. The hero is also some sort of genius scholar (He majored in "French Studies" at Oxford around 1800? Right!) who overlooks a recent, single, very large deposit in his banking account and multiplies a number by 3 instead of 300? Weird. 9. The heroine is a botanist of such amazing skills that in the space of about three months, beginning around September, she rejuvenates a neglected flower garden, and it is a garden of such beauty, the characters are enjoying this remarkable floral display in November, and she's worried that her husband has picked her roses (in full bloom, by the way) sometime in late January or February. A genius, indeed. 10. The characters move between the United States and England with amazing ease during a declared war between the two countries (the author's put so many other things in the story, however, taking on the War of 1812 might have been daunting even for her). If you can suspend reality long enough to ignore these types of gross errors, you may enjoy the book. Otherwise, save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun and touching BUT...
Review: If you didn't know, this was THE book earlier this year. I caught the fever and haunted the new bookstores (What do you mean, you don't have it? It's barely a month old! No, I don't want Nora Roberts!) and scavenged the old ones, but I never found it. Then I got wise and ordered it from Half.com, and settled down over my precious fall break to read my much-anticipated treasure. I've good news and bad news. The bad news... nothing can live up to my expectations. By now, I thought it would be a cross between Rhett's staircase kiss and a direct revelation from God. But when I finished it, I felt as if what I'd really gotten were a few Hershey's chocolate nuggets (you know, satisfyingly good but not that great) and that God was actually just some guy over the store loudspeaker. I like my men to be gentlemen. Brent wasn't. Oh, he has a title, and you're suppose to think that underneath that tough, unloved exterior he is. I'll buy that, but that doesn't rub away my impression that he's just kind of... cold. And blunt. Expect him to be very blunt and straight-forward, expect a lot of twists, misunderstandings... that began to annoy me when Ashworth would pile one "incident" on top of the other until... I didn't really care, anymore. You can read the list of the reviewer underneath, but come on, babe, it's FICTION, and I've never came across anything in my life that was perfect. But the good news, now. Despite what I've said, it's very well-written, and the heroine far surpasses the hero in my opinion. She's smart and ambitious and kind in her own particular way. Every modern woman would understand Caroline's position, as in, encountering even today in our "enlightened" times bigotry about women's intelligence, and the issue of pursuing a career or having a family. Take a chance, and see if this book works for you.
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