Georgette Heyer is, of course, the queen of the historical romance. In her career she wrote over fifty novels, many of them set in the Regency period. Friday's Child is another of her Regencies, although it's not one of my favorites. However, it still bears the hallmarks of her excellent writing skill with particularly amusing dialogue among some of the young bucks in the story.

Hero Wantage has always loved Sherry, Lord Sheringham, her neighbor. When Sherry's marriage offer is rejected by the beautiful Isabella, he vows to marry the next woman he sees - which happens to be Hero. At first it's just a marriage of convenience: Sherry and his friends imagine their life won't change at all, Hero will just tag along as when they were young. Despite this rather dramatic naïveté, as events unfold and Hero falls into scrape after scrape, Sherry has to look at things a little differently.

Hero has always loved Sherry, but as she falls into more and more trouble, Sherry's exasperation turns into anger - until he begins to understand the worth of his wife. There's a kind of growing up into responsibility theme in this book, and the growing up happens particularly to Hero, who wasn't brought up to be a Viscountess. The real stars of the book, for me, aren't the hero and heroine but Sherry's friends Ferdy, George and Gil. These three are fantastically amusing, good-hearted toward Hero, and some of their dialogue is just brilliant.

The youth of the hero and heroine in this book doesn't always appeal to everyone, but those who enjoyed A Convenient Marriage and Cotillion will probably like this story. It's not one of Heyer's best, but it's still well worth a read.