The Wicked Godmother
Series: A House for the Season, Book 3
By: Marion Chesney / Narrated By: Lindy Nettleton
Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
A tad deplorable, but certainly FAR more charming than Book One…
Here we go again with the deplorable Hero! I dunno what it was in her life but MC Beaton, writing as Marion Chesney, must’ve been going through a twisted phase in her life because here again in Book Three of the A House for the Season series, we have a Hero who seems to hate women. And why would I find that swoon-worthy?
The story is of Harriet Metcalf, a “country mouse”, who is left to bring her departed benefactor’s twin daughters out for the London Season until they find suitable husbands/marriages. And naturally those girls just happen to be snide, slandering, backstabbing gits, so there’s them as deplorable characters also. The Hero, the Marquess of Huntingdon, also has a mistress (See? I mean, I know it was a commonplace occurrence, but why would that add to his swoon-worthiness?), and she’s a vindictive wench, so there’s HER too!
Even Harriet’s wonderful dog, Beauty, behaves wickedly at times. But no, I liked Beauty, so there’s not that… at least… phew!
Anyway, there’s just something about Huntingdon that makes Harriet speak honestly and impolitely. Which Huntingdon finds excessively rude. And there’s just something about Harriet that really pisses Huntingdon off—so NATurally, that means he’s in love. Still, I must say that MC Beaton developed the story well enough, with enough twists and turns and predicaments that it was believable when Harriet and Huntingdon call a warm truce and become friends. That made for a more pleasant story.
And of course there are our servants of 67 Clarges Street who play matchmakers, plus they have developing stories of their own, and we can see how wretched the lives of the serving class were. Little Lizzie is growing up, and she’s such a decent girl who does all sorts of decent things in this book that Harriet decides to do right by her and teaches her to read. But Joseph? Oh ugh! Again—deplorable! deplorable! deplorable! He does something so despicable that I almost stopped listening, but Huntingdon explains it to Lizzie in a way that made me understand that perhaps people with no means, no money, no prospects, might indeed make choices that are poor.
Unlike some other reviewers, I’m still not having a problem with Lindy Nettleton as a narrator. Not at all. I keep scanning their reviews, and they keep saying she does a poor job with nothing specific noted. I mean, huh? I think she does a decent job with male characters, makes the Heroes attractive—even as they’re behaving abominably—and I do so love each of the servants. Okay, maybe her voice for Alice is sloooow, but Alice is quite the languid creature.
I’m still not loving this series as much as The Poor Relation, and I’m starting to think that maybe it’s not such a great thing to stumble onto an author’s best works so early in the Listening game.
After all, in our little audiobook club, we did Georgette Heyer’s Arabella early on and I’ve been hard pressed ever since then, trying to think of something anywhere near that delightful.
Ah well. On to Book Four…
:)
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