Have you ever felt both simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed by a book? Because that's kind of how I felt about this one, BLEDDING SORROW. It wasn't bad, but everyone was singing its praises to me about how it was such a mind-shattering Gothic novel that didn't care about happy endings, and reveled in its own twisted nature. That sounded like something I could totally get on board with, and I knew already that this author was fully capable of writing such dark and gloomy stuff that reading it could just about ruin your day, because Marilyn Harris also wrote THE EDEN PASSION, which has the dubious honor of being one of the more twisted and unpleasant "romance" novels I have ever read.
BLEDDING SORROW is only a romance in the most liberal sense of the word. There are two people who are in love in this book, but other than that, it doesn't really fit the genre for a wide variety of reasons. The focus of BLEDDING SORROW is definitely Gothic horror. The setting is an old Elizabethan house owned by the Bleddings, minor nobility that can be traced back centuries. The current owner, Geoffrey Bledding, is impoverished and must lease it out to the Historical Trust's various events. He and his staff are relegated to a distant wing of the house and are expected to make nice with the tourists and the students touring his home, which he does, playing host most convincingly.
But Geoffrey is not the gentlemanly lord that he seems. He's got his wife, Ann, locked away (an homage to the madwoman in the attic trope, perhaps), only he's the one who has caused her to be mad through many nights of druggings and rapes. Poor Ann's only solace are the small mercies of Caldy More, the servant, and the curious attentions of the handsome new coachman whose job it is to drive the coach and do menial tasks around the estate. Ironically, the first Geoffrey Bledding was also cuckolded by a coachman, and his reaction to this was, well, shall we say unreasonable.
Ghosts haunt BLEDDING SORROW, foreshadowing what will happen. All of the characters in the book seem to be locked into their paths, without question; this is a book that seems to believe in both fate, and the idea that history repeats itself. You'll suspect the ending, but it will probably still take you by surprise. I read a spoiler in one of the reviews on Goodreads and was still taken aback. Holy shit. What an unfair, depraved little book. But then, of course the woman who decided to have a narcissistic coward as the hero of her romance would choose to end her Gothic romance in this way.
Should you read it? Only if you like dark, depressing books and aren't easily offended by outmoded tropes and language. BLEDDING SORROW is not PC, and it doesn't pull back any punches when it comes to the mistreatment of its characters. I think it might have been a more effective book if the characters were more fully fleshed out. Ironically, the supporting character, Caldy More, has the most deep and thoughtful development over the book, whereas the three mains feel much more shallow and superficial - at least to me. That said, I did think it was interesting, and if you can manage to find a copy (sadly it's still out of print), it's worth a read for the WTFery alone.
I feel personally attacked by this book because it was so bad, and after liking the author's other book, LIONS AND LACE, so much, I felt like she had done me - and her other fans - dirty by publishing this... this dreck. THE GROUND SHE WALKS UPON is real bottom-of-the-barrel historical romance, with enough cheese to start up its own artisinal shop in downtown Berkeley. Seriously, wtf was going on with this author when she published this book? How can you go from LIONS AND LACE to this?
I picked this book because I needed a Celtic themed romance for my Halloween challenge. This book, sadly, doesn't mention Samhain, but it does mention Beltane (the other major Celtic holiday), as well as the concept of a geis (also spelled geas), which is a sort of fateful pact that must be fulfilled, at the cost of grievous consequences.
Lord Trevellyan is an English/Irish lord who rules in Ireland at the time of the Protestant Ascendancy. At the start of the book he is nineteen, and told of a geis that is part of a curse put upon his family for basically taking the lands away from the Irish. If he does not marry the woman he is fated to be married to, who must come to him freely, then his lands will all fall into ruin. He is then led to a cabin with a beautiful woman lying on a bed - the woman is dead, but she has a baby. He is told, in no uncertain terms, that this is his future wife, which reminded me uncomfortably of that SNL skit, Meet Your Second Wife. Or that imprinting scene from BREAKING DAWN.
Nineteen-years-ish later, Lord Trevellyan is now almost forty years old and the heroine, Ravenna, is a teenager. She's freshly back from school, where Trevellyan sent her after he started getting icky feelings about her when she was scarcely prepubescent, and the feelings are now much ickier. He's quite cruel to her because all of his previous marriages have failed in one horrendous way or another and he's been told by everyone around him that it's because of the geis, and he is a man who does not like having fate wrested from him, so naturally he decides to basically hold her captive in his house and threaten to murder all the men around her, while also putting the moves on her and treating her like a whore, and then at one point even going so far as to lock her in his dungeon so she won't run.
Ravenna is one of those irritatingly plucky heroines that seem to populate 90s bodice ripper romances. They stomp their dainty little feet and act hopelessly outraged, and seem bewildered by their traitorous bodies. This one is an author, and large chunks of the book contain excerpts from her self-published fantasy novel that, interestingly, mirrors her own life and slow "romance" with Niall Trevelyan. This is ironically the most realistic element of the book, in that like many self-published hobby authors, she does not have talent and her character is a self-insertion Sue.
I couldn't quite get over the "here is the baby you're going to f*ck" in 19 years beginning. I thought that was gross. I also didn't like Trevellyan. I thought he was weak. Obsessive heroes are usually my cup of tea, but he felt more like a creepy pervert, and he was so angry all the time, and also so insecure about the red herring love interest in this book. The Ascendancy was also not handled very well. I recently went to Ireland and learned about how the Crown seized land from Irish people and oppressed them systematically by preventing them from having titles, voting rights, or political power, and it was pretty sickening. I am totally fine with unpleasant acts of history being written about (I have, for example, read a controversial historical romance with a Stasi love interest), but they have to be realistic and they have to at least make a token effort at being respectful and doing the culture and the time they are writing about justice, and I did not really feel like that was the case here.
Yeah, no. I'm pretty bummed, and I bought several of this author's other books after liking LION AND LACE so much, so I'm hoping that this was the exception, and not L&L. :(
This is the one romance book that many men have deigned to pick up, even if just to look at the cover and sneer, and is frequently used as the scapegoat example to bemoan the romance genre as a whole as being a tasteless wonderland for idiots without brain cells, i.e. women. Because, as you might have noticed, anything that is marketed exclusively to women is frequently condemned by the "general populace" (i.e. men) as being without taste, merit, or worth. E.g. romance.
My feelings about TWILIGHT could be mapped out as a series of complex dips and rises. I've always been really into vampires and remember seeing this book on Amazon back in 2006 - you know, back in the days when it only sold books and CDs - while looking for books about vampires to ask my mom to buy for me. Intrigued by the promise of dark romance, I clicked to read the Kindle sample and was a little surprised when the opening paragraph featured not vampires but some privileged bitch in an eyelet lace blouse whining about how she was exiling herself to one of the most beautiful places in the world as punishment.
