Miss Lacey's Last Fling

Rating:
Summary: Fun book, solid four stars.
Review: "Miss Lacey's Last Fling" is one of the better-written regencies, Ms. Hern has a style that is very easy to read, with a happy, bouncy attitude that shines through!

Unfortunately for this book, I had picked up "Blue Castle", by L.M. Montgomery, on the same day, and while both books have a similar plot, L.M. Montgomery did it so,so much better, that "Miss Lacey's Last Fling" was almost a pale shadow in comparison.

But this is definitely one of the better Regencies, a very enjoyable and entertaining read.

Rating:
Summary: Finally! A return to the Regency classic!
Review: Candace Hern's Regency novels have always charmed, but this one is special. It's an old plot -- rake reformed -- but Hern breathes new life into it with Rosalind and Max. Die-hard Regency readers require historical accuracy in their romances, and this one will meet their highest standards. Unfortunately, the genre seems to be a dying art. If more authors wrote at this level, perhaps that would not be the case. This one is delightfully romantic. A beautiful book.

Rating:
Summary: Finally! A return to the Regency classic!
Review: Candace Hern's Regency novels have always charmed, but this one is special. It's an old plot -- rake reformed -- but Hern breathes new life into it with Rosalind and Max. Die-hard Regency readers require historical accuracy in their romances, and this one will meet their highest standards. Unfortunately, the genre seems to be a dying art. If more authors wrote at this level, perhaps that would not be the case. This one is delightfully romantic. A beautiful book.

Rating:
Summary: A lovely romp
Review: Miss Rosalind Lacey, under the impression that she is dying of the same disease that killed her mother, decides to go to London for one last fling. Flings have been few and far between in her life, as she has spent the bulk of her youth looking after her family. If her life is to be cut short, she reasons, then why not flout society's strictures and have a good time, tasting all the things she's missed?

Max Devenant is wealthy, aristocratic, rakish and bored. His life has been the same year in and year out since he was eighteen. When he meets Rosalind he is delighted by her lust for life. Before he realises it, he is seeking her out at balls, and missing her when she's not there. Ms Hern has created two characters who have a lot to offer each other - Max can give Rosalind the experience she craves, and she can give him a fresh perspective on life.

The plot is fast-paced and well thought out. Ms Hern's style is nothing out of the ordinary, but is very smooth to read and is highly appropriate to the comedy of the book. Sexual tension between Max and Rosalind is quickly established and maintained throughout, and there are some very sexy scenes.

The biggest achievement of "Miss Lacey's Last Fling" is in the appeal of Rosalind Lacey. Here we have a heroine who loves life and seeks excitement, but without coming across as silly or selfish. She deserves this fling, and we feel her desperation as she contemplates what she believes is her imminent demise. The secondary characters - Aunt Fanny and Rosalind's father - are also well drawn.

Ms Hern has taken a very bleak premise and turned it into a lovely romp. A keeper.

Rating:
Summary: A lovely romp
Review: Miss Rosalind Lacey, under the impression that she is dying of the same disease that killed her mother, decides to go to London for one last fling. Flings have been few and far between in her life, as she has spent the bulk of her youth looking after her family. If her life is to be cut short, she reasons, then why not flout society's strictures and have a good time, tasting all the things she's missed?

Max Devenant is wealthy, aristocratic, rakish and bored. His life has been the same year in and year out since he was eighteen. When he meets Rosalind he is delighted by her lust for life. Before he realises it, he is seeking her out at balls, and missing her when she's not there. Ms Hern has created two characters who have a lot to offer each other - Max can give Rosalind the experience she craves, and she can give him a fresh perspective on life.

The plot is fast-paced and well thought out. Ms Hern's style is nothing out of the ordinary, but is very smooth to read and is highly appropriate to the comedy of the book. Sexual tension between Max and Rosalind is quickly established and maintained throughout, and there are some very sexy scenes.

The biggest achievement of "Miss Lacey's Last Fling" is in the appeal of Rosalind Lacey. Here we have a heroine who loves life and seeks excitement, but without coming across as silly or selfish. She deserves this fling, and we feel her desperation as she contemplates what she believes is her imminent demise. The secondary characters - Aunt Fanny and Rosalind's father - are also well drawn.

Ms Hern has taken a very bleak premise and turned it into a lovely romp. A keeper.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting idea, entertaining story
Review: Rosalind Lacey, oldest child of a motherless family, has given up her young adult years in order to care for her father and bring up her younger siblings. Now 26, she is going to London for the first time to have some fun. For Rosalind has been feeling ill lately and, because her mother died from an illness the nature of which was always kept from the family, she thinks she's now suffering from the same thing. A local doctor has agreed with her self-diagnosis of a few months to live.

