Review: Whiny, oh-poor-me hero loves an insipid, underdoggette heroine.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 13, 2014
I enjoyed Lark'sThe Illicit Love of a Courtesan: HarperImpulse Historical Romance, the romance in which the hero of this new story is still a boy whose mother, widow of the heir to a dukedom, is left to her own devices and has to resort to life as a courtesan until rescued by her own hero.  That was a pretty good love story.The boy, John, his grandfather's heir, is torn between the love of his mother and the control of his cold grandfather.  So, waah, waah, waah.  He grows up feeling unloved?  He's quite the Whiny John here, although I'd gotten the idea from the previous book that he was well loved by his mother and received love and acceptance from his new stepfather.  So what's with all this woe-is-me attitude in this book?So, sorry.  I didn't like him.  Also didn't like the heroine.  Although not of the peerage, she and her brother grew up as childhood friends of John's.  And, of course, she's always, always, always loved and pined for him, even when he goes off to Egypt for ages to waah-waah some more.He comes back to England when big bad mean grandpa the Duke dies and John has to take over the duchy.  That also calls for more waah-waah-ing on his part.  But at the funeral he sees his sweetly insipid childhood friend and mysteriously becomes attracted to her, almost to the point of obsession.  So the romance goes from there.  It's an unequal footing for the couple.  He has all the power and she has nothing except her undying love for him and, apparently, no self esteem.I could not like this off-balance romance and the writing wasn't good enough to make up for it.  Very repetitive and slow-moving, with an extremely slight storyline.  Oh, and the Punctuation Police?  This is another Kindle book in which they are AWOL.