The Heiress Effect

The Heiress Effect (2013) Courtney Milan

Set in England in 1867.

This is another good book, but also not quite as good as The Countess Conspiracy.

But it was good.

“Is it something I said?” Jane asked. And if so, which sentence?

Oliver makes many mistakes, but you know he’s going to do the right thing, and not just for the HEA.

It was simple. He didn’t like to laugh at anyone. He could find too much of himself in the object of their amusement. And while much had changed since his childhood, that never would.

Jane is an interesting character–one who has determied to be herself, at first because she didn’t know better, then because she was trying to avoid marriage, and finally because she accepts who she is.

Pink and all.

All comparisons failed Oliver. It wasn’t the bright pink of anything. It was a furious shade of pink, one that nature had never intended. It was a pink that did violence to the notion of demure pastels. It didn’t just shout for attention; it walked up and clubbed one over the head.

It hurt his head, that pink, and yet he couldn’t look away.

The room was small enough that he could hear the first words of greeting. “Miss Fairfield,” a woman said. “Your gown is…very pink. And pink is…such a lovely color, isn’t it?” That last was said with a wistful quality in the speaker’s voice, as if she were mourning the memory of true pink.

“What does one call a color like that?”

She smiled at him. “Fuchsine.”

“It even sounds like a filthy word,” Oliver replied.

I also really liked the sub-thread with Emily, Jane’s sister.

Emily meets a man, and that man is kind of awesome.

“Are you…uh…Mr….uh…”

“Yes,” he replied, because he answered to Mr. Uh almost as often as he did to his own name.

Fairfield shrunk away from the anger in Anjan’s voice. “I meant well,” he whispered.

Anjan leaned forward across the desk until he was an inch away from the other man. “Mean better.”

Oh look! Sebastian again!

Nobody can object to a discussion of plant reproduction. If they did, we’d require flowers to don petticoats instead of wandering around, showing their reproductive parts to all and sundry.”

I will once again note that the model on the cover IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THE MAIN CHARACTER.

The twelve holes in Jane’s corset were an evil, true, but a necessary one; without them, she would never have reduced her waist from its unfashionable thirty-seven-inch span down to the still unfashionable girth of thirty-one inches.

That model does not have a 31 inch waist. Her waist is, almost half that I think.
Rating: 8.5/10

Published by Courtney Milan

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