A harsh but gentle love story. Of love denied, gone wrong and Remembered.

Remember Love (Ravenswood #1) by Mary Balogh 

Just as the untamed Gwyneth Rhys finds her heart’s desire, as the young Devlin Ware, Viscount Mountford, recognises and bravely tells her he loves her, and asks her to marry him, ‘just like that’ within moments, their hopes are dashed.

At the local fete Ball held at Ravenswood Hall, Devlin and Gwyn come upon his father comporting with a lovely widow who has newly taken up residence in the village of Bascombe. Devlin confronts his father over his actions, the older family adults club together in the face of scandal and accusations, and Dev is gone, banished from Ravenswood and Bascombe, as are Gwynn’s dreams.

Six years later and two years after his father had died, Dev returns to Ravenswood, a man who doesn’t know love, a hardened, battle weary soldier from the Napoleonic wars.

What he returns to remains to be seen. 

Gwyn is unmarried but that seems about to change. She is keeping company with Alec Morgan, a well known musician and composer. Gwyn has decided that romantic love was for the past. It was painful and for the very young. 

Now Dev is home and of course they meet. The chemistry between Gwyn and Dev is curtailed and halting. Gwynn’s wildness has retreated. The promise of her beginning seems to have faded. Dev is shutoff, fortressed. I felt  there should have been so much more between them on their reacquaintance, but then I looked again at the title and I remembered. So maybe this is all there can be. Dev has to learn to feel and trust again. In his interactions with his siblings he was little more than an uptight vey young man. In youthful righteousness and anger, he called out a situation that he knew to be wrong. For that, he suffered. Can one remember love, or must that fade away with the past?

It’s only when Dev returns to Ravenswood that he begins to realize that he was not the only one to suffer. 

There’s more hidden in the folds of this book, about love and life, about relationships, and taking stands that on the surface are correct, but it seems there’s always a price for those beyond the immediate focus.

An interesting and thoughtful start to the series, not mind blowing, but laying the groundwork for another Balogh family saga. I very much look forward to seeing how this work expands.

A Berkley Group ARC via NetGalley. Many thanks to the author and publisher.

BTW Marketers! P-leeze can we stop appealing to the Bridgertons as a bona fide reason for reading Historical  Romances by other authors!