Author: Virginia Heath
A new Regency romp of a series, about governess who believes in cultivating joy in her charges, clashes with the children’s uncle who hired her, only to find herself falling in love.
When the flighty older sister of former naval captain, Henry Kincaid, decides on a whim to accompany her explorer husband on an expedition to Egypt, he finds himself unwittingly left in the lurch with her three unruly children and her giant, mad dog. With no clue how to manage the little rascals, a busy career at the Admiralty that requires all of his attention, and no idea when his sister is coming back, Harry has to hire an emergency governess to ensure that everything in his ordered house continues to run shipshape. In desperation, he goes to Miss Prentice’s School for Girls prepared to pay whatever it takes to get a governess quick sharp to bring order to the chaos.
Thanks to her miserable, strict upbringing, fledgling governess Georgina Rowe does not subscribe to the ethos that children should be seen and not heard. She believes childhood should be everything that hers wasn’t, filled with laughter, adventure, and discovery. Thankfully, the three Pendleton children she has been tasked with looking after are already delightfully bohemian and instantly embrace her unconventional educational ethos. Their staid, stickler-for-the-rules uncle, however, is another matter entirely…
All’s Fair in Love and War is the first novel in Heath’s new Miss Prentice’s Protegees series. After enjoying her other series, The Merriwell Sisters, I was looking forward to reading this one. The story follows 22-year-old governess Georgina (Georgie) Rowe. She attended a school for governesses when she was 16 after her moth died and her colonel stepfather no longer wanted her. Her next assignment is to work for Naval Captain Harry Kincaid after his sister dropped her three kids and dog with him while she traveled to Egypt. The pacing of the story starts by setting up Georgie and her struggle to get a governess job and then transitions into her adjustment to her new position.
As the story is dual POV, the reader gets to be in the heads of both Georgie and Harry. It takes a bit to get to know Harry, but he ended up being an enjoyable character. Georgie, on the other hand, was a little more difficult to like as her inner monologue got to me. It was a little negative and repetitive, which made the story drag in some places. I think some reworking on the inner monologues would have increased my engagement with the writing. The romance and characters were good, but this novel did not quite live up to the three in the other series. I think this series has a lot of potential as Heath is a very talented writer. While this one was not as great as the others, it was still worth the read and I would read the next one in the series.
**I give a special thank you to Netgalley and the publisher, St. Martin’s Griffin, for the opportunity to read this entertaining novel. The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.**
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