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A review by stacieadavis
An Arranged Marriage by Jo Beverley
1.0
Content warning: sexual assault.
Full disclosure: this book may have gotten three stars from me in other circumstances. The author seems to have done her setting research, and it kept my interest. What I won't overlook in this book is the fact that it used a rape as a "meet-cute" for the romantic leads. Although it isn't one of those books where the male protagonist himself wins the hand of the fair lady after having sexually assaulted her--which is especially stomach-turning on the scale of awful--the rapist still goes unpunished, the other characters downplay the seriousness of the attack, and the crime becomes normalized as merely an awkward social gaffe. Eleanor Delaney's independent spirit is no consolation for this ugliness. She merely becomes yet another woman whose pain is compounded by the indifference of both her attacker and her society to her fundamental personhood.
Full disclosure: this book may have gotten three stars from me in other circumstances. The author seems to have done her setting research, and it kept my interest. What I won't overlook in this book is the fact that it used a rape as a "meet-cute" for the romantic leads. Although it isn't one of those books where the male protagonist himself wins the hand of the fair lady after having sexually assaulted her--which is especially stomach-turning on the scale of awful--the rapist still goes unpunished, the other characters downplay the seriousness of the attack, and the crime becomes normalized as merely an awkward social gaffe. Eleanor Delaney's independent spirit is no consolation for this ugliness. She merely becomes yet another woman whose pain is compounded by the indifference of both her attacker and her society to her fundamental personhood.