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3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
2.5 stars
Those first two hundred pages were... XP
But after that I just flew right through it.
Those first two hundred pages were... XP
But after that I just flew right through it.
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
WARNING: SPOILERS!
Bertrice Small's was a brilliant writer, and this book's plot is solid. It never lagged and kept me turning pages till the end.
My adulation ends here. You'd better grab coffee now; this is going to be a lengthy review.
I first read UNCONQUERED years ago when I was young and dumb. Recently, I gave it a reread. Mistake. Huge mistake. Rereading it as an adult, the impact has hit. Hard. And I need to vent.
(Oh, to build a time machine and go back to slap this book out of eighteen-year-old me's hands! If I could do that, this review wouldn't be necessary!)
UNCONQUERED encapsulates all that is cringeworthy in Small's books, especially gratuitous violence. The aftermath of the raid on the Cherkessky farm ranks right up there with the deflowering scene in ADORA as the most revolting thing I've ever read in Small's books, or in any book by any author, for that matter. I'll spare the details; they're horrifying.
As are the details of Gillian Abbott's demise. Jesus. No one deserves to go out like that. Not even my worst enemy.
Every time Jared was mentioned, I threw up in my mouth a little. He was a f*ckboy and is by far the most repulsive "hero" in the Small canon, brimming over and bursting with every despicable trait imaginable. He only loved Miranda for her physical attributes and groomed her like crazy. (There is mention that Jared still had much to teach Miranda about love; proof of the grooming right there.) To add to his "ick" factor, he constantly creeped on Amanda, calling her "kitten" and even kissing her outright!
Miranda was no angel, either. She was a narcissist and a borderline sociopath who thought her poo didn't stink because she had wealth and a title. She was a Mary Sue who could make every man who laid eyes on her fall in love/lust. She was a useless member of society who contributed nothing to it. And she was hugely stuck on herself.
The thing that enraged me about Jared the most was that he was 100% of the reason Miranda suffered misfortunes in Russia, and the guilt lay on him in two parts. First, as any caring wife would, Miranda hared off to Russia to ascertain his safety when he went MIA. Couldn't he have kept in touch with her somehow to assuage her fears? Also, I'm 200% convinced that he was involved with other women while incarcerated. (Miranda suspected this, which was probably true, and it's probably why he didn't keep in touch with her.)
Second, when Miranda and Gillian met for the first time at Almack's, Jared dangled them in front of each other in a perverse, twisted game, when he should have dragged Miranda away at the first sight of Gillian. Any man with half a brain knows to keep his wife and his ex-whore far away from each other. That Jared failed to do this imbued Gillian with a vendetta against Miranda, and boy, did she ever get even! It was Miranda's rotten luck that Gillian was in St. Petersburg at the same time she was, and Gillian's status as Prince Cherkessky's mistress put her in a unique position to claim her vengeance. If Jared had handled things better at Almack's, perhaps Gillian wouldn't have acted out.
To add insult to injury, Jared dared to blame Miranda for her calamities in Russia. In actuality, if he had been a proper husband and stayed home with her, none of that awful stuff in Russia would have happened to her!
Every bad thing that happened to Miranda could be traced back to Jared, not just the Russia experience: her father's death, being put in Gillian's crosshairs, the unfortunate one-night stand with Jonathan, the confrontation with Belinda de Winter, etc.
I understand Miranda and Lucas were thrown together under less-than-favorable circumstances. But he was beautiful inside and out, worshipped her, and supported her while she was pregnant with Fleur. (While Jared abandoned her while she was pregnant with Tom. Also, it was so sweet that Lucas carried her back to her room each night instead of making her do the walk of shame <3. Jared would never have done that for her.)
Lucas was the only man who had courted Miranda, or tried to court her. None of her other men cared enough about her feelings to do that: Jared rushed her into marriage for the sake of an inheritance, Jonathan took advantage of her while she was intoxicated, and Mirza manipulated her into sleeping with him. And no matter how cold she was to Lucas, he never stopped loving her. It was heartbreaking. She was a soul-sucking succubus who destroyed him.
I wouldn't have nearly as much angst from this book if Lucas had disconnected from Miranda when he realized she would never requite his love for her. Also, it would have made me happier if someone had hired him as a butler or something after the prince was killed. Then, perhaps, Lucas could have gotten a fighting chance at building a new and better life.
A word in Lucas's defense: he was coerced to be intimate with Miranda, as she was with him, thanks to Prince Cherkessky's insistence that they mate. Neither had the choice not to be intimate. A platonic relationship wasn't an option for them. And the prince would most certainly have been the type to hold a gun to their heads to get the job done. (Look how he didn't hesitate to resort to murder to take care of the Gillian problem). He was the villain, not Lucas. This is the hill I will die on.
