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andra_mihaela_s's review
4.0
This was a delightful surprise!
Both Sarah and St.John were fully realized and honest to their characterization! Although is pretty obvious who stands in the way of their happiness, I couldn't guess how exactly the "theft" had happened...This first contact with the characters - an unhappy girl caught in a uncomfortable situation with another man - led itself to a beautiful conclusion with an equally nice journey.
Susanna Graig is a new author for me and I believe that her strength is found in the ability to create believable characters with enough emotional strain to have an old TV drama, and just the right amount of levelheadedness to resist being overly dramatic and pathetic.
So I reiterate, all the people mentioned in this book felt real, with just the emotional baggage as per their story and each with the perfect moment and things to add when necessary. A historical TV drama like the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.
For the highlights of the story!
-Sarah was very well balanced as a fugitive with an unexpected complication...looking at Clarissa..>..>....with a dash of a reserved "widow". Again, she was well behaved, proper and with a quite intelligence when necessary; a stubborn woman when the situation called; reluctant to trust without proof (rightfully so! >..-St.John was an interesting one...he also is prone to running from things that scare him, but his blindness to what he has in front of him is more upsetting. I enjoyed the fact that he needed time to accept the unexpected complication with Sarah once he found her...after all..everyone has doubts, insecurities and sometimes plain indifference to someone who wronged them. A small complaint...sometimes his opinion changed with the wind..and that was a little bit frustrating as a reader. Over all, I liked him...he was real and honest with himself and Sarah...not my exact type but he fits her to a T.
-Other characters who left a really good impression on me: Abigail Norris (Sarah's friend), Emily Dawlish (the village seamstress), Gerald Beals (the baker), and Mrs.Potts (the cunning old lady! :))) She always knew what was going on! Loved how she took Sarah's side)
-Awareness in regards to the privilege built on the backs of slaves
- last bit of praise: the romantic/smutty scenes were on point/ at the right time! ^^
Negative impressions: hmmm..hard to say...some repercussions for all the wrongdoings were in order for the culprits, but I cannot say I mind them missing from the book.
I really recommend this book, especially as a fall read...all that sea side scenery was perfect!
Enjoy!
Both Sarah and St.John were fully realized and honest to their characterization! Although is pretty obvious who stands in the way of their happiness, I couldn't guess how exactly the "theft" had happened...This first contact with the characters - an unhappy girl caught in a uncomfortable situation with another man - led itself to a beautiful conclusion with an equally nice journey.
Susanna Graig is a new author for me and I believe that her strength is found in the ability to create believable characters with enough emotional strain to have an old TV drama, and just the right amount of levelheadedness to resist being overly dramatic and pathetic.
So I reiterate, all the people mentioned in this book felt real, with just the emotional baggage as per their story and each with the perfect moment and things to add when necessary. A historical TV drama like the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.
For the highlights of the story!
-Sarah was very well balanced as a fugitive with an unexpected complication...looking at Clarissa..>..>....with a dash of a reserved "widow". Again, she was well behaved, proper and with a quite intelligence when necessary; a stubborn woman when the situation called; reluctant to trust without proof (rightfully so! >..-St.John was an interesting one...he also is prone to running from things that scare him, but his blindness to what he has in front of him is more upsetting. I enjoyed the fact that he needed time to accept the unexpected complication with Sarah once he found her...after all..everyone has doubts, insecurities and sometimes plain indifference to someone who wronged them. A small complaint...sometimes his opinion changed with the wind..and that was a little bit frustrating as a reader. Over all, I liked him...he was real and honest with himself and Sarah...not my exact type but he fits her to a T.
-Other characters who left a really good impression on me: Abigail Norris (Sarah's friend), Emily Dawlish (the village seamstress), Gerald Beals (the baker), and Mrs.Potts (the cunning old lady! :))) She always knew what was going on! Loved how she took Sarah's side)
-Awareness in regards to the privilege built on the backs of slaves
- last bit of praise: the romantic/smutty scenes were on point/ at the right time! ^^
Negative impressions: hmmm..hard to say...some repercussions for all the wrongdoings were in order for the culprits, but I cannot say I mind them missing from the book.
