This particular author is new to me but it sounds like she has written a number of Regency romances but from a smaller publisher and it looks like she has quite a fan base established and I am super excited to share more about this upcoming series with you guys today! Set in 1896, there’s a nice depiction of a Victoran seaside town complete with bathing carriages, small boys dressed in sailor suits and ladies promenading in their finery, although I’m not sure the phrase ‘get his finger out’ would have been in common parlance then. However, the author, Hannah Dolby, masterfully pulls the reader in by expertly layering her story so you cannot help but want to read more. Violet is more enthusiastic than subtle at the outset, which leads to some hilarious confrontations. More than anything else about what she has written about, that is the thing that is most unique to her time.

Tangling lively memories with true-to-earth yarns about westerners, Agnes Morley Cleaveland brings her life on a New Mexico cattle ranch to life. I liked Violet’s character, she struggles with what society wants her to be and I always love a ‘rule breaker’ so in that I enjoyed Violet’s character. Finally, Violet is trying to decide if her decade-long determination to remain a spinster has been more fuelled by fear than her inability to fall in love. The story follows Violet Hamilton, a twenty eight year old woman whose mother disappeared ten years earlier.

This includes pushing one such unfortunate into a boating lake and inserting a hot teapot between herself and another.

This means she is caught unawares more than once, but to her credit she is rarely discouraged and persists regardless. An advertisement discovered by chance leads her to an another private eye, and though Benjamin Blackthorn initially turns her down, Violet eventually convinces him to help. Since 2012 is the centennial year for NM statehood, my book club is reading 3 books about various aspects of NM history.By 8 they were on horseback and not tame well-mannered horses but any available even half broke horse carrying messages between the ranch house and cowboys in camps. Overall while I did enjoy the writing style and parts of the story, much of the book was slow and I found myself bored. The Chalke History Festival announces a new name, new look, and tons for history buffs to get their teeth into! Although it makes for some slapstick humour, I wouldn’t have minded if the author had made Violet slightly less ditzy.

Treated with both pity and alarm, she’s fed up of being constantly compared to her beautiful absent mother, yet keenly feels her absence – especially when it comes to advice on finding a career available to women, and to courting an appropriate man. Faith Hogan‘Eleanor Oliphant for historical fiction fans, with a dash of detective work and mystery thrown in. The tone of the book sounds very much like an oral history; I do wonder somewhat if someone else transcribed Morley Cleaveland relating these stories to an audience, because it comes off as very conversational and, at times, as if it is part of a larger conversation to which the reader is not completely privy. My understanding of westward expansion was far different when I was in fourth grade and playing Oregon Trail than it is now, and my feelings about being a person of European descent living on stolen land are, frankly, a tangled mess. Her father had survived the raid to become, at an incredibly early age, chief construction engineer of the young Santa Fe railroad.Violet unwittingly endears herself to readers with her no-nonsense attitude and sheltered naivety – two things that shouldn’t really go hand-in-hand but do, with hilarious and heart-warming results. I really enjoyed reading this book; it's nicely organized even if not strictly linear and is well-written.