Romance

First Comes Marriage by Mary Balogh

Karen Wheless


I’ve been waiting for the last book to come out before I delved into Balogh’s latest series. She’s been a bit disappointing to me lately, but I live in hope!

First Comes Marriage by Mary Balogh
(2009, Regency Historical) 5/31/10
Grade: 3.5

When Viscount Lyngate arrives in their small village, Vanessa Huxtable Dew isn’t expecting her life to change. But soon she and her family are whisked away, as her younger brother has unexpectedly inherited an Earldom. Vanessa finds herself married to the viscount, her brother’s guardian – is it just to save her family, or is there more emotion involved?

This is the first book in a new Balogh series, and a lot of time is spent introducing the characters for the next four books. This takes away from the main romance between Elliott and Vanessa – but their romance doesn’t have a lot of conflict, so the time spent with other characters doesn’t detract much from the story. She thinks she’s plain but it determined to be happy anyway, he’s stuffy and afraid of love because his father was unfaithful – it all seems like a pale copy of Balogh’s other books. Vanessa, in particular, is very reminiscent of Christine in the much better Slightly Dangerous, but this book lacks the depth of emotion that that book had. (The most moving part of the book is Vanessa’s devotion to her first husband, who died young of consumption, but even that lacks some depth of feeling.) There’s nothing terribly wrong with this book – the characters are pleasant and the book is well written – but it just doesn’t bring anything new to this nice but familiar story. 3.5 – grading on the Balogh scale, since I know how much better her books can be.

There were things I really liked about this book, and I might have given a newer author more of a pass – but I know Balogh can take a familiar story and make it sing, and she just didn’t do that here. So Balogh gets graded on a curve.

Karen Wheless

I've been reading romance since I discovered Kathleen Woodiwiss at age 12. I love all kinds of romances, especially emotional and angsty stories. I finally cut back my TBR pile from 2000 books to only 400, but I still have lots of books left to read!

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