I remember thinking, "Wow, this is dumb. Nobody is going to read this."
And that is why I am not a marketing executive.
When the book became ridiculously popular, I was curious. Because I was a teenager, and if there's a demographic that's demonized more than women it's probably teenagers (e.g. teenagers are sheep, etc.). My mom bought me the book from Costco, of all places, and with no small amount of skepticism, I settled in to read. I actually stayed up until 3AM that night to finish it, and ended up getting only a couple of hours of sleep for the classes I was taking the next day. It was good. There wasn't a lot of action, but in a way that was kind of comforting. Bella was one of the first heroines that I really identified with - she was quiet and studious and socially awkward. She enjoyed reading and not just in that token way that makes her not like other girls; she wrote an essay on the misogyny in Shakespeare (a topic that I, myself, explored in one of my college essays). I also liked the fact that she seemed both jaded and naive; something that I, as a "world-weary" eighteen-year-old strongly related to. I burned through the second and third books (also purchased at Costco, thanks, Mom), and then noped out of the fourth book when I found out that there were things like baby soulmates, sex scenes involving pillow-eating, and weird science that involved giving vampires venom in place of bodily fluids and, for some reason, a different number of chromosomes that just so happened to equal that of the pineapple. (Let's all just take a moment to sit back and imagine a pineapple with fangs.)
My point here is that TWILIGHT was easy to read and featured a generic heroine who had a quiet personality that didn't make me feel like I wasn't enough. After all, she was ordinary and got a GQ vampire boyfriend. Maybe that meant that being ordinary was okay. Many YA novels stress the quirkiness or the glory of their heroines, but I liked the idea of a "plain Jane." It was also my gateway novel to classic literature. I made my mom buy me copies of all the books Bella read or mentioned, which was how I ended up reading a slew of classics like JANE EYRE, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and SENSE AND SENSIBILITY that year. For fun. I know, right?
Then the movies came out and Kristen Stewart became the much-mocked star with her dead eyes and Robert Pattinson the questionable hero with his scoffing interviews and scruffy appearance. I wasn't happy with the casting choices and did not see the movie, but other people did. Many other people did. Suddenly the movie - and the merchandise - were everywhere and so were the fans. My god, honestly if anything put me off this book it was probably the fans. Especially the ones who tore forums apart with their vicious arguments over the battle that will go down in history long after everything else has crumbled to dust: Edward vs. Jacob? I found myself growing embittered against the book that I had previously enjoyed, and suddenly I could see all the problems with it that I had previously ignored. The relationship is toxic. Bella lacks agency. Grand sweeping gestures of "love" are expressed in the form of mortal peril. TWILIGHT also ushered in a whole new era of copycats, as everyone tried to write TWILIGHT with angels (FALLEN, HUSH HUSH), TWILIGHT with werewolves (SHIVER), and TWILIGHT with faeries (WICKED LOVELY or THE IRON KING).
I decided to read this ten years later for a Halloween-themed romance challenge, and also to see how my perspective on the book changed with time. It is hilarious to me that Bella, with her limited experiences at the ripe old age of seventeen, sounds at many times like a weary Mormon housewife, speaking about her father the way one might express frustration about a husband (creepy), and about her mother as a child. She claims ignorance to social practices, and yet gives herself the advice that a Mom might, and lectures her friends about being rude or irresponsible. Also, who says "Holy Crow!" unironically who isn't either eighty years old or Mormon? Exactly.
Edward is also significantly less attractive to me this time around. I think maybe it's because he smacks of the patriarchal, with his constant talking down to her as one might a child, and his sly winks about her being so young while seeming old, if you know what I mean, hurr hurr. That's a little creepy. All the claims about their relationship being unequal are valid; he is so much older than her that he has so much knowledge and experience and resources that she can never really aspire to be on equal footing. The relationship is skewed in his favor and he is, by his own admission, a master manipulator. It's also very creepy that he watches her sleep and knew without asking where she kept her house key. I'm still not over that. Even as a teen, I was kind of like, "Um, hey wait."
I also never noticed that... um, Edward's taste in fashion is kind of bad? In fact, he dresses kind of like a sleazy 70s actor. I have receipts. Go through some of my status updates for the book and see what pics I paired with them. All that he's missing is a Ron Jeremy mustache. I guess this could also potentially tie into the whole "30-year-old mom" vibe if Bella is actually modeled of Stephenie Meyer and she's using Edward as a template for all of the heartthrob leading actors in movies that she watched growing up, which probably were from the 70s or 80s and probably featured questionable fashion choices like ivory turtlenecks and beige colored leather jackets.
I do think that TWILIGHT changed the young adult and romance genres for the better, in that it showed people that things ladies like can not only enter mainstream pop culture, but also become raging successes that empower women not just to seek out and enjoy their own entertainment, but also to go out and create their own. I could say a lot of things here about some of those paranormal YA copycats and how I feel about P2P fanfiction that is repackaged as original fiction but this review is already getting pretty long, so let's save that for another day. Part of the reason it's so hated is because dudes had to confront the fact that a movie for women had entered their "safe space." There was no room in this world for them; the narrative was not about them. There aren't any guns or lasers in TWILIGHT and the "action" doesn't happen until the last 100 pages (unless you count vampire baseball or near-car accidents). It's an entirely character-driven romance between a female teenager and a vampire, and about how their relationship develops over 4.75 books (I'm counting that BREE book as .5 and MIDNIGHT SUN as .25, since it was never released). People love to demonize romance, and I still get comments from individuals telling me how stupid they think the books I read are, but honestly, TWILIGHT, like all romances, was just about escapism and having fun.
'Murder' probably isn't the first word that comes to mind when you think 'romance,' unless you're Ted Bundy, but there's an entire sub-genre of romance novels that focus on crime and mystery, called "romantic suspense." Since one of the books on my Halloween challenge for romance novels actually focuses specifically on murder, there were plenty of options to try and select from.
I ended up going with Anne Stuart's THE WIDOW because I've had it on my Kindle for several months and because Anne Stuart, when she's at her best, is at the top of my favorite authors in the genre. The problem is, when she's at her worst, her books are basically unreadable.
THE WIDOW is about our doormatty heroine, Charlie, who now owns her own restaurant in New York. Her ex-huband, Pompasse, is like fifty years her senior and still lives in Tuscany where he works as an artist and cavorts with adolescent girls, sometimes well before they turn eighteen. So nobody is really that sad when he kicks it, even though Charlie feels obligated to return to the estate and sort out his affairs.
