Lots to Love in "Ladies in Hating"

 

Ladies in Hating

by Alexandra Vasti 

It is rare when the third book of a trilogy can be picked up cold and still be a delightful and engaging read. Of course it helps when the main characters here are peripherals in the other books and vice versa. Regardless, it's a quick, quality read that's vastly(!) entertaining.

 

This novel sparkles from the first word. Lady Georgiana, daughter of an earl, is a successful Gothic novelist...under a pseudonym, naturally. At present she is much beset by the realization that another author, using the pseudonym Lady Darling, is using similar situations and character names in their equally successful novels. Thus far readers have not complained, but Georgiana is certain that someone is spying on her writing, capitalizing on her success. And she must discover who it is. Because if she can’t, and if her writing career goes down the drain, then she and her mother, who left the family home to look after her, will have no income with which to feed and house themselves.

Cat Woolcott has a similar conundrum. She has just learned that the wealthy daughter of a house where her father used to be a butler is her chief rival in the matter of Gothic novel writing. Worse, Lady Georgiana accuses her, Cat, of stealing details and characters and even titles. If Cat's writing career goes down the drain, she will have no way to keep herself, her brother, and her older cousin Polly, who looks after them, from the poor house. She’s been working a day job all this time to keep them all fed and clothed while her brother studies law. But if she wants to get ahead of that despicable daughter of an earl, she will have to leave her day job at the pie shop to research a novel that Lady Georgiana cannot possibly know anything about. It’s a big risk and it’s all made worse by the fact that, under other circumstances, she would be more than happy to wangle a closer acquaintance with the delectable daughter of the big house.

When the two rival authors end up exploring the same moldering manor house, Gothic overtones balloon like a black cape against a full moon.Sapphic urges surge right along with them. There’s a nightgown in a moonlit library scene - a classic of the genre - and a secret garden, a scream in the night, a secret diary, and so much more. Even a cute dog with its own part in moving the plot along. 

Underpinning all the frivolity is a thoroughly convincing relationship-in-development that conveys the importance of deep honesty, owning one's mistakes, and mutual support through life's dangers and stressors. It's much more credible than a classic HEA where problems are expected to vanish the instant Love is mutually declared. It's easy to see why Alexandra Vasti is one of today's most popular Regency authors.

This is a fun, writerly, Regency romp that’s a send-up of the Gothic, equally as witty and ten times as naughty as Northanger Abbey.

 

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