LoveSpell, $5.99, ISBN 0-505-52534-8
Fantasy Romance, 2003
The latest paranormal historical from Janeen O’Kerry still doesn’t work too well with me. She must have plenty of fans for her to keep going in her paranormal series – this is the seventh book in the series? – so I guess fans will probably like this one too. It has all the hits and misses as the previous books in the series have.
Keavy, our heroine, rejects all the suitors because (a) she believes she is too tall and hence an unsuitable wife, ie no man will love such a tall wife, and (b) when she is just a little more than a kid, she fell in love with a man who could change into an eagle. Shut up, Freud. It’s not nice to speculate about such unsavory things – it’s just an innocent encounter between a lil’ girl and an eagle, that’s all. Keavy, now an unheard-of twenty-five years old spinster in those medieval times, finally decides that if she cannot marry for love, she may as well marry a stranger instead of some guy she knows well. Because that’s what you do when you can’t marry for love, I guess. If I emulate romance heroines in my life, my tombstone will read: Dead at sixteen, I hate Harlequin. (Sorry Harlequin, but it’s the only publisher I know that rhymes somewhat with “sixteen”.)
How lucky for her then that she learns that her bridegroom’s people have the best tradition ever: every bride must sleep with the King on the wedding night. Wow, I hate to see what happens when sixteen brides are married in one night. And by joyous circumstance, King Aengus is her Eagle Man! (I wonder how she will act when he has to service other brides once they’re married, but hey, Dead at sixteen, I hate Harlequin, let’s just move on.)
And so they engage in lovely honeymoon bliss, upon which she and he begin walking around just agonizing about their doomed love. She is so tall, so how can he marry her? Besides, he said once that he doesn’t want to marry for love, so she will hold on to what he says – she’s tall, he can’t love her as a result, so that means if they marry, it’ll be a marriage of convenience! And that’s… that’s… ghastly! A fate worse than death! Ugh, ugh, ugh, oh, it is so painful to fall in love, sob, sob, sob. On his part, it’s all “how can he love her when she makes it clear that she doesn’t want to marry, or can he even tell her?” ugh ugh ugh. Two people, two silly people, walking around in a melodrama about storms in teacups.
It’s not very nice for a hero to spend almost the entire book moping in a sad funk. It makes me want to call him a loser. The heroine is silly and she is also described as perfect – perfect hair, perfect body, perfect. Two losers, sitting around, grabbing on to something the other said and then clinging on to it even when it’s obvious that they can love each other if they only stop trying so hard to be stupid – well, Maiden of the Winds is a silly story of little misassumption bloated beyond proportions just so that our immature lil’ kiddies can pretend at playing adult games of falling in love. Hmm, whatever. Grow up first, kiddies.
