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Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

Married by Christmas Marriage of Convenience by Carole Mortimer

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Married by Christmas was one of the first books I ready by Carole Mortimer; the intense emotional connections delighted me and I noted it on my books to buy list. I reread it now, about two years later, and I still enjoyed it, but after reading so many other romances I found it closer to good, not great.

Everything happens in London, in the main characters’ homes or hotel. The story is compressed to about a week and a half.

Plot Synopsis and Characters

Lilli lost her mother to a 5 year long bout with cancer just a few months ago, and her fiancé Andrew dumped her right after. She’s had a miserable last year. Tonight her friend Sally convinces her to go to a party given by a lady she knows slightly but doesn’t much like, Gerry. Gerry has a terrible reputation for men, Lilli calls her a man-eater.

Sally points out to Lilli an older, very handsome man who is obviously enraptured with Gerry. The man is Lilli’s dad, Richard. Lilli can’t believe her dad is chasing the man-eating Gerry so soon after her mom died and is disgusted and furious. She wanders around the house where she meets Patrick in the kitchen who clearly is someone special to Gerry. They flirt a bit, Gerry and Richard walk in and Lilli sees that she can get back at both of them (and herself) and having drunk a little too much, gets Patrick to take her to a hotel. Richard and Gerry both try to dissuade them but Patrick isn’t listening and Lilli is too angry and hurt to care.

Lilli is horrified the next morning when she wakes up to Patrick singing in the shower. She goes home where she and her dad have a short argument. Several fast meetings later Lilli learns that

  • Richard owes Patrick’s bank several million pounds that he cannot pay because Lilli’s former fiancé had embezzled the money before dumping Lilli in favor of a another man and her dad doesn’t want to humiliate Lilli by prosecuting him.
  • Patrick wants to marry her.
  • Lilli doesn’t want to marry Patrick

Lilli is no dummy and realizes Richard could go ahead and prosecute Andrew if Lilli marries Patrick. So she agrees but is not too happy about it, especially when Patrick gives the usual Harlequin Presents Hero speech about not believing in love. He wants her body and he wants kids and he intends to marry forever.

Patrick’s ex-wife shows up at the wedding reception and is nasty until Lilli – not Patrick – routs her. The next morning Richard shows up, yes the morning after their wedding night. How tacky! Patrick is not amused and he’s even less thrilled when Richard tells them that Andrew insists on speaking to Lilli. Andrew gives Lilli the money he embezzled and all should be well, except Patrick is in a real tizzy. Lilli walked out! Lilli went to her former fiancé!! Lilli is at Gerry’s house drinking champagne!!!

Patrick races there, they have the usual I Love You scene and a nice epilogue where Lilli has twin girls and Gerry and Richard, now married, have a baby son. There are several explanations in there too, all to show that Richard and Gerry and Patrick and Lilli all are blessed with true love.

Surface Emotions

The main problem I see with Married by Christmas is the characters seem to feel everything on the surface. Author tells us what Lilli thinks underneath her superficial gaiety and sparkle but the emotions don’t feel solid. She tells, not shows us Lilli’s heart.

Patrick has the typical reasons for his anti-love outward stance: He lost his mother when 15, later his dad, had to raise Gerry, had a horrible first marriage with a wife who chose an abortion rather than gaining weight with a baby. Yet he loves Lilli and supposedly fell in love with her when she fell asleep the moment she lay down when they got to the hotel room. He hadn’t slept with anyone since his first marriage broke up although he’d been looking for a solid gold lady, and Lilli completely ensnared him.

This is plausible but not all that likely. Lilli is 17 or 18 years younger than Patrick, beautiful, charming and he wants her very much. Sure. But love? Love a lady who happily leaves a party with a man she never met before and begs him to take her away to make love to her? Maybe. Or maybe he simply finally felt ready to love someone and Lilli is lovely and available, in the right place at the right time.

Carole Mortimer presents the secondary romance between Richard and Gerry as fact. She later has Gerry explain to Lilli how she and Richard met years earlier before his wife got cancer and how the man-eating rumors are false. This is nice but doesn’t add much to the story. The reason Lilli was in despair and left party with Patrick was to spite her dad and Gerry, but it doesn’t advance Lilli’s story to learn how they knew each other.