When it turns out that Pompasse - who I kept reading as Pompous, because that's what he was - was probably murdered, again, nobody is that surprised. The big shocker is that some of his most famous paintings, all of them of Charlie, have gone missing. The hero in this book is an Australian true crime author who wants to write a sleazy biography of Pompous's family, so he creeps his way into the estate by pretending to be valuing the properties, and maybe get into Charlie's pants.
I did not really expect the murderer, but nor did I really care. Charlie is such a limp rag of a heroine. Maguire, the hero, was a jerk. Henry, Charlie's fiance, was a jerk. Gia was such a cardboard cutout of jealous OW that it was almost laughable. The servants were stereotypes, and the villain was your typical mad and vengeful trope - which, admittedly, is probably the most common reason for revenge-murders. But at the same time, I'd like it if the climax wasn't just a few badly-rendered flashes of lighting bolts shy of a 1950s pulp horror film.
Definitely one of my least favorite Anne Stuart books.
I picked up THE MASQUERADE for a category in this Halloween-themed romance challenge I'm doing. The category was for a masquerade or costume party-theme in a romance, and while combing despairingly through my Kindle, I thought the title of this book seemed promising. Luckily, it lives up to the title: the catalyst for what ultimately brings h and H together hinges on the events that happen during an All Hallows' Eve masquerade.
Elizabeth is one of the three daughters of an impoverished family of country nobility in Ireland. She has two sisters named Georgie and Anna. They are acquaintances with the de Warenne family, the local nobility, and go to their big parties twice a year. The heroine, Elizabeth, has a crush on the eldest de Warenne son, Tyrell, and has since they were both children and what she felt was major hero worship.
At a Halloween party many years later, when Elizabeth is all dressed up, she has a Princess Diaries moment when Tyrell finally sees that she's not just a chubby wallflower *eyeroll*; she is a woman of supple curves and sensual pleasures. So being the classy sort, he invites her to join him in an assignation behind a tree. Like I said, he's just bursting with class. Unfortunately, her pretty spoiled sister Anna ruins her costume and wants to swap, so Elizabeth ends up going home so Anna can stay.
Long story short: Anna sleeps with the man she KNOWS her sister has a crush on.
I know.
Her argument was that she's the one all men want and she was just so shocked that someone might not find her attractive that she threw herself at Tyrell until he decided to rub some of that - ahem - class he's just bursting with onto her.
I know.
And this being the regency period, when sexual education consisted of "save it for marriage or be ruined forever," they don't use protection and Anna gets pregnant. With Tyrell's son.
I. Freaking. Know.
When Elizabeth finds out about this she's mad for all of two seconds before deciding to go to their rich aunt's house on the pretense of forging a letter expressing a wish that they nurse her back to health. Initially the aunt is one of those curmudgeonly prickly-pear types, but she eventually warms up to the girls and is shockingly sympathetic when she finds out what's really going on. The aunt, Eleanor, is actually one of my favorite characters in this book because she had a pretty solid sense of right and wrong and didn't go about on her merry way being a trash person to whomever she pleased.
So Anna and Elizabeth stay with Eleanor until Anna gives birth and the kid is basically Tyrell's spitting image. Elizabeth, knowing that they can ~never~ be together, is so entranced by this mini-Tyrell that she snatches him from her sister like it's the last cookie in a box of Oreos instead of a baby and announces that she's going to keep him as her own. Anna reluctantly protests, but she's engaged to someone else (and, you know, just slept with her sister's man-crush for funsies), and says, "Hey, great idea! I'm off to happiness now with my rich and handsome husband with NO consequences! Ta ta!" while Elizabeth does the job of raising mini-Tyrell, AKA Ned, with the singleminded possessive obsession you expect to see in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and not, you know, a ROMANCE.
Eventually, Elizabeth is forced to return to her family and they are SCANDALIZED that their good girl decided to become a bad girl. The truth outs and when they find out who the father is, they march Elizabeth right up to the de Warennes' doorstep and demand satisfaction. Tyrell is furious because not only was he duped out of some hot, classy lovins on Halloween, the object of said lovins decided to sleep with someone else (he thinks) and try to pass the kid off as his. So he blackmails her into being his mistress by threatening to take her child away, and Elizabeth, being psychotically obsessed with Ned and Tyrell, agrees, and tries to pretend that she's a virgin by "accidentally" spilling wine all over the bed before they have sex, because she's so ~subtle~.
It doesn't work, and Tyrell is waaaay too creepily happy about being her first. A freshly-produced heir and a virgin bed partner? That's like insecure dudebro jackpot. Also she loves being in the kitchen and making him tasty treats. BUT WAIT, it gets better. Tyrell is planning on marrying this rich heiress named Blanche, while keeping Elizabeth in his house. UNDER THE SAME ROOF AS HIS WIFE. Because he's so ~classy~. When people (rightfully) call him out about this, he says that he's doing it for his son. Because *eyeroll* that's so believable. Elizabeth, on the other hand, claims that she's not jealous but spends so much time crying and spying on Tyrell's fiance, and acting all passive-aggressive while telling everyone who will listen, "I just want him to be happy!"
Eventually she leaves him for his own good after an encounter with Blanche's father that's pretty civil, except for the fact that he burns up her love note that she leaves before going. Blah blah blah, Georgie has a romance of her own, Anna is still happy and consequence free, Blanche was traumatized as a child and incapable of laughing or crying(??) which is why she doesn't want to get married, so she graciously steps aside and Elizabeth and Tyrell end up married with FIVE kids because class. Ned isn't mentioned at all in the epilogue. I guess he only matters when he's an entre to frustrated lusts and now that the heroine has her own children to be obsessed over, he's served his purpose. Because you know, classy. Also, poor Blanche - unable to laugh or cry? I wish she had a place in that epilogue. She's the nicest OW I ever seen and they swept her out of the narrative like dirt on their way to their ~classy~ happily ever after.
This is a real saga of total trash people, and that is not a phrase I throw around lightly. To be a trash person, you have to give a serious lack of f**ks about other people. Elizabeth gave no f**ks when she stole her sister's baby (luckily her sister didn't want the baby), and she gave no f**ks about how wantonly carousing around with a married-man-to-be might affect her semi-noble family and her remaining sister's prospects. Which it did. Badly. Anna was also a trash person, for sleeping with a man she knew her sister wanted and who wanted her back, and then for dumping her own flesh and blood on her sister to go start a new family with her shiny new husband. Tyrell was a trash person for thinking with his junk and then trying to pass that behavior off as real man of the house-type gallantry, and Georgie was a trash person for enabling her sisters' bad behavior.
