Silhouette TimeTwist, $4.50, ISBN 0-373-51226-0
Paranormal Romance, 2003 (Reissue)
Air force pilot Aurora Durant is flying near Saddam Hussein’s country when her plane gets stuck in a mighty windstorm that sends her and her partner Charlie all the way back to the time of the Roman Empire. (“Holy Axis of Evil, I told that French ponce that this will happen!” says George W Bush.) She finds herself held by the senior centurion Lucius Antonious. They will embark on a foreplay where he will lock her up, she will scream and kick ass a bit, they kiss, he locks her up again, she will scream some more, et cetera. Then she has sex with him to save her buddy Charlie from eternal servitude, they fall in love, and I hope the lions eat them all.
Somewhere in Time doesn’t work for me at all. Mainly because the heroine is such an idiot. Firstly, once she has overpowered the guy in some gung-ho moves, would you believe that she willingly shows him how she does those moves right after? Isn’t this like telling a serial killer who has held you captive the best ways to slit a chicken’s neck? Also, for all of Aurora’s bluster, she is a victim. She has sex with Lucius to save Charlie, aw how noble, let me sprinkle holy water over poor Aurora’s genitals and pray for divine mercy. She doesn’t even know how to adapt to her environment, charging up to Luke before his men and commanding him around like a harridan. She knows the men won’t like it even if Luke indulges her, but she just cannot stop. I don’t even know how she can fall in love with Luke when all she does is to throw tantrums when he treats her just like how a Roman dude will treat his sex slave. What does she expect? Wine and Chianti?
Compare this book to Virginia Henley’s Enslaved. The heroine, when she realizes that she’s going to be a sex toy, decides that she may as well doll up and seduce the mighty gladiator dude and makes him her slavering, drooling sex toy completely at her mercy in the privacy of their rooms. Now that’s the way to do it, if you ask me. What’s all this nonsense about demanding political correctness in a time when those words don’t even exist? Aurora, shut up.
