Berkley, $7.99, ISBN 0-425-18685-7
Historical Romance, 2002
Did you see the cover price? $7.99 for a Lynn Kurland book. Has this author even hit the upper echelons of the NYT bestseller list yet? This author must have a very good agent. Unpublished authors, you know whose number you should dial now.
Anyway, From This Moment On is a bleh book. It has everything that will annoy me no end: a dumb heroine posing as a knight, lots of cartoony villains bordering on being skanky, and a plot that revolves around our heroine needing constant rescue while making a martyr out of herself.
Aliénore “Freak Alien” of Solonge was about to marry when she listened to a nasty woman’s gossip of her hubby-to-be, the Butcher of Berkamshire. The woman is mean and nasty, but like Freak Alien here said, why should she lie right? Why indeed. So Alien flees and becomes a knight named Henri.
Cut to today, where “Henri”‘s charge, Sybil is about to be married. One thing leads to another and “Henri” ends up in her ex-intended’s house, and there she learns that he ain’t so bad after all. Love is in the air. If I take a hammer and whack away at my forehead, I still won’t understand then what the heck is the entire point of making the heroine run away only to learn that she is all, all wrong. The author may as well plant a sign on Alien’s butt: “Kick me, I’m an idiot.”
And as a knight, “Henri” is pathetic. She trembles, shivers, and generally freezes up when she is close to being discovered, I have no idea how this brain-flattened Alien freak dummy can last ten seconds in the outside world as a knight. Maybe some people will call this display of ghastly ineptness “feminine virtues”. I call it “if you can’t handle the heat, please don’t stick your head in the oven unless you really want to roast your useless head into crisp.”
So Colin likes Henri. He teaches her to fight. People beat up Henri/Alien. Colin comforts her. People beat up Henri/Alien. Colin comforts her. To top it off, Alien wants to save the world. I don’t know whether to look through splayed fingers or convert to Scientology so that I can beg Xenu to come down and take me to that lovely distant planet where I will never be subjected to such silly stories ever again.
This book has two agenda: to prove how useless heroines are, and to top it off, they can’t even make decent decisions. Heck, the heroine ran away for nothing, didn’t she? “Stupid” just doesn’t cover the meager territory within her brain cavity. And to add to the insult, this book’s title has me hearing that awful Shania Twain song in my head now. From This Moment On is a dull, predictable, and annoying rescue fantasy of a dumb, use-free damsel who mistakes stupidity as something “feminine” and hence “good”. Give me a break.
