Book Review - Lisa Kleypas's It Happened One Autumn
It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas
Published by: Avon
Publication Date: September 27th, 2005
Format: Paperback, 382 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy
Lillian Bowman and her sister helped her fellow Wallflower Annabelle find true love. The problem is whom she fell for wasn't part of the initial plan. She was to marry a member of the peerage so that she could then sponsor Lillian and Daisy so that they could in turn make the matches their mother and father crave. Instead Annabelle married happily beneath herself to a wealthy industrialist. But that doesn't help the Bowman sisters. So they are back at Lord Westcliff's estate in Hampshire hoping to find someone who will sponsor them for the upcoming season. Lillian isn't personally happy about this arrangement because she finds Lord Westcliff a cold customer. He thinks he's above everyone and has made his dislike of Lillian very clear. The other Wallflowers have their theories about this animosity, but Lillian won't listen. Instead a rather indecent escapade in the garden after she and Westcliff have a blazing row she places on her new perfume. She's rather genius when it comes to mixing scents. Her family manufactures soap and in fact that is why they are at Stony Cross Park, Lord Westcliff wants to go into business with Mr. Bowman because he thinks soap will be a lucrative market in England in the near future. Lillian's new perfume is a scent she created herself with the help of a parfumier that she intended to compliment her own body chemistry. Though there was one secret ingredient. A secret ingredient she thinks is responsible for Lord Westcliff ravishing her in the garden. Obviously, it's magic. Which means that the Wallflowers have to test if this is true. It only works for Lillian and Annabelle though, leading Lillian into another compromising position in the orangery. Though this time she's ready. She declares to Westcliff that unless he convinces his mother, the Countess, to sponsor her and her sister for the coming season she will make their little indiscretion public. Lillian is shocked when this actually works. Though working with the Countess is an excruciating reminder of how American her and her sister are. But what if Westcliff wasn't under some magic spell and was actually falling for this delightful savage? For starters Lillian wouldn't need the Countess's help, but the Countess would definitely have something to say about it!
What I find interesting about It Happened One Autumn is that while it is the second Wallflowers book underneath it all the structure is identical to the first book, Secrets of a Summer Night. We meet our heroine. She goes to a house party at Lord Westcliff's estate, Stony Cross Park, in Hampshire. The hero and heroine fight their attraction but eventually succumb. Everything is fairly low key at the house party despite the sexual tension but then at the very end danger threatens their love but they survive to get their happily ever after. And here's the thing, despite such strong similarities to the first book it was still enjoyable as it's own thing. Perhaps this is because, deep down, all romances are just certain tropes reconfigured to create a new story and Lisa Kleypas went, how about I just reconfigure what already worked once? For me the real reason it works is because I could just read about house parties all the time and I'd be happy. I love Stony Cross Park and it's gardens and forests and walkways. This volume threw in a secret garden that just happens to be a butterfly sanctuary and now I totally want to go to there. Oh, and the humor contained within the elaborate feasts and how as Americans Lillian and Daisy just can't with the calves' heads made me sympathetic and bemused simultaneously. It also made me think seriously about being a vegetarian. I also strongly related to Lillian as a heroine. I'm very, not just opinionated, but stubborn. When Lillian is called a brat I had a visceral reaction, just like she did with the calves' head. While Lillian might be willing to embrace the fact that she can be a brat, I will never deign to allow anyone to say I am one. Especially when they are one. And yes, I'm actually referring to an incident I had in one of my art classes. I should mention that at the time both me and the person who flung the insult at me were in our thirties. But what really didn't work for me was the whole perfume angle in this book. Yes, it makes sense for Lillian to know a lot about scents given her father manufacturers soap, but I don't care. I hate perfume. It's like me being called a brat, it's a whole world of nope. I don't want to be near perfume, I don't want to think about perfume, it stinks, it triggers headaches, just no.
Zelda Fitzgerald is a tragic figure, and not just because she died sedated and locked in in a fire that broke out at the hospital she was living at in Asheville, North Carolina, claiming her life and the lives of eight other women when she was only forty-seven, but because she will forever be known, and to some vilified, as F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre, was the pampered baby of her family. She was active and artistic from an early age, taking an interest in swimming and dance, and later an interest in drink and boys. She was as shocking as she could be given the society she was surrounded with and her strict father, the judge. But the war and the parties for the troops gave her greater leeway than a southern belle would normally have and right before her eighteenth birthday she met F. Scott and both their lives would be forever entwined and she would find notoriety as the "first American flapper." 
