Well, the Bridgerton reading continues (though I have run out of my book stash of them for a bit, so I'll have to return to that later), this time with a book taking place after the last three.
Youngest girl of the family Hyacinth Bridgerton is...a character. Difficult. Strong-minded. Blunt to the infinite power. She's close pals with Lady Danbury, who she reads trashy novels with every Tuesday. She's gonna be a hard girl to match. So far the only people who have proposed to her have been fortune hunters or idiots. Naturally, her family is all hyped for her to end up with Lady D's nephew Gareth St. Clair, i.e. the only guy in town who's up to standing up to her.
Gareth has daddy issues even worse than Simon's. His father loathes him because Gareth is the product of an affair his mother had, and yet Gareth ended up becoming the legal heir to the family title. Lord Pissypants hates Gareth so much that he's willing to strike out at him, including doing things like trying to marry him off to a girl with mental issues and other horrid things I cannot reveal without spoiling. I will say that at one point in the novel, his dad throws a particularly nasty curveball that had me gasping in shock, especially given the timing of a certain event that had just happened. (It's slightly anticlimatically handled, though.)
Anyway, Gareth winds up with a diary written by his (supposed) Italian grandmother Isabella, which Hyacinth offers to translate. As it turns out, Isabella was forced into marriage with Gareth's asshole grandfather and wasn't happy about it...and at some point in time, hid a set of diamonds somewhere within Clair House. Suddenly, Hyacinth's life turns into something about as exciting as a trashy novel, and our dynamic duo set out to find the stones without Lord Pissypants finding out about it...
I had a lot of fun with this one. H&G are a pretty damn good match, and while I tend to think they could have been a wee bit snarkier (I don't know why I think this, I may be thinking of especially snarky paired couples elsewhere), I had a good time reading their adventures. So, four stars from me.
Update: the author has apparently taken it upon herself to write "second epilogues," i.e. short stories taking place after the original novels. These can be found on amazon.com and ereader.com and fictionwise.com, sold in ebook format. (Or just check the link.) There is a second epilogue for this book, which takes place 20+ years after the end of this one. It resolves the one hanging plot thread remaining from this book, in an amusing (albeit long time coming!) and kind of sweet manner.
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