Random Romance Reads: The Switch, Lynsay Sands

I'm including this one with the RRR, even though the underlying difficulties all stem from "period" miscues rather than anything else.

The Switch
Lynsay Sands
ISBN: 9780062019820 (reprint)
Read October 24, 2014

The short, mostly spoiler-free version:  A set twin girls, countrified members of the ton, have their bucolic peaceful lives disrupted by the deaths of their parents.  Their uncle, the new guardian falls peril to gambling and bad investments, and his idea is to sell the winsome girls in marriage to rich elites, thus preventing his financial ruin.  One sister is to a gentleman who is simply repugnant, but the other is meant for one who has been through three wives in the last few years, and rumor runs rampant about their "accidental" deaths.  En route to the marriage mart, they stop at an inn, and the girls escape, with one sister dressed as a boy to evade suspicion and to assuage propriety.  They are immediately noticed and taken under the wing of a kindly noble, who passes them off as cousins while they have their season in London, taking turns pretending to be the sister or the brother as they set their caps for different men.  Blackmail and the dissolute uncle provide the villainy, and Gretna Green is abused beyond all reason in tying up the leads in holy matrimony.

The good:
Crossdressing!
Interesting premise with twins and gender-bending where each twin takes a turn being male.
The put-upon hero is vastly overwhelmed, and I felt sorry for him and his confusion the whole book.

The bad:
Crossdressing mechanics and historical fashion and clothing in general not matching up with the time-period intended (although God only knows what that period was, as I couldn't work it out beyond somewhere possibly very "early regency").
Paper-thin characters for nearly everyone, especially the men.
Overstepping the bounds of propriety and allowed behavior in some places, while calling attention to them and carefully attending to them at others.  If the whole story had simply pretended the mores did not exist, I would have taken it as a silly story set in an imaginary or simplified "regency-land" and gone on with the story.  Calling attention to the proper modes of behavior simply made me wince at all the gross violations (sartorial and social) that went unremarked.

The Verdict:
Silly but with world-building flaws that are grievous given that it claims to be set in the real world, in a time and place which was scrupulously recorded at all levels of society.  If the "flaws" were, as I suspect. used to forward the plot or build moments for the characters, then I'm even more grumpy, because that's just sloppy plotting, and totally unnecessary and slapdash.