The Winter Bride

In this funny, sweet book about sisters, narrator Alison Larkin delivers distinct voices and accents to bring to life the rolicking story of Damaris Chance. A beauty with secrets, Chance is determined not to marry. Charming rogue Freddy Monkton-Coombs also has an aversion to marriage--until he meets Damaris. Their romance leads both on a merry chase, complete with a fake engagement, swimming pigs, and marriage-minded debutantes on the hunt. This touching story, so well delivered, makes one laugh out loud one moment and sigh the next. A listening experience to be savored. A.C.P. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

February 24, 2014
Gracie continues the charming seasonal saga of the four Chance sisters (introduced in The Autumn Bride), family by choice rather than blood, with this thoughtful and tender Regency. Miss Damaris Chance (formerly Tait), a missionary’s daughter, has a well-earned “abhorrence of marriage.” The Honorable Frederick Monkton-Coombes wants to present a fiancée to his cold and distant parents to avoid their matchmaking schemes. Freddy and Damaris enter into a business arrangement: she will engage in a faux betrothal in exchange for ownership of a cottage that will allow her to be self-sufficient. Freddy’s cultivation of his rakish reputation has developed his wooing skills, which are put to the test when his friendship with Damaris evolves slowly into romance, despite both parties’ hurts and vulnerabilities. Gracie gradually expands the setting without overwhelming the reader by sending Damaris and Freddy to his family estate, separating them from Damaris’s benefactor and Freddy’s business partners, while setting the scene for the next two seasons.