I wanted to cry when Miranda contemplated abandoning Fleur after she was born. How could she even consider abandoning that sweet baby whom such a sweet man fathered? And cry again when she treated Lucas so coldly at their reunion. Couldn't she have at least said how happy she was that he had survived the raid?
(BTW, how exactly did Lucas survive that horror? Small didn't explain, and she should have!)
Miranda's callous attitude toward Lucas compelled him to take his life while she coughed up a few crocodile tears and said how happy she was for him now that he was dead! I can't make this up! She demolished him, and I wanted to wring her scrawny, narcissistic neck for doing that!
I can't reconcile Lucas's and Fleur's tragic fates, and I wish I could jump into this book and give them the happy endings they deserve. They were the only characters in this sh*tshow of a story that I truly liked, and they were both treated horribly. WHY???
(Not gonna lie: I'm on Team Lucas. That man was divine, irrespective of how he came into Miranda's life, and she was a fool to spurn him. God had a plan for sending her to that slave farm, as horrible as it was. Miranda should have run away with him and said goodbye to Jared.)
Among the many things that infuriated me was Miranda's attitude toward sleeping around. Sleeping with Lucas made her an adulteress and a whore, but sleeping with Jonathan and Mirza didn't. Hmmm. Could this have had anything to do with the fact that Lucas hailed from an impoverished peasant background, and Jonathan and Mirza were upper-class men of means? Yeah, it had everything to do with that. Miranda was unabashedly classist, among her many sins.
Something else that bugged me, among many things, was the book's ending. Miranda was shown happily carring on with Jared in the main cabin of their yacht, apparently unaffected by all she had endured the previous two years. Really? Really? Had I been her, I'd have been holed up alone, grieving for Fleur, wracking myself with guilt over the way I had treated Lucas, and suffering from PTSD from the Tatar raid. But she had astoundingly wiped all that clean from her mind. That's what a narcissist/sociopath does, after all.
Rereading UNCONQUERED reminded me why I closed the book, literally, on Small. Her books aren't romances, despite them being categorized as such. This book, as are most of her books, is a tale of misogyny, rape, adultery, pedophilia, necrophilia, incest, murder, violence, cruelty, bleakness, despair, and next-level heartache bundled together in a pretty bow with "love story" written on it and unleashed on an unsuspecting public. I get that they're set in past centuries, and people were different back then. But that's still no excuse for being subjected to the disturbing topics Small presents. Her books are more barbaric than romantic, and this is another hill I will die on.
Small ruined her raw talent by filling this book with the vilest things imaginable, and I wonder if she did so sadistically to elicit vehement reactions from her readers and play twisted games with their emotions.
This book contains sufficient triggering subjects to warrant a warning sticker on the front cover.
I read romances to come away glowing with the conviction that love can conquer all, but I've never felt that way after reading Small's books, especially this one. I came away from it filled with angst, heartache, and rage. I'm swearing off all romance novels forever thanks to the trauma this travesty of a "love story" has caused me. I should never have reopened this Pandora's box, and I am sorry I did, for this book has messed up my head badly and brought me so much heartache. It hurt my soul.
Bertrice Small's was a brilliant writer, and this book's plot is solid. It never lagged and kept me turning pages till the end.
My adulation ends here. You'd better grab coffee now; this is going to be a lengthy review.
I first read UNCONQUERED years ago when I was young and dumb. Recently, I gave it a reread. Mistake. Huge mistake. Rereading it as an adult, the impact has hit. Hard. And I need to vent.
(Oh, to build a time machine and go back to slap this book out of eighteen-year-old me's hands! If I could do that, this review wouldn't be necessary!)
UNCONQUERED encapsulates all that is cringeworthy in Small's books, especially gratuitous violence. The aftermath of the raid on the Cherkessky farm ranks right up there with the deflowering scene in ADORA as the most revolting thing I've ever read in Small's books, or in any book by any author, for that matter. I'll spare the details; they're horrifying.
As are the details of Gillian Abbott's demise. Jesus. No one deserves to go out like that. Not even my worst enemy.
Every time Jared was mentioned, I threw up in my mouth a little. He was a f*ckboy and is by far the most repulsive "hero" in the Small canon, brimming over and bursting with every despicable trait imaginable. He only loved Miranda for her physical attributes and groomed her like crazy. (There is mention that Jared still had much to teach Miranda about love; proof of the grooming right there.) To add to his "ick" factor, he constantly creeped on Amanda, calling her "kitten" and even kissing her outright!
Miranda was no angel, either. She was a narcissist and a borderline sociopath who thought her poo didn't stink because she had wealth and a title. She was a Mary Sue who could make every man who laid eyes on her fall in love/lust. She was a useless member of society who contributed nothing to it. And she was hugely stuck on herself.
The thing that enraged me about Jared the most was that he was 100% of the reason Miranda suffered misfortunes in Russia, and the guilt lay on him in two parts. First, as any caring wife would, Miranda hared off to Russia to ascertain his safety when he went MIA. Couldn't he have kept in touch with her somehow to assuage her fears? Also, I'm 200% convinced that he was involved with other women while incarcerated. (Miranda suspected this, which was probably true, and it's probably why he didn't keep in touch with her.)
Second, when Miranda and Gillian met for the first time at Almack's, Jared dangled them in front of each other in a perverse, twisted game, when he should have dragged Miranda away at the first sight of Gillian. Any man with half a brain knows to keep his wife and his ex-whore far away from each other. That Jared failed to do this imbued Gillian with a vendetta against Miranda, and boy, did she ever get even! It was Miranda's rotten luck that Gillian was in St. Petersburg at the same time she was, and Gillian's status as Prince Cherkessky's mistress put her in a unique position to claim her vengeance. If Jared had handled things better at Almack's, perhaps Gillian wouldn't have acted out.
To add insult to injury, Jared dared to blame Miranda for her calamities in Russia. In actuality, if he had been a proper husband and stayed home with her, none of that awful stuff in Russia would have happened to her!
Every bad thing that happened to Miranda could be traced back to Jared, not just the Russia experience: her father's death, being put in Gillian's crosshairs, the unfortunate one-night stand with Jonathan, the confrontation with Belinda de Winter, etc.
I understand Miranda and Lucas were thrown together under less-than-favorable circumstances. But he was beautiful inside and out, worshipped her, and supported her while she was pregnant with Fleur. (While Jared abandoned her while she was pregnant with Tom. Also, it was so sweet that Lucas carried her back to her room each night instead of making her do the walk of shame <3. Jared would never have done that for her.)
Lucas was the only man who had courted Miranda, or tried to court her. None of her other men cared enough about her feelings to do that: Jared rushed her into marriage for the sake of an inheritance, Jonathan took advantage of her while she was intoxicated, and Mirza manipulated her into sleeping with him. And no matter how cold she was to Lucas, he never stopped loving her. It was heartbreaking. She was a soul-sucking succubus who destroyed him.
I wouldn't have nearly as much angst from this book if Lucas had disconnected from Miranda when he realized she would never requite his love for her. Also, it would have made me happier if someone had hired him as a butler or something after the prince was killed. Then, perhaps, Lucas could have gotten a fighting chance at building a new and better life.
A word in Lucas's defense: he was coerced to be intimate with Miranda, as she was with him, thanks to Prince Cherkessky's insistence that they mate. Neither had the choice not to be intimate. A platonic relationship wasn't an option for them. And the prince would most certainly have been the type to hold a gun to their heads to get the job done. (Look how he didn't hesitate to resort to murder to take care of the Gillian problem). He was the villain, not Lucas. This is the hill I will die on.
I wanted to cry when Miranda contemplated abandoning Fleur after she was born. How could she even consider abandoning that sweet baby whom such a sweet man fathered? And cry again when she treated Lucas so coldly at their reunion. Couldn't she have at least said how happy she was that he had survived the raid?
(BTW, how exactly did Lucas survive that horror? Small didn't explain, and she should have!)
Miranda's callous attitude toward Lucas compelled him to take his life while she coughed up a few crocodile tears and said how happy she was for him now that he was dead! I can't make this up! She demolished him, and I wanted to wring her scrawny, narcissistic neck for doing that!
I can't reconcile Lucas's and Fleur's tragic fates, and I wish I could jump into this book and give them the happy endings they deserve. They were the only characters in this sh*tshow of a story that I truly liked, and they were both treated horribly. WHY???
(Not gonna lie: I'm on Team Lucas. That man was divine, irrespective of how he came into Miranda's life, and she was a fool to spurn him. God had a plan for sending her to that slave farm, as horrible as it was. Miranda should have run away with him and said goodbye to Jared.)
Among the many things that infuriated me was Miranda's attitude toward sleeping around. Sleeping with Lucas made her an adulteress and a whore, but sleeping with Jonathan and Mirza didn't. Hmmm. Could this have had anything to do with the fact that Lucas hailed from an impoverished peasant background, and Jonathan and Mirza were upper-class men of means? Yeah, it had everything to do with that. Miranda was unabashedly classist, among her many sins.
