“Oh, goody!” I thought, as I started to read With Eyes Of Love, both hero and heroine wear glasses, are bookish, quietly funny and dislike the inanities of life in the ton. Just my cup of tea. My tea quickly started getting lukewarm, and then downright cold, as I discovered glaring historical inaccuracies and language, the flimsiest of plots, and that my hero and heroine were not nearly as interesting as they seemed at first glimpse.

Elspeth Quinn is heading to Bath for her first season, where she is to be a guest at her aunt’s house. Because her family is impoverished, she has never had a come-out and agrees to the invitation, as much to save her mother the cost of feeding her (and her younger brother, whom she brings along) as to make the social rounds. Her cousin, Caroline, is an acclaimed beauty who remains, inexplicably to both herself and her mother, at least, unwed at the ripe old age of 22. Both mother and daughter believe that the contrast between stunning Caroline and dowdy cousin Elspeth will prove too much for the eligible bachelors, and one of them will demand Caroline’s hand. Elspeth knows right away why she was invited, but even then the reality is much worse than she had imagined. Caroline and her mother, Bettina, are petty, selfish, conniving shrews, revealing nothing beyond their two-dimensional portrayal. Caroline takes care to make cousin look as bad as possible, while her mother constantly harps at Elspeth not to draw attention to herself when it appears as if she might be gaining attention on her own.

Julian Thorpe has just returned to Bath for the Season after an absence of two years. Entering the social fray at the urging of his ill father who wishes to see him wed before he dies, Julian is much happier in the country tending to his pigs and other livestock, but he is also a dutiful son who wishes to please his father. Despite not having made an appearance in Society for so long, he is immediately comfortable with his surroundings, familiar with Bath’s foremost society leaders and is inexplicably the most eligible bachelor on the scene – to Caroline, at least. While visiting Caroline and her mother, Julian encounters a woman in the library (Elspeth, of course) whom he believes to be a maid. He absconds with her glasses, and is amused by her repeated use of the exclamation “Drat!,” as well as her quick-witted replies. When he finally meets Caroline’s cousin, he returns her glasses to her, revealing as well that he, too, is similarly poor-sighted. That plot distinction is barely mentioned throughout the rest of the book, signaling to me (even through myopic eyes) that it was just one of many plot devices to get the action moving forward.

Julian decides almost immediately that he wants to marry Elspeth. He sets out to woo her, and she is equally speedy in returning his affections. There is nothing in the way of their being married, and happily so, until cousin Caroline decides that she will marry Julian, and torments both Julian and Elspeth’s lives for the remaining half of the book. The author depends on the weighty conscience of Caroline’s conspirator and one of those venerated grande dames of the ton to untangle the situation, and the solution is both messy and flimsy.

Regretfully, the two bespectacled characters are as boringly bland as anyone else in love, with very little to distinguish them from any other hero/heroine. Even the requisite consummation scene is paint-by-numbers, from the heroine’s wonder at the hero’s size to the “this will hurt only for a minute, darling'” to her eventual bliss. Yawn.

Simply put, the plot is so light it almost flies away. Also completely unbelievable is the fact that Caroline seems to believe she would be able to live her life as she pleased once wed, and that her husband would have no control over her. The ceding of one’s life into another’s hands is what made marriage such an enormous decision in those times, and Caroline blithely announcing she would sign a lease for a London townhouse made me, normally a fairly lenient reader in terms of precise historical accuracy, want to lead the author to the library for some research.

And while we’re on the subject of historical accuracy, the language tends toward the anachronistic. While “spanner” has an old etymology, “throwing a spanner in the works” seems too modern a phrase. Caroline swears at Julian, something that would never have happened in the specific context, and both Julian and Elspeth say “drat” repeatedly, which would also have been inappropriate. Author McFadden also uses the word “demoiselles” exclusively when referring to young, unwed girls, and this time I wished she had made better use of her thesaurus.

With Eyes Of Love has a promising start, but quickly loses momentum. It felt anachronistic, as if the author were setting her love story, which needed some antiquated plot conflicts to delay the eventual HEA, in the Regency period purely by accident, and portrayed none of the spirit of the times that even most wallpaper historical authors are able to do.