Review: Dark, Depressing Story- Not Your Typical Feel-Good Chater Novel
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 29, 2013
Reading this dark and violent tale, I would never know this was an Elizabeth Chater novel but for her name on the cover.  I have read a number of her stories, buying some of her novels individually, as well as three of her collections- all for the reasonable price of between 99 cents for the individual novels (and her collections, too, when on sale) and $2.99.  Her stories are filled with interesting characters from the Georgian Era and Regency Period.  They are happy stories, but do have some meat in them.  A heroine loses her family home due to her teenage brother's foolish bet, a hero has a series of "accidents" which injure and nearly kill him due to a nephew who is staging these "accidents" in hopes of killing his uncle so that he can inherit, and heroines flee from facing the prospect of unwanted arranged marriages by striking out on their own.  These are typical examples of what happens in her novels.  In the end, people who are good and kind find their HEA, even though there are some close calls.  Her novels are clean, and are filled with hope and love.Not so with this story.  In this novel, it seems that all of the bad luck and close calls from her other novels suddenly descend upon the good, kind-hearted characters in this story.  Something so sad, so shocking happens to the h about 1/3 of the way into this novel that I wanted to stop reading the novel and delete it.  I pushed on toward the end because I knew that I wanted to give a complete and fair review of this novel to Chater fans who had enjoyed her other novels and were considering buying this one.  It is as if in this novel, set in the Victorian Era, the good fortune enjoyed in the Georgian and Regency time periods had to end- violently.I cannot recommend this novel.  I feel that Chater fans will be put off by the really dark material here which will blindside them.  People who are reading Chater for the first time will be given a completely wrong impression of her novels and storytelling.  This was the last of her novels which I read after purchasing a number of them from Amazon, and if this had been the first one, it would have also have been my last.  There are great Chater novels out there- this is not one of them.******************SPOILERS***************************The h is this tale is an eighteen-year-old innocent who has lived in England for ten years and is returning to India and her parents.  She knows nothing about "the facts of life", and this tale shows how young women who are kept so sheltered that they know nothing about the dangers facing them in the real world can be taken advantage of.  She grows up without the benefit of being around older brothers and their friends whose gossip might be overheard, nor the gossip of servants who can sometimes impart knowledge of the real world to sheltered misses.  She really doesn't know how she can be used by men.  Onboard the ship, she is befriended by a brother and sister who do their best to protect her from a handsome and charming officer who wants to seduce her, although the h of course thinks that they are in love and so she agrees to become secretly engaged to him.  When they arrive in India, she says goodbye to the brother and sister, only to learn from the villain and an uncaring fellow passenger that her parents are dead.  That night, while she is crying over the loss of her parents, the villain drugs and rapes her.  Due to the opium, she thankfully can't remember what exactly happened, and without knowing "the facts of life", she is in the dark anyway.  She continues to love and wish to marry her rapist.  She sees him again when he visits her at her employer's home for tea.  She agrees to meet him again at a market, alone in a tent and asks him what happened that night.  He asks if she would like him to show her, and says that he would like to.  Yuck!  He has people to see, places to go, and thankfully leaves her.  She is not so lucky the next time they meet alone.  She again goes to the market to see him to ask him questions, and he takes her to a tent away from the market.  There, he again rapes her, this time without opium so she is now awake to all suits.  She escapes and later when questioned about the attack, she says "I was raped".  Now, I guess, because of the attack, she uses and understands the term "rape" and understands everything he did to her the first night as well.This story's villain is so evil, it is sickening.  Secondary characters act one way, and then another.  A fifteen-year-old girl with great instinct- she can tell who is good, and who is bad- allows herself to be touched by the villain, and then creates a scene at a ball.  Really?  This is a girl who knew the villain was evil from the first moment she laid eyes on him, I find it hard to believe that she would give him the time of day.  One minute, characters want to leave India because of uprisings, then after murders occur, they decide to stay.  What?I cannot recommend this novel to anyone.  I have read all but two of the Chater novels offered by Amazon, and this one leaves you in a state of depression.  One of the most disturbing novels I have ever read.