Book Review: Caroline Saves the Blacksmith

Title: Caroline Saves the Blacksmith

Author: Nina Jarrett

Date: 2023

Publisher: Rogue

Quote: "How would she ever forgive herself for what she had done?"

Well, she'll do it again. If you agree with me that much of the charm of the Regency Romance genre is that upper-class young people at least pretended to be innocent before the wedding, this will be another unsatisfactory read. It revolves around not only Christian holidays, songs, and blessings, but a Christian theme--acceptance of grace. Still, it's a little too frank and detailed about the adventures of a girl who lacks sexual self-control to be considered a Christian book. 

William, the best rated blacksmith in town, suffers an injury while sneaking out at night to mend a poor old woman's roof. Rushing off to deliver a baby, the doctor knocks on the nearest door and sends Caroline out to play nurse. Enforced proximity leads them to spill their secrets. William can't forgive himself for sending another man to the war in his place; Caroline can't forgive herself for having lost a previous job by being caught having sex in the stable with the young lady's fiance. (Unlike much of this plot, this detail I believe: young men pretending to be innocent and romantic with the young ladies they intended to marry very often seduced, or just raped, servants.) William doesn't care that Caroline is a verifiable Bad Girl, in an era totally devoted to the idea of Good Girls (who were asexual for life) and Bad Girls (who, once they discovered that they liked sex, probably lost all moral standards altogether and would soon be found selling other people's silverware for cheap, toxic whisky). There are documented cases of men who married "ruined" ex-maids, actresses, and even outright harlots, even at this period, but they are few and William hardly seems the type. At this period it seems to have been more likely that, like the European prince who really was allowed to choose a commoner at a ball, a dying man wanted to leave his estate to a woman with no other matrimonial prospects.

But this is a spicy romance from the British sector of the Lost Planet of Nice, where the Prince will probably never become King because everyone's having so much fun with his Regency. (In this book, shockingly, his coronation is scheduled. His world is coming to an end!) It may never have happened, but it deserves to have happened. Romance readers who don't mind a few words-that-attract-bad-things-to-computers probably won't complain about the period's standard word for a male bird being used in contexts that have nothing to do with poultry.

There were four predecessors and will be at least five follow-ups to this romance, each marrying off a different couple in a different part of England, in which the characters are all acquainted with one another. Toward the end of this one we hear of a baron having been murdered; in the next volume we're promised the story about whodunnit and why.