Samhain Publishing, $5.50, ISBN 978-1-61923-264-8
Historical Romance, 2016
It’s a familiar story. Boy meets girl, penis meets vagina, and then the boy goes off to war, is presumed dead, and the girl marries another. Of course, we can’t have her be seen as some kind of flighty tart that gives it up to boys for fun, so she’s coerced into the marriage and he’s the biggest bastard in the land. Oh, and she has a brat that she will do everything to protect, and then, the boy comes back from the dead. Like I said, familiar story.
Perhaps this is why I have a hard time feeling for The Jacobite’s Return. It’s a very well crafted story, and the characters are such that even when they are being silly, they do it in a way that makes them seem… well, not that silly. Lord Jack Lindsey is a nice guy all in all, and Rosie Delacourt is fine, but the whole story just feels done before. Her desperation and, yet, her oh-so-typical determination to somehow endure and look sad because it isn’t proper to do something, the husband’s eye-rolling evilness, that uninspired and oh-so-how-many-times-do-we-need-such-a-scene moment of him taunting her of her jealousy at seeing him apparently dating another woman, that brat, the really unintentionally hilarious revelation of villainy at the end (“He got me drunk… and wrote down my life story… and I’m so TRAPPED, sob!”)… the whole thing just feels so played out.
Maybe it’s just me, I was tad under the weather when I read this and, while my brain did recognize that the author manages to avoid most of the pitfalls of writing such a story, my