Review: melodrama and passion
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 11, 2013
If you are an afficionado of melodramatic historical romances you will no doubt enjoy this tale. It has the obligatory two stereotypes: a beautiful, feisty, independent female, and a darkly handsome, arrogant, antisocial male who bellows, grunts, growls and snarls enough for the whole state of Virginia. Their mutual attraction has them lusting after each other from their first meeting and we `hear' their passionate thoughts sizzling to their loins at every meeting thereafter. Their love making is handled well with plenty of passion, explicit but not crude.The pace is good with plenty of action to maintain the momentum. However, some of the situations which allowed Cassandra and Colton to fall into each other's arms seemed rather contrived. At the party is was a natural progression of the story but at other times it felt rather as though the authors had said to each other, `It's rather a long while since they kissed - how can we get them close again?' and then tortured the plot to conform to their agreed ploy eg why would Colton suddenly fling Cassandra over his shoulder and ride with her struggling form in front of him on his horse when she has been happily riding her own horse for the previous few days?There were 10 pages of front matter on my Kindle, which seems rather excessive. It then starts with a fair chunk of backstory in the first two chapters which is then repeated in a more natural manner in the two following chapters. I soon found that the tendency to repetition was regrettably prevalent, often within a few paragraphs.There are errors and inconsistencies throughout. As a result I just wasn't convinced by the story or the characters. These are a few examples:1) Cassandra goes to work at Colton's stud and tobacco farm as he wants `to buy your horses and make them the foundation of my breeding line'. This is from someone who has supposedly already prospered as the breeder of what he considers to be the finest horses in Virginia, owning hundreds of them. The problem that Cassandra immediately discovers with the previous steward's stallion, for which Colton has been paying stud fees for two years, only shows Colton as a fool who knows nothing about breeding or bookkeeping, and an intellectual inferior to Cassandra, with no control over his stud farm or his staff. Tom is described as knowledgeable and totally loyal to Colton, so why didn't he point out the problem with Flynn's stallion? The whole episode came across as a desperate attempt to find some way for Cassandra to make her mark when she first takes on the job of steward.2) Colton worries about leaving Cassandra in a house in Concord but wishes `if only she had stayed put in Beacon Hill instead of traipsing into Boston's more troublesome area'. Admittedly Concord is now considered to be part of Greater Boston but in April 1775 it was a separate town. During this first battle Colton trots towards Jackson, yet after a few minutes' conversation he is seeking his horse.3) Cassandra wades into a lake to do her laundry. Just as I'm wondering how she would achieve this in the middle of the lake, she slips down the bank into the water. Then, when I have the problem of working out how there is a `flow around her legs' if it's a lake, she says `I thought I would enjoy the quiet of stream' (sic). She then `studied the bank for the easiest way to exit the river': not the best place to do the laundry, then, whether it's a lake, stream or river. Having retrieved the floating laundry it is then merely `damp' as she carries it back to the house.I was surprised to see that with two authors, an editor and a proof reader listed there were still so many errors. Most of them were relatively minor typos eg `Cassandra's felt her fading blush return' or `Hand placed a hand on what was left of the bannister'. With four people working on the text it should have been flawless. There are some poor or incorrect choices of words and some clumsy phrasing eg `she was not blinded to the injustices the Crown held over the colonies' or `an extraordinarily high forehead pronounced by a sweeping updo of hair'.This is not my preferred genre but my rating is based on the quality of the writing, not my preference. It could be much better if the authors had thought more carefully about continuity and natural plot progression, and the editor and proof reader had been more diligent.I was allocated this book to review as part of the Goodreads Review Group scheme for non-reciprocal reviewing of indie authors by indie authors. I received a free copy but this in no way obligated me to give any other than an honest review.