What really annoyed me was Elizabeth is so obsessed and stupid and selfish, and yet we're constantly told about how kind-hearted and noble and gracious she is. And I'm like, "Seriously? I must not be hearing you correctly over the sounds of the seagulls circling around all these literal trash people." Oh, she gives all her money to poor people even though her family's impoverished. Really? Where is that money coming from? She doesn't have a job. You mean she's giving her poor family's money away to people on the street while ruining her sister's prospects and fucking a practically married man? Oh wow, so noble, wow, I can only aspire to that level of magnanimity.
The beginning of this book was OKAY because I'm a sucker for family dramas and I kept reminding myself that all of the characters were teenagers and teenagers are SUPPOSED to act selfishly and make bad decisions. But years went on and the characters continued to be stupid trash people and eventually I stopped caring about any of them. I do like the concept of this series, which is about a noble family that begins in Medieval times (and is allegedly a somewhat knockoff of Christine Monson's STORMFIRE), but like the blood of this family, the fire of the plot appears to have thinned as well over the years, degrading from bona fide 80s bodice ripper to present-day trash person drama.
I'm proud of myself for finding a book that fit the masquerade theme I needed but I'm seriously questioning the serious loss of brain cells I think I experienced while wading through this dreck.
I'm low-key impressed by how good this was. I got this out of the Kindle freebie section and if you've been following my reviews, you know that I have some thoughts on the freebie section. It's a lot like a bargain grocery store in the sense that you can get some high quality goods for next to nothing... and you can also get a hell of a lot of stuff that's barely fit for consumption. The "bad" basically subsidizes the "good."
BLACK BAYOU is one of the first books in a while that successfully creeped me out. In a way, it's reminiscent of some of those occult movies from the early 2000s, especially Rose Red (2002). The book opens with our heroine, Marigold, waking up to her parents trying to murder her in a bathtub. Beside her is the corpse of her dead sister. Before her parents can succeed, the police arrive and her parents are both shot and killed.
It turns out that her parents were both "angels of death," and had been killing the patients at the hospitals at which they worked for years. People in her town blame her for the killings and her boyfriend breaks up with her because he can't stand the pressure. Having nowhere else to go, Marigold is sent to live with her last remaining relative, her aunt Delilah in New Orleans.
Her aunt is creepy and aloof, but worse still is the house. Something about it creeps her out and it doesn't help when a local tour guide/voodoo practicioner tries to warn her to get out. That night, Marigold has horrifying delusions that are so terrifying that she locks herself in the wardrobe to stay safe. It turns out that the guide is named Louis Dupont and he and his family go way back with the La Roux family, as the La Roux family owned several of his ancestors as slaves. He tells Marigold about some of her chilling family history, which are linked to the mysterious occurrences in the house.
This isn't really a romance, at least not in the traditional sense, but I really liked the relationship between Louis and Marigold, and since this is the first book in a series, there's a chance that they might have a relationship later on. There's also a super twisted scene in an ancestral tomb in a graveyard, which was exactly what I needed for my romance novel scavenger hunt. Oh man, I am so glad I read this while it was light out and not in bed, at night. I would have peed myself in fear.
I'll be the first to tell you that the Kindle freebie section is a crapshoot, but BLACK BAYOU is one of the gems. I enjoyed the book and its creepiness; it was the perfect fall read leading up to Halloween.
Reading a Phyllis Whitney novel after a Victoria Holt has officially cemented Ms. Whitney as my new favorite gothic romance author. Many gothic romance authors wrote historical and "contemporary" gothic novels, but the "contemporary" ones were often horrendously dated and bad, because they were written in the same overly wordy and prudishly old-fashioned style, which ended up feeling jarring and anachronistic. Here, with SNOWFIRE, Whitney managed to capture the claustrophobic and smothering atmosphere of a crumbling manor home on the moors, even though it's set in a swanky modern ski lodge. How does she do it? With atmosphere, crafty wordsmithing, and a plucky heroine reminiscent of Nancy Drew who is determined to do what is right, even if it means sacrificing her own beliefs.
The heroine is named Linda and she has come to the Graystones, a cozy ski lodge, not for skiing but to exonerate her brother, Stuart. The Graystones are owned by a man named Julian McCabe, an ex-champion skiier. His wife, Margot McCabe, also used to love to ski, but an accident left her in a wheelchair and she was never quite the same afterwards. When she ended up being pushed off the ramp on her balcony by an unknown assailant, Stuart, who was studying skiing under Julian and his sinister groundsman, Emory, was blamed. There are too many holes in the story given, however, so Linda manages to secure a position as a hostess of the lodge while also attempting to ingratiate herself into the McCabe family to find out more information about who might have wanted to kill Margot - and why.
One of the things I love about Whitney's works is that she is so good at writing emotional scenes. A lot of gothic romances seem watered down and dreary, but that has never been the case for me when reading a Phyllis A. Whitney book. The McCabe family is emotionally devastated over Margot's death and features a wide array of characters that are eccentric and suspicious. There's Julian, of course, who might have wanted his wife dead because of the hindrance she proved. There's Julian's sister, Shan, who is a flower child that carries spells in her back pocket and believes that the family cat is a reincarnation of Margot (creepy). And then there's Adria, the daughter of Margot and Julian, who might also have reason to kill Margot, and seems to be seriously emotionally disturbed.
I think one of the reasons I love these gothic novels so much is that they remind me of the middle grade Point Horror novellas I devoured by the dozens in middle school. This one in particular made me think of that old R.L. Stine novella, SKI WEEKEND. They're a little dated but in a way that feels more nostalgic than tone-deaf, and I recommend them to anyone who used to read all those trashy middle grade horror novels and then grew up craving more. :)
As if I needed an excuse to read more gothic romances... well, I do, which is why I'm taking part in a Halloween Reading Challenge designed to celebrate all things paranormal, dark, and spooky in my favorite genre - romance.
Victoria Holt, who died in 1993, was one of the obvious go-to choices for the "author who is dead" category. Not only was she exceptionally prolific, she was also a writer in two of my favorite vintage romance subgenres: pulpy gothics and pulpy historicals (the historicals were written under the penname, Jean Plaidy). The only problem with that is that being so prolific means that sometimes, quality takes a nosedive. There are Holt novels that I loved... and then there are Holt novels that left me shaking my head and going WHAT.
THE SHIVERING SANDS has a kind of silly title, which made me think of the Shifting Sand Lands level from Mario 64, and an equally silly premise. Our heroine, Caroline, was the only non-archeologist in her family. She loved music. One day, both her parents died tragically on their way to a dig, leaving her archeology-loving sister, Roma, and her both adult orphans to pave their own way. Roma continued doing her thing and became a prominent influence in her field, whereas Caroline decided to give up her passion to be supportive of her man, Pietro, whom she obviously still respects despite him being a grade-A jerk who says things like "you are worthy of me." He dies tragically too, and Caroline fiddlefarts around until Roma goes missing on a dig in Kent, after which Caroline decides to go play some Scooby Doo and figure out where her sister went.
