This was really lovely.

I normally don't enjoy Regency books. Mostly because every single one of them i tried so far was not a historical fiction but rather an erotica with slight historical setting. And while i don't mind eroticas i honestly prefer mine when there is indoor pluming. Just a personal preference.

To make this short story even longer:

I really enjoyed this for a Regency time set book.
Which mostly has to do with the fact that while its a romance, its not at all a sexy romance and that was quiet lovely to see and read.

I really enjoyed the characters, i enjoyed the quirky snarky but still nice and thoughtful main woman. She had a bit of a harder time, being born between two classes - her mother higher class, her father a sailor which was an interesting spin - but living with her aunt after losing her parents and fighting to keep her brother with her.

I really liked the main guy, who had a chronic pain situation going on after a riding accident that left his leg in a bit of messy situation -they live in a manor in the middle of nowhere so thats something very realistic i think, since during that time how much could a doctor really do with a bad bone break? Especially after a few hours until the doctor could actually make it to them? So it was nice to see someone actually having issues with something that happened to them.

I really liked how the author wrote those moments too, because i think it was really realistic.
How he could tell how the weather was behaving simply because he felt it literary in his bones, how he struggled some days to even be nice, how he had to really think about where he wanted to go in this huge manor with too many steps that werent super easy for him to manage.
How he changed after the accident and some people didnt really thought about how life changing it really was for him to now have a leg that hurts him and living in an area thats cold and wet.

I just really thought it was so well done and actually one of the best representations on chronic pain!

Which was so nice to see!

I also liked that this was not really insta-love but rather an instant understanding between the characters. Where the characters talked with each other and noticed that they enjoyed each others company and saw each other as a person and accepted each others as they are.
Which was nice to see.

I also loved how the main woman loved her brother and tried her best to do whats right for him.

I didn't love the relationship with the aunt in this book. It was written in a way that makes sense for the time its set in, because relatives actually took people in just to get money for them -sadly that still happens today.
But i didn't enjoy her behavoir and nobody tried to tell her it was not okay or try to help but instead just ignored it.


What i didn't like too much was that the main woman basically ran away instead of asking for help. And i think that was a bit unrealistic for someone that wasn't afraid to stand up to a person that could really make her life difficult.
But when she could really use help from someone that can actually do something to help her without big issues or trouble... she doesn't ask for it? She just goes away and tries to deal with it herself and expect everything to basically just wait months for her to make her own plans in hopes she finds a solution?
Makes absolutely NO sense to me at all.

But all in all I enjoyed it.
I liked the writing, i enjoyed the characters, i loved the realistic and well done representation of chronic pain, i enjoyed the overall plot and the ending was good too.

This book also showed me that i don't actually dislike an entire historical fiction era but rather a specific type of that era that is most popular.

So thanks to this book, i will try to pick up more Regencies without sex scenes.