This was too long a book. It felt as though the author just kept adding and adding to an ever ending story. It was a great book to start but past the middle it just didn't work for me.

Pretty good Downton Abbey-esque read though it was a tad bit too long. The reader kind of knows where this story is going, but it's an enjoyable journey just the same.

I want to preface by saying I LOVED the first book in this series. It was full of drama, heart break, romance, adventure - it was, quite honestly, the perfect historical romance. I have been waiting with baited breath for the second in the series to come out. When I saw it available on Net Galley I did a little dance and hit "request'

Oh, ouch, boy, whoa, what a disappointment. I am brutally honest because I spent cherished time reading it from beginning to end, but felt that the author did not have the heart to do anything more than push out a story for publications sake. It's not like the Maisy Dobbs series where you know the author has run out of ideas and is dragging a dead horse way waaaay past the finish line. It's like the author didn't even try. Like she typed up some notes and filled in a couple of areas and sent it in as a draft that was never proofed.

Why the scathing review? Let me count the ways:

1. There are bizarre passages of time that are unaccounted for and left me feeling confused
2. Characters say or do one thing, and then later in the book (or even in the next scene) they are either not present or act as though they never said or did what they said or did before (hope that makes sense)
3. Lady Julia Hazelton - argh - what a twit. She's got gobs of money and is determined to help the poor but does very VERY inappropriate things. For example, she makes out with another character in the home of a woman who just died giving birth while her children and husband grieve upstairs. She has sex with a character after a car accident on the property of a man who's wife is crazy with grief and stumbles upon them. And how many times in a novel can one woman turn down marriage proposals. Honestly, she's past her prime and not very interesting but as soon as she looks at a man he drops down on one knee - ok! we get it! she's a catch!
4. Cal - oh Cal - you're not a winner either. The secret you have is not very interesting, especially since Lady Julia is determined to help fallen women and would probably think it a badge of honor to have a prostitute as a mother in law. And you think you're so cool and artsy because you were in a gang and you paint without your shoes on. A boring, self-absorbed jerk.
5. All other characters are stock characters who are present only to make the main characters seem more pious or dark. The poor, especially, are treated in a way that's snobby and a bit offensive.
6. Apparently there's a murder mystery in here, but it's not very interesting and the resolution is weird.

To sum it up - what was meant to be a love-letter to Downton Abbey (the characters in this book are literally the characters from the show in everything but name) is instead a flop that leaves the reader's intelligence feeling disrespected.

Fans of Downton Abbey will enjoy this book. Lady Julia longs to do something with her life. She wants to help the widows who were left with little options but selling themselves after the war. Her family, of course, is horrified at this prospect. When the new Earl of Worthington arrives from America determined to tear the estate apart, Lady Julia is determined to keep it together.
Cal, the American heir, is still bitter after his father was disowned and the family left destitute. He is not thrilled about the prospect of being an earl and is determined to sell everything and leave those who treated his parents cruelly destitute. The more time he spends with Lady Julia, however, begin to convince him that he might not want to destroy the Worthington Estate and might instead do something great with it. Fun romantic read!

A wonderful romance set in the vibrancy and pageantry of the roaring 20s. He's an American turned English earl who has a vendetta. She’s a duke’s daughter and eventual countess who must finally decide what matters most in life. Cal’s father was cast out by his aristocratic family because they didn’t like his choice of bride. The end result was a childhood of poverty for Cal. Now that he’s the earl, he intends to make the family who threw his away pay for their sins. Lady Julia Hazleton was engaged to the heir before his death and she vows to do everything in her power to keep the American from throwing the current family out. As the story unfolds everyone learns that the family has more skeletons in the closet than anyone imagined and Julia discovers that the American earl is not the savage she once thought.

In the Worthington Wife, Page crafts an intriguing story about family secrets, shame and how the power of love can heal even the worst of betrayals.

I received an ARC of this book, from the publisher, via NetGallery, in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I haven't really read a lot of books set in the 1920s, so I was intrigued by The Worthington Wife. After reading it, I ended up with mixed feelings about the book. I did like it well enough to read to the end. I was intrigued by the mystery and wanted to find out who killed all of those girls. I also did like Julia's character. Her willingness to stand up for what she believed in was one of the best parts of her. The romance between Cal and Julia added another depth to the story. Their fall for each other and the way Julia helped change Cal was sweet.

However, there were a few things that kept me from loving the story. I thought it was too long. There were parts that could have been left out of the book. It definitely dragged in places. I didn't like getting the maid/cook's point of view. It really wasn't necessary to the story and just made the book feel disjointed. I also didn't really get the feel that this was the 20s. But, then that could just be because I am not familiar with England in the 20s and how society worked then. (I've never seen Downton Abbey) The scene in Paris with the two famous authors really pulled me out of the story. It was a little unbelievable like the author threw in that scene to remind me it was the 20s in Paris.

