Mary Balogh

Regency/Miss Martin's School for Girls series

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If you're like me, you've gleaned so many facts from romance novels, you easily could hold your own with a bunch of stuffy Ivy League history professors.

For instance, we Medieval fans effortlessly can detail the trials of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the predilections of Richard the Lionhearted, all the while explaining why the Monty Python gang was dead wrong: Many, indeed, did expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Adore Regencies? Bet you're all aquiver at the words Trafalgar, Salamanca, and Alba.

And let's not get started on what the phrase "war between the states" can do for the hearts of fans of Yankee-boy-meets-Confederate-girl novels.

Great writers of historical romance are just that because they convey eloquently the zeitgeist surrounding their stories through painstakingly researched prose and dialogue.

Some even are hip to the fact that many readers find heroes who've fought in the greatest conflicts of their times noble, sympathetic, and vastly appealing. And if those heroes have deep emotional scars that can only be healed by a heroine's gentle touch and strong will?

More, oh, more's the better.

One of the greatest writers of historical romance, Mary Balogh, takes the tortured-in-his-soul war hero theme we love so well and removes any hint of cliché in "Simply Love," her decidedly passionate and relentlessly touching new love story.

Anne Jewell is a teacher at a genteel school for girls, where she's safely ensconced herself and her young son, a precocious, charming boy conceived in an act of violence Anne's never allowed herself to address or process.

During a month's summer holiday at the Wales country estate her acquaintances, the Bedwyns, Anne begins a tentative friendship with Sydnam Butler, a dignified gentleman who was brutally tortured during the Napoleonic Wars and remains maimed and hideously disfigured.

Sydnam made a quiet, meaningful life for himself as steward of the Bedwyn estate, but now inexorably is drawn to Anne, the beautiful young woman whom he soon understands is perhaps more damaged -- and feels more alone -- than he.

Their relationship grows more intimate with each painful secret they confide, but they necessarily part at summer's end.

When circumstances demand they meet again, neither is hopeful their "ever after" will be a happy one.

"Simply Love" is an example of Balogh's extraordinary talent for keeping the love story central to a novel while creating a plot that reveals far more than just how hero and heroine will unite.

Yet her beautifully written romances are better than most because they always portray the genesis and growth of all kinds of love.

In case you've forgotten, that's what defines the romance. It's why we read them, it's why Balogh writes them, and it's why I recommend you --

Buy the book.

MaryBalogh.com

Next Week's Review and AuthorView: "Trouble," by Ann Christopher