The Proposal (Survivor's Club Book 1)

I first came across Mary Balogh *years* ago, like back in the very early 90s, and I was startled to find a Regency author who wrote smart characters who talked to each other. It's a pleasure to see she's still writing smart characters. Hugo was a survivor of the Peninsula Wars, having led a Forlorn Hope, while Gwen had been widowed seven years previously. On the surface, they wouldn't appear a likely match, but it was fun to watch them come together.I wonder which of the Survivor's Club will have their story told next, and I'm looking forward to finding out. 😀

I've become rather addicted to Balogh novels after scorning the whole "Regency" genre for years. Yes, she can be formulaic -the star crossed lovers from different social groups is a familiar one- and this is the 12th or 13th book since we were introduced to Lily/Neville/Lauren/Gwen in "One Night to Love." But she makes it work. Yes, Hugo is brooding and wounded; yes, the widowed Gwen's marriage was not the idyll her family hoped. But we've come to care about these characters. We've come to know Gwen, and wanted a happily-ever-after for her. There is a realism to the characters' struggles, a practicality that Balogh has explored wonderfully without damaging the romance one bit. Gwen and Hugo are on a level with Ann and Sydnam, and we're really not sure how the story will turn out till we reach that last few pages. Well done, Ms Balogh!The drawback to this novel is that it is, necessarily, too short. There are gaps that do not make sense, centering around characters from previous novels. For instance, Neville and Kit are survivors of the Napoleonic Wars, yet at social encounters they make polite small talk with Hugo, supposedly the hero of Badajoz. That makes little sense - in my family and work I know many vets from WWII to the current conflicts, from a myriad of backgrounds. There is a comraderie with one another, a bond that seems sadly lacking here. It doesn't come from battle-talk, or bravado, but shared experience. It could have become a way Hugo and members of Gwen's family could connect, yet Balogh uses it as a way to make Hugo feel his difference. Readers of her novels will understand when I say maybe Wilma and Sutton would've made meaningless small talk. But Kit, whose brother was so badly wounded? Neville? Doesn't flow with how we've come to know them.Just a heads-up to readers new to Balogh, or rediscovering her after reading MUCH earlier novels. Generally the sexual encounters between characters are no more descriptive that other novels, and lack the soft-porn vulgarity of some, thank goodness. But there are times I have trouble getting past the graphic and sometimes silly focus on the sounds. Just me? Maybe. But when a scene makes me pause and go, "Ewww!" rather than moving along the story it's a distraction.All-in-all, I want more of the Survivors Club, more of the characters we've met, more of their stories. Thank goodness for my Kindle, so I don't even have to wait for the package to come!P.S. If a future Survivor's Club novel lets us know that Jason has lost all his hair, his estate and has been busted to manure slopping private by Wellington, I'd stand up and cheer!

I did things a little backward with this series and read books two through five first. I love the series and was always curious about how it all got started with Hugo and Gwen's story.The book started slow as it set up the series with the background of The Survivor Club. Then in alternating perspectives Gwen and Hugo contemplate their quiet, serene existence.Gwen discovers that she is lonely as a widow seven years after her husband's death and decides that it might be time to finally rejoin life. She has a loving supportive family, dear friends, and a comfortable financial situation, but as she looks at the loving couples around her, she dreams of more. She decides to find a quiet, easy man who just wants companionship nothing of passion and nothing like before. She still bears the guilt and the scars from her last venture into matrimony. Unfortunately, a trip to a friend, a twisted ankle, and a huge, large man with a scowl and a blunt way of speaking confuses all her plans.Hugo has had his year of mourning and knows he needs to fulfill his promise to his father to care for his step-mother and half-sister, take care of his father's business, and continue the family legacy with a son of his own. He is fine with the first two tasks even though he prefers his quiet, home away from people, but getting the son involves getting a wife and that would mean sharing his home with another. Hugo has a lordly title that was bestowed on him for heroic services to the Crown, but he grew up middle class and it is to that class that he plans to turn for his wife. With the help of his friends in The Survivor Club, reconnections with his family, and a most blue-blooded aristocratic woman that is all wrong for him, but he can't get out of his head, Hugo is forced to rejoin life and embrace living.As I said, this one starts out slow and takes a while to set up. In fact, it is guilty of rehashing the same ground a few times making the pace stutter. Fortunately, the characters are worth it and their situation kept me reading through the end. They are most definitely an opposites attract across the social classes romance. I loved reading their story. Hugo was the best. He reminds me terribly of another Hugo from an older book and I do wonder if the author was paying her own tribute to such a fantastic, engaging male hero. Because with his big rough ways, blunt speech, and gentle heart under his forbidding appearance, Hugo had my heart early on in the story.The situation was teased out slowly and carefully with nothing coming fast and easy. These two people have been through so much. I loved watching them help heal each other as they shared their dark, tragic secrets for the first time. They were antagonistic and struggled through misconceptions for much of their early acquaintance even while the attraction sizzled between them, but then the understanding and commonality came and I was swept up in their romance that they felt was doomed to go no where.The surrounding characters were a strong secondary layer to the romance. Hugo's friends and family and Gwen's family, even bad guy of the piece added something. I loved seeing Hugo with his friends, but also his younger sister. And that big confrontation scene with his nemesis had me holding my breath. I haven't read the Bedwyn Saga and its prequels, but for those who have, this would be a special treat reuniting with those characters and seeing Gwen as a crossover figure.So, it was a slow and steady read with some spice in the romance, nice balance to the historical backdrop of post-Napoleonic war, and a solid group of characters. I would most definitely recommend it.

