This is the fifth book in Grande Dame Mary Balogh’s Ravenswood series. This is the series centering around the family of the previous Earl of Stratton, Caleb Ware, who had been exposed to the ton for his clandestine affairs by his own son, Devlin. REMEMBER THE DAY starts out seeming to center on Owen Ware, but then the romantic focus flips over to Nicholas, the late Earl of Stratton’s second son.

Winifred Cunningham, the adopted daughter of a society

portrait painter, believes that her new best friend, Owen

Ware will soon ask for her hand in marriage. But when Owen

introduces Winifred to his elder brother Nicholas, the late

Earl of Stratton’s second son, the “slow burn of attraction”

between them heats up and threatens to engulf them.

Winifred and Nicholas are chalk and cheese, and it’s fun to

watch them rub along and figure out that they have more

reasons to come together than they do to disagree.

REMEMBER THE DAY brings together the Wares of Ravenswood and

the Westcotts. Caleb Ware and his wife Clarissa had five

children of their own, and Caleb had a sixth child born out

of wedlock. Clarissa, the Dowager Countess of Stratton,

also gets her own book in this series. The Westcotts had

their own series with ten prior books and a novella. Balogh

brings back almost all of these characters, including

children of previous couples, so there is an inordinate

amount of family members running about here. Balogh admits

in the Author’s Note at the beginning that maybe she bit off

more than she could chew in terms of her readers keeping

everyone straight. She does give a brief precis of each

character, spouse, and offspring at the beginning, but I

gave up trying to keep them all straight and just let them

jostle around in the story without worrying about where they

fit in. The problem with long-running series is that they

usually become unwieldy, and this is definitely true here.

Balogh’s later books all have a lot of introspection and

endless navel-gazing. I am growing frustrated with the

never-ending musing about what brings happiness. I do enjoy

when a romance shows growth of the characters throughout the

book, and I also enjoy emotional maturity in my heroes and

heroines. But Balogh tends to carry this too far, similar

to Anne Perry, author of both the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt

and William Monk series of historical detective fiction. I

stopped reading Perry because of her constant prosing, and

I’ve been threatening to stop reading Balogh for the same

reason.

Faithful Balogh readers may enjoy this long-winded revival

tour of the Wares and the Westcotts. Most readers would be

better served to simply start with Balogh’s earlier works,

which offer more robust romance and less internal monologue.

REMEMBER THE DAY is a lackluster example of Regency romance

from a previous reigning queen of romance.