Summary and Overall Rating

Carole Mortimer is usually a 3 star author for me, some are better, some are worse, some are very much worse. After rereading I would give Married by Christmas a skimpy 4 stars; it’s good to very good.

I bought my copy of Married by Christmas from Thriftbooks. You can find Kindle and new or used copies on Amazon and other used book sites and eBay.

All Amazon links are commission-paid ads.

Valdez’s Bartered Bride Harlequin Presents by Rachel Thomas

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This has an absolutely stupid plot. He and she either marry or he has to find his unknown half brother. Why? Because her dad owes his bank a ton of money and that’s what the contract he signed calls for and now the bank’s board of directors wants the loan repaid. Supposedly there is plenty of cash and property that dad can’t access without meeting the loan terms, but once that’s done dad’s skating.

Let’s see. He could have refused and let the bank flounder on without the infusion of cash or told the bank to suck it up and write off the loan since daddy couldn’t pay without meeting the ridiculous terms. Instead he and she spend time together, sleep together and eventually she talks to his mom to find out who his father had an affair and illegitimate kid with.

Everyone should be happy, right? Nope because someone (her dad) tipped off the tabloids who have lots of photos and embarrassing details and of course he blames her for the publicity. And nope because they both somehow decide they are in love and end up engaged to marry.

The plot is so convoluted and inane that it’s hard to take anything in the book seriously. I basically skimmed and read the ending.

1 Star

A Cinderella for the Greek – Julia James Light Romance

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If you are in the mood for a light, almost frothy romance, try A Cinderella for the Greek by Julia James. (Paid link) It is mostly enjoyable but not a story that will move you or will linger in your mind.

Ellen is tall, rather large-boned and teaches gym to a local school. Her father died a year ago and she has been busy fending off his greedy widow – her stepmother – and her equally greedy stepsister. Both disparage her, call her names, mock her, all the usual Cinderella treatment. They went through her rich father’s money and now all that is left is their valuable English manor home, and some of the remaining art and antiques. The two are shameless, stealing even Ellen’s jewelry.

Max develops property and tours the house, thinking to purchase it as an investment, but realizes when he arrives that this could be a home. The steps encourage him and do not tell him that they own only two thirds of the house. Ellen cooks and serves lunch, then corners Max to say she owns a third and will not sell. This is her home.

The steps claim Ellen has never accepted them and refuses to sell just for spite. Max discovers Ellen is not fat but incredibly in shape, an athlete and decides to sweep her off to London for a makeover and a ball. (See where the Cinderella title comes in?) Things progress from there. Ellen and Max hit it off and spend a few weeks together travelling, enjoying each other’s company and sleeping together.

Max tells her he did all this to show her that there is life beyond her home and to entice her to sell to him. He is not being entirely truthful of course because he also has fallen in love. He asks her to buy out her steps and she explains that she has no money, that they took everything, spent an enormous fortune before her dad died and now are ghoulishly stripping everything left. Max is dumbfounded. Ellen leaves. She later decides Max was right and agrees to sell. When she arrives to sign her sales agreement Max surprises her and proposes for a happy ever after.

A Cinderella for the Greek could have explored the stepmother/sister resentment or why Ellen was such a doormat that she even allowed stepsister to appropriate her pearl bracelet. It does not. Author Julia James lays out the situation and proceeds to tell the story straightforward, giving us plenty of Max’s viewpoints to show us how he thinks Ellen is and how he wants her to be.

Overall this is a light, enjoyable story but not one I could recall even the day after I read it. Max is the best character, interesting, willing to help, manipulative, kind, loving, certain he is right and knows everything, self-confident. Ellen is more two-dimensional, not a fully-realized person and the steps are stock characters.

I did appreciate that the “Greek” in the title refers to Max having a Greek father. For a nice change we don’t get all the heavy-handed, heavy breathing me-boss/you-female nonsense that too many Harlequins offer.

