Two characters meet their match

Season for Surrender is hard to define. Well, it’s a historical romance--one look at the cover shows you that--and there’s nothing particularly unusual within its pages to mark it out as special within the genre. There’s an earl, a marquess, a few unmarried women looking for husbands, an opera singer, a country house party, a bossy aunt... all that you might expect to see. Oh, and a ridiculous title that I’m sure the author didn’t choose.

What is different about Season for Surrender is that the action almost entirely takes place inside people’s heads. Not that other things don’t happen--there were some trips out, a game of charades, etc.--but the meat of the story is less about what people do and more about what they think and the masks they put up to hide their true selves.

Our hero Alex, Lord Xavier, exists behind a persona he’s developed over the years: the rakish aristocrat. Bookworm Louisa Oliver is thought of as a bluestocking, but she, too, would like to widen her horizons. The interplay between the two--Louisa as the first person who really ‘sees’ Alex, and Alex only now beginning to let someone see the real him--is excellently written. I always find it hard to believe in the true reformation of rakes in this kind of story, but not at all in this book--I was absolutely convinced.

I greatly enjoy character-driven plots, and both hero and heroine in this story are very appealing, particularly as they make mistakes which we can see. However, I didn’t find myself glued to this book at all--although it is good, it isn’t particularly gripping. Once again, I find it hard to define why. It may be a historical romance with a rake that needs reforming, but the story is much more than that.