I really recommend this book, especially as a fall read...all that sea side scenery was perfect!
Enjoy!
slowburnsrus's review
2.0
DNF. Naive and easily manipulated heroine and a hero who’s initially an ass. I’m sure he gets better but I disliked all the characters too much to keep reading.
samd's review
1.0
ARC, NetGalley, &c
I've had to let this one percolate. A disappointment from start to finish. Flimsy premise, deeply unlikeable hero, heroine who was honestly doing her best given the circumstances, extremely sloppy and offensive handling of a delicate issue, i.e., slavery. Maybe white readers might have had an easier time with this? I'm not white. Never mind, I'm getting ahead of myself.
THE PLOT: A sort of bog standard, impoverished noble family needs filthy lucre to renovate their crumbling estates; nouveau riche merchant family wants a Title for their daughter; arranged marriage happens. No one is happy, obstacles to happiness are overcome, HEA ensues.
This purports to be a Georgian, but there's nothing particularly Georgian about it but maybe a few clothing descriptions and the fact that the West Indies and not actual India is where the hero goes to do his character development and get a Sexy, Ungentlemanly Tan™.
THE ACTUAL PLOT: Sarah Sutcliffe is eighteen years old, sheltered, and has the super hots for her new husband, St. John, to whom she has been married for all of two weeks, and who clearly does not want to be married to her. Like, at all. On the night of her wedding ball, she overhears him whispering sweet nothings to a female childhood friend. So she runs off, gets a little tipsy, and ends up in another man's lap with her titty out. Everyone, naturally, walks in. (Wow, this was clearly arranged by the villain of the piece, my honed romance reader instincts say.) To make matters worse, she's lost the family's signature jewels, a sapphire necklace. Things are about to get real bad for her.
UNTIL...... her evil stepmother offers her an out: just run away to a little place in the middle of nowhere. So, like an eighteen-year-old, she does. Everything about Sarah that has nothing to do with her husband's dick, I actually really like: she's independent, she's--this is barely a spoiler, secret babies are a dime a dozen--risen up under the pressures of being an "widow" whose child is rumored to be a bastard, she's done her best to improve the town she's hiding in. Good girl.
And then we get a look into St. John Sutcliffe's head. Our Hero: bog standard jackass with daddy issues, straight out of central casting.
Look. Daddy issues peaked in 1995, with Lord of Scoundrels, aka the Evangelion of romance novels. Daddy issues are just not inherently interesting. You gotta be a god tier character writer to pull them off, and Susanna Craig emphatically does not have the range. From what I can tell, we're expected to believe St. John had cultivated a pose of studied indifference to the world for so long and Years of practiced indifference had built a shell of ice around his heart-- and so on and so forth. Aight, I like an Iceman Hero, but... from what the author gives us, St. John got a few whoopings as a kid, and his dad is kind of mean, and that's about it. Nothing horrendous enough to justify what an enormous dick he is. All child abuse is horrible and traumatizing--yes--but I expect some narrative followthrough in my fiction.
Anyway, three years later, he comes back to England goes in search of his family jewels, and he just--turns up in Sarah's new life, upends it, threatens to take her kid away regardless of whether it's actually his, because she is a slut, he knows it to be true (and the less said about this kid, the better, I normally don't mind a plot moppet but this is a truly insufferable plot moppet), gradually realizes that all his awful assumptions are true and maybe the picture he formed that night he found her on Some Dude's lap was wrong. Sure.
At no point does he try to rise above his daddy issues. At no point does he actively try to become a doper person; as Sarah forgives him--for whatever unfathomable reason, narrative necessity, straight up not knowing any better--so are we, as the reader. I'm not buying it.