This is the second book in a series. I thought it did fairly well as a stand alone. I didn't feel I needed to know Zoe and Nigel's back story to read this book. I think fans of this era will enjoy the book. -Kari

3.5 Stars. Lady Julia Hazelton is feeling somewhat adrift. Having lost her first love to the Great War and her second love to the chasm between their social standings, she needs a sense of purpose. Her family is pressuring her to marry, but she's seen what a marriage without love can do to people, and she's vowed to marry for love or not at all. So she throws herself into a startup charity to help destitute war widows and their children. She also spends much of her time tending to the tenants on her family's estate and on the neighboring estate, Worthington, which she would have been mistress of had her fiance not been killed in the war. But Worthington is in a state of chaos. The new heir to the estate is a long-lost relative, a bohemian American whose arrival disrupts the staid order of English nobility. With her best friend, Diana, in the scandalous position of being pregnant with a married man's child, and terrified that the new earl is going to throw them all out on the street, Julia vows to do all she can to see the estate maintained. Getting close to the new earl is no hardship--he's gorgeous, progressive, and enigmatic--but getting to the heart of him and convincing him he has a place in her world is going to take some work.

Cal Carstairs bears a grudge, and he's finally in a position to do something about it. As heir to the estate of the family he holds responsible for his parents' deaths, he arrives at Worthington intent on revenge. But his plans to sell the estate piece by piece and see the family brought low are called into question when Lady Julia captures his attention. Nothing like the aristocracy he's come to hate, Julia challenges all of his preconceptions and shows him how many lives would be affected if he ruined the estate. Over the course of their visits to the estate's villages and business interests, Cal discovers that several young women have gone missing over the years, and, with a soft spot for misused and forgotten women, Cal vows to uncover the truth of what happened to them. But when the clues start adding up and point toward the Worthington estate, he must decide if revealing the truth and gaining justice for the girls is worth destroying the fragile new peace he's established and his relationship with Julia. And when a new threat sets its sights on Julia, Cal will have to come clean about his unsavory past and face the fight of his life to hold on to everything he loves.

I have mixed feelings on The Worthington Wife. I loved the main characters. Julia is an admirable heroine whose desire to have it all--a loving marriage, children, and a greater purpose in life, a feeling of making a difference--is something most women can relate to, and her work with war widows and her compassion for the tenants of the estate are noble and heartfelt. Cal's carefree attitude and his struggle to reconcile his thirst for vengeance with the responsibilities of owning an estate and his growing feelings for Julia won me over, along with the tale of his rise from a childhood of crime with the Five Points Gang. And who doesn't love a man who creates art? I also loved the depiction of the time period and the sense of newness of it all--short dresses, motor cars, jazz clubs. There's very much a sense of living in the moment and pushing boundaries in the aftermath of a harrowing war. I did not read An American Duchess first and found that this sequel stands alone just fine, though I probably would have had a better appreciation for the supporting characters and Julia's family had I read it.

The story is engaging from the first page, and I could not put this book down. Lush descriptions, the glitz and glamour of the Roaring Twenties underscored by a current of lingering gravity from the Great War, a mature, tender love story, and a touch of mystery and danger had me burning through the pages. I really thought this was headed for at least 4-star territory, but instead the final pages let me down. So much time was spent in the first half acquainting Cal--and the reader--with the ins and outs of Worthington and the society they inhabit that many aspects of the plot were shortchanged in the second half as the story raced to a hasty and rather superficial conclusion.The payoff I had been waiting for--Julia and Cal as a couple--is so rushed that we hardly get to spend any time with them, and some of their actions seem to come out of nowhere. The resolutions of the mystery and Diana's pregnancy dilemma are rushed, and we learn about many things that happened after the fact. I could also have done without the "downstairs" scenes from a kitchen maid's point of view that played a minimal role in the overall story.

And yet, in spite of the shortcomings of the latter portion of the story, I still thought it was a gripping, transporting, and very romantic read. When I wasn't reading it, I couldn't wait to get back to it. And I've thought about it often in the days since I finished it. Just an FYI: though this seems to be marketed as romantic historical fiction, it is really historical romance. I love romance, so that's fine by me, but I point it out for those of you who aren't normally fans of the genre. But if you do love romance, and you're looking for a change of pace, The Worthington Wife provides a passionate story with a lot of heart and deeper exploration of social issues in an underrepresented and exciting era when Western civilization was transitioning from the old age into the new.

The Worthington Wife was a lot of things; it is part romance novel, part mystery, and part straight historical, and it did most of that successfully.

The novel evokes the time following WWI and how the life on the great estates in England were struggling against the modernization of the coming world. We see a little bit of the Roaring Twenties with regards to unsavory characters and some of the jazz/dance clubs, but it doesn’t take front stage here. The novel explores some of the effects of the war on those who were on the field, both men and women, and how their experiences effected them at home and how their service was perceived upon returning home. I felt that there was more historical depth here than in many romance novels and I appreciated that.

The romance was more subtle through about two-thirds of the novel and then ratchets it up into the world of a more traditional historical romance after that complete with somewhat detailed bedroom scenes. I felt the scenes were tasteful and well built into the narrative and made a lot of sense to the characters as they had been established thus far. I believed the romance here.

