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militantlyromantic's review
adventurous
emotional
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.5
The premise of this feels extremely Old School. The female lead, Mia, was captured by corsairs on a sea trip at seventeen and taken to be part of a harem in the Middle-East. Some seventeen years later she escapes during what is essentially a coup, and returns to England. She goes back to her father, who feels pretty accurately sociopathic in his need to marry her off before someone catches on to the massive lie that she's been in a convent all this time. Unfortunately, she's neglected to mention that she's left a seventeen year-old son behind, and has every intention of going back to get him.
(It's honestly never entirely clear to me why she can't just get him to come in the first place aside from "because plot" which I don't love. I'm not saying the author doesn't give a reason. It's just...not a very good one.)
Anyhoodle. Enter Adam, our main duderino. Adam has had two wives die under, uh, questionable circumstances. This has made him persona non grata with the rest of society. But Daddy Sociopath needs his daughter to legally shack up and he really does not care with whom she does it. Adam has not so much planned on doing the marriage thing again, but, welp, Mia's pretty fascinating, so he changes his mind. In fairness, this is the part Spencer makes work. I believe Adam is lonely, and sees Mia as a fellow outcast and wants what being with her offers him.
And for readers who are into the sexy times, Spencer is also quite good at those. They don't particularly do anything for me, but I can tell, objectively, that they're well-drawn.
When Mia finally begins working toward her goal of getting back to her son, Adam's reactions are probably accurate--angry she hasn't told him, certain he's not going to allow her to set foot anywhere near danger--but I don't care? She speaks Arabic, he doesn't. She knows her way around the palace, he doesn't. Also, it's her son. Whom she's going to recognize. And I'm just over domineering male behavior. I know a lot of readers find the "I'll protect you instinct" endearing. I find it annoying. Tell her you wish she wouldn't go, then respect her choices, FFS.
There's also this storyline regarding Adam's first wife having been mentally ill and him being terrified that it's been passed on to his daughters that's hard to talk about because while I respect that mental illness in women remains stigmatized today and was a weapon against women at that time, the whole storyline feels a) unnecessary and b) ableist in a manner that left a bad taste in my mouth.
Similarly, Mia spent seventeen years of her life in the harem, she raised a son there. Yet she seems to have no friends whatsoever--it's clear that there was a lot of rivalry, but it seems unlikely that zero alliances would have been formed--and aside from her ability to speak Arabic and her sexual knowledge/her relative lack of caring about what British society thinks, she doesn't seem to have picked up ANYTHING from being in an entirely different culture, where everyone would have practiced a different religion. It's as if the harem was a vacuum of a sort. I get that the premise of being a harem captive is treading some pretty fine lines in terms of Orientalism/exoticization of the Other. But the way it's used in this book makes it feel like because it's outside of England, it doesn't exist as a place of its own, a place that MATTERS, and that isn't a great solution for the overall problem.
In the end, this isn't a badly done book. It's just not a well-done book, either.
Content Warnings
Minor: Ableism
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