Rating: 4 stars
Reading Rainbow - Purple/violet cover
It's 1811. Winnifred "Winnie" Wallace just wants to settle down in a small town in Wales and raise sheep. She has a modest amount of money, given to her by her con woman mother before said woman absconded to France. However, being a single woman trying to establish herself leads to a lot of suspicion, so Winnie fibs a tiny bit and claims to be married, but estranged from her husband. She literally makes up a name and an address for her fictional spouse, and suddenly she's welcomed into the community.
Ten years later, Spencer Halifax, the Earl of Warren, is told by his solicitor, Henry Mortimer, that it has come to his attention that a woman claims to be married to Spencer, and has copies of banns that very much seem to suggest that the wedding took place. Because all the church records of the place where they supposedly got married were lost when the church burned down, legally speaking, there is no way to disprove the claim, and Spencer may in fact have a wife in Wales.
Spencer has to rescue his fake wife from the local jail, where she's ended up after punching a rival farmer who accused her of theft. Once she cleans up all the grime, he is, of course, stunned by her beauty (they are never just plain and average in these stories). She convinces him that she in no way wanted to defraud or entrap him in any way, and is rather shocked to realise that her clever lies and external circumstances might mean they are actually legally married. She agrees to accompany him to London, but there is a chance they may have to ask for an actual annulment.
Margo's novella was the shortest of the three stories, and the one I liked the least. Matilda's is probably the longest, and the one I liked the most. That puts Spencer's novella smack bang in the middle, at four stars. It's the most farcical of the three stories, and the plot just keeps getting more and more preposterous as the story progresses. There's the fake marriage to be dealt with, and Winnie's secret plan to return the stolen necklaces her mother gave her to their rightful owners, which involves showing up at dinner parties and hiding in broom closets, and sneaking about at the opera, and what have you. It's not quite insta-love in this story, but it comes very close. Winnie and Spencer don't spend a lot of time together before it becomes clear that their fake marriage should become a real one, and that both of them are sick of being alone and terribly responsible apart, when they have so much fun together.
I'm really glad that I have discovered Alexandra Vasti as a writer. I have an ARC of the novel she's releasing in June, and I'm really looking forward to reading it.
Judging a book by its cover: The covers of Vasti's self-published novellas are a lot less elaborate than her current romance covers. I do really like the shade of purple used for the background and the little white flowers.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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