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Title: Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland: with Dreams
WonderClub
Item Number: 9780554004532
Number: 1
Product Description: Full Name: Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland: with Dreams; Short Name:Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780554004532
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780554004532
Rating: 4.5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/45/32/9780554004532.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Chris Reitan
reviewed Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland: with Dreams on November 26, 2012This is Sara Craven’s first Mills & Boon! I like to imagine Sara Craven as a bright young romance writing ingenue, all fresh and optimistic and passionately determined to write the best romances with the best plots, and she packs so much plot into this book that she doesn’t disappoint.
Beautiful blonde Lissa lives in a one bedroom flat in London with a friend. She’s having a nice fun life and while she could be in a nicer flat she gets to wear nice clothes and go to parties and its all pretty idyllic.
Lissa has a job as an assistant for her godmother, who writes historical novels. Her typing/light research/errands job is something fun for her to do until she gets married. I am ok with that – she sort of vaguely mentions that she liked making up stories for children when she was younger, but that’s clearly never going anywhere. She’s very pretty and very charming and middle class and will be excellent at dinner parties. Later, we’ll discover that she is the most incredibly stable heroine of all time: her boss will never sack her, and if she ever needed money her parents are a phone call away. She also seemed to have at least enough emotional intelligence to understand people’s behaviour could be motivated by something other than ‘they are trying to make me feel terrible, and I won’t let them know it’s working!’Her main heroine weakness is to fixate on the OW and once she’s decided she wants the hero, she wastes her time tragically assuming that the OW has won, and she’s lost the hero forever.
Lissa is dating French Paul. He works at the embassy and is handsome and charming, but spoiled. Lissa wants a grown-up man who dedicates himself to his work. He’s proposed marriage after six weeks, and while she's flattered, she’s fairly certain she won’t be marrying Paul. He’s not setting her heart a-flutter. Sure, it’s nice that he has a sports car and she gets to go to swanky events and her picture is starting to show up on society pages. But he’s just sent over a big impressive brooch that looks old and suspiciously diamond-encrusted. It’s not appropriate for the status of their relationship. Still, she’s pinning it on her new chiffon dress when Raoul shows up.
He introduces himself as Paul’ friend, with a message from Paul, who can’t take her out. Raoul has some ideas for an evening entertainment. And finally, here is a man who does evoke some feels in Lissa’s breast, although she’s not quite sure about him. Still, they end up having a great time, until he turns a passionate kiss into a boob grope and tears her dress. Lissa remembers that she’s sort of with Paul, and it is way too soon in their acquaintance for him to be passionately ripping at her clothes. Save that for the second date, buddy! So she calls him a fiend, and he implies she’s a hooker, and sort of says that he could do sex on her and it wouldn’t be rape because he took her to a show and bought her dinner. Still, he leaves without getting into sexual assault, and poor Lissa is left unsullied to have a good cry about how men suck.
Paul has arranged for Lissa’s godmother to visit his mother the Comtesse’s chateau. There will be historic documents to read! Lissa gets to come along too! Sadly there isn’t a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ library, but Lissa does get a white four poster bed, a pink carpet and pink wallpaper. And a view over a rose garden that’s becoming a little overgrown.
And it turns out that Raoul is Paul’s older brother and the Comte. There’s also an OW snarling in the background – Dominique. She’s going to be part of a merger deal! Paul is to stop being a brat and start being estate manager at the chateau, and he’s also to marry Dominique!
Paul takes Lissa’s rejection pretty well, but manages to persuade her to be his pretend fiancée. Lissa wasn’t going to, but then she eavesdrops on a conversation Raoul is having with some girl on the phone, where it sounds like he’s gloating that he’s managed to make it so Paul won’t marry some tart, and it won’t cost them a cent. Lissa is hurt and angry and wants revenge! This all quite naturally backfires when Dominique switches her attentions to Raoul.
Lissa gets to be all wracked with guilt over the deception, and is completely unconvincing as a loving fiancée. But everyone’s fine about it. Sara Craven hasn’t yet decided all heroines must suffer every single character in the book being awful to them, so while the other (nice) characters will occasionally hint to Lissa that they're a little disappointed in her, she gets away with a decent amount of passionate stupidity.
There is so much going on. Raoul was married to a horrible woman who died horribly on the way to leaving him for another man. She left behind a daughter she’d told Raoul wasn’t his, and Raoul will have very little to do with the little girl, except to tell her to obey her governess, a woman who has daily headaches and won’t let the girl go outside.
Naturally, Lissa fixes all this up. And she fixes up the rose garden too, which was the grandmother’s pride and joy, but has fallen into neglect because the grandmother couldn’t stand Raoul’s wife so she retired to Antibes.
In fact the only way Lissa is not perfect wife material is that she has headaches and falls off a horse into a ravine. This is not the way a prospective comtesse should behave, but presumably once she’s having regular sexy times the headaches will all clear up and she won’t dangerously rush off on a horse to get away from the hero.
Raoul is such a busy man, what with being a Comte and running a fabric design business and organising a merger and spending time with Dominique and attempting to woo Lissa. She refuses to talk to him! But then, since he mostly attempts conversation when she’s gone to bed with a headache, it’s clear poor Raoul has no idea about proper timing.
Raoul’s not a complete idiot – he’s worked out that surprise ninja kissing is an effective strategy, and has also clearly worked out that Lissa isn’t engaged to his brother. His fierce anger and tormented bitterness over his first wife is …. Kind of mild, really. I get that he was supposed to be all tortured for his feelings for Lissa the gold digging tart, but so drawn to her that he had to go in for a snog at every opportunity. But he doesn’t seem to have any turning point in deciding Lissa is the woman of his dreams BEFORE he starts designing the fabric for her wedding dress with his top fabric designer. Raoul seemed to think that all he had to do was make some nice cloth and announce at dinner that he was marrying Lissa and it would all work out from there.
Nicole the shy fabric designer, because clearly Sara Craven felt there was no such thing as too many romantic entanglements, was Paul’s childhood friend and in love with him. Paul got slightly seduced by Dominique, and then fell for Lissa when his long suffering family got him sent to London for a while, but for some reason Nicole still likes him. Maybe. She could definitely do better.
Finally: smoking is very much in evidence from both sexes. At one stage Lissa turns down a cigarette because she doesn’t want to spoil the taste of the lovely meal she’s just eaten, and doesn’t seem to smoke again. That the heroine smokes at all, though, shows that we’re at some cigarette saturation point, post ‘young ladies don’t smoke because that’s fast’ but pre ‘young ladies don’t smoke because it’s starting to be seen as unhealthy.’ Dominique is clearly a villain because she smokes a brand that smells gross, and Raoul is clearly super suave because he smokes Gauloises. Although I’ve just looked that up, and it seems he was smoking cool lady cigarettes, but maybe this is a subtle signal that he was so comfortable with his masculinity that he could smoke whatever he wanted?
So much plot! The five star rating is purely sentimental, because really there’s more shoved in here than is necessary. Still, really enjoyable and the book is worth hunting down if you’re a Sara Craven completist.
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