Lady Flora’s Fantasy starts out promisingly enough. Flora is 22 and tired of the Marriage Mart. She vows to sit out the Season – until, that is, she meets the dashing Lord Dashwood and his friend Lord Lynd on a pre-season trip to Brighton. She gives only a passing glance to Lynd, but after five minutes of flirtation with Dashwood, she decides to go to London after all.

Unfortunately, Dashwood has read the Dummy’s Guide to Being a Cad and has taken every word to heart. He intends to marry Flora for her money, and never means to be faithful. He shows his true colors repeatedly to his pal Lynd, and to the reader, but Flora is blind to his transparent manipulations. It’s hard to see what she sees in him; she declares repeatedly that he is the most honest, most wonderful etc. etc., but her judgment seems based on nothing more than how well he wears his tight Regency clothing.

For that matter, Lynd and others are taken by Flora’s intelligence, but that was not in evidence very often as she first falls for Lord Dashwood, and then gets herself into deeper and deeper trouble as the book goes on. The titular “Fantasy” is the series of daydreams she has of romantic declarations of love, secret assignations and so on, all of which are so conventional and unrealistic as to work against her supposed intelligence.

I enjoyed the first half of the book in spite of all of this. I felt sure that Flora, smart as she is, would eventually see Dashwood’s real intentions, and the true romance, with likable beta-guy Lynd, could get going. The descriptions and dialogue swept me in, and Kennedy slings the Regency lingo with a skilled hand. An occasional lapse into modern slang (characters tell one another to “Cool off” and “Spare me,” both of which sounded more California 20th century than England 19th century to my ears) only distracted me momentarily.

Unfortunately, the book goes off the rails in the second half. Lord Dashwood predictably jilts Flora, who then makes a marriage of convenience – to another, utterly wrong man. This character deserved a romance in his own right, as he was kind and decent even as Flora stays out of his bed and nurses the flame of her devotion to Dashwood. At the same time, Flora finally starts noticing what a nice and good-looking guy Lord Lynd is, which leads to potentially adulterous longings for two different men.

I hung in there, hoping to see it all resolved satisfactorily. But instead, things got worse and the whole plot fell to pieces in the last fifty pages when Dashwood plays Flora like a yo-yo yet again. A last-minute sub-plot involving Flora’s sister is left unresolved and true love is not acknowledged until the very last page. By this point Flora has run roughshod over Lord Lynd’s feelings so many times that I couldn’t see this last-second realization as an end to the story.

In the hands of a lesser author, this book would have hit the wall several times over. As it is, the lack of a main romantic storyline and the adulterous thoughts of Flora and actions of another character will turn off many readers. It is a testament to Ms. Kennedy’s storytelling skills that despite my growing aggravation I kept eagerly reading right to the very disappointing ending. Surprisingly, despite the grade, I would try another book by this author, but recommend you steer clear of this one.