Marrying Winterborne (The Ravenels, #2)

by Lisa Kleypas

[Amanda]

Ahh, Lisa Kleypas. While I may not have the intense love affair with her books as others do, I keep giving them a shot, hoping that the next one will wow me. Enough do that I keep coming back.

Marrying Winterborne isn't much different, although it took me a while to get through it. What this book suffers from, at least from my perspective of a) reading a lot of historical romance books and b) not being wholly immersed in the Lisa Kleypas fandom, is its feeling of predictability in the way Rhys and Helen are driven apart.

It's not that Marrying Winterborne had blowup I expected (it didn't), but the tension leading up to it certainly made me expect "just another one of those" conflicts. And while it's always good when an author can take a trope and surprise readers, it took me time to get to that point. (It might also be a sign I just need a historical romance break.)

I originally picked up Marrying Winterborne because I confess I watched and loved the TV show Paradise on Netflix. It's about the first department store, and the similarities between that show and this book were enough to intrigue me. And although they're two distinct stories, I wasn't disappointed with this one.

Helen is exactly the type of character I love in historical romances: one who chooses to buck society, at least in terms of their expectations. She refuses to see Rhys as lesser than her, simply because he was common-born. Rhys was pretty typical, romance-wise. He does handle himself nicely in the end.

Fans of Lisa Kleypas and historical romance will eat up Marrying Winterborne.