And here's the other reason we're meant to buy St. John's nonstarter of a redemption arc: like Sarah, he ran away; unlike Sarah, he ran away to the West Indies and got a job as a clerk on a plantation, and saw some bad shit there. I was already pretty queasy about how the author was going to handle it as a plot element as of this bit:
The narrative then moves on to how this plot moppet who may or may not be his daughter has melted his heart, etc. etc., and nothing else. Just... little black faces. Interchangeable little black faces. And then the author proceeds to drop every ball it is possible to drop the next time slavery comes up. Our Hero relates a story about a black woman sneaking onto a ship to find her child and subsequently drowning them both, but it's all about him and his inaction and his failure to save this absolute stranger, and the stain that his has left on his soul, and the way I'm putting it here, it sounds like it might be slightly compelling, but it's not. It's not.
This! Is horrible! It does not get any better from here.
Onward to:
A most uncomfortable reckoning. What a fucking mild way to put it. "I, a wealthy white man, witnessed the incredible pain and suffering of brown people, and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt, and a little bit of angst." It all gets dumped in this one little scene, and is not carried forward through the novel. It's a bigger theme than this writer's abilities and this shitty stock plot is capable of handling with any grace.
For example, the evil stepmother (who turns out to be a bit toothless, in the end) expresses her disappointment that St. John never brought her back a cute little black page; that's just dropped as an awful thing an awful person said, and it's not interrogated, not questioned, as I scream into my Kindle and contemplate giving this an immediate DNF. After all that, all the reaction we get is, "Sarah bit her tongue."
And, you know what, one good thing this novel has done for me is to force me to look at India and the suffering of the Indian people being the stock "let's not think too hard about British imperialism, guys" location in romance novels. If one insensitive, thoughtless treatment of colonialism is this awful, I am so sorry for my SE Asian sisters, who potentially have to deal with it every time they pick a historical romance up.
The author's note at the end adds this absolute fucking slap in the face:
Nothing is confronted, here. Nothing is challenged. Nothing is come to terms with! Slavery exists as a backdrop for white people to feel bad about themselves, and that's about it.
This is not even to mention the disappointing denouement--would that every novel could put its actual villain in a rowboat, never to be heard from again. The charmless stock characters in the town Sarah is hiding in--maybe "charmless" is a little harsh, but they don't have any life to them. Heyer, this is not. The bizarre tone shift at the end. The treatment of domestic violence, which is nearly as patronizing and shallow as the treatment of slavery, and so on and so forth.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. The summary of the next book in the series looks even worse, on the slavery front, and I will not read it.
Nice cover, though! Real nice cover. I'd consider this giving this an extra star for the cover... and the rowboat.
I've had to let this one percolate. A disappointment from start to finish. Flimsy premise, deeply unlikeable hero, heroine who was honestly doing her best given the circumstances, extremely sloppy and offensive handling of a delicate issue, i.e., slavery. Maybe white readers might have had an easier time with this? I'm not white. Never mind, I'm getting ahead of myself.
THE PLOT: A sort of bog standard, impoverished noble family needs filthy lucre to renovate their crumbling estates; nouveau riche merchant family wants a Title for their daughter; arranged marriage happens. No one is happy, obstacles to happiness are overcome, HEA ensues.
This purports to be a Georgian, but there's nothing particularly Georgian about it but maybe a few clothing descriptions and the fact that the West Indies and not actual India is where the hero goes to do his character development and get a Sexy, Ungentlemanly Tan™.
THE ACTUAL PLOT: Sarah Sutcliffe is eighteen years old, sheltered, and has the super hots for her new husband, St. John, to whom she has been married for all of two weeks, and who clearly does not want to be married to her. Like, at all. On the night of her wedding ball, she overhears him whispering sweet nothings to a female childhood friend. So she runs off, gets a little tipsy, and ends up in another man's lap with her titty out. Everyone, naturally, walks in. (Wow, this was clearly arranged by the villain of the piece, my honed romance reader instincts say.) To make matters worse, she's lost the family's signature jewels, a sapphire necklace. Things are about to get real bad for her.
