Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't mind fluffy throw away books. They can be fun. I can overlook it if the author gets easy spelling and grammar wrong every few pages; retched for wretched or 'do embroider' instead of 'do embroidery'. I can overlook getting the date of an invention wrong if it's not too out of period but easy, daily trans-Atlantic telephone calls thirty years before they were even possible is stretching it. I can gloss over weird name spellings - Hannish? Hamish, Donnel? Donal, Leezil? Lisl or Eliza or Elizabeth maybe… McKenna? Wait! What? McKenna? Why would a Scottish girl in 1899 have an Irish surname for her Christian name? - if they don't constantly drag me out of the story. I like getting a lot of history in my reading but not when it means I have to read the book with an open browser window on a search engine because most of the book is striking me as, "that's not right!" and when I look it up I see the author did get it wrong. I can understand an author being confused by British peerages and title usage, but not when that's a main component of the plot. The frankly ignorant way people are addressed in this book was constant source of irritation. A Duke ought to have at least a passing acquaintance that DeBrett's Peerage *exists* and not think it would be a really good idea if someone came up with a list of legitimate English peers! Obviously stereotyped characters don't usually bother me in this kind of book. Calling the characters in this book 'stereotyped' would be giving them a depth of character they didn't deserve. They are flatter and far less nuanced than merely stereotyped. Simple plots are usually not a deal breaker but so little happened in this novel and what little did happen was telegraphed chapters before. I just had to plod through a lot of words to see the obvious play out. After chapter 5, I just skimmed the rest in about 10 minutes because my eyes were bleeding at the inanity. Any individual flaw would not make the book a bad one. Any two or even three flaws would be OK. This one book had ALL of the flaws and nothing that made reading it a worthwhile use of my time.