WARNING: SPOILERS
Being the widow of a famous pianist (and a pianist of some repute herself) gives her easy entrance to the family who owns the lands where Roma was investigating. And this family - this family has one of the most confusing vipers' nest of a relationship tree that I have encountered in a while. She becomes piano teacher to three girls, one of whom is the vicar's daughter (Silvia). The other two girls, Allegra and Alice, have TWO different mothers. Alice is, I believe, the illegitimate child of the vicar's daughter's wife and the Stacy patriarch, Sir William. Allegra is the daughter of the black sheep son of Sir William, Napier, and a gypsy woman. This means that Alice, while being young enough to be Napier's daughter, is actually his step-sister(?) and Silvia's half-sister. There's this crazy old woman named Sybil who likes to paint creepy paintings, and I think she is Sir William's spinster sister, which would make her Alice's aunt, and Allegra's great-aunt. Napier, meanwhile, is engaged to Sir William's rich ward, Edith, which has put him back in his father's favor, because he has been ostracized for several years due to his possible murder of his younger brother and family golden child, Beau, which led his mother to commit suicide. BUT WAIT, there's more. As it turns out, Allegra is actually Beau's daughter, not Napier's, so she is his niece, and not his daughter. And Alice isn't Sir William's child at all, but the child of a criminal. If that doesn't give you a headache, I'm not sure what will. But man, I had a hell of a time trying to keep track of all these people.
THE SHIVERING SANDS is one of my least favorite Holt novels. It's so boring and slow to start that I skimmed for the first 150-pages or so. Then she employs this gross trope she's done in a couple of other books of hers that I can't stand. The heroine falls for a MARRIED man and Holt legitimizes this relationship by killing off the wife somehow so he's freed up for the heroine. The author did this in THE DEVIL ON HORSEBACK as well, which is another book of hers I wasn't crazy about. It was even more annoying here because the wife was killed in a series of 80s slasher movie-esque murder sprees, as well as the heroine's sister (which bummed me out - I was hoping she'd be returned safely). To the author's credit, I actually didn't guess who the killer was until the reveal, and the heroine ends up in some pretty serious trouble at the end. Too bad the previous 200 pages before the grand reveal didn't make me care more. Also, F that hero, who is just as judgy and pretentious as her ex-husband. He doesn't have any of the rugged gothic charm that some of Holt's other heroes have, and the excessive name-drops of Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre didn't win this book any favors, because all it did was remind me of other, better gothic romances that I could be reading instead.
I'm even more annoyed because usually I only spend $1.99 on an ebook, but since this is an author I usually like, I bit the bullet and spend $2.50 or whatever it was this ebook cost when it was on sale. So the fact that I did that and had this book blow so much was the straw on the camel's back, as far as I'm concerned. If you want to get into this author, I'd recommend starting with THE PRIDE OF THE PEACOCK, MENFREYA IN THE MORNING, or ON THE NIGHT OF THE SEVENTH MOON. Stay away from this one, though, unless you want to be annoyed and confused, like I was.
It isn't often that a book successfully puts you off from the author's note in the beginning of the book, but TOUCH A DARK WOLF manages this with terrifying finesse when the author announces with a satisfaction you can literally feel emanating from the page: "the Chosen were the descendants of King Solomon and his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines from many nationalities that scattered to the ends of the earth upon his death."
You see, apparently in the original, the heroine was a Mary Sue of the Bella Swan variety who had this magical blood that everyone wanted - especially supernatural baddies with teeth. Originally, they were called "Elan," but now they are called the "Chosen," and turning this blood-lustiness into a religious food fight between heaven and hell "adds fullness to the story and comes so much closer to the tale I wanted to tell."
Which I literally have no idea how to respond to...except by writing this review.
Erin Morgan is a nurse at a clinic called Sno-Med. Sno-Med gives free blood testings to people and seems like a great place...in the same way that the Bates Motel seems like a "family friendly" venue if you catch my drift. Erin realizes something off when a raging stereotype of a Middle Eastern despot comes in for a blood transfusion for his "cancer" and she finds four dead bodies in a room with full transfusion bags hanging over their exsanguinated corpses. Her boss, a raging stereotype of a designer-clad sleaze-bag named Cinatas, tries to attack her with a morphine needle but she escapes.
While on the run, she spends a lot of time in her car. And at one point, she opens her eyes to find a naked man on her car who, if the cover is any indication, apparently looks like Chris Sarandon. Chris Sarandon is an angelic type of being called a Blood Hunter who has been bitten by a demon ("Tsara") and therefore damned (i.e. turned into a vampiric werewolf). And since Erin is one of the Chosen, that means he craves her blood the way Edward craved a late-night Bella snack. But of course, that would be giving in to the forces of actual hell, which - I KID YOU NOT - is ruled by a creature named Heldon. THE RULER OF HELL IS NAMED HELDON.
Erin and her angel-werewolf-vampire decide to confront Cinatas and Sno-Med with the help of a Suspicious Police Officer, a good doctor (i.e. not an agent of Satan), and a druid. You see, Sno-Med is hosting an expo with free blood tests which is really an excuse to test people for that Blood of Solomon BS to turn them into demon chow. Oh, and the best part is, while Googling this, there's a BIG REVEAL that Cinatas is "Satanic" spelled backwards and "Sno-Med" is "Demons" spelled backwards, like it's SOME GIANT TWIST that they were evil all along. I couldn't help thinking of that "Nilbog! That's goblin spelled backwards!" line from Troll 2. And then I realized that this book is basically the romance novel equivalent of Troll 2, by which I mean it's so awful that it would be unwatchable if it weren't trying so earnestly hard, with such bad timing, that it's almost comedic.
I thought PRINCE OF NIGHT was bad, with its vampires-are-actually-aliens-who-can-only-impregnate-virgins-and-all-males-of-the-species-are-violent-rapebabies plotline (no, I am 100% serious, seriously check out my review for that sh*t and rake in the lulz), but I think this was way worse. The hero has the emotional maturity of a frat boy and one of his reasons for why they should be intimate is literally "we're already intimate in my head, so why not for real tho" which is the logic you might expect for a 12-year-old boy. She also leaves him alone on a couch for five seconds and he immediately finds the porn channel, and the fake porn dialogue is more convincing than the actual porn dialogue in this book. (The sex scenes are terrible by the way, and if I could go another twenty years without encountering "the very wet heart of her desire" again, I would be very pleased.) There's also this totally cringe-worthy scene where the heroine basically goes along with pretending that the hero is mentally retarded to avoid that aforementioned police officer's suspicions. Add to that the fact that the hero is an angel-vampire-werewolf who hunts vampires and demons and werewolves who are apparently the denizens of some guy or girl named Heldon who is ruler of Hell, and the villain literally being named "Satanic" spelled backwards, and you have yourself one hell of a mess. This was awful, and also hilarious, but I can't in any honesty rate this any higher than a 1*. Sorry.
