Honestly I am starting to worry I am going into some kind of a decline. Why am I reading so much Heyer? Clearly my brain is tired, but is this just a passing phase or is this what aging is? I am not sure if I am joking or not. Perhaps I need to be grateful I knocked off the biggies in my twenties: your WAR AND PEACE, your MOBY DICK, your REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST. What if I have lost my mojo? Comfortingly I note that about half the FREDERICA posters on Goodreads struggle with exactly this question, while the other half have basically no shame.
That said, FREDERICA is a cheerful Regency romance. It has some good points: there is lots of fun with new inventions – hot air ballons, and the ‘pedestrian curricle’ also called the ‘ladies accelerator’, which is the very first version of a bicycle (internet blackhole on this here, do feel free to click if you have as poor internet discipline as I do).
Overall though, I did not enjoy it very much. Unusually for Heyer, the dialogue between Frederica and her love interest was sort of repetitive. Also, I found it (again unusually for her) a bit anti-feminist. Frederica is so ludicrously innocent that she doesn’t notice she is in love with the love interest until the last page. It is hard to admire some one so totally disconnected from the guidance of their crotch, which in my experience is usually pretty clear.
Also, though this is not Heyer’s fault, I read this on Kindle, and really the publisher has gone for a most depressingly tasteful cover. You know what I want, and it is total contempt for female readers, and it is here.