Reviewer: Lori Graham
Title: Love is Blind
Author: Lynsay Sands
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing
ISBN: 0-8439-5500-7
Release Date: August 2006
Genre/Sub-genre: Historical Romance
Year/Setting: 1818/England
Overall Rating: 4.5
Sexual Content Rating: Sexual
Language (Profanity) Rating: None
Violent Content Rating: None
Lynsay's Website: www.lynsaysands.net
Lady Clarissa Crambray has a small problem – or what should be a small problem. Without her glasses, she is blind as a bat. Her stepmother has been given the task of finding a husband for her so they left their country home for London at the height of the season. Now here is where the bad eyesight comes into play. Her stepmother believes she is unattractive with her glasses so they are gone and Clarissa has to stumble through without them. Many men find her attractive and even fairly easy to talk to but things keep happening such that she is developing a reputation of being a major (and I do mean major) klutz. For example, one poor man had his leg mistaken for a table and Clarissa placed her teacup upon it. Now that doesn’t sound all bad until you realize that a table is much more stable than a leg and the teacup was sure to fall over. Again, inconvenient but not terrible, right. Wrong, the teacup fell the wrong direction and I believe Reginald said it best when he stated that Clarissa had burned his piffle.
As the season progresses, Clarissa finds she is quite lonely. While she is used to not having many people around her (as they live in the country), she misses the freedom of her needlework, taking walk and most especially reading. She can’t do any of those things without her glasses. So, she sits all day.
Finally, one night a man approaches her and asks to dance. She is honest with him and tells him he is taking a major risk but he decides she is worth that risk. She found Adrian easy to talk with and that he took great care with her. He even wants to spend more time with her and pays great attention to the details. One example is her sharing that she missed reading and he promptly takes her on a picnic and reads to her.
Now Adrian is also getting something out of this. Adrian is the Earl of Mowbray and while there are women who would marry him for his money, he wants someone to love him. With the scar left on his face by his days at war, women have shied away from him. However, he has found a woman who can’t see much. Maybe there is hope of love before she stumbles upon his flaw.
Love is Blind is truly a sweet love story with quite a bit of humor thrown in. Just to keep it rich though some intrigue is also developed as it appears someone doesn’t want Clarissa around for her long and some her klutz accidents may not have been accidents. I thoroughly enjoyed the way Lynsay Sands played with her characters. She illustrated magnificently how we human beings can be led astray by the word assume (you know the old definition assume means making an *** of u and me). Well, that is exactly what happened with Clarissa and Adrian. Clarissa assumed she was unattractive because of her glasses and didn’t wear them. Adrian assumed no woman would want him because of his scars and they both assumed they knew what the other person was feeling about them. I bet we can all think of times we have done exactly this same thing. Both of these characters had been hurt along their lifetimes, however, which made it understandable to behave the way they did. I loved the secondary characters though who didn’t let them get away with it.
Lori
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