P.S. If you find yourself feeling morbidly curious, it's currently free in the Kindle store.
Reading this book made me so, so happy because it's basically everything I ever wanted in a gothic novel. October is the perfect time of the year to be reading these too. When the leaves start turning and the weather cools down, there's nothing better than bundling up in your favorite blanket with a mug of tea and hunkering down with an old-timey mystery novel from the pre-Internet days.
I was suckered into buying THE QUICKSILVER POOL because the premise seemed to be promising a Daphne DuMaurier/REBECCA-inspired jaunt through the post-Civil War South. The heroine, Lora, was a nurse during the Civil War and ended up marrying wealthy Union soldier, Wade. When we meet her, he is just bringing her home to meet the fam, which includes his son from his previous marriage, Jemmy, and the looming and sinister matriarch, Mrs. Tyler.
Lora quickly becomes miserable because it's clear that her husband still carries a torch for his first wife, whose presence looms everywhere in the house. Her mother-in-law is awful, and when she's not making snide comments about how much better the first wife was, she's mocking Lora for being classless and inferior, and emotionally blackmailing everyone else in order to get her way. Other sinister characters include the sister of the first wife, a woman named Morgan who might have designs on Lora's husband, and a mysterious freed slave named Rebecca. REBECCA. Oh, yes, this was definitely REBECCA-inspired. That absolutely cinches it.
The last book I read by Phyllis Whitney was called THE MOONFLOWER and was also post-war, only that war in question was WWII. Many of the things I liked about THE QUICKSILVER POND were also present in THE MOONFLOWER - a rich and detailed setting, complex and sometimes unlikable characters who develop in interesting ways over the course of the story, and an emphasis on familial relationships and interactions that are strengthened through adversity. Another one of my favorite gothic romance authors is Victoria Holt, but many of her heroines are passive and lack agency, and she tends to fall into the trap of demonizing The Other Woman. Whitney, by contrast, is much more feminist in flavor - her heroines are independent and grow stronger as the books go on, and, even more shocking and welcome: she often has a surprising and interesting twist with the other women you meet in the story, making them into interesting and well-rounded characters.
Like THE MOONFLOWER, THE QUICKSILVER POND is slow to start, but then it really picks up the pace and is full of action. It's largely character-driven, but when those characters might be involved in covering up family secrets and murders, the pace quickly picks up. I couldn't put this book down and was desperate to find out what everyone was hiding. I wasn't disappointed. The ending was pretty great, and showed just how developed each of the characters was, in my opinion.
One caveat: the N word is used once, towards the end, but not in a positive or casual way - and the person who says it is not good. I understand some people will take issue with this, but in a post-Civil War society near the South where people are feeling angry and cheated over the outcome of the war, this felt pretty realistic to me. You may feel differently, and that is your right. /shrug
If you want to get in on the gothic-novel craze but are afraid they might put you to sleep with their harmless coziness, pick up this book. This was a great book. Definitely my fave of hers so far. You can expect to see more paranormal- and mystery-themed romances from me this month as I work through this Halloween-themed challenge. So far, it seems to me that I'm off to a pretty good start. (If you want to take a peek at what other books I'll be doing this month, you can view them here.)
This author's Lux series is basically what launched her from quiet indie author cult status to mainstream publication fame. A lot of my friends enjoy both her young adult paranormal romances and her contemporary new adult romances, so I was curious to pick something of hers up and see if I liked it. After picking up THE DARKEST STAR as an ARC, I'm no longer quite as curious. If this book is representative of her other works, we have some problems.
THE DARKEST STAR is basically like if you took the plot of TWILIGHT and injected it with more violence and sex, and tried to instill a bit of superficial commentary about illegal immigration and ICE through the use of aliens, a la District 9. Evie is an Ordinary High School Girl™ who lives in a world where aliens, called "Luxen," have made contact. They are called Luxen because they have magic light powers and usually that just makes them Groin-Meltingly Hot™ but sometimes if they are evil, they zap humans' eyeballs out.
Evie meets the Luxen while out with her Token Lesbian Friend™ and they go to the forbidden alien night club to meet her best friend's girlfriend, who is also a Luxen. It's super obvious that this is what she is, so I had a HI-larious moment later when Evie finds this out and is shocked. Anyway, that's when she meets the Pecs-and-Abs™ love interest, Luc, who is basically Edward Cullen with even more personal space issues. Also, he can read minds and finds Evie so fascinating. His personality can be summed up in one word: abs. In two words? Low-riding jeans. "Wait, Nenia," you're saying, "that's not a personality." Correct, friend. Because he doesn't have one - unless you consider being a possessive, lamely sarcastic alphahole a personality, in which case, that is his.
At Evie's school, the Luxen sit at their own Groin-Meltingly Hot™ cafeteria table, but unfortunately an evil Luxen is going around zapping humans' eyeballs out. This causes the kids to wantonly discriminate against the Luxen students against their school and say that they should basically be deported. One of Evie's ex-friends is the ringleader for this movement and Evie thinks she is so lame, but doesn't really do anything to stop her except saying, "Hey, not cool." Evie's ex-best-friend responds the way all bigots do - by flipping the verbal middle finger and then spending all night posting on message boards about how much they admire President Trump. In a word: Evie does jack shit. Unless you count agonizing over whether to bang or not to bang Pecs-and-Abs™, in which case she does that thing. Many, many times! But he's an evil alien, oh noes! But oh, she's not a bigot.
The story continues with a vain attempt at a mystery subplot, with Evie discovering that she's not an Ordinary High School Girl™ after all (what a shock! a young adult paranormal romance where the heroine *isn't* ordinary?), Luc trying to figure out who the evil Luxen who's zapping out humans' eyeballs is while also Hiding Potentially Existential Crisis-Causing Information from the Heroine for the Heroine's Own Good™ while also mooning over his Pure and Long Lost First Love™, much to Evie's admiration and jealousy (guys who moon over dead girls are so romantic - oh wait).
There are a lot of similarities to TWILIGHT, between the mind-reading and the evil human-hunting Luxen who wants to kill the heroine, the popular Luxen table at the school, and the way that Evie gets involved with Luc's whole "immortal" family (except they're not exactly his family, just friends and associates - so actually maybe they are his family after all, but in the Italian mob sense). Evie was especially unlikable as a heroine because she had no personality. I heard the heroine in the original Lux series was a book blogger, but this heroine has no interests and nothing about her was interesting. I also thought the twist about her was super lame and a cheap excuse to legitimize Insta Love™.
