Housekeeper With Benefits: The Heir

My sister, who loves me (see Take a Chance challenge), recommended Heir by Grace Burrowes when I asked her for a book I hadn't read before.  To add icing to the cake, she lent me her Kindle to read it on, so I got to try out handheld electronic books as well as the recommended text.  I enjoyed both, but am not going to seek out my own.  Unless of course, said sister gives me an AWESOME birthday present, so that I have my own cosy personal NOOK, complete with library ebooks.

The Kindle was fun to read, and definitely lighter than a book.  I of course carried my bag of books around with me anyway, because what if I wanted to read something else, but when I got stuck icing my shoulder for twenty minutes after physical therapy, I enjoyed the Heir and the lightweight reader too much to want to swap out.  I think most people would find it easy to use from the start; as a klutz it took me a while to figure out how to escape the table of contents, and then later, to find the table of contents again.  The pages felt a bit small but didn't hinder my reading rhythm in the way that large print books do.

The book itself was a fun historical romance.  The characters were fairly modern in their outlook, but not baffled by their society.  In some historical romances, the heroine is SHOCKED to discover that women don't get to vote or win medical scholarships or use birth control (except often Our Heroine has learned this art from her crafty grannie), but in this one they seemed fairly grounded in their time but still comfortable hanging with the present day reader.  The initial set-up was fun (I always like when the main characters meet by accidentally attacking each other, although it helps if the less powerful person wins).  The love scenes were refreshingly believable, and my main complaint was the last quarter of the book, which was silly and unnecessary.  It was the worst kind of plot by misunderstanding, where both make unreasonable and incoherent assumptions and then refuse to mutter a word that would clear everything up.  The occasional appearances of the blackhearted and paper-thin villains actually pulled this part of the book up a bit, which is a sad thing.  My sister and I were very impressed by this first book by Burrowes, although when I went looking for her web page I see that actually it's the pen name for a fairly prolific author, so the first-book mistakes aren't so forgivable after all.  Anyway, very nice story that doesn't stick the landing.  B