Something else that bugged me, among many things, was the book's ending. Miranda was shown happily carring on with Jared in the main cabin of their yacht, apparently unaffected by all she had endured the previous two years. Really? Really? Had I been her, I'd have been holed up alone, grieving for Fleur, wracking myself with guilt over the way I had treated Lucas, and suffering from PTSD from the Tatar raid. But she had astoundingly wiped all that clean from her mind. That's what a narcissist/sociopath does, after all.
Rereading UNCONQUERED reminded me why I closed the book, literally, on Small. Her books aren't romances, despite them being categorized as such. This book, as are most of her books, is a tale of misogyny, rape, adultery, pedophilia, necrophilia, incest, murder, violence, cruelty, bleakness, despair, and next-level heartache bundled together in a pretty bow with "love story" written on it and unleashed on an unsuspecting public. I get that they're set in past centuries, and people were different back then. But that's still no excuse for being subjected to the disturbing topics Small presents. Her books are more barbaric than romantic, and this is another hill I will die on.
Small ruined her raw talent by filling this book with the vilest things imaginable, and I wonder if she did so sadistically to elicit vehement reactions from her readers and play twisted games with their emotions.
This book contains sufficient triggering subjects to warrant a warning sticker on the front cover.
I read romances to come away glowing with the conviction that love can conquer all, but I've never felt that way after reading Small's books, especially this one. I came away from it filled with angst, heartache, and rage. I'm swearing off all romance novels forever thanks to the trauma this travesty of a "love story" has caused me. I should never have reopened this Pandora's box, and I am sorry I did, for this book has messed up my head badly and brought me so much heartache. It hurt my soul.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Incest, Infidelity, Miscarriage, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexism, Sexual violence, Slavery, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Grief, Abortion, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Gaslighting, Abandonment, Alcohol, Sexual harassment, War, Classism
2.5 stars. Had a few good moments, but with all of the unnecessary descriptions of unimportant details and the silly twists and turns for the heroine, this story eventually became an eyeroll-worthy mess.
But I did love the hero. So there IS a plus.
But I did love the hero. So there IS a plus.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Oh. My. God. What did I just read??
I cannot begin to describe the craziness that is this book. For one, the main characters are hardly together for most of it. Between political intrigues and kidnappings, it shouldn't come as a surprise. It was to such a point that I started shipping Miranda (the heroine) with other suitors.Mizra stole my heart and it pained me that she didn't stay with him, even after he sexed her to bring her back to life. I shit you not.
Adultery, incest, sex slaves, rape, not-really-consensual-but-ok-let's-pretend-it-was sex are the order of the day. It took me nearly 3 weeks to get through the first 50%. Yes, it was that painful. The endless descriptions of every menial, useless little detail from the dresses to the food (so.many. salmons en gelée) to the precise cardinal directions of all the buildings in the story (and I do mean ALL THE BUILDINGS). It was absolutely madness.
After the first 50%, the plot showed up and boy was it a doozy. Ridiculous to a T yet strangely entertaining in the "what the fuck is going to happen NOW?" sense.
Ms. Small goes on a killing spree that I had never seen before in any romance novel. It was sort of like the Game of Thrones of romance novelswith the exception that the protagonists DO survive . Everyone from parental figures to characters you love to people you wanted dead, she took care of it. At times it became rather unfulfilling how quickly she got rid of troublesome characters. There was no real retribution except death. Poo. And oh my GOD when Lucas killed himself, my heart broke into a million pieces. He didn't deserve such a floptastic ending.
Overall crazy, clogged and too much for me most of the time. I am very unsure if I dare pick up another Bertrice Small novel but one thing I can say with confidence: it was quite a ride.
I cannot begin to describe the craziness that is this book. For one, the main characters are hardly together for most of it. Between political intrigues and kidnappings, it shouldn't come as a surprise. It was to such a point that I started shipping Miranda (the heroine) with other suitors.
Adultery, incest, sex slaves, rape, not-really-consensual-but-ok-let's-pretend-it-was sex are the order of the day. It took me nearly 3 weeks to get through the first 50%. Yes, it was that painful. The endless descriptions of every menial, useless little detail from the dresses to the food (so.many. salmons en gelée) to the precise cardinal directions of all the buildings in the story (and I do mean ALL THE BUILDINGS). It was absolutely madness.
After the first 50%, the plot showed up and boy was it a doozy. Ridiculous to a T yet strangely entertaining in the "what the fuck is going to happen NOW?" sense.
Ms. Small goes on a killing spree that I had never seen before in any romance novel. It was sort of like the Game of Thrones of romance novels
Overall crazy, clogged and too much for me most of the time. I am very unsure if I dare pick up another Bertrice Small novel but one thing I can say with confidence: it was quite a ride.