So she wants to visit her notorious Aunt Fanny and experience everything she can possibly manage to fit in. Trips to the theatre, balls, masquerades, drives in the part, flirting with handsome gentlemen, maybe even a kiss or two. And once she meets her aunt's good friend, Max Devenant, she wants even more than that.

Max, once he realises that Rosalind isn't going to swoon if he says something improper, is only too happy to assist her in scandalising Society: waltzing with her in Almack's before she has permission - and holding her far too close! Attending masquerades with her and kissing her in public. Helping her to attend gambling dens dressed as a man. And, ultimately, showing her how rakes treat women they admire.

But then Rosalind discovers that her diagnosis was wrong and that she's perfectly healthy and, ashamed of her actions, she runs off back to Devon and abandons Max, to whom she is now more than an agreeable flirt. Can he win her back?

I enjoyed this book, the second I've read by Hern. However, a few niggles left me unable to rate it more highly. The diagnosis of Rosalind's 'illness' was badly handled; why would any doctor confirm something the nature of which he wasn't aware of? Rosalind's status as an instant hit at balls and so on was surprising, considering her age; she would more likely have been sniggered at as an ape-leader or something. And I couldn't take seriously her sudden flight and rejection of Max once she knew that she wasn't sick after all.

Other than those, this is an entertaining book.

Rating:
Summary: What's a girl to do?!
Review: So if you were told that you were going to die in a couple months what would you do back in the 1800's? Well I don't know about you but I would do exactly what Miss Rosalind Lacey did...Live life to it's fullest!!! Rosie is the oldest child out of a family of six children, and when her mother dies of mysterious headaches, Rosie's about 14 or 16 years old. Rosie then is given the position of holding up the household because her father is so grief stricken. Well it ends up that Rosie who used to be outgoing and up for anykind of fun is now a 26 year old country mouse, who was just informed that she has her mothers illness and has only a few months to live. It is then that she relizes that she hasn't lived life at all. She's only looked after her family and taken care of them. Soshe begins to make a list of everything that she wants to do and writes her free-spirited Aunt Fanny who lives in London to let Rosie come stay with her in London. At first Aunt Fanny is hesitant to let her quiet, reserved, country mouse of a neice come stay with her. However soon after Rosie arrives and announces that she wants to completly change, Fanny is more than willing to do just about anything! Including going to boring old Almack's!! Max Devenant, professional rake, is bored with life. He's tasted everything there is to taste and it now all tastes bland. However when this new, fearless, beautiful Rosalind comes into the scene he finds that the word boring is nowhere in his vocabulary. He now finds himself jumping into theatre boxes, being chased with Rosalind throughout the theatre, and being drawned to her in the most courious way that he just can't understand. Ms. Hern did a wonderful job developing the feelings between the two main characters! She showed the fear that Rosie felt of dying perfect and later when the truth comes out about Rosie's mother just makes it even better! The only problem I had throughout the entire book was when Max is literally throwing himself at Rosie's feet wanting to marry her and she still refuses him! It makes you wish you could just shake her!!! I promise not to give the ending away but I must admit that it made this reader smile.

Rating:
Summary: What's a girl to do?!
Review: So if you were told that you were going to die in a couple months what would you do back in the 1800's? Well I don't know about you but I would do exactly what Miss Rosalind Lacey did...Live life to it's fullest!!! Rosie is the oldest child out of a family of six children, and when her mother dies of mysterious headaches, Rosie's about 14 or 16 years old. Rosie then is given the position of holding up the household because her father is so grief stricken. Well it ends up that Rosie who used to be outgoing and up for anykind of fun is now a 26 year old country mouse, who was just informed that she has her mothers illness and has only a few months to live. It is then that she relizes that she hasn't lived life at all. She's only looked after her family and taken care of them. Soshe begins to make a list of everything that she wants to do and writes her free-spirited Aunt Fanny who lives in London to let Rosie come stay with her in London. At first Aunt Fanny is hesitant to let her quiet, reserved, country mouse of a neice come stay with her. However soon after Rosie arrives and announces that she wants to completly change, Fanny is more than willing to do just about anything! Including going to boring old Almack's!! Max Devenant, professional rake, is bored with life. He's tasted everything there is to taste and it now all tastes bland. However when this new, fearless, beautiful Rosalind comes into the scene he finds that the word boring is nowhere in his vocabulary. He now finds himself jumping into theatre boxes, being chased with Rosalind throughout the theatre, and being drawned to her in the most courious way that he just can't understand. Ms. Hern did a wonderful job developing the feelings between the two main characters! She showed the fear that Rosie felt of dying perfect and later when the truth comes out about Rosie's mother just makes it even better! The only problem I had throughout the entire book was when Max is literally throwing himself at Rosie's feet wanting to marry her and she still refuses him! It makes you wish you could just shake her!!! I promise not to give the ending away but I must admit that it made this reader smile.

