Harlequin Historical, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-29841-9
Historical Romance, 2015
Like the previous book, Annie Burrows’s A Mistress for Major Bartlett, Louise Allen’s A Rose for Major Flint can be read as a standalone if you wish, but the first few chapters can be quite confusing as characters just show up and do their thing without much information given as to who and what they are. It doesn’t help that somebody is somebody’s bastard half brother and a couple of people have somewhat similar names (Gerald and Gideon, for example). If you are new to the whole Brides of Waterloo series and you have some patience, you will soon be able to catch up. After all, even if you don’t know the specific details on these characters, they are such stereotypes that you can easily fill in the blanks using what you know of romance tropes.
Basically, the story is like this: Major Adam Flint saves a woman from the enemies, fortunately before they rape her, but alas, Rose is already traumatized by the whole thing that she wakes up with amnesia and an inability to talk. Because amnesia automatically turns a person into a horny five-year old child, she immediately molests Adam’s nipples as they are, ooh, so fascinating. and Adam is, like, oh, how he’d like to shag this babe but alas, amnesia, angst, the usual. These two proceed to do the same old dance. First, the whole falling in love as a healing process thing, then he’s moaning that he’s of a lowly station and hence not good for her, she starts moping that she cannot marry him because he doesn’t say the L word, everyone wants to be more noble than the other person – if you have read anything by the likes of Catherine Anderson and friends, you know the whole routine by now, I’m sure.
A Rose for Major Flint is a pretty polished book, from a technical standpoint, but I found myself putting this book aside way too easily. It’s not very interesting, I’m afraid, mostly because this is a very familiar and predictable tale. The heroine spends time assuring the hero that he’s awesome all the while putting herself down, the hero does the same for her, and they persistently and often painfully refuse to believe that they are worthy of the other person. This is a well-written example of a blah story. There’s nothing really wrong with it except that it bores me more than I’d have liked.
By the time they finally reach the happy ending, I feel relieved because, finally, I can put this book aside for good and read something else. Hopefully, something else with more explosions and other things to keep my interest.
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