Connie Brockway's "No Place For a Dame"

No Place for a Dame - Connie Brockway

 

What a trainwreck!  The heroine is supposed to be a brilliant and highly-educated amateur astronomer, and the hero is supposed to be a fabulous English nobleman with a sideline of spying/assassination. Trouble is, one never actually sees the heroine doing any science or even scientific reading - it's all "tell", not "show. The heroine has discovered a comet and wants to present her discovery to the "Royal Astrological Society".  But she can't do that as a female, so she finagles the hero into agreeing to introduce her to the Society in disguise as a young man. I should have figured out that things would go downhill from the point the word "Astrological" came into the story ...

 

Anyway, once the heroine starts her adventures in cross-dressing, the book turns into a farce, sort of like the movie "Dumb and Dumber", but without the humor. I'm not sure which was worse - the heroine's misadventures as a boy or the spying/assassination plot, which made no sense whatsoever. 

 

Don't waste your time with this one. For a far better romance where the heroine is an amateur astronomer in the Regency period, I can recommend Sheila Simonson's "Lady Elizabeth's Comet".