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Amberleigh
Her heart was born anew...
Amberleigh, with her hair of flame, had come to the St. Clare estate in Ireland to escape her grey life as a governess. Here she would become a companion to the nobly born Elaine St. Clare, an old school friend, so fragile, so innocent and so unlike her stepmother Devora, the beauty with the iron will...
Amid the mists of Carnhaven...
Amberleigh soon found herself bearing the shame of another woman, and uncovering the strange secrets everyone seemed to hide -- from the roguish patriot, Devlin Quade, to the stern and handsome Lord Davenant. Amid the intrigue, the spirited young woman was sure of one thing: that she was losing her heart to a man who would never return her love.
Amberleigh, with her hair of flame, had come to the St. Clare estate in Ireland to escape her grey life as a governess. Here she would become a companion to the nobly born Elaine St. Clare, an old school friend, so fragile, so innocent and so unlike her stepmother Devora, the beauty with the iron will...
Amid the mists of Carnhaven...
Amberleigh soon found herself bearing the shame of another woman, and uncovering the strange secrets everyone seemed to hide -- from the roguish patriot, Devlin Quade, to the stern and handsome Lord Davenant. Amid the intrigue, the spirited young woman was sure of one thing: that she was losing her heart to a man who would never return her love.
- GenresHistorical Romance
348 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published September 1, 1980
55 people want to read
About the author
Carole Nelson Douglas
167 books567 followersCarole Nelson Douglas is the author of sixty-four award-winning novels in contemporary and historical mystery/suspense and romance, high and urban fantasy and science fiction genres. She is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian historical suspense series (she was the first woman to spin-off a series from the Holmes stories) and the multi-award-winning alphabetically titled Midnight Louie contemporary mystery series. From Cat in an Alphabet Soup #1 to Cat in an Alphabet Endgame #28.
Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks.
Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots.
Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016.
All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook.
Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well.
Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you."
Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.
Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks.
Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots.
Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016.
All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook.
Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well.
Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you."
Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 15, 2017
Eh, it was okay. I'm not sure if part of the problem is vintage paperback burnout on my side.
UPDATE:
So it's several months later, & I just noticed that I never added anything to the promised essay on why Amberleigh sucked. Oops. Allow me to correct this oversight.
*clears throat*
It was VERY SLOW. It was VERY BORING. It was VERY DISAPPOINTING. This is what happens when gothic romance goes horribly, dryly, excruciatingly wrong -- and I hope someone will take it off my hands via Paperback Swap.
...Yeah, that's about it. :P
UPDATE:
So it's several months later, & I just noticed that I never added anything to the promised essay on why Amberleigh sucked. Oops. Allow me to correct this oversight.
*clears throat*
It was VERY SLOW. It was VERY BORING. It was VERY DISAPPOINTING. This is what happens when gothic romance goes horribly, dryly, excruciatingly wrong -- and I hope someone will take it off my hands via Paperback Swap.
...Yeah, that's about it. :P
January 1, 2025
I don't even know where to begin, why oh why do I judge a book on it's cover? The beautiful artwork of the couple on this book is everything I love so I just had to read it, how I wish I didn't, even by the first 40 pages I knew I wasn't liking it yet I kept going and I wish I stopped as it just made me deeply hate this book. I wasted the whole night on this book, read it in one sitting hoping it would get better but now I actually just hate it, one of the worst books I've finished. I saw positive reviews to this book on Amazon and I'm like, why on earth??? I have so much to complain about, firstly the fact that this is meant to be a "romance" um no, skip it, the "heroine" is still thinking about a man she met twice for like a minute each time up until the very end of the book, and the "hero" doesn't come into it until around page 120........and even then their interactions is not very romantic, and how they get together is not romantic either, there is no romance here.
To start with the worst things about it, this book was deeply misandrist, literally everything about it was dripping in feminism which shows how totally inaccurate it is to it's time considering that 99% of women in the 19th century opposed feminism, so the book constantly has women complaining how hard it is to be women.....something that they didn't actually do, this is something unique to modern women, also how disgusting it is to ignore how hard it is also to be a man but see women can be so self deluded, they think they know what it's like to be a man despite the fact they have never been men, and men have successfully protected women from some of the worst horrors through history which is why they can delude themselves into thinking men had it easier, ah yes it was so hard to be a lady getting served up hot chocolate in bed and having a personal maid bathe her and dress her and brush her hair while the brothers of ladies were over fighting and dying in blood soaked mud at war on foreign soil........but again what would women know of this? because they've been historically spared from this due to men wanting to protect the women in their life, in fact women seem to think that because men don't complain about stuff like them that it means things don't happen to them.....when in reality men suffer, men experience negatives experiences just like women but they keep it to themselves and not burden others with it, where do you think the saying "take it like a man" comes from? It's just really disgusting today this lack of respect for the suffering and sacrifices of men and I normally never read anything that pushes this feminist ideology, and I wish I wasn't subjected to it, this book was meant to be a book about forbidden love and yet I feel like I was subjected to a gender studies class without my consent.