2 Stars

I purchased my copy from Harlequin.com to read via Glose E reader. Amazon and Barnes and Noble both offer E versions and you can purchase paper copies new from all three retailers or check eBay and Thriftbooks for used copies. There is a comic version too. All Amazon links are paid ads.

The Christmas Eve Bride by Lynne Graham – Not Much There

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Doesn’t the title, The Christmas Eve Bride, sound like a romantic courtship, wedding and honeymoon? Instead this is a hurried little story about Amber, now working as a gardener for a rich couple who live near her married sister, and her former love Rocco. Amber was deeply in love with Rocco and mentioned to a former school friend that they were together; the school friend then embroidered this into a juicy tell-all tabloid scoop.

Rocco didn’t even give Amber a chance to explain, he dumped her and told her not to call him again or he’d file stalking charges. A week or so later Amber discovered she was pregnant, her employers fired her and she couldn’t get a job that paid enough to raise her baby. She eventually ended up working as a gardener on an estate near her sister because the job came with a small cottage. Our story opens with Rocco visiting the estate and spotting her, assumed she was there researching for another tell-all story. Various insults and kisses later Rocco asks her to move to London to be his mistress. He knows nothing about her baby but is exhilirated to discover they had a child and quickly falls back in love with Amber and they marry on Christmas Eve.

The basic problem here is the story and characters stay just that, not real people we can imagine being. There is no immediacy, no sense of empathy. I can imagine a man being glad to discover he has a child – but only after he gets over being flabbergasted, dismayed and angry. Yet author lets us think that Rocco is surprised, yes, but delighted.

Add to the weak characters to the silly plot and you have a book that is barely readable, certainly nothing worth spending a couple of hours on. So why did I read it? It was part of a bundle borrowed on Hoopla and it was a very fast read on New Year’s Eve.

I reserve 1 Star ratings for books I couldn’t finish, so let’s be generous,

2 Stars

The comic version of The Christmas Eve Bride standalone novel is available on Amazon; I didn’t find the bundle.

Bought for Marriage Harlequin Presesnts Romance by Margaret Mayo

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This is not a good book. The writing style is juvenile with go-nowhere dialogue and short, choppy sentences and little to no description, no setting and poor characterization. I did not believe the romance.

The novel has a lot of sex scenes and some are explicit. Outside of sleeping together the hero and heroine have little connection – there is a mention of her enjoying his company but that’s it – and there is virtually no sense of them becoming a family or caring about each other.

The plot is Harlequin Presents goofy la-la. She’s half Greek, half English and her Greek dad used devious methods to keep her with him while growing up. Now she’s grown up and still lives with Dad and works for him too, even though she knows he’s a pretty bad egg, mean and selfish to the bone. Good ol’ dad is going bankrupt so like any good smart dad sends his gorgeous virginal daughter to ask his dearest enemy for a bazillion dollars (or Euros as the case may be) and just as any dear enemy would do, our hero takes one look at gorgeous lady and says sure thing, sweetums, but you gotta marry me too. One thing progresses after another, all in this same vein.

So the story lacks any depth or believablility, the characters are 2-dimensional at best, there’s too much kissing and not enough caring, we never see or read much about the lovely Greek locations (aside from noting gardens exist) and the writing style is aimed at mid teens. Other than that this is a lovely novel.

So why am I reviewing it when I’ve a stack of others that I’ve left high marks on Good reads? For one thing I almost liked this the first time I read it, about 6 months ago, and gave it 3 stars on Goodreads, which is funny because I recalled it as not good at all and have avoided Margaret Mayo ever since. For another, Bought for Marriage is part of the Forced to Marry Harlequin E book bundle which I purchased and I try to review what I buy. (I’m behind over 60 books but who’s counting.)

I recommend you avoid this novel unless you are really tired and really bored and just want something fluffy to keep you going for a couple of hours.

2 Stars / 1+ Star

I read this first as a standalone pdf on Archive.org. Amazon has the Forced to Marry bundle in Kindle and the standalone novel Bought for Marriage is available on Kindle or, more expensively, in hardback or paperback.

All the Amazon links are paid ads.