Yet again with this author, I remain unconvinced. Asa Ardleigh is the youngest of 3 sisters of a gentleman squire. We first meet her in Paris (pre revolution) when she accompanies her sister & the sister's new husband. She's a bit of an idealist, and a supporter of abolition, so quickly gets swept up in the salon culture and the talk of changing the regime. She also falls for a young Frenchman who is as idealistic & wet behind the ears as she is. They become lovers and vow to marry. There's another suitor on the scene however, with a distant cousin who is due to inherit the entailed estate. Asa takes a dislike to him on the basis that the family's money is built on the slave trade, but she neglects to ask Henry what his opinion might be. Then she gets taken back to England.
Some years pass and Asa is still holding a torch for Didier & shunning Henry (much to her sister's dismay). And thus far it was going OK. Readable, believable (to an extent) but then a French companion is introduced and it all sort of goes a bit odd. The denouement is, frankly, preposterous and involves all sorts of irrational behaviour on the part of our muddle-headed heroine. Asa seems to manage to survive everything that happens to her by just that - it happens to her, little seems to touch her and she grows very little through the course of the book. Affections are transferred in a highly predictable manner and nothing much is resolved. So a promising start, but a daft ending make this a mediocre read. ( )

Picked randomly from the library catalogue, Katharine McMahon's Season of Light - the title taken from a line in the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities - is a rather pedestrian, French Revolution by numbers novel, with flat characters, historical cameos and an uninspired plot. I wanted to enjoy the story, which is easy to read and well researched, but never really found myself drawn into the tale, or interested in the heroine. I have read reviews which suggest that Season of Light is like Austen with world events - the classic author famously blanked the French Revolution in her novels - but it's really not. The first half is Georgette Heyer, perhaps borrowing a few of Austen's storylines - the romantic cad versus the staid but devoted landowner - while the latter is more Orczy's historical philosophy written in Philippa Gregory's style.

Thomasina 'Asa' Ardleigh, an opinionated but naive young girl, travels to Paris in 1788 and there, in timeless teenage fashion, meets the love of her life, an enthusiastic young lawyer named Didier Paulin. Whisked back home on the eve of the Revolution, Asa spends the next five years moping around her father's house, being a dutiful daughter and sister, and championing good causes (abolitionism is thrown in for good measure). A wealthy but dull distant cousin, Harry Stockdale, makes eyes at Asa, despite the fact that she refused his first proposal in Paris, and all her relatives try to pair them off, but she is still besotted with Didier. Encouraged by her secretive French lady's companion, 'Madame', Asa throws caution to the wind and returns to France to seek her erstwhile lover - right in the middle of the Revolution.

'... although it is true that you don't seem to be governed by duty and obedience as most women are.'
'I thought I was - until I met Didier. It seemed to me, when I fell in love with him, that I had no choice.'

I found the first half of the book, about Asa's whirlwind romance and her saintly life back home, to be at once incredible and unchallenging, like a young adult novel written to make the past appeal to modern readers. Asa is described as 'bold and idealistic', but she is never shown to be that strong - merely naive and outspoken. She can talk the talk about slavery and equality, but her blunt condemnation of Harry, and her simple judgement of her father, merely show her up to be inexperienced and ignorant of real life. And my word, anybody but a lovesick teenage girl could see through Didier's game!

The part I preferred most was actually Asa's return to France, and the trouble her quick tongue and dull brain get her into. McMahon's description of revolutionary France is refreshingly brutal, compared to the fluffy nonsense that comes beforehand - she gives us the suspicion, the danger, and the guillotine, with a guest appearance from Charlotte Corday instead of Robespierre. Those chapters were actually very reminiscent of the Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel series, which is a good thing in my view, and I found myself almost caught up in Asa's plight - until the end.

Readers of Georgette Heyer and Philippa Gregory will no doubt find this a light, unobjectionable historical romance, perfect for the library shelves, but the characters and story were too predictable to capture my imagination. ( )