In Beauty and the Baron, Deborah Hale again displays her special talent for taking the comforting themes and settings of age-old romances and transforming them into something new and altogether wonderful. Her heroine, Angela Lacewood, might be compared to Elizabeth Bennet for her charm in confronting an irascible hero...to the traditional 'Beauty' of the 'beast' fame...or even to Jane Eyre in her choice of the scarred Rochester over the handsome, appropriate St. John. But Angela goes farther even than these heroines in the depth of her love for Lucius Daventry, a man wounded in spirit as well as in body at Waterloo. Always empathetic for the lonely and the suffering, she forces Lucius to admit her to his night-shadowed world. It is there that both she and Lucius discover that beauty is most truly revealed not by light, but by darkness. Beauty and the Baron does more than make what is old new again. Thanks to Hale's skilled characterizations and deft use of setting and symbolism, it is a story that enchants, bright and vivid and meaningful as a falling star.