Again with Flambards books that swerve and swerve hard and catch you out with the change in mood!

The last book ended with Will and Christina married and riding off into the sunset (if with the ominous overtones of war everywhere). Never one to pull their punches, Peyton doesn't give us even a glimpse of their married life, but opens this book with Will dead, Mark missing in action, and Flambards even more decayed and run down than usual. The widowed Christina has to work out what to do with her life, which turns out to be a surprising mix of building up a found / chosen family, by having Will's baby, buying Mark's bastard son off Violet, and finally confessing her love to Dick.

Then drama ensues by Mark turning out not to be dead after all and actually being the heir to Flambards, and Violet's son decides that rather than be kicked out to the farm he'll burn the farm down, but with a little storybook magic it is all wrapped up in a bow, Dick and Christina get Flambards and the children, and Mark rides off into the sunset with his rich new fiance Dorothy who has promised him a much nicer house with much better hunting somewhere else.

War and grief, and love, and what we need and what we can have, and social class, and how we treat prisoners of war, and how our early teenage years shape us forever, this book is definitely more of the Flambards magic. ( )

I think I enjoyed this one particularly because of having just read the other two: as a result, the emotional baggage carried right forward, and I could really empathize with Christina's grief, and turmoil, and, eventually, happiness.

I liked this SO much better than the second in the series. Christina is herself again, although widowed and inexplicably sick to her stomach. Flambards is a ruin, and Mark is missing, presumed dead in the war. And there are horses at Flambards again, and I think Peyton is at her best when writing about them. I'm not a real romance fan, but once I'm hooked, I have to find out what happens next. So on to the last book I go... ( )

NA

Orig. publ. by Oxford Universit Press, 1969.bag sale ( )