What A Lady Wants by Victoria Alexander
review by lawson

If you are looking for a discussion on fate, perhaps this book is not the way to go for true philosophical musings, but it does bring up the idea of how much fate does have control over one’s life.

Enter the heroine Felicity, an amateur astronomer is on her balcony wishing on a star. For a self-proclaimed practical person, wishing on a star is usually not the best course of action, but in this case, her wish is granted when Nigel Cavendish leaps over the wall into her garden. Escaping from an angry husband whose wife’s bed he has just left.

After this escapade, Felicity is convinced that Nigel is her fate, and spends the rest of the time attempting to convince him that she is right. Hilarity ensues. Seriously. When a book contains some things having to do with a balcony and a gun and no one is seriously injured because of it (twice), it can be hard to make the slapstick on the page work. Alexander does a good job of making it mostly believable, even though it is some flimsy shtick.

Also after this, Nigel is asked by his father to begin running the family estates, which is then designed to help him throw off his childish ideas and start becoming the man his father believes him to be. It seems that everyone has faith in Nigel except Nigel himself. Nigel does seem to dislike change and want to whine about it quite a bit. Felicity then sees the need to seek all sorts of help from Nigel’s family and her friends since she sees that they are “fated” for each other. Through these acts there’s plenty of snappy dialogue to entertain the reader. Both characters are intelligent and don’t mind showing that to each other through flirting.

Though there are some comical moments, snappy dialogue and some good chemistry between the leads, the theme of fate throughout the book does get rather old. With the amount of help that Fate gets in the book, it seems more that your fate is what you make of what is given you rather than some grand design by the universe. And the secondary characters seem to see everything before the main characters, except the balcony scenes that is.

Grade: B