What wordy, frothy fun Ibbotson's books are. Perfect going on a trip books. In fact, reading them makes me wish I was going somewhere, as her heroines always seem to be off somewhere new and exciting and exotic. But since I am not going anywhere (exotic or otherwise) in the near future, getting lost in them has proved a wonderful balm for my It's mid-March and Still Snowing blues. Anna is a Russian countess whose family is forced to flee their wealth and their home after her father is killed in the Russian Revolution. Completely displaced, living in a flat in London with her former governess, she determines to support her ailing mother and younger brother by taking a job as a maid at the country estate of the Earl of Westerholme. Rupert, the young Earl, is recently home from the war, wounded and desperately trying to save the destitute estate he didn't want to inherit in the first place. You see, he promised his older brother just before he died that he would do anything in...