Rating:
Summary: Miss Lacey's Wild Ride Is This Season's Treat
Review: This is a gloriously satisfying tale by an author who never fails to charm, in which a dutiful doormat of a young woman twists her life by its tail and transforms herself into one of the Regency period's most delightful and compelling heroines.

Rosalind Lacey at 26 is a country mouse from Devonshire with a dry twig of a father, a life sacrificed to chores, and the sudden diagnosis that she's dying of epilepsy.

Instead of shriveling up and blowing away, "Rosie" resolves to get a life (albeit short) that will finally be a merry one. She sets off for London with a list of objectives revolving around one, and only one, social Season in London, with all of the dizzying blandishments she has only fantacized. As her mentor, she chooses her sly, superbly-connected Auntie Mame--Lady Fanny Heatherington. Fanny treats Rosie to an historically-correct makeover (with an LOL French hairdresser) that turns the drab country mouse into a stunning fashionista, then introduces her docile neice to Society--the social whirl of balls, theater, and an army of rapacious rakes capable of filling her waning days with ardor and passion.

Among the newly-dazzling Rosie's admirers, the most frustrating is Byronically handsome, jaded, and melancholy Max Devenant, so exquisitely bored with the ladies he's already sampled, life has lost all promise. Max becomes smitten with Rosie, who practically whoops with glee as she takes the reins in her own gloves and races her carraige through Mayfair, makes the crimson-faced bluenoses sniffing for scandal faint from her antics , samples champagne at Daffy's and does illicit gambing on Jermyn Street.

Then Miss Lacey sees a London doctor to help with one of the "symptomatic" headaches of her fatal disease and discovers- with shock and a mounting horror- that it's nothing but a bloody great hangover. It seems that Miss Lacey has been misdiagnosed. She has a full life ahead to accept the consequences of her ribald life and her toying with the peripatetic Max...

Ms. Hern is a delightful writer, socially perceptive and witty in the language of the era (e.g. "that fatuous tulip Oswald"). You will feel all the wrenching humor of Rosalind Lacey's metamorphosis and enjoy unexpected wrinkles in this clever story that manages to be completely beguiling to the last page and leaves you wanting more.

Eagerly awaiting Ms. Hern's next fling!

Rating:
Summary: Miss Lacey's Wild Ride Is This Season's Treat
Review: This is a gloriously satisfying tale by an author who never fails to charm, in which a dutiful doormat of a young woman twists her life by its tail and transforms herself into one of the Regency period's most delightful and compelling heroines.

Rosalind Lacey at 26 is a country mouse from Devonshire with a dry twig of a father, a life sacrificed to chores, and the sudden diagnosis that she's dying of epilepsy.

Instead of shriveling up and blowing away, "Rosie" resolves to get a life (albeit short) that will finally be a merry one. She sets off for London with a list of objectives revolving around one, and only one, social Season in London, with all of the dizzying blandishments she has only fantacized. As her mentor, she chooses her sly, superbly-connected Auntie Mame--Lady Fanny Heatherington. Fanny treats Rosie to an historically-correct makeover (with an LOL French hairdresser) that turns the drab country mouse into a stunning fashionista, then introduces her docile neice to Society--the social whirl of balls, theater, and an army of rapacious rakes capable of filling her waning days with ardor and passion.

Among the newly-dazzling Rosie's admirers, the most frustrating is Byronically handsome, jaded, and melancholy Max Devenant, so exquisitely bored with the ladies he's already sampled, life has lost all promise. Max becomes smitten with Rosie, who practically whoops with glee as she takes the reins in her own gloves and races her carraige through Mayfair, makes the crimson-faced bluenoses sniffing for scandal faint from her antics , samples champagne at Daffy's and does illicit gambing on Jermyn Street.

Then Miss Lacey sees a London doctor to help with one of the "symptomatic" headaches of her fatal disease and discovers- with shock and a mounting horror- that it's nothing but a bloody great hangover. It seems that Miss Lacey has been misdiagnosed. She has a full life ahead to accept the consequences of her ribald life and her toying with the peripatetic Max...

Ms. Hern is a delightful writer, socially perceptive and witty in the language of the era (e.g. "that fatuous tulip Oswald"). You will feel all the wrenching humor of Rosalind Lacey's metamorphosis and enjoy unexpected wrinkles in this clever story that manages to be completely beguiling to the last page and leaves you wanting more.

Eagerly awaiting Ms. Hern's next fling!