Commentary: The Songbird's Seduction by Connie Brockway

I'm a huge fan of Connie Brockway's books. I have her entire backlist and eagerly await her newest releases. So imagine my surprise and pleasure when the mail brought me an advance review copy of The Songbird's Seduction sent to me by Connie herself. Not only was I able to read a new book by her, but I had the cachet of being an early reader. The cockles of my heart were thrilled. Ahem.

So I had high expectations riding into the book, and this always makes me apprehensive. What if the book doesn't live up to the pedestal I've placed it upon?

Luckily, for me, The Songbird's Seduction delivered. It delivered on the story, on the historical period of the Downton Abbey Edwardian era, on the characters, and on Connie Brockway's signature witty repartée. Every character—be they main characters like Archie and Lucy or secondary characters like Aunt Lavinia and Margery—is drawn with care. Their complexity makes them interesting, makes them come alive.

London operetta singer Lucy Eastlake was orphaned at an early age and bounced around from relative to relative before she was taken in by these two elderly aunts of hers. They're single ladies living in genteel but constrained circumstances. However, they gave Lucy all the advantages they could give her and all the love her short life had previously lacked. Lucy's joie de vivre confounds and befuddles her aunts, as does her signature "things will work out" attitude.

Lucy doesn't believe in waiting for fate to hand her what she desires—she likes to reach out and grasp her opportunities tightly in her own two hands. And this runs contradictory to the story of her Aunt Lavinia's youth, where she fell in love with a young army officer in India. She felt he loved her, she knew she loved him, but he had an understanding with someone else, which he decided to honor and she respected that. So in the end, these two people who loved each other in their youths were separated forever without having revealed their love to each other, till a legacy came along fifty years later that reconnected them.

A fortune in rubies was to be divided up among the remaining four survivors of the siege in India, but Lord John Barton, Lavinia's John, gifted his share to Lavinia. So Lucy and her great aunts Lavinia and Bernice set off for France to collect their fortune.

There were to be aided in their endeavor by Lord Barton's grandson, Professor Ptolemy Archibald Grant, a straitlaced, brilliant cultural anthropologist. Lucy at first rejects his help, but as circumstances have it, she and he end up taking the ferry over to France together. Meanwhile, Lucy's great aunts have already departed for France under the aegis of Lucy's theater friend Margery, impersonating a theatrical woman to ease the great aunts' discomfort.

Missed connections between the two parties, many adventures, and much hilarity ensue, giving Archie and Lucy precious time together. They fall in love, and things are progressing swimmingly until Archie makes a discovery that makes him angry with Lucy. Lucy hies off in tears to meet Lavinia's deadline for divvying up of the fortune.

Whilst there, seeing Lavinia, she's reminded again how she could not make the same error that Lavinia made in not seizing her happiness, of letting her love leave her to live the best years of her life in regret. So Lucy reverses her earlier decision to let Archie alone and decides to try to convince him of her love. Meanwhile serendipitously, Archie's arrived at exactly the same conclusion. Love does indeed triumph all differences.

The Songbird's Seduction is releasing today, and after writing this review, I've been reminded again why I liked this story so much, and I've succumbed to the urge to re-read it.