A Knight in Shining Armor

by Jude Deveraux, 392 pages

Dougless Montgomery has had a lifetime of ill-advised love affairs, but this time she thought she'd finally found Mr. Right. Everything had been going so well with Robert, a respected doctor, until his spoiled, lying, hateful thirteen-year-old daughter entered the picture. Now all the couple does is fight, with Robert always taking Gloria's side...and Dougless's money. Even a "family" vacation to England has failed to mend their relationship. Abandoned at a thirteenth-century church after one shouting match too many, Dougless throws herself at the foot of a tomb and cries her eyes out, wishing some knight in shining armor would come rescue her from her misery.

The last thing Nicholas Stafford remembers is sitting at a table in his cell writing a letter to his mother in a last-ditch attempt to prove his innocence before his imminent execution for treason against the queen. So how is it he now finds himself standing in a church, in his good armor, looking down at a strangely dressed weeping woman? And what's with the speeding iron wagon that nearly runs him down outside?

As Dougless and Nicholas try to figure out why he's come to her--to fix his problems or hers?--they research his family's history, have his bad tooth pulled by a proper dentist, and share more than just respective chronological cultural notes.

I had a hard time getting into this time-travel romance, largely because of Dougless. In her afterword, Deveraux says she wanted to write about an "alcoholic personality," one who lives to break another human's spirit, and I think she succeeds with Robert. My difficulty is with Dougless's addiction to her own unhappiness. Robert is clearly a $%*@ and an emotional, as well as financial, drain on her; but she never really confronts him, choosing instead to pout and wallow in self-pity and self-loathing. Instead of feeling sorry for her, I was angry at her for not acknowledging reality or trying to do anything to change it. It took well over half the novel for me to care about what was happening, but once Dougless acknowledges her feelings for Nicholas and lets Robert go, I enjoyed it and was able to appreciate all the well-researched, fascinating sixteenth-century details in the latter part of the book (I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to mention that the time travel goes both ways).

My only other thoughts are that the story is a little dated--cassette players!--and that I will never understand a woman who considers shopping for makeup, stylish-for-the-times clothes, and a giant new purse to be a priority activity when she's just been abandoned in a foreign country without her wallet or identification and left to rely on the fickle generosity of a delusional stranger with a sword. Also, no one ever stops and says, "Huh. 'Dougless' is an odd name for an American woman in the 1980s, isn't it?" Well, no one except for me, I guess.