We are back with a brand new book y'all! Over the next few weeks we will be diving deep into the book Gentleman Jim by Mimi Matthews. If you catch our twang coming out it is because the artwork on the front cover of this book has some real American West/Cowboy vibes, reminding us of our Arizona heritage. If you want to read along with us we found a copy at our local library so check it out and join us for the ride! As a reminder, we are reading this book blind (meaning we haven't read the back cover) and so we don't have any idea what the book is about or where the story will take us. Hence some of our crazy predictions.
In this first chapter we are setting up our story by recapping the Prologue. We meet who we can only assume are our two main characters (since they are basically the only ones in the prologue) - Nicholas Seaton and Maggie Honeywell. Nicholas is the bastard son of a maid who works in the stables, Maggie is the daughter of the wealthy landowner he works for. A nefarious suitor for Maggie's hand stands in their way towards true love. Looks like we have the makings of a classic star-crossed lovers situation here.
Here are some questions we had while reading the prologue:
- Were cowboys descendants of Highwaymen?
- Why was the daughter of a squire allowed to grow so close to a groom with no parental intervention? There are references to swimming in their smallclothes, which is basically the skinny dipping of the 1800s! Apparently absentee parenting was a thing even two hundred centuries ago.
- Why does Nick think it is a good plan to escape being hanged for theft and join forces with his dad . . . who he is pretty sure is a highwayman, and probably wanted by authorities? I don't think he thought this through before committing to this plan.
- And finally, why does it feel like this book should have been set in the Old West in the 1880's?
Here are our predictions and wagers we have for this book so far (based solely on the prologue and our vast experience with Regency romance tropes):
- There will be a time jump - how far in the future is hotly debated (Amy says 10 years, Beth says 3-5 years)
- The wound from Fred's whip will come back into play at some point in the story because for some inexplicable reason Maggie will not be able to identify Nick by his face? Do faces change that much in 5-10 years?
- Nick will find he is actually descended from a wealthy aristocratic family and be introduced to Maggie in the future as a "gentleman" (basically his plan to reinvent himself works)
