I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters. I found the part about Catherine's mother's death really moving, and could almost feel the stifling loneliness she felt afterwards.
However, from then on Julia Gregson just asks us to suspend disbelief too much. OK, so Deio's brother is short sighted and pre-occupied and doesn't realise he's interviewing a girl, and none of the men on the drove catch on??? Or do they know really, which is why she gets a hotel room? In which case they were taking a huge risk, because Catherine's family could have had them charged with her abduction.
Deio would have been a Welsh speaker. I find it unlikely that he would strike up any kind of relationship with army officers: drovers weren't exactly high up the social ladder, and this is victorian England we're talking about. Equally unlikely that he would get a commission in the army - in those days an officer had to be a gentleman, although he could have enlisted as a private soldier. He is also surprisingly sentimental about his horses for a horse dealer - surely he would have arrived in Balaclava and sold the horses as quickly as possible for the best money he could get, because he knew that he would not be able to keep them in good condition?
Also, Julia Gregson obviously never read Black Beauty as a girl, or has never seen any nineteenth century hunting prints, otherwise she would have realised that almost all riding and carriage horses in those days had docked tails, making Deio's question about what happened to the horses' tails pointless. And if Cariad's foal was sired whilst she was running wild after the storm, it throws the whole timescale of the novel out - a horse pregnancy is 11 months.
On the plus side, I found the growing affection between Barnsie and Sam very moving, and much more believable. I think Catherine's love affair would have been more believable if Deio had been a gentleman rather than a drover. The crossing social boundaries bit really didn't work for me, even if it was just a convenient and unusual way of getting her to London.
Like pianist, I found the ending unsatisfactory, like are 2 people who are both AWOL from their respective posts really going to set up a cozy little home on the edge of a battlefield on enemy territory, with a couple of injured horses to rehabilitate?
Oops, it sounds like I'm being really nit-picky about this novel. I'm actually really disappointed with it, because the beginning was great, but the rest didn't live up to its promise for me. Somehow it seems to present itself in the wrong category: it is more Mills & Boon than historical novel. I found myself just wanting to slap Catherine and tell her to grow up! The only reason I bothered reading it to the end was because of this bookclub.