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Wooing Miss Whately

by Meredith Bond

Meredith Bond is a fairly new Regency writer, but apparently she is quite creative, having already written the related stories of three other heroes. Her current traditional Regency, titled Wooing Miss Whately, features an American heroine whose father had renounced his title and gone to America many years before. Sarah Whately then, has no notion of the social rules that prevail in London--and as soon as she arrives in England, she proceeds to unwittingly violate one convention after another. Yet she soldiers on, because she has an important objective to achieve.

One of the first Englishmen she meets, Viscount Reath, is a good-natured enough gentleman, but she rips up at him for being an arrogant aristocrat. It seems her father has planted republican ideas in her head. In fact, she rips up at Reath on many occasions, but he seems to find her rudeness intriguing. He does his best to be helpful to the clueless colonial, but little does he know that he stands between her and her objective!

“[Sarah Whately] is a character you would feel sorry for because she has led such a difficult life, but she is trying to make everything better--better for herself and for her father,” says the author about her heroine. “She is the type of person who will do anything for the people she loves, but she is also rather angry and uncouth (not having been brought up properly by a governess). For this reason, I hope readers will root for her and want her to get what she is trying so hard to obtain.”

Meredith also points out that the series “is being printed backwards.” The order in which she wrote them is not the order in which they were picked up by the publisher! So if you are obsessive about reading a series in order, you'll have to buy them all first and then arrange them.

If you like patient, kind, and resourceful heroes who are just right for somewhat prickly heroines, Wooing Miss Whately is the book for you.