Lady
Jenny's Christmas Portrait
By Grace
Burrowes
Sourcebooks
Release
Date: September 24, 2013
I always
love having each year's new crop of Christmas-themed romances appear. Grace Burrowes' contribution for 2013 is the
story of the last Windham daughter, Lady Genevieve, Jenny to her friends and
family. The next-to-youngest and the
last unmarried daughter, Jenny has begun to feel she has no life of her
own. Her family doesn't understand or
appreciate her devotion to painting and her status as maiden aunt leaves her
restless and unhappy. She especially detests
shuttling from one happily married sibling's household to another because her
parents won't leave her home with only the thirty-some servants to safeguard
her virtue.
While
staying with her sister Sophie, Baroness Sindal (and the heroine of Burrowes'
2011 Christmas romance, Lady Sophie's
Christmas Wish), Jenny meets portraitist Elijah Harrison, who has come to
paint Sophie and Sindal's two sons.
Jenny and Elijah have a unique prior acquaintance. She disguised herself
as a man to take drawing lessons in a class for which he posed nude. When they meet, she isn't aware he knows what
she did.
An earl
who doesn't use his title, Elijah quickly finds himself enchanted by
Jenny. They share a love of painting and
a sense of dislocation within their families as well as a strong, instant,
mutual attraction. Jenny is equally
enchanted but resists any thought of a true relationship. She is resolved to go to Paris to study art
and, though she doesn't realize it, exorcise her personal ghosts.
Burrowes
has a gift for creating obstacles that arise from her characters' earlier
lives. The obstacles here don't seem as
dark, or possibly as threatening, as those in some of her books, but I found
that appropriate for a holiday story.
I also
enjoyed seeing the Windham siblings gather for the holidays. Many of the things I enjoyed, seeing them
with their spouses after their happy endings, knowing their families are
growing, also happen to be things that twist the knife of Jenny's unhappiness
with her life.
I'm
sorry to come to the end of the Windham saga, but I think it's fair to say
Burrowes has closed it out with solid hit.
~ Nancy Northcott
www.nancynorthcott.com
A former attorney who never outgrew her love of comic books, science fiction and fantasy, Nancy left the legal profession to pursue her dreams of creating her own action adventure stories. Check out her terrific contemporary romances set within a fantasy world in present-day Georgia. I highly recommend them! ~PJ
Are you reading the Windham saga? Which family series have you had a hard time bidding farewell? Have you started your Christmas romance reading yet? Any recommendations?
A former attorney who never outgrew her love of comic books, science fiction and fantasy, Nancy left the legal profession to pursue her dreams of creating her own action adventure stories. Check out her terrific contemporary romances set within a fantasy world in present-day Georgia. I highly recommend them! ~PJ
Are you reading the Windham saga? Which family series have you had a hard time bidding farewell? Have you started your Christmas romance reading yet? Any recommendations?
