Sometimes it almost seems like plot ideas float around in the air. Five or six years ago, I read three separate westerns about tone-deaf heroines who wanted to be saloon singers. Last year mistress books were all the rage. And this year? It has to be love lessons. I’ve seen no less than five of these stories so far, two of them published this month. This is the first I’ve read, and I can’t say it got me particularly excited about the trend.

Lady Caroline Linford thinks she really loves her fiancé, Hurst Slater. Not only did he rescue her brother from almost certain death; he’s also handsome and charming. Then she walks in on Hurst and Lady Jacquelyn Seldon, en flagrante delicto. She promptly exits the room without being noticed, surprised to find that she feels curiously detached from the scene. Then Lady Jacquelyn’s fiancé arrives, looking for her. Braden Granville is fairly new to the London scene. He grew up in the slums of Seven Dials, but escaped a life of poverty when he apprenticed to a gunsmith. Now he manufactures guns himself, and is very wealthy. For reasons that don’t particularly make sense, Caroline doesn’t want Braden to find out what their fiancés are doing, so she stalls him long enough for the lovers to make separate escapes.

At first Caroline thinks she’ll simply break off the engagement. Why would Hurst want to marry her, if he loves Lady Jacquelyn? But Caroline’s mother dissuades her. The invitations have been sent, Hurst’s blood is as blue as it gets, and Caroline shouldn’t expect a love match anyway. This is where the love lessons come in. Caroline’s mother suggests that Caroline use her womanly wiles to secure Hurst’s affections. But Caroline has no idea how to use her womanly wiles. But she knows someone who can teach her; Braden Granville isn’t called “the Lothario of London” for nothing. Besides, she has something he wants – solid proof that his fiancée was unfaithful, and the willingness to testify to that effect in court.

Braden entered into his engagement to Jacquelyn in good faith. He knows she’s not a virgin, because after all she slept with him. At first he liked that she was different from the usual women on the marriage mart. But that was before he realized that she slept with other men too. With Caroline’s help, he can get out of his engagement without having to pay for a breach of promise suit. But before he knows it, the love lessons are getting out of hand. Caroline grows on him, and soon she is all he can think about. He’s honest about his feelings for her early on, which is both cute and refreshing.

Rakes across London may be opening up sex schools just to compete with the surge in demand, but I’m not sure this is a plot device I can really buy into. There may be instances in which a heroine applying to the hero for lessons in wiles/sex/flirting/learning how to “be bad” works, but I had trouble with this one. Caroline is a total innocent, talking about sex in the most oblique terms (because she doesn’t even know the right words to use), yet the first time she approaches Braden with her offer she bemoans her virginity like a teenager in an 1980s John Hughes film. Now I am not one to insist that every Victorian woman was taught to hate and fear sex, but Caroline’s thoroughly modern attitude made no sense to me, and made it hard to get into the book at all in the beginning.

Fortunately, the love lessons are really just a device for Caroline and Braden to get to know each other, and once they do, that plot recedes into the background somewhat. The two of them actually have a lot in common. Both are engaged to unfaithful people (who want to marry them for their money). Both are upstarts; Caroline’s father was the first Earl of Bartlett, and he gained his title because he introduced amazing plumbing to one of the royal residences. Besides, they are both just plain nice people. The middle part of the book isn’t bad, and there are some very nicely written love scenes (and almost love scenes).

But just when things are looking up, a stupid misunderstanding rears its ugly head. It centers around a promise that Braden made to Caroline’s brother, but mostly it just seems like an excuse to tack fifty extra pages onto the book. All in all, it added to the uneven reading experience.

This is the second book I’ve read by Patricia Cabot. The first was An Improper Proposal, and I enjoyed it, enjoyed it a great deal more than I did Educating Caroline. However, my lack of enjoyment was so tied to the “love lessons” plot device that I certainly wouldn’t be adverse to trying Cabot’s books again. If you are a reader who applauds the love lessons trend, my guess is that you’d enjoy this book much more than I did.