Review: Disappointing.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 06 8, 2013
I was so sure I would enjoy this book.  I made it to Chapter Eleven and had to stop.  The primary female character had been so abused during childhood by her father that her self-esteem was shot.  She accepted and expected the same type of treatment from her husband. Her husband's first wife had belittled him and cheated on him and left him feeling worthless as a husband.  So we have two people with self-esteem issues.  Nothing new about that.  However, the male character was downright abusive to his new wife--all because he was determined not to be burned again by another woman.  He forbade her from setting foot outside the house and from even speaking to any other man, on pain of a beating; then at night he was a skilled lover.  Daylight arrives and the abuse picks back up.  Meanwhile his low-self-esteem wife is trying to anticipate what to do to prevent filing him.  Since the bedroom sex seems to be going well, she shyly takes the initiative, only to be angrily rebuffed and called the "w" (or the "h") word by her husband.  Now wifey thinks it's no more than she deserves.  I kept waiting for a change in this sick pattern but by Chapter Eleven I just could not take anymore.  This book seemed to have such potential.  Maybe it does have potential.  Maybe I should have kept on reading and I may have discovered that both husband and wife finally realized the sickness of each of their behaviors.  But I felt that continuing to subject myself to such dysfunctional behaviors would make me just as sick as those characters.