Also like most feminist things, this book was ironically very misogynistic too lmao literally all the female characters in this are terrible or crazy or miserable, they're all man haters, they all take no accountability for their actions, in fact every single women in this is horrible and it's all because of men lol that's the conclusion the books comes to, all of these women had no brains in their head of course, it was men pulling their strings, they had no say in any of their actions, they were "manipulated" into doing things, feminists always think women are so feeble minded it's hilarious.......spare me. In fact Hugh and Devlin were the only decent characters in this whole book, everyone else was horrible, so this book really just was about how horrible men are but yet all the horrible people in it are women? lol is the author confused on how to write??? it's kind of funny, it's just wrote so badly, I can't believe I finished it.
I hate this book most of all for turning strong, feminine and intelligent 19th century women into whiny, weak, miserable 1970s gender studies students which is what this was.
Which btw it never fails to amuse me about authors and readers who like to add feminism into period romances, like lol so you believe women were oppressed by men then, so why do you like reading about romances in that time?? lol it seems very contradictory, I love reading period romances because I'm not a brainwashed feminist so therefore I actually know 19th century women were actually much happier than modern women and I am a fan of 19th men also. If I believed what feminists do, that women were "oppressed" and "treated like crap" during that time then I would certainly not be reading romance novels set in that period.........lol but feminists are not known for their intelligence or consistency in their convictions so there's that.
I think I've ranted enough, I just finished this book and had a horrible night after wasting all of new years eve on it, I want my 8 hours back, basically I hate feminism and I hate this book! god I hate finding this crap in my 19th century novels. I HATED THIS BOOK, if it wasn't for the beautiful cover I would throw it in the trash where it belongs! then again i might just do that after cutting off the cover to keep.
To start with the worst things about it, this book was deeply misandrist, literally everything about it was dripping in feminism which shows how totally inaccurate it is to it's time considering that 99% of women in the 19th century opposed feminism, so the book constantly has women complaining how hard it is to be women.....something that they didn't actually do, this is something unique to modern women, also how disgusting it is to ignore how hard it is also to be a man but see women can be so self deluded, they think they know what it's like to be a man despite the fact they have never been men, and men have successfully protected women from some of the worst horrors through history which is why they can delude themselves into thinking men had it easier, ah yes it was so hard to be a lady getting served up hot chocolate in bed and having a personal maid bathe her and dress her and brush her hair while the brothers of ladies were over fighting and dying in blood soaked mud at war on foreign soil........but again what would women know of this? because they've been historically spared from this due to men wanting to protect the women in their life, in fact women seem to think that because men don't complain about stuff like them that it means things don't happen to them.....when in reality men suffer, men experience negatives experiences just like women but they keep it to themselves and not burden others with it, where do you think the saying "take it like a man" comes from? It's just really disgusting today this lack of respect for the suffering and sacrifices of men and I normally never read anything that pushes this feminist ideology, and I wish I wasn't subjected to it, this book was meant to be a book about forbidden love and yet I feel like I was subjected to a gender studies class without my consent.
Also like most feminist things, this book was ironically very misogynistic too lmao literally all the female characters in this are terrible or crazy or miserable, they're all man haters, they all take no accountability for their actions, in fact every single women in this is horrible and it's all because of men lol that's the conclusion the books comes to, all of these women had no brains in their head of course, it was men pulling their strings, they had no say in any of their actions, they were "manipulated" into doing things, feminists always think women are so feeble minded it's hilarious.......spare me. In fact Hugh and Devlin were the only decent characters in this whole book, everyone else was horrible, so this book really just was about how horrible men are but yet all the horrible people in it are women? lol is the author confused on how to write??? it's kind of funny, it's just wrote so badly, I can't believe I finished it.
I hate this book most of all for turning strong, feminine and intelligent 19th century women into whiny, weak, miserable 1970s gender studies students which is what this was.
Which btw it never fails to amuse me about authors and readers who like to add feminism into period romances, like lol so you believe women were oppressed by men then, so why do you like reading about romances in that time?? lol it seems very contradictory, I love reading period romances because I'm not a brainwashed feminist so therefore I actually know 19th century women were actually much happier than modern women and I am a fan of 19th men also. If I believed what feminists do, that women were "oppressed" and "treated like crap" during that time then I would certainly not be reading romance novels set in that period.........lol but feminists are not known for their intelligence or consistency in their convictions so there's that.
I think I've ranted enough, I just finished this book and had a horrible night after wasting all of new years eve on it, I want my 8 hours back, basically I hate feminism and I hate this book! god I hate finding this crap in my 19th century novels. I HATED THIS BOOK, if it wasn't for the beautiful cover I would throw it in the trash where it belongs! then again i might just do that after cutting off the cover to keep.
May 30, 2020
I really tried to get into this book, but I couldn't find any empathy for the main character, who had no self-esteem whatsoever, and allowed herself to be punted around like a half-deflated football.
November 22, 2008
Just a typical romance - I didn't think it was anything special.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews