A review by books_ergo_sum
Through a Dark Mist by Marsha Canham

adventurous

1.0

Sooo. I didn’t have a good time with this one. My issues fell into a few categories…. Let’s get into it 😅

The romance plot:

▪️ There wasn’t much of one? These MCs hardly spent time in the same location, let alone in the same scene, let alone talking to each other, let alone falling in love on-page. I could’ve given it 1⭐️ for this alone.

This was NOT a Robin Hood retelling:

▪️ If ‘taking from the rich and giving to the (other) rich’ counts as a Robin Hood retelling then I quit.

There were some questionable writing techniques:

▪️ Holy head-hopping, Batman. We switched POVs every few paragraphs, with bizarre results. 

▪️ It leaned into the ‘ugly/deformed = evil’ trope. It was so ubiquitous that a, “Ooo, I bet you didn’t think this physically perfect person was going to be bad,” moment was supposed to… mean something? Yuck.

▪️ The girl-hate in here was getting to me.

▪️ I was intrigued by how low-key evil all the characters were at first, wondering how they’d do as MCs. With some, it was a ‘they’re secretly good’ thing; a classic. But with others, it just involved character breaking reversals. And with our heroine, it involved changing her from someone who didn’t care that her intended husband was philanderer (because she was hungry for that Grade A: D) to this innocent miss who was ashamed she felt any desire at all. Annd yeah, character breaking but also I think we were supposed to be disgusted with her at first? But I loved the first version of her character?

Then there was a ‘not this book’s fault—maybe Prisoner of My Desire has given me unrealistic expectations for how a 1991 book with SA as the main theme is going to pull it off’ … thing 😅, because:

▪️ I’m the idiot for thinking a ‘91 pub date book was going to do an okay job of SA themes, right? Well, it didn’t. It was also vague and contradictory about it, which made me reread huge chunks of the book multiple times (which didn’t contribute to my overall enjoyment, let’s just say that).

▪️ Didn’t appreciate the casual homophobia. But again, what was I expecting? 😅

This book is much-beloved. And it nailed the campy medieval old school histrom thing, so I’d recommend it for that.