A review by sararo
To Resist a Scandalous Rogue by Liana De la Rosa

1.0

I picked up this book because it was on a list of books with Jewish main characters and I'm always down for reading that. Hoo boy. There was one thing I really liked about the book - namely the author's sensitivity to power dynamics in social relationships in England across class lines. But overall, this book didn't work for me for two reasons: first, the constant references to the Duke (hero's brother in law) making all his money in the West Indies. Given the time period, I'm not interested in books where the hero and his family's money explicitly comes from the slave trade. I know the Duke was the previous hero and maybe the author painted him as a reformer and abolitionist there, but it wasn't apparent here. 

Second, and more importantly, the way the author handled Judaism and heroine's Jewish identity was beyond frustrating. The random Hebrew words and references to Jewish instruments/stories from Jewish mythology were jarring (and at times wrong) and on any sort of deeper level, Judaism didn't seem to be integral to her personality. And the ending - where the heroine

CONVERTS  TO CHRISTIANITY - was just... Don't market a romance as having a Jewish heroine if in the end she converts to Christianity, even if only superficially. Especially given that in her first marriage, the heroine was committed enough to Judaism that her husband converted for her. Her no longer being legally Jewish isn't actually a happy ending.

I don't know the author's own religious affiliation, but a Jewish sensitivity reader would have helped with some of the serious problems here.