Although I probably should have read this before Ten Things I Love About You, I’m actually glad I read it second. I was able to enjoy Ten Things without being too picky about it.
What Happens In London by Julia Quinn
(2009, Regency) 9/6/10
Grade: 3.5
When Harry Valentine moves in next door, Olivia Bevelstoke can’t help being curious. According to the gossip, he killed his fiancée! So she decides to spy on him – and discovers there’s something mysterious going on…
This book definitely had the Julia Quinn wit, but it just didn’t have the depth of emotion of her last book. There were some hilarious scenes in this one – there was one scene in Olivia’s drawing room that had me laughing hysterically. But the romance felt lacking. The hero and heroine don’t have much of a connection until almost 200 pages into the book, and their scenes together felt scattershot and unfocused. The whole book had an episodic feel, like a bunch of individual scenes put together instead of a coherent whole. I liked the characters, and it seemed like the author was trying for something more with the hero’s background and the heroine’s frustration at being seen as shallow, but those plotlines never really went anywhere. The book did come together in the end and it was fun to read, but it just wasn’t memorable.
I think Julia Quinn is one author who has won me over with Facebook. I tend to forget about her books since she’s not an auto-buy author for me, but her posts on FB were just frequent enough to get me to buy 10 Things.
Karen Wheless
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