Review: Predictable - but very nice
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 10, 2012
Aric Claydon, one of King William's trusted knights,  is on his way to meet his bride. He has never seen her before and he doesn't really care who she is, since this isn't a love marriage but a marriage of convenience that would give Aric his own land and hopefully an heir. He is one year late to claim his bride but has sent an advance party that has been back reporting to him. Therefore he knows approximately what Lady Danielle looks like and he also knows that there are her cousins with whom he would have to deal.Lady Danielle knows what to expect from her future life. Marriages of convenience with the sole purpose to produce heirs and secure alliances are common for noble ladies. She just hopes that her future husband would be good to her people and maybe to herself. She willingly accepts her faith but cannot understand why her groom delays his arrival for one year. In any case, her cousins haven't lost the opportunity to needle her accordingly. However, when Lady Danielle sees her betrothed for the first time she knows that this gorgeous warrior could never feel anything for her. Or can he?Aric was depicted as the classical alpha male of the time. A fierce warrior with a demanding code of honor that wouldn't allow him to show his feelings, since this could be interpreted as weakness.Lady Danielle was a more complex character. She knows what is expected of her in all domains of her life. She tries to co-exist with her abusive cousins, runs the estates' business, cares for her people and has accepted the fact that she will end up in a marriage with purpose but no love. It was interesting to see how she transformed from a woman with very low self-esteem to a worthy counterpart of Aric. It was also very moving to observe that Danielle always believed in love, struggled in her marriage of convenience to find this emotion and was finally rewarded with deep love from her husband. Very nice!The story line was well arranged and clearly laid-out, unfortunately though a bit predictable and nothing unusual for this genre. In any case, this didn't really diminish the reading pleasure, especially since the main characters as such were clearly dominating the plot and not vice versa.I very much enjoyed the author's historical remarks that helped create the right atmosphere and background for the book. However, there was one sentence towards the end of the book that left me stunned. In this sentence Aric banned somebody to the Americas (Location 3953: "You will be banished to the Americas and imprisoned there.") How come? Time wise the story is placed in 1072, but I thought that large-scale European colonization of the Americas began shortly after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Is there any explanation for this?