Where Lily Stays Lily

One Night for Love by Mary Balogh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very entertaining book. I enjoyed reading it, hoping for happy endings for a number of characters, wondering how it would all work out, and I was eagerly looking for the answers to questions through the whole second half like it was half mystery. A couple of those questions are left somewhat unanswered--technically revealed, but in a vague way--which I didn't love, but it didn't detract too much. Still a lot of fun.

(For example--Lily was told to find something in her father's bag, and the reader knows it involves a secret. I want to find the bag, or find what was in it. Lily never finds it, unfortunately, and though Neville locates someone who knows what it involved he never tells us explicitly what that was. We're clued into the secret already by that point, so it's kinda moot, but I really hoped they would somehow find the original document, at least for closure. Same for their original proof of being married--I hoped that would turn up, somehow, like in the TV show Belgravia. We didn't need it, but it felt like a missed opportunity.)

But overall, it's a cool plot with good twists and lots of great scenes.

The FMC, Lily, is a great character, original and likable, and so is Neville, which makes them easy to root for. And the people who are at first kinda anti-Lily come around in a way that does them credit, so that we can like them, too, or almost all of them. I like that Lily herself is unaffected, friendly with people of all stations, and remains that way throughout, chatting with people her peers would never chat with, peeling potatoes that they would never peel, but still able to be herself with the gentry. At first, they are put off by that aspect of her character, but later they appreciate it. That's a lot of her charm, for the reader as well as for the other characters in the novel, and she keeps that innocent quality from beginning to end.

Some of the story, by the last few chapters, is a little melodramatic, and that stretches the conclusion out more than I would like. It also takes the tone in a too-serious direction--too many apologies and reminiscences, too many starts and stops and partings, too many "I'll wait until you're ready" moments--so that I winced a tiny bit in the last 30 or 40 pages. But it still was mostly upbeat and fun, which preserved (for me) an "I liked reading this a lot" 4-star rating. (I've read the books in the wrong order, accidentally, so I knew how the plot came out before I started, and I'm not sure if I would have liked this more or less if I had read it in the right order. Doesn't really matter. I enjoyed it fine.)

In any case, I find myself entertained and charmed by Mary Balogh's books, enough that I've already ordered another one in the related series, and I'm looking forward to it. Maybe I'll buy and read them one at a time, all 40 or 50 of them, like ET following a trail of Reese's Pieces...

Recommended.

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