It can be a distraction reading the work of someone you know. My uncle published a novel and my father wrote a short one and so I'm familiar with the question of whether one is being extra critical or overly sympathetic and also not being able to avoid noticing elements that you think you know where they took them from. It is much to Sue Lodge's credit that the story took over from such diverting issues at an early stage and I was happily involved without too much double think.
Set in 1810, we are very conscious of period language and etiquette. We would be, anyway, from Jane Austen but I took time out from re-reading Middlemarch to read this and so was already most of the way there. Whereas Middlemarch is set twenty years later, it was written over 150 years earlier and is different in temper, length and scope. However, they both have at their centre the issue of a young lady's ideal marriage partner. Hetty Avebury here is nothing like Dorothea Brooke but our concern is with their respective marriage prospects and the reader is likely to be on their side.
Only a Hero Will Do is vividly written and particularly strong on character. We are immersed into a world of rapscalions, popinjays, hoydens, strumpets and bombazine and I found out what an abigail was by necessarily looking it up.
As a Regency Romance, there is plenty of frisson with skin tingling and rippling as two people demurely attracted to each other come into close proximity. In the first half of the novel, Dr. Robert has to examine Hetty at least three times. But the plot moves on at a pace with some ingenious devices and cleverly realized episodes. That Hetty's friend Dan Dickens happens to be on the same boat that she is shanghai'd onto is one of those things that just might happen but whether the gifted cardsharp could really lose and carry on losing to a pack of marked cards stretches credibility a little bit. None of which is of great detriment to the story because Thomas Hardy often relied on more surprising effects of fate and so more recently did Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.
Though Hetty's bethrothed, Stark, is a bad-tempered bully, he is a buffoon but in the second half of the story, Anthony is a more ruthless and formidable villain. The book almost divides on a hinge where one is replaced by the other as the main suitor in pursuit not so much of her but her inheritance. She is a spirited an immensely likeable character but even her resourcefulness wouldn't be enough without the hero that we know from the start she will eventually marry.
However, that isn't before some cliff-hanging, page-turning adventures, several desperate scrapes, injuries and a large helping of derring-do. It is genre fiction but a fine example of it and enjoyable for the zest and energy of its writing as well as its gripping plot.
It is a ripping yarn in the finest tradition and those who enjoy it will be glad to find that Susan Lodge has written others and is likely to write more.
