I will say that Sarah, the heroine here, is a great deal more tolerable than the absolute ninny who was the main character in the last gothic romance I read. She's cool-headed and relatively rational, although perhaps not terribly intelligent, as she's got no real understanding of the people around her - she's a terrible judge of character - and the very obvious villain is completely beyond her. (A reader of very average intelligence will figure it out extremely quickly.)

What's really letting this down, though, and what's keeping it from being a three star popcorn read, is the same fundamental problem as the ninny-book: the timescale's so compressed that the story loses all credibility. There's no reason that the events here couldn't have taken place over the course of a summer, for instance, but to have Sarah be let off a criminal trial for poisoning, take a job as a governess, fall in love with the father of her charge, live through several attempted murders and one actual, fall out of love and then fall back into it again, all over the course of, what, less than a week? Certainly no more than two... it's eye-roll-inducing, it really is, and it undermines all that lurking atmosphere of menace that's supposed to successfully underlie the gothic romance genre. The one sane doctor here considers her unstable, and given her short term, constant emotional back-and-forth... he's not entirely wrong. She's not a poisoner, and she's right that something fishy is going on, but under the circumstances who could possibly trust her?