I love the language so much and it makes me almost hate Sherry because the story is too good and I fight between the need to know how it will all work out and the pure pleasure I get from the turns of phrase. I read the quote in the above review about the British class system out loud to my husband because I just loved it so much. I read other parts to him too and while he was awake I was a good girl reading every word, savoring them like Verity’s dinners. But once he went to bed it was a mad dash to the finish with pages skipped and paragraphs skimmed.

I feel so cheated (by myself) when I do this and so have backtracked to once again luxuriate with each line. At the same time, I’m glad I have those pages to go back to because I’m not yet ready to say goodbye to these people. Now if I can only stretch it out until next summer, maybe I’ll have developed some will power by then.

And I too must call out Sherry’s wonderfully complex secondary characters. My heart broke for the brothers and their loss of each other. In the same vein, I adored Lizzie and felt I took a punch to the gut when William expressed his preference for music halls. Thank goodness all was restored to right in the both the music room and the kitchen.

The hero of NOT QUITE A HUSBAND is the youngest brother of Will Marsden from DELICIOUS. And the secondary hero, I think, will be dear sweet Freddie from PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS. I’ve got an interesting girl in mind for him.

Oh good. Freddie needs a heroine. Okay so it was the son in between Will and this youngest son who is the one Will got disinherited for? Right? I’m looking forward to it.

Another thing I really liked was the depiction of Bertie. He’s dead. He’s never on the scene in the book, but he’s complicated. We see his inner conflicts through what he left behind, and we see the hero’s and heroine’s conflicted feelings about him.

Yeah. What Stuart discovered Bertie wanted buried with him knocked me for a (nice) loop.

Great review, Jayne. Sherry was kind enough to give me an ARC when I met her a couple of weeks ago, and I pretty much devoured it in a single sitting. Dare I make the obvious pun? No, no I will not.

Of course I liked the fairy-tale-esqueness of it. Another thing I really liked was the depiction of Bertie. He’s dead. He’s never on the scene in the book, but he’s complicated. We see his inner conflicts through what he left behind, and we see the hero’s and heroine’s conflicted feelings about him.

In Private Arrangements I loved how characters that could easily have been stock–the socially climbing mother, the earnest young suitor–became complex and interesting in their own right. Sherry did it again with Delicious. A character who had wronged the protagonists could easily have been a one-dimensional villain, but instead he came off as a man who had done bad things, but who remembered and regretted them.

Sheesh. I’m gushing again. I’ve got to stop that. Or, at least, I should go back to my own blog and gush there…Anyway, what I meant to say was, Delicious is a great read.

The hero of NOT QUITE A HUSBAND is the youngest brother of Will Marsden from DELICIOUS. And the secondary hero, I think, will be dear sweet Freddie from PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS. I’ve got an interesting girl in mind for him.

It’s due out sometime in the summer of 2009, which is good, since I’ve my file open and there is only 14,828 words written. So I’d better get back to work. :-)

But I was surprised at how spoilerish this review seemed (maybe I’m wrong). It might have been nice to get a warning at the beginning.

Thanks for the review!

Janine, you should read Like Water for Chocolate. It is a wonderful book (I think it’s better than the movie, but I usually do).

So in the final copy, not only did the hero’s parents marry, but he was also legitimized by an act of Parliament.

Now onto the entail. Fortunately for me, the estate in Delicious is not titular land, so there is no need to petition parliament or anything drastic like that to break entail. (Another change b/t ARC and final copy).

As Courtney Milan, whose legal credentials are even more scary than Jane’s, told me,

If all you care about, plot-wise, is that your character inherit the land, you don’t even need an Act of Parliament, or to worry about the legitimization of the brother. What you need to know is that the word “entail” can mean two different things.

1. What people typically think of as an “entail” is that the land passes to eldest legitimate male, in primogeniture fashion. But by the time you’re writing (in fact, long long before) you could easily defeat this by suffering a Common Recovery. Basically, it was a fake law suit, where you paid some dude (like your lawyer) to sue you saying, “Hey, that entailed land–really it’s mine! I swear!” You defaulted on that suit by not showing up in court. So the property now belongs to your lawyer, and presto, your lawyer was not subject to the entail and so the land is no longer entailed. Your lawyer gives your property back to you, and you now own property that is not entailed.

2. The second kind of entail is the entail in Pride and Prejudice, and it needed to be redone every generation (hence the reference in Pride & Prejudice to Mr. Bennett joining with his son and “cutting off the entail”). Usually, the way this worked is Grandfather A says, “I give my estate to B for the duration of his life, and after that to the male heir of his body.” But there is no reason that it has to work that way. All you have to do is write the entail differently: Grandfather A says “I give my estate to my eldest son for the remainder of his life, remainder to his issue, but if he should die without issue, the remainder goes to Our Hero.” Where “Our Hero” can be quite literally anyone.

The most famous example of this was an illegitimate bastard named James Smithson, who left 100,000 pounds to his nephew for life, and if his nephew died without issue, to those cocky Americans who showed the Brits how to thumb their nose at stuffy blue-bloods who looked down on bastards. And that is where we got the Smithsonian.

In either event, if the father wanted to provide that his illegitimate child would get the estate if his legitimate son passed on without issue, that would basically be a piece of cake for any solicitor worth his salt. No Act of Parliament needed.

Hope this helps!