UNTIL...... her evil stepmother offers her an out: just run away to a little place in the middle of nowhere. So, like an eighteen-year-old, she does. Everything about Sarah that has nothing to do with her husband's dick, I actually really like: she's independent, she's--this is barely a spoiler, secret babies are a dime a dozen--risen up under the pressures of being an "widow" whose child is rumored to be a bastard, she's done her best to improve the town she's hiding in. Good girl.
And then we get a look into St. John Sutcliffe's head. Our Hero: bog standard jackass with daddy issues, straight out of central casting.
Look. Daddy issues peaked in 1995, with Lord of Scoundrels, aka the Evangelion of romance novels. Daddy issues are just not inherently interesting. You gotta be a god tier character writer to pull them off, and Susanna Craig emphatically does not have the range. From what I can tell, we're expected to believe St. John had cultivated a pose of studied indifference to the world for so long and Years of practiced indifference had built a shell of ice around his heart-- and so on and so forth. Aight, I like an Iceman Hero, but... from what the author gives us, St. John got a few whoopings as a kid, and his dad is kind of mean, and that's about it. Nothing horrendous enough to justify what an enormous dick he is. All child abuse is horrible and traumatizing--yes--but I expect some narrative followthrough in my fiction.
Anyway, three years later, he comes back to England goes in search of his family jewels, and he just--turns up in Sarah's new life, upends it, threatens to take her kid away regardless of whether it's actually his, because she is a slut, he knows it to be true (and the less said about this kid, the better, I normally don't mind a plot moppet but this is a truly insufferable plot moppet), gradually realizes that all his awful assumptions are true and maybe the picture he formed that night he found her on Some Dude's lap was wrong. Sure.
At no point does he try to rise above his daddy issues. At no point does he actively try to become a doper person; as Sarah forgives him--for whatever unfathomable reason, narrative necessity, straight up not knowing any better--so are we, as the reader. I'm not buying it.
And here's the other reason we're meant to buy St. John's nonstarter of a redemption arc: like Sarah, he ran away; unlike Sarah, he ran away to the West Indies and got a job as a clerk on a plantation, and saw some bad shit there. I was already pretty queasy about how the author was going to handle it as a plot element as of this bit:
Sarah nodded absently, still watching Clarissa on the floor. "Have you spent much time with children, my lord?"(37%)
"A little," he said, recalling the eager, innocent black faces that had surrounded him on his every visit to the slaves' quarters on Harper's Hill Plantation.
The narrative then moves on to how this plot moppet who may or may not be his daughter has melted his heart, etc. etc., and nothing else. Just... little black faces. Interchangeable little black faces. And then the author proceeds to drop every ball it is possible to drop the next time slavery comes up. Our Hero relates a story about a black woman sneaking onto a ship to find her child and subsequently drowning them both, but it's all about him and his inaction and his failure to save this absolute stranger, and the stain that his has left on his soul, and the way I'm putting it here, it sounds like it might be slightly compelling, but it's not. It's not.
"[The people trying to get the woman and her kid out of the water] were... unsuccessful. The crowd broke up and went their separate ways, almost as if nothing had happened."
She hesitated. "And you?"
"I went back to the pub and--and tried to wash away the memory," he concluded, with a shake of his head.
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he was an unfeeling monster. And perhaps that ugly truth was not to be regretted--after all, feeling caused nothing but trouble and pain.
This! Is horrible! It does not get any better from here.
"And did you succeed?" she asked.
"No." The word passed his lips reluctantly. "Try as I might, I never could." [...] "But I might have done something.
"You did." She brushed his sleeve with her fingertips and then pulled back again. "You let that woman choose her fate. And then you saved [the plot moppet, who almost drowned a little bit ago] with what you learned that day. Let those things wipe away a bit of your guilt."
"Can guilt ever really be expunged?"
Onward to:
Three years in Antigua had forced him to consider how much of his won life--and the lives of almost everyone he knew--had been made possible by the inhuman toil and suffering. It had been a most uncomfortable reckoning.
