A review by lezreadalot
The Raven and the Banshee by Carolyn Elizabeth

4.0

“Are you all right?” 
“No. Not until you touch me.”

A wonderful historical romance with a dash of action and adventure, and characters I really really came to love. Branna and Julia fell in love at sixteen, but are then torn apart by parental whims and a tragedy on the high seas. Now it's 15 years later, and Branna is a ruthless ship captain and Julia is a successful merchant, and they find themselves thrown together again. I can be pretty picky about pirate stories and depictions of the historical Caribbean, and while I didn't particularly love anything about the way the setting was portrayed, I had nothing to complain about either. There's a lot of action and adventure and gore, and I think this does a good job of showing the brutality of life on the seas without going overboard (................ba dum psh) about it. It didn't take long for me to get totally immersed in the story and the characters.

Said characters were just awesome, exactly what I want out of a novel like this. Branna is badass and competent and desperate to cling to the ruthless name she's made for herself, but she can't keep her heart hard against Julia. Julia was wonderful as well; the consummate survivor, smart and confident and gives as good as she gets. Their chemistry was so so good, and even though the push-and-pull in the relationship was a teensy but frustrating, it was realistic, and played out the way I think a second chance romance of this nature would. Some of the situations they get thrown into are so harrowing, and the ways they come out of it, the ways the author shows how much they still care about one another... I really really loved it. All of the scenes aboard the ship when they're learning to be around each other again, but in a different capacity... gah. I ate it all up. There's also so many good care-taking scenes in this that I just adored. Another thing I liked is that Branna is known as a female captain. In a lot of stories like this, you'll have the female character masquerading as a man in order to rise to the position she is. While I don't dislike that at all, I do enjoy that Branna has to juggle the extra weight of always needing to be seen as tough and capable, because as a woman, her position is so precarious.

This could have gotten a higher rating from me, but the pacing did slow down considerably several times, and that messed with the flow for me. The change of pace was probably necessary, but idk, I feel like it could have been written better, so we didn't feel like we were in a lull. Might just be a me thing though!

Listened to the audiobook as read by Mary Sarah, and. Okay, I definitely liked her voice, no complaints there, but she had a very unique reading style? Especially when it came to the prose? Her voice would lilt up and down unnecessarily, and sometimes it would genuinely confuse me, because we'd be in the middle of a fight scene and homegirl would be reading like she was doing ASMR or singing me a lullaby.