Timeless Lovers Press, $0.99, ISBN 978-1497748026
Historical Romance, 2012
Lily Silver’s Christmas at Ravencrest is an actual sequel, more of an epilogue actually, to some story that I have not read: Dark Hero. I only know the title of the related story from the author’s afterword.
Nowhere in the book page did it say that this one is a sequel. In fact, the cover of this one indicates that it is the first entry in the Dark Hero Christmas series.
Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t read minds or track every author out there, so I think I have the right to be feel tad cheesed off about being thrown right into a party with all the other guests that know one another and I’m the only fellow that is feeling left out.
Anyway, in this one, Elizabeth Fletcher is already married to Donovan Beaumont, Count Rochembeau, and this is the first Christmas that she will be celebrating as his wife.
His 15-year old brother is feeling tad cranky, however, mostly because he was shot in the arse by a villain that had a grudge against the hero (no, really) and not feeling it about being displaced from England to his sister’s new home in the West Indies.
If Michael weren’t already a handful, members of her family are also coming over…
Well, if it isn’t already obvious by now, my main issue with this thing is that it’s a sequel of something that I haven’t read, and this short story doesn’t give me a good idea of who and what these characters are, much less why I should care about them.
Elizabeth comes off as a high-strung lady that needs everything to be perfect—perfect!—but lacks the poise and analytical thinking to get things done in a properly organized manner.
Donovan is quite an ass in that he often does things to further aggravate Elizabeth while maintaining a smirk on his face. Under usual circumstances, his antics are harmless, but he should know that his wife is wound-up and ready to blow at any second, surely! As it is, he only makes Elizabeth feel more histrionic, and reading about her being like that makes my anxiety levels shoot up as a result.
Meanwhile, the secondary characters feel more like props in a play, as they are tad one-dimensional and exist solely to push and prod the heroine into where the author wants Elizabeth to be.
Mind up, I’m torn between wanting to hide when Elizabeth explodes and wanting to be there to her snap and pick up an ax to brutally murder everyone in a fit of psychosis. Still, let’s be real: there’s no way any of this is happening.
No, instead Elizabeth just sort of exists here, worrying and agonizing until her husband sweeps her in his arms and then everything is alright again, because he’s going to give her plenty of hot sex as the happy ending of all happy endings.
This feels anticlimactic. It’d be nice if Elizabeth is more proactive here instead of merely going into perpetual worrywart mode, but she just sort of drifts around until she gets the “I survived Christmas with the family!” consolation trophy.
I know, I know, in real life, Christmas with the family can be like this, and most of us are just happy to have lived through another one with our sanity mostly intact and having murdered no one no matter how tempting it would be to do so. That’s real life, though, and this is a story. It won’t hurt for the heroine to kick ass during the whole thing.
Because the heroine is what she is, this one doesn’t feel like a complete story as much as it is a rather unsettling head trip inside a heroine that seems to be on the verge of going full cray cray at any second but doesn’t, making me sitting at the edge of my seat all the time for the explosion that never comes.
The whole experience is unsatisfying as a result, like being stuck with a guy that only does clumsy foreplay for what seems like eternity until one screams “Can you just get it over with already?”, only for him to go oops, look at the time—he has to go catch Pokimane on her live stream now. Just ugh, really.