The mystery part I can’t get much into without giving a lot away, but suffice to say it comes and goes throughout the novel and you don’t realize early on that it is really anything important, but it becomes more so as time goes on. I didn’t figure it out right away, but my suspicions started to raise themselves about three-quarters through and I was ultimately right. It played a lot into the motivations of the characters and drove some of their decisions throughout.

The author did a great job creating these characters. I loved Julia and Cal, they were each interesting on their own, but brought out the best and worst in each other when together. They could both be infuriating, but coming from a good place, even if they expected different outcomes. Most of the peripheral characters were well fleshed out, I think the exception would have to be Cal’s female cousins (beyond Diana). They all live with him, but I can’t remember the other two girl’s names or know anything about them.

There was one thing that bothered me throughout my experience reading this book, and that was the interaction between my expectations based on the book blurb and the reality of the book. I don’t particularly think that this blurb was as effective as it should have been. Typically, I expect that what is revealed in the blurb is not a main plot point and that the events discussed will occur relatively early in the novel – this is meant to pull you in to the plot, not give it away. Based on this idea, I expected this “impulsive marriage” to occur relatively early and then we would watch as events played out based on their not well thought out marriage. I kept waiting and waiting for the marriage and even checked back to make sure I had not made up the fact that there would even be a marriage! It doesn’t happen until a couple chapters before the end, which frustrated me as it felt like I was sold something a little different than I was told. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the story and was compelled to pick it up to read at times that I probably should have been doing other things, but I just felt I was kept waiting too long.

When I started reading The Worthington Wife I didn’t know that it was the second book in a series, however right away I knew I was missing something. It wasn’t that I felt I didn’t have enough information to understand what was going on, but it was instead the opposite. I feel like the author almost tried to give too much information, but in a way that was too obvious and lacking in fluidity. In that first chapter I didn’t feel that I needed to know all about the American Duchess, the sister-in-law to the heroine of The Worthington Wife. It could have been more appropriately placed in a later chapter when Zoe was actually important to the story. Having not read the first book (although I do have it), I’m not sure what we came to know of Julia in that book, but I felt like I was able to get to know her just fine in The Worthington Wife, as well as the other characters. That first chapter just felt very clunky to me.

I will definitely be going back to read the first book as well as any subsequent ones, this could have just used a little clean up.

What a wonderful opportunity to catch up with Nigel and Zoe from American Heiress! I LOVED Julia's story, loved Cal and the Downton Abbey-esq. way he came to be heir to Worthington Park. They take a longer road to happily ever after than I would have wished- but I am an impatient romantic, their road was a thrilling read.

" The Worthington Wife" is an enjoyable romance set a 1920s. Many of the themes resonate still today in terms of women and their sense of identity & place. While it does not incorporate as much of the history of the 1920s as it could have, it is still light, satisfying read.

Stevie‘s review of The Worthington Wife (1920s England Series, Book 2) by Sharon Page
Historical Romance published by HQN Books 27 Dec 16

Sharon Page’s previous book set in 1920’s England has been on the fringes of my radar for quite some time, although I’ve never actually got round to picking up a copy. Somehow, I missed that this is a sequel to that one, although it does stand alone reasonably well as a story in its own right. After reading a number of books in which an American woman provides the resources to save the estate of an aristocratic British family, I was intrigued to see how a novel might tackle the contrasting situation of an American heir dealing with the unexpected acquisition of a British title and estate – presumably with associated debts and death duties.

Cal Carstairs finds himself unexpectedly Earl of Worthington, after his father had been virtually disowned by his family for marrying a working-class American woman. As a consequence, Cal and his brother grew up with very little and saw their parents die young due to the circumstances they found themselves in. Having served as a pilot and seen his brother badly injured in the trenches, Cal has managed to break away from his criminal past and make enough money from legal investments to support his brother, while going on himself to make a living as an artist in Paris.

The shock announcement that an American has inherited the neighbouring estate comes as Lady Julia Hazelton is arguing with her brother over her plans to provide employment for local women left impoverished after the war and, in some cases, forced to resort to prostitution in order to support their families. Julia was engaged to the son of the previous Earl, but has sworn not to marry following his death in the war. She also promised, however, to ensure that his family and estate were cared for and so is thrown into opposing the new Earl, who plans revenge for his parents’ deaths by breaking up the estate.

This is the point at which I started to get cross with the book. If the estate is entailed, as it might well be, then Cal can’t start selling off parts of it until a couple of years after this story is set, when the law will change. If, however, the estate, or parts of it, is not entailed, then why did the whole pass to Cal? If the family were estranged from him, then surely it would have made more sense for anything that could be passed to a closer family member be left to them in the previous Earl’s will? And what about the death duties? We never do get to hear about them.

On top of that, the romance aspects of the book did little for me, I wasn’t convinced by the mystery subplot or its resolution, and the whole issue of one character’s unwanted pregnancy could (and almost certainly would) have been solved by a trip to a discreet Harley Street doctor rather than the complex plans that seemed mainly to serve as excuses for the characters to gad about Europe.

All in all, rather a lot of disappointment for me here, but at least I was saved from buying the previous book in the series.

Grade: D