All's Fair in Love and War (Miss Prentice's Protegees, #1)
Virginia Heath
A new Regency romp of a series, about governess who believes in cultivating joy in her charges, clashes with the children's uncle who hired her, only to find herself falling in love. When the flighty older sister of former naval captain, Henry Kincaid, decides on a whim to accompany her explorer husband on an expedition to Egypt, he finds himself unwittingly left in the lurch with her three unruly children and her giant, mad dog. With no clue how to manage the little rascals, a busy career at the Admiralty that requires all of his attention, and no idea when his sister is coming back, Harry has to hire an emergency governess to ensure that everything in his ordered house continues to run shipshape. In desperation, he goes to Miss Prentice’s School for Girls prepared to pay whatever it takes to get a governess quick sharp to bring order to the chaos. Thanks to her miserable, strict upbringing, fledgling governess Georgina Rowe does not subscribe to the ethos that children should be seen and not heard. She believes childhood should be everything that hers wasn’t, filled with laughter, adventure, and discovery. Thankfully, the three Pendleton children she has been tasked with looking after are already delightfully bohemian and instantly embrace her unconventional educational ethos. Their staid, stickler-for-the-rules uncle, however, is another matter entirely…
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This was a hard read for me, and I ended up DNFing at 52%. I've read other books by Virginia Heath and enjoyed them, and while the premise for this book was good, the pacing and plotting felt painful.
Georgie has been trained to be an excellent governess, despite her radical views that children learn more through play than by sitting in a classroom. Strict naval captain Henry has the opposite view when it comes to his unexpected acquisition of his nephew and nieces. Henry has every minute of his every day planned and structured, and expects Georgie and the children to adhere to a strict schedule as well. What he couldn't have planned was his attraction to Georgie's delectable figure and out-of-control hair.
Being honest, by 50% of the way through this book the two main characters had really only had one interaction together where they weren't strictly discussing the education of the children. After this one moment of intimacy the MMC decides it's been too long since he's "sowed any oats" and that he needs some "shore leave". There is much internal discussion about how eager he is to find a willing woman, and multiple paragraphs describing how he's gained some weight and needs to wear his newer, larger pants because they're less constricting for his nether regions. This is just one example of what felt like lots of filler that I read without any real character development or any indications that the two main characters were attracted beyond the physical at all. I can appreciate a slow burn, but there has to be some kind of fire lit to begin with, some kind of spark to start the process, and this book was lacking that.
I'm interested in reading more from Virginia Heath, despite this book being not for me. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC!
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