Love in the Afternoon (Hathaway Series) Book

Night or day, it’s always high time to fall in love with New York Times bestselling author

LISA KLEYPAS

She harbors a secret yearning.

As a lover of animals and nature, Beatrix Hathaway has always been more comfortable outdoors than in the ballroom. Even though she participated in the London season in the past, the classic beauty and free-spirited Beatrix has never been swept away or seriously courted…and she has resigned herself to the fate of never finding love. Has the time come for the most unconventional of the Hathaway sisters to settle for an ordinary man—just to avoid spinsterhood?

He is a world-weary cynic.

Captain Christopher Phelan is a handsome, daring soldier who plans to marry Beatrix’s friend, the vivacious flirt Prudence Mercer, when he returns from fighting abroad. But, as he explains in his letters to Pru, life on the battlefield has darkened his soul—and it’s becoming clear that Christopher won’t come back as the same man. When Beatrix learns of Pru’s disappointment, she decides to help by concocting Pru’s letters to Christopher for her. Soon the correspondence between Beatrix and Christopher develops into something fulfilling and deep…and when Christopher comes home, he’s determined to claim the woman he loves. What began as Beatrix’s innocent deception has resulted in the agony of unfulfilled love—and a passion that can’t be denied…

 “Will leave you breathless.”—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

A favorite game of authors from Shakespeare to Christopher Moore is to steal a plot and transform it in their own image. Think of Hamlet: Shakespeare picked up a play about a revengeful prince and made the poor bloke fat, short of breath, and unable to make up his mind. Hamlet's girth may well reflect that of Shakespeare's lead actor rather than the Bard's own, but the prince's pesky habit of over-thinking things is reflective, I would argue, of the fact there was only one wicked uncle and five long acts to get rid of him. In short: Hamlet's famous uncertainty stemmed, at least partially, from a problem in the original plot the playwright needed to solve.

Lisa Kleypas's Love in the Afternoon transforms the erstwhile lover, Cyrano de Bergerac he who writes love letters to the beautiful Roxane on behalf of an ignorant friend into an odd, animal-loving young woman from the 1700s. Miss Beatrix Hathaway has claims to the title of lady, but no ambitions; as Christopher Phelon once said disdainfully of her (within her hearing, naturally), she is more suited to the stables than the drawing room. Yet when her friend Prudence, a reigning beauty, announces that writing letters to Christopher, now fighting in the Crimea, is more tedium than she can bear, Beatrix picks up her pen. She writes letters about wayward donkeys and rapscallion dogs; Christopher writes back with wrenching, heart-broken stories of war. Kleypas transforms Cyrano's reputation as a swordsman to Christopher's reputation as a war hero. But she tackles a reality that Edmund Rostand, Cyrano's creator, avoids: the ability to kill is a devastating accomplishment. Kleypas's Christopher is haunted by the men who died at his hands, and he must find Beatrix his true letter-writer in order to recover his balance and his soul. Love in the Afternoon is a beautifully wrought version of this classic tale; on the surface, it takes an unhappy ending and makes it joyous, but just as importantly, it picks up an aspect of the swashbuckling hero and makes it relevant to our time, to a country presently at war.

--Eloisa James