Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I should have known that this would be an aggravating read when, in the first few pages, the hero's grip is described as "vice-like". A vice is a fault, weakness or evil habit. A VISE is something used to clamp items in place. So here the hero would have a weak, faulty and/or evil embrace. 'Okay,' I thought; 'maybe it's just a typo.' No such luck. There are numerous mis-wordings of a similar nature. Just a few examples: the use of "breath" (as in, "she could not breath") where the word "breathe" is clearly needed, or the word "whit" (which means "a small amount") where the word "wit" is needed (as in, "she had not the whit or will to employ a lady's maid"), "clamored" for "clambered" (as in "the child clamored up onto his uncle's lap". What this actually means is that the child is making a loud sustained noise onto his uncle's lap, which is either a bit creepy, or unintentionally hilarious.) In addition, there are numerous examples of poorly-structured sentences, such as "... the gentleman in the tall toupee, which Jane noticed wore clothes cut from a cloth befitting a gentleman." What this sentence (I hope unintentionally) says is that the toupee is wearing clothes made from cloth befitting a gentleman. For all we know, the gentleman himself may be naked. Moreover, there is WAY too much made of the heroine's beauty - she is evidently so gorgeous that people literally cluster around her and stare at her in public. She is advised by a perfect stranger that this is acceptable behavior and she owes those staring at her the reward of a smile. I think it highly unlikely that the _haute ton_ of England either behaved this way or found it acceptable (staring is rude in most cultures), and even more unlikely that the victim of such rudeness would be considered to be under an obligation to reward her unwanted admirers with smiles. Punctuation is marginal, run-on sentences are rampant, the use of adverbs is shaky, and there are many sentences with clauses that seem to have popped in from another paragraph entirely and have little or nothing to do with the sentance in which they appear. The author has included some of the appropriate slang and idiom of the day, but there is quite a lot of intrusive modern slang and idiom. All servants are blank-faced. The heroine is not just stunningly gorgeous but so perfectly kind and brave and gentle and forgiving and charming and brilliant (we are told, though there is little to support this other than the author's assertion that it is so) that it's nauseating. Behavior is inconsistent; someone will fling themselves into a passionate embrace and then "cooly" offer their paramour a glass of wine. I admit I've only read about 20% of the book; maybe it gets better. However, up to this point, I'm having a hard time understanding why this is getting such high reviews.