I feel like this book tried to do many things, and it did almost all of them badly.
Thanks to Netgalley/the publisher for the review copy!
I was initially going to post lots of status updates for this book, because I feel like that is what you are supposed to do when you manage to finagle a prized ARC like this one - but instead I knocked it back like it was a glass of drinkable wine and I was trying to get drunk off of it. What I'm trying to say is that it was good. Really good. Defies expectations good.
AN ASSASSIN'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND TREASON, despite the cutesy title, is actually a very dark story. It is set during the times of Elizabethan England. The heroine, Katherine, is the daughter of an illegal Catholic and sees him murdered before her eyes. Naturally, she wants revenge and seeks out his associates who are in the middle of a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth and replace her with a Catholic ruler. Her plan? To dress up as a boy and join a group of performers who are performing Twelfth Night before the Queen...and then assassinate her during the last act.
The hero, Toby, is a spy in the employ of the Queen's spymaster. He's part of the intelligence behind Katherine's father's murder, and is determined to ferret out the rest of the culprits. His plan is to work with William Shakespeare to create a play that appears to be sympathetic to Catholics (called Twelfth Night) that will be performed before the Queen. Surely, the would-be assassins won't be able to resist the trap, and when they do, they'll be waiting. To be absolutely sure that he's got the right person, he'll be acting in the play. He doesn't expect to fall for his opposite though; the attractive "boy" who plays his love interest, Viola-Cesario to his Duke Orsino.
So yes, it sounds cheesy, and it was, a little. But it was also action-packed and reminded me of some of the good YA I've read, like POISON STUDY or GRAVE MERCY or even THE WINNER'S CURSE. Books that are well-written and don't look down on their audience, and feature heroines who actually have agency and don't just sit around twiddling their thumbs while pining away over the love interest. I can't tell you how happy I was to see a few F-bombs dropped in this book, or to have actual grievous consequences looming over the two star-crossed lovers. Also, this is a cross-dressing romance, which is a secret weakness of mine, but it tackles head-on what most of those types of books only skirt around: the hero is bisexual, and reacts in a very believable way to finding out Kit is a girl (unlike some of those other books, where the hero is like, "Woohoo! Thank God I'm not gay!")
This book is very gay, and in the best possible way. I think you should read it.
Thanks to Netgalley/the publisher for the review copy!
I was not a fan of THE EDGE OF NEVER. To this day, it is one of the most irritating new adult books I have read. That said, I was still enthused about picking up KILLING SARAI. My friends on here kept recommending it to me, saying that it reminded them of my own work. I think that's one of the highest compliments you can get as an author, because you (ideally) write the stories that you wish you can read yourself, so when someone tells you that they've found a work similar to yours, it's like Christmas come early (and this is how I've discovered some of my favorite books incidentally, like THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME). Second, I'm a James Bond girl at heart (no, not that kind of Bond girl), so whenever I hear about a book with a dangerous mercenary with a gun, I get irrationally excited. #Nostalgia
I really wanted to like KILLING SARAI, but I didn't. To be fair, it is a much, much better book than THE EDGE OF NEVER. I hated THE EDGE OF NEVER and wanted to throw it at the wall. KILLING SARAI just made me sad because it had so much squandered potential. The heroine is the sex slave of a drug lord, and has been his prisoner since she was - gag - a young teenager. She has it better than some of her cohorts because she's his favorite, but life is still pretty miserable. That's why, when her captor, Javier, contracts a mysterious American hitman to kill one of his enemies, Sarai decides to try to persuade him to take her back with him. To both their surprise, he agrees, and she ends up accompanying him on his adventures.
There are several major problems with this book. One; I personally didn't feel that the characters were very well fleshed out. What made Victor, the hero, tick? I don't know. I know he's supposed to be mysterious but when his abs have more character than he does, there's a problem. (Seriously, I know he has abs. How many times must you tell me about his impressive musculature?) Sarai is not much better. She's an empty shell of a character, and not in the damaged way, but in the lack of character development way. "Damaged" is still a characterization. She did and said some very strange things, and I didn't understand why she was so quick to fall for Victor when she had no reason to trust him and by all accounts, should be suspicious of every man, especially men like Victor. She's also very hateful towards women, and said some incredibly disturbing things about rape, even implying at one point that being raped by Javier wasn't so bad because he was at least attractive. Um, what???? She was also very stupid, constantly running into danger and flashing a fan of $5000 in public. Dumb.
Two; the instant love in this book was ridiculous. I felt like they went from being wary allies to "I will die for you, my love" practically overnight. Both of these characters have ZERO reason to fall recklessly in love, and in fact, there are about a thousand reasons why they SHOULDN'T. It was very inconsistent with what little we knew about their motivations, and I don't think it did the narrative any favors.
Three; for a dark book, this felt very tame. I've read several books about sex trafficking, and so far I think my favorite is DELIVER by Pam Godwin. That book reveled in its darkness. KILLING SARAI tries to be unpleasant but feels surprisingly tame, to the point that when bad stuff does happen, you're like, "Whoa, what." I think Redmerski had some really good ideas and the showdown with the hotel magnate at the end was easily one of the best parts of the book (as well as the intense beginning), but it still felt very tame. I guess this is a pretty big departure from the author's first effort, so I get it, but that's no excuse for a bad story. It needed to be grittier, in my opinion, and more convincing.
Four; the writing was not great. The author misused a couple words (someone averted their eyes towards something, and I saw a couple typos). Again, I get the struggle of being self-published, but being a best-seller indie author puts you in a different class from your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, "this is my side-side hustle" indie authors like me. Her editor (she must have one, at this point) really should have picked up those sorts of mistakes. I also felt like there were a lot of sentences that just felt very oddly or awkwardly constructed, and things like that tend to pull me out of the narrative because I am compulsive like that. YMMV, and if you don't give two fits about grammar, then by all means, dive in and enjoy. I know some people really don't care about that sort of thing.
All in all, I can't say that I was very wowed by KILLING SARAI. It was just the thing I needed for my Halloween reading challenge (that blood on the cover, yo), but as a story itself, it was very disappointing. I'm glad I got it while it was free, that's all I'm going to say. But if you're into Anne Stuart's Ice series and don't mind the tics that surface in indie prose, I could see this becoming a favorite.