A most uncomfortable reckoning. What a fucking mild way to put it. "I, a wealthy white man, witnessed the incredible pain and suffering of brown people, and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt, and a little bit of angst." It all gets dumped in this one little scene, and is not carried forward through the novel. It's a bigger theme than this writer's abilities and this shitty stock plot is capable of handling with any grace.
For example, the evil stepmother (who turns out to be a bit toothless, in the end) expresses her disappointment that St. John never brought her back a cute little black page; that's just dropped as an awful thing an awful person said, and it's not interrogated, not questioned, as I scream into my Kindle and contemplate giving this an immediate DNF. After all that, all the reaction we get is, "Sarah bit her tongue."
And, you know what, one good thing this novel has done for me is to force me to look at India and the suffering of the Indian people being the stock "let's not think too hard about British imperialism, guys" location in romance novels. If one insensitive, thoughtless treatment of colonialism is this awful, I am so sorry for my SE Asian sisters, who potentially have to deal with it every time they pick a historical romance up.
The author's note at the end adds this absolute fucking slap in the face:
In the Runaway Desires series, characters confront this ugly reality, come to terms with their roles in it, and challenge it when they can. In this, as in so many ways, the heroes and heroines of romance are unfortunately far from typical.
Nothing is confronted, here. Nothing is challenged. Nothing is come to terms with! Slavery exists as a backdrop for white people to feel bad about themselves, and that's about it.
This is not even to mention the disappointing denouement--would that every novel could put its actual villain in a rowboat, never to be heard from again. The charmless stock characters in the town Sarah is hiding in--maybe "charmless" is a little harsh, but they don't have any life to them. Heyer, this is not. The bizarre tone shift at the end. The treatment of domestic violence, which is nearly as patronizing and shallow as the treatment of slavery, and so on and so forth.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. The summary of the next book in the series looks even worse, on the slavery front, and I will not read it.
Nice cover, though! Real nice cover. I'd consider this giving this an extra star for the cover... and the rowboat.
pgchuis's review against another edition
3.0
Sarah, a merchant's daughter, marries St John, a member of the aristocracy, and after only two weeks of marriage she is found in a compromising position with Captain Brice, and having lost the family sapphires. No one believes that Sarah is an entirely innocent victim of circumstances. St John fights Captain Brice in a duel and, believing he might have killed him, flees to the West Indies for three years. St John's wicked step-mother spirits Sarah away to a tiny village in Devon, occasionally sending her small amounts of money, and claims the body of a woman recovered from the Thames was Sarah's.
Three years on, St John returns to England, discovers that Sarah is still alive and heads off to Devon to find her. On his arrival, he discovers that she has a daughter...
I found this novel well-written and well-paced, but the problem I had with it (and other have already mentioned this) was St John. If he secretly felt attracted to his new wife, why was he letting Eliza drape herself all over him and whispering to her? Why did he do that anyway? Why did he allegedly feel he could never love anyone? The process of his getting to know Sarah during the course of the book was believable until he has a tantrum on discovering she is planning to leave to escape being shunned as a moral outcast - something he has caused, albeit inadvertently. The ending got a bit ridiculous. The butler could not possibly have been unaware that St John had a wife. Was St John's father a hateful bully or a caring man in mourning for his first wife? Must confess to a bit of skimming towards the end.
Three years on, St John returns to England, discovers that Sarah is still alive and heads off to Devon to find her. On his arrival, he discovers that she has a daughter...
I found this novel well-written and well-paced, but the problem I had with it (and other have already mentioned this) was St John. If he secretly felt attracted to his new wife, why was he letting Eliza drape herself all over him and whispering to her? Why did he do that anyway? Why did he allegedly feel he could never love anyone? The process of his getting to know Sarah during the course of the book was believable until he has a tantrum on discovering she is planning to leave to escape being shunned as a moral outcast - something he has caused, albeit inadvertently. The ending got a bit ridiculous. The butler could not possibly have been unaware that St John had a wife. Was St John's father a hateful bully or a caring man in mourning for his first wife? Must confess to a bit of skimming towards the end.
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