Review: A good plotline but that's pretty much the only thing worthwhile
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 17, 2013
The story is about the rescue, by a naval captain, of a pregnant woman who had been kidnapped and treated as a sex slave for a year and about the woman and captain falling in love.The good things about this book are:An unusual storyline--not the same old, same old plot---and, relatedly, the reader's desire to keep reading to figure out what disastrous events will occur and how the protagonists will deal with them.The not so good things about this book are:The characters are cardboard cutouts--no complexity here--and throwbacks to an earlier era.  He believes women should stay at home, not work, and have babies. (This is treated by everyone as just a quirk--not really important.) The heroine is sweet, soft-spoken and suitably compliant, trusting him on everything and doing what she is told. We are told he is respected by his men but all we see is his being tyrannical, difficult, and unpleasant. He appears to fall in love with her because she is beautiful and acts deferential and adoring.  UGH! I mean, I like some alpha male heroes (Kristen Ashley's for example) but this guy is just a jerk and she appears happy to be a second-class citizen.Many problems with the writing. Arguably the worst offense is the anticlimaxes, that is, foreshadowing things that don't happen! A classic example raised in many writing classes is from Checkov, that is, a writer should never bring a lot of attention to a loaded gun lying on the table at the beginning of the story unless someone does something with it. That failure to follow through is exactly the kind of thing that happens in Saved: one of the main plotlines just.....disappears. We get this big build up about this critical issue then NOTHING happens!! No real resolution--we are only told that everyone stops worrying about it. ARGH!Another example: we have a secondary female character who enters part way through the novel to carry out a plot-related task.  She spends much of her time mooning over a secondary male character and we are told a lot about what she is thinking and feeling. Even after she realizes the man is married she is still crushing on him but doesn't try to hook up or anything.  Then she completes her plot-related task and....leaves. Again, nothing happens! A build-up and another anticlimax when this subplot doesn't go anywhere.Other problems: There is little of the details about the way things look, feel, sound, smell and taste in the story, things that bring a story to life. We learn virtually nothing about the heroine. Finally, the young, gentle, innocent heroine seems hardly bothered at all by being repeatedly raped, beaten, and locked up for a YEAR by a Muslim terrorist who treats her as a sex slave! Talk about difficulty in suspending disbelief!At first I thought this might be a Christian book because of the conservatism of the characters and the fact that we never hear or see much of anything lustful from the hero in the first three-quarters of the book. However, there is a fair amount of cursing, including the use of the f word, so I guess not.So, if you have very traditional beliefs about men and women, including liking heroes who are arrogant, macho and tyrannical but still don't mind reading books with cursing, maybe you could like this book.