Courting Trouble, by Nonnie St. George

I liked the first Nonnie St. George book I read, The Ideal Bride. Even though the humour was a bit too slap-stick for me most of the time, it had a wonderful romance. I heard at various message boards that her following book, Courting Trouble, featured a more witt-based type of humour, so I really wanted to give it a try.

I had the opposite reaction to Courting Trouble that I did to The Ideal Bride. While I loved the humour, the romance was a huge failure for me. My grade would be a C+.

St. George has a wonderful eye for satire, and she's incredible witty. I kept laughing out loud, especially during the first half of the book. The way she made fun of the conventions of the genre and of her own characters was priceless, and I kept finding little jewels every couple of paragraphs. To tell the truth, I didn't think the author would be able to keep up the manic pace, but she did, and that element of the book was what I enjoyed best of all.

Unfortunately, I didn't like the romance nearly as much. I just hated that the plot mainly consisted on everyone trying to bully the heroine into marry the hero. Maybe I would have come to like the book if St. Fell had experienced at least an instant of uncertainty, but he spent the entire 250 pages being just as smug, condescending and manipulative. By the end of the book, I wasn't even enjoying the humour as much, because I was so put out by St. Fell's arrogance.