When it comes to genres with a lot of hype, like romance and YA, there's a bit of an "Emperor's new clothes" phenomenon in that some people just seem to get sucked up into all of the praise and excitement and end up rating the book higher because of how their experience of reading it ties into the crowd mentality. I also think that with some of the so-called "brainy" books, people mistake confusion for intricacy. How else to explain why so many people thought LOST was brilliant? (Sorry if you like LOST.)
UNDER THE NEVER SKY has a bit of both when it comes to these two phenomenons. It came hot on the coattails of THE HUNGER GAMES's dystopian popularity, and despite its incredibly shoddy world-building (which I'll be talking about shortly), people have been praising it for being complex. Um, maybe, but that doesn't necessarily mean good. A knot can be complex, but if your instructions were supposed to be a bow and you did a knot anyway, and nobody around you can untangle it, you didn't really do what you were told to do, and it defeats the purpose.
UNDER THE NEVER SKY is set in a post-apocalyptic world, on what I'm assuming is Earth. The sky is full of something called "Aether," which I'm guessing is a solar storm. I'm also guessing that being in such close proximity to these probably-radioactive (again, never explicitly spelled-out) rays forced humanity into hiding. The heroine, Aria, is one of these: her people are the Dwellers and they live in pods that shield them from the desert and the skies, and to keep from growing insanely bored they have retreated into virtual reality worlds called Realms for their entertainment.
On the other hand, you have Outsiders, or people who don't live in the pods and continue to forage in the ruins of humanity like hunter-gatherers. Dwellers derogatorily refer to them as Savages. They are tattooed, and a lot of them have X-Men-like powers, which I think they refer to as Scires. The hero, Perry, is one of these. He has two superpowers, the ability to smell "tempers," or emotions, and acute vision. If this sounds familiar, yeah, it's a bit like what happened in THE DARKEST MINDS, and I'm guessing it's because of radiation that humans ended up evolving like this, because what other explanation is there? The author certainly didn't provide insight into how humanity diverged, or why.
The story kicks off when a bunch of teens go out to be wild, as teens do, and Aria ends up taking the fall for the leader's son. She gets kicked out of her pod, and left to die in the desert. Here, she meets Perry, who saved her from death already. The way she treats him is pretty awful and until they suddenly decide they are in love, both of them basically hate each others' guts. Aria thinks he's a meanie savage and Perry thinks she's an over-entitled shit who is too stupid to live. I must admit, my sympathies lay more with Perry - especially when Aria plunges headfirst into a coven of cannibals.
I've read a lot of YA dystopian novels and I think UNDER THE NEVER SKY has more in common with the bad ones than the good ones. THE DARKEST MINDS and SHATTER ME also featured dumb-as-dirt heroines in dystopian/post-apoc worlds where humans suddenly developed super powers for no apparent reason, and in both of those books as well as this one, the lazy world-building ruined the story for me because the abundance of plotholes kept pulling me out of the story to ask, "WHY?" I also think that if you're going to write a post-apocalyptic novel, you need to answer the hows and whys of how the world was destroyed. This is a qualm I had about the Ritchie sisters' THE RAGING ONES, where both the timeline of the inciting event and the world-building are equally unclear. You can have post-apocalyptic novels where the end world has little in common with the original. I think one of the crowning examples of this is A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, which is told in three parts, and features society rebuilding itself in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, first as hunter-gatherers, then as a Medieval society, and then, if I remember correctly, as a futuristic one. Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy is another example, where genetic and technologic manipulation have basically caused society to implode, warping the natural into the unnatural. But both of these books, which I liked incidentally, had solid answers for the hows and the whys.
UNDER THE NEVER SKY has some interesting ideas but fails to execute them properly. Too many things were left unanswered, and the story was not really all that different from other HUNGER GAMES copycats who wanted to create that same dystopian environment without adding the same amount of stakes, world-building, or character development. The result? A painful drag of a read.
ETERNITY joins the cadre of bad paranormal romance I've read this year, alongside other greats such as TOUCH A DARK WOLF (a werewolf romance) and PRINCE OF THE NIGHT (a vampire romance). Fittingly, ETERNITY is about witches, and it's really unfortunate for this book that I happened to be watching Hocus Pocus around the same time because this book reads like someone watched Hocus Pocus, and completely missed the point.
Our heroine is a witch named Raven. Her mother is a healer in the 18th century, and after she fails to heal Raven's cousin, their relative decides to throw them under the bus by branding them as witches. They are rounded up by local witch hunter/heretic, Nathanial, to be hung. Nathanial's protege, Duncan, thinks that Raven is super-hot and is so horrified by the proceedings that he decides to abandon his master. Furious, Nathanial ignores his pleas and kills them both.
As it turns out, because Raven saved someone else's life in her past life, she gets to be an immortal witch. The only way she can be killed is if someone cuts out her heart, because that's how bad witches get to live forever: they live off the lives that they steal from someone else. And Nathanial, Witch Hunter Esq., is one of these bad witches who is not happy when he finds out that the dead bodies he planned to cut the hearts out of are both missing.
Raven goes to New England, has some run-ins with Native Americans, and settles in a small town where she becomes the object of lust for the local pilgrims who assume - guess what- since they are unable to control the activity of their privates, Raven must be a witch to fill them with such lusts. So the witch hunt begins anew, with Nathanial joining the fray yet again, and then Raven and a new witch friend flee into the woods to live with Native Americans, before going to...Salem. I think.I may be confusing the order of events, because it was all so ridiculous and I was rolling my eyes a lot.
Anyway, after Duncan dies trying to save Raven or whatever, they meet again and now he's a witch because he died trying to save her, only he's been re-adopted by Nathanial who has this weird, inexplained obsession with Duncan where he sees him as a son. Raven tries to get Duncan to love her but his attachment to the man who killed her mother is so traumatic, she doubts him. Nathanial fondles a statue of a raven while imagining cutting out Raven's heart. There's a final showdown. The bad guy wins, lol. Just kidding, this is a romance. Of course he dies, and everyone lives happily ever after. What did you think was going to happen, honestly?
I would just like to point out that the soulmate angle is this book's biggest weakness. Especially since their "meet-cute" is him thinking, "Wow, that girl is hot" while she's on the gallows, and they are basically eye-fucking while her mother is being executed. Gee, how romantic. I've never been a believer in love at first sight, and thought all of these characters suffered from a major case of TSTLitis. You know, it's funny because for last year's Halloween challenge, I read another witch romance set during the witch hunt times, called DEVIL'S MISTRESS, which also featured an obsessed witch hunter who hunted the heroine with fanaticism. It also opened with the death of the heroine's mother, and like this book, the hero is the man who helps save her from a similar fate.
I don't get why writing a good witch romance seems to be so difficult, but almost all of the ones I've encountered are painfully cheesy and weird. Let me know if you find a good one, because I haven't.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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