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ephemerily 's review for:
The King's Spinster Bride
by Ruby Dixon
I felt mixed while reading this about whether I was enjoying it or not. On one hand, I loved the premise of a hero who's always remembered the woman who saved his life, and vowed to return to her someday. And I liked the device of a heroine marrying a barbarian with unusual wedding customs that adds a bunch of steamy scenes. I'm new enough to the romance genre that I'm not up on all the tropes, so if these are tropes, they are new to me. The writing was good and I mostly enjoyed reading about the characters.
But I kept finding my attention knocked out of the story. For one thing, both characters seem to have two personalities. Malthior is smitten with Halla and cares about her comfort and pleasure, but more times than I can count, he suddenly thinks "Halla belongs to me" or "She is mine" or "I get everything I want" and it was so jarring. And Halla flips between being a 100% shy virgin and being an assertive leader. Some of the vocabulary was a little more dirty than I'm used to, and the barbarian customs were a little squeam-inducing (squeamish-inducing?), and there was talk of war and killing as if it was no biggie—not something to do when necessary, but what Mathior loves. The little distractions took away from the story, and there were so many of them that they threatened to overwhelm my reading experience.
But I kept finding my attention knocked out of the story. For one thing, both characters seem to have two personalities. Malthior is smitten with Halla and cares about her comfort and pleasure, but more times than I can count, he suddenly thinks "Halla belongs to me" or "She is mine" or "I get everything I want" and it was so jarring. And Halla flips between being a 100% shy virgin and being an assertive leader. Some of the vocabulary was a little more dirty than I'm used to, and the barbarian customs were a little squeam-inducing (squeamish-inducing?), and there was talk of war and killing as if it was no biggie—not something to do when necessary, but what Mathior loves. The little distractions took away from the story, and there were so many of them that they threatened to overwhelm my reading experience.