A Regency Christmas Feast: Five Stories
£127.02
A book to discover for The Wassail Bowl alone - Anthologies of short stories around themes often have varied levels of success - I find that sometimes the stories are completely incompatible with each other, writing styles seem too different and the overall quality of the story writing is disappointing.I bought this entire book because of the Mary Balogh story which I had read at a friend s house a year ago and remembered being fantastic. Her story, The Wassail Bowl, the last in the book, is just brilliant. Somehow she manages to cram incredible amounts of emotion and feeling into a fairly short story about an estranged husband and wife having to spend Christmas together. There s a strange typographical anomaly in this story in that at the beginning of the story the hero is called the Earl of Wyndham and lives at Wyndham Hall but halfway through he becomes the Earl of Wycherly who lives at Wycherly Hall. Still it doesn t matter to the overall story because it s always clear what s going on. John, the Earl, has been estranged from his wife for three years since she became pregnant by another man, Antonia has been ordered to allow their son Jeffrey to visit his father for Christmas but the Earl doesn t expect Antonia to bring herself and her bastard daughter too. John wants to ignore Antonia and Jane but this isn t possible, firstly because of Antonia s behaviour towards him when first setting eyes on him again and secondly because Jane is curious about him. As the Christmas festivities go on around them the couple begin to explore more deeply what happened between them and to try to relearn trust and love. Mary Balogh is always an excellent writer, of course, and is also very succesful with short stories because she doesn t bite off more than she can chw - her stories focus on small elements of a plot which mean that these elements can be deeply explored, rather than trying to cram too much of an overall plot into limited space. This short story is very moving in several places and is alone worth the price of the book.The Gingerbread Man by Edith Layton is the first story in the anthology and was a very pleasant surprise. The Duke of Blackburn s sleep is being disturbed by dreams of gingerbread (which he doesn t even like) and he wonders if his subconscious is trying to tell him something. He starts investigating whether gingerbread has another meaning, at the urging of his old friend Elizabeth, and soon finds his plans going rather awry. His plan to offer for the Incomparable of the Season seems less wise, his mistress and he part company because he begins to understand more about her life, and his whole world is rocked when his old friend announces her own matrimonial plans. This was a lighthearted story but very enjoyable and had an amusing twist at the end. It s a great introduction to this author s work and although the language used was often rather more American than British English it was still a great read.The Christmas Goose by Patricia Rice, the third offering in this collection, is a story of a woman fallen on hard times as she looks after her dead husband s sisters. When her husband s friend returns from the war he feels a complete failure because he is unable to help his comrades and his life is relatively easy, being the younger son of a viscount. When he meets Rebecca, widow of his friend, he tries to help her but it is difficult to come to her aid without appearing to give her charity. Some of his attempts to help actually make things more difficult. In the end he takes a risk in contacting her estranged father in the hopes that he can bring about some sort of a reconciliation. The description of Simon LeMaster s survivor s guilt after the Peninsular war is excellent, as is the way in which we see his thoughts as he fails at trying to help Rebecca. Although a short story and therefore without a great deal of time to investigate characters the author reveals both Rebecca s and Simon s thoughts to us excellently as they begin to wonder if they can lean on each other. This was an excellent story and a reminder that hardship can exist both in the lives of soldiers and in the lives of those left behind with no pensions and little assistance.The Proof Is In The Pudding by Barbara Metzger is the fourth story in this book (Balogh s Wassail Bowl is the final story) and this one was a little bit of a disappointment. There was nothing wrong with it as such and it was written in an enjoyable and light style, it just didn t feel very realistic. Johna Ogden is a widow and unfortunately her husband was a gambler and all round dodgy character so she and her unmarried sister Phillipa aren t socially acceptable. She persuades the Viscount Selcrest to ask his mother to launch them into the ton, which she does, but Johna continually puts their new social position at stake with her erratic behaviour. There s a rather farcical battle with a dodgy French chef and most of the action takes place way before Christmas so the Christmas theme is a tiny part of the story for the final couple of scenes. The Viscount is an attractive hero, although possibly too good to be true, and his interest in Johna appears mainly to be because he lusts after her as she s such a liability, but it s a pleasant enough read, if not up to the standard of The Gingerbread Man, The Christmas Goose or The Wassail Bowl.Sophie s Syllabub is the second story in this anthology and unfortunately it doesn t live up to the standards of the other stories. Not in terms of writing style as it s an easy read with reasonable historical detail. The big problem is the central premise of the book, that a married couple who have been estranged for a year patch up their differences when meeting accidentally in Brussels and travelling back to England together. Sophie Greenwood is working as a governess in Brussels when she bumps into Captain Owen Lassiter, her husband, again. Two months after their wedding he had an affair with Serena Hetherington, a neighbour, and after that night Sophie left him and refused to have anything to do with him. Owen wants to win Sophie back and so the story shows his efforts as they travel together back to Canterbury. Unfortunately for this reader his arguments didn t seem entirely to work - he explained to Sophie that sex doesn t mean much to a male, that she s got to trust him and that he now knows how much he hurt her. Rather amazingly Sophie eventually falls for this and says she can trust him so they can live happily ever after. Although Owen is clearly a handsome man and persistant too he didn t come across as very trustworthy and he seems to blame Sophie for overreacting to his infidelity. This didn t make either hero or heroine attractive to me and is sharply contrasted by Mary Balogh s story which also contains infidelity but is written in so much more of a believable and understandable manner and the forgiveness of the parties in that makes sense whereas it doesn t in this story.In summary this book contains three excellent stories, one very good one and one rather disappointing one. However that s not a bad score for an anthology which can often have one good story and three disappointing ones so I award this book five stars even despite the disappointment of Sophie s Syllabub. And of course the entire book is worth finding just for The Wassail Bowl, a story to be read and savoured over and over again.