The author does a commendable job with the time period and setting.

Judith doesn't run away crying instead she claps and says Alice put on quite a performance and basically how dumb Gavin is for falling for it. Show More (vindictive, crazy, lover of Gavins) talking she tells Gavin exactly what is on her mind. While this book contains some of the traditional romance novel tropes of the late '70s and early '80s (it was apparently first published in 1981), such as the classic 'hero has to rape the heroine to prove his virility to the audience', there's a sense that the author's not tremendously comfortable with it (as opposed to many other tropes that she *is* comfortable with, such as hyper-romantic language and make-up-break-up super-jealousy), but for those who are avoiding stories in which the hero rapes the heroine and then she discovers she has a passionate love for him (and sex with him), this is one to leave on the shelf. I think we spend a little too much time on descriptions of clothes, but I freely admit that I'm not the most representative of women - maybe a lot of other women *want* that sort of detail. You could definitely tell she had the idea in mind to write a book for each of them, because they're strongly-developed characters in their own right.ĭeveraux has a tendency to go full-tilt for the detail in her books as the narrator of one of her later books (Remembrance) says, romance novelists have to do a ton of research because their fans will never let them hear the end of it if they get a detail wrong. The interesting parts of the story mostly have to do with the interactions between Judith and Gavin's brothers the brothers definitely seem the most fleshed-out part of the story (to some extent, even moreso than Gavin himself).

There are several plotlines, each building to a climax and ending to make way for the next.

The velvet promise series