A review by bluejayreads
This Other Eden by Marilyn Harris

Did not finish book. Stopped at 36%.
My youngest sister is getting married in August, and I volunteered to make origami flowers out of book pages for the bridesmaids’ bouquets. So I ended up with a small stack of my late great-grandmother’s old books to cut up and turn into flowers. But there’s not that many bridesmaids, and even with all the pages that didn’t make for good-looking flowers and all the flowers that tore because the paper was old and fragile, it still took less than a single book to make all the flowers my sister needed. So I was left with a stack of old books with no real purpose. And for most of them, I had no information about them except a title and author name. 

This is one of the books in that stack. It was a hardcover missing a dust jacket, so all I had was the fact that the cover itself was green, the book was old enough to have some yellowing around the edges of the pages but not old enough to be really fragile, and it had the title and author embossed on the spine. That’s it. So, as I was briefly looking through all of the books to see if any were worth more than the donate bin, I flipped This Other Eden open to the first page and tried to see if I could figure out what it was about. 

To no one’s surprise more than my own, I was actually drawn into the story! Whatever this book was actually about, it had a strong beginning that grabbed my interest, and I was instantly absorbed in the story of the clever but naïve young woman sentenced to a brutal public whipping over a misunderstanding with the fickle and feckless lord of the castle. It spent a lot of time with the perspectives of other characters, giving me insight into the cast of mostly-unlikeable but always human-feeling characters surrounding the central lord and young woman, and while nothing really seemed to be coalescing into a plot, it was well-written for the most part and the characters were interesting enough to keep me engaged. 

Then I made the mistake of looking this book up on The StoryGraph so I could mark it as currently reading. And The StoryGraph had a cover. And some back cover copy. So if you looked at the information at the top of this post and went, “This does not at all look like something I expected to find on this blog,” it’s because you went in with a lot more context than I did. 

But sometimes that lack of context can be a good thing. After all, there’s no way I would have even cracked this book open if I’d known from the start it was some variety of bodice-ripper. I do generally think trying new things is a good thing to do, and if I have to do it by lack of context, so be it. I did feel a little weird about the romance being between the 16/17-year-old girl and the 40ish-year-old man who had her whipped, but it was probably historically accurate to the 1700s when the book is set, and considering the start of the book it would probably be a few years before she could stand to be in the same room as him. So while that would still be a creepy and disturbing age gap, it would probably at least avoid literal pedophilia. So I decided to keep giving it a chance. Even as Marianne’s characterization devolved into inconsistency, by turns a shrewd and calculated manipulator and a cheerful, innocent Pollyanna type who inadvertently (and disturbingly) kept seducing all the much older men around her, I kept reading. It managed to keep my interest. 

Where I finally decided to stop reading is the point where Marianne’s older sister sets her up to be raped. (I don’t feel like this is a spoiler since A, it’s less than halfway into the book, and B, the back cover itself says that Marianne and Thomas get together in the end so I can’t spoil anything much worse than that.) It’s established earlier in the book that her sister has always disliked her, but it’s also clearly established that the dislike has nothing to do with this scenario – the sister just thinks Marianne should have had sex with Thomas the first chance she had and letting him rape her would actually be good for her. Minor spoiler, the rape attempt is thwarted, but I couldn’t bring myself to continue reading after that. I can believe that under unlikely but possible circumstances, a woman might be able to forgive a nobleman for having her whipped. I cannot reasonably believe that a woman could forgive the man who had her whipped and then attempted to rape her so thoroughly that she’d become his romantic partner – at least not without some sort of violent force or intense psychological manipulation that I have no interest in reading about. So either this book turns into some sort of psychological horror around the halfway point (unlikely, given the ostensible genre) or it makes attempted rape into at best something that can be overlooked in a romantic partner or at worst a manifestation of love. Either way, I’m out. 

I have actually read some of this type of romance before. (By “this type,” I’m drawing a distinction between contemporary romance and historical/bodice-ripper-type romances, because they’re very different in my head.) Both of my grandmothers were into them, and one lent me a few, at least one of which I know I actually read. So it would be inaccurate to say finishing this would have made it my first of this type of romance novel. But it would have been my first in over a decade and my first as an adult. So I kinda wanted to give it a chance for that. And up until that point, it was engaging enough to keep reading. But that whole rape thing killed my interest. Regardless of the reprehensible message, I don’t think there is a redemption arc in literary history powerful enough to make me see middle-aged attempted rapist Thomas Eden as a suitable husband for anybody, let alone the teenager he attempted to rape. I realize that sexual-assault-as-a-sign-of-love was not an uncommon trope in older romances and that this book was published in the 1970s. But it wasn’t okay then and it still isn’t okay now. This book got its chance, and that’s all it gets. 
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