Mary Balogh writes about complicated people with deep inner lives who manage to find one another despite the obstacles that divide them. This novel is the first in a series called "The Survivors Club," which follows a group of Regency-era war veterans as they recuperate from wounds that are both physical and psychological. And to their credit, Mary Balogh has chosen to find them each the perfect mate for one another. In this first volume, a strong silent middle-class man is given a peerage for bravery by the Prince Regent, but it sits heavy on his shoulders. When he finds himself attracted to a young upper-class woman who badly sprains an ankle on a lonely beach, he comes to her rescue. I loved the way the sensitivity of two introverted people with skeletons in their closets is brought to light and they begin to trust, and eventually to love one another.

I liked the premise of this series a lot. I thought it was a really bold move to go with a group of soldiers who were genuinely both traumatised and permanently scarred by war, and I really admire Ms Balogh for this. I also really, really liked that Hugo, the hero of this book, had very mixed feelings about being a hero, because his heroics, while saving many lives, had also been the direct cause of the loss of many more - and he had been the only one unscathed. This has utterly changed Hugo's ideas of himself, and it was the aspect of the book I enjoyed the most - the fawning that made his skin crawl, the few who turned on him whom he actually believed had every right to do so. I would have liked to have seen more of how this all affected him, I'd have liked a bit more of the past, when he and the other Survivors were convalescing, and I did feel slightly short-changed in the end, but to be fair, I think that was because there were so many other bits of the book that I didn't enjoy more and would have preferred to have been replaced with Hugo's story.I was not at all keen on Gwen, however. She had been widowed for seven years, and had spent those seven years, it seems to me, in complacent nothingness. Don't get me wrong, the chemistry between her and Hugo was great, I believed they were perfect for each other and the romantic scenes were beautifully, evocatively written, but here's the thing that bothered me about them. If Gwen really was so straight-laced and so happy with her life, shouldn't Hugo and the very strong attraction she felt for him - so strong as to lead her to making love with a virtual stranger on a beach (fab scene) - well, shouldn't it have had more of a jolting effect on her? But maybe I had her wrong. Maybe the long, drawn out struggles she had in accepting both Hugo and the new life he represented, really were appropriate to her character? Thinking about it, I have got it wrong, but then the problem comes back to the fact that I didn't really like her.The third thing that I wasn't so keen on were the huge galaxy of a supplementary cast, especially towards the end. So many family members, so many little sub-plots and stories, and all so beautifully told - such as the anniversary party - but for me, they felt like padding, and they got in the way of the romance. This is NOT because I don't like secondary characters - in general, particularly when they are family, I love them, family dynamics fascinate me and I don't think there's enough of them in romances. But in this case, they felt like colour rather than characters who had any real role to play, and I confess I skimmed quite a bit of the scenes populated by them towards the end.And finally, the class issue. I loved that it was there but I wish it hadn't been laid on with a trowel.But don't let these negatives detract from reading the book - I've just tried to explain what I didn't like about it. What really worked was the premise, the romance, the chemistry between Hugo and Gwen. And for me, Hugo's story, which I'd have liked to see a great deal more of.

I have read several reviews of this book which all suggested Mary Balogh was back to form (some of the more recent books have been less appealing than her earlier works in many readers' minds) and so I looked forward to reading `The Proposal'. In fact I read it twice with a month's gap in-between. And as much as I enjoyed the book I didn't feel it was actually all that special.There was lots of potential in a story about Lady Gwen Muir who has featured as a minor character in many of Balogh's other books including the Bedwyn (Slightly) series and the Simply series as well. All we knew about Gwen was that she had a limp and was a widow who had chosen not to remarry. In this story we find that Gwen's marriage was certainly not easy and that she had no real intention to look for another husband - even after she meets Lord Trentham, the former Major Hugo Eames, hero of the army for fighting a Forlorn Hope at Badajoz.Gwen and Hugo are from different social classes and a relationship between them seems impossible. But in this story we follow them as they get to know one another and as a proposal is suggested - that Hugo court Gwen - to see where it leads. Is there a chance for a happy ending between two such different people?I'm struggling to identify what it was about this book that left me dissatisfied. One minor aspect is that Balogh seems to have recently got into the habit of italicising words in reported speech to presumably give you an idea of the stresses in what people are saying, but very often the way I am reading the sentence in my mind doesn't work like that, and the excessive italicisation just annoys me. The other aspect I find in this story is that we are continually being told what people think, there's a lot of repetition throughout the book, rather than seeing what they think by their actions. I also felt that the pacing wasn't always that effective, there were dull sections where nothing much happens except people think about things, often with italics.We meet lots of characters from previous Balogh novels. I have read the books so know who they are but I do wonder about new readers and what they will think - there are lists of people and it can get confusing. Is this really necessary, except to encourage readers to buy her backlist perhaps?Both hero and heroine in this story are almost perfect; in fact, the only imperfection we see in Gwen (apparently) is her limp. Hugo's main disadvantage is that he frowns a lot. Balogh's earlier books tended to be peopled with far more human characters who had many faults and made many mistakes in their book. I found the characters in this story almost a bit too good to be true and the `baddies' unrealistic in their portrayal.Although I do still like Mary Balogh's books very much I don't find the more recent stories nearly as satisfying as some of the earlier ones (`More than a Mistress', `The Secret Pearl', for example). However, having read many reviews of this book it seems I am in a minority in this view - so go ahead and read it yourself!Originally published for Curled Up With A Good Book © Helen Hancox 2012

I always enjoy reading Mary Balogh books as the people are written in a way in which I feel they may have behaved in the 1800's rather than the way they are written by many authors who write 21st century women dressed in a long frock and riding side saddle instead of astride.However, I was somewhat surprised when Lady Muir had fallen in love with Hugo and he with her after less than a week. Mary's stories usually have the love aspect grow in a way which is more believable.Unlike another reviewer I don't mind reading about what is going on in the mind of a character, in fact I like it as I feel I am able to understand them as a person better. I do agree with that reviewer that the pace somewhat dragged in places. Even the inevitable baddy was dealt with quickly. Lady Muir intimated that there was perhaps more to her husband's death and her fall from her horse. These small tidbits are usually dealt with in full by Mary and in this book I felt they were left half done. It was as though she felt she had to put something of the like in in order to make a baddie but then couldn't quite be bothered to develop the storyline properly. Perhaps the book would have been too long if she had.I am uncertain if I will read the other survivor books. I like Mary's style of writing and usually enjoy her stories but fickle female that I am I simply like my heroes to have the potential to be perfect in mind and limb. I don't really want my hero, or heroine come to that, to have lost limbs or sight. If I want that I will watch the news. I know these books are about overcoming disability through love and romance but I am not certain I want to read that kind of storyline. I may wait for Flavian's story as he seemed interesting.The Slightly series and Huxtable set are definitely keepers so if you enjoyed this book and have not read those you should as you will love them.

A thoroughly superb romance and the start of what sounds like a fascinating series.The weaving together of experiences, good and bad, dealing with deep seated pain and anguish, learning that you can live and love despite the awfulness, takes the reader on an emotional journey to a HEA.Highly recommended.

I'm a great Mary Balogh fan and have read just about all her books and I have to say that this and her last offering, 'A Matter of Class' have been a disappointment.Despite the mediocre reviews, I thought I'd try this because I wanted to find out Gwen's story and we did; baldy, just set out on the page without any significant attempt to link it to the emotional context or the plot of the book. A real opportunity wasted I felt! Her history could have been relayed in a couple of sentences in terms of the way it was explored in the book.Something else which has arisen in the last to books is the constant 'spouting' of philosophical issues by characters often in long 15-line stretches of dialogue. Who talks like that? Apart from the fact that it's rude to 'hog' the conversation, it's unrealistic and preachy. How many of us have our thoughts and approach to life sorted out? In my experience 'insight' comes in momentary snatches.I know it's supposed to tell us about the characters but it feels more like hearing Mary Balog! Sorry.I'll probably read the next one in the hope that things get better, but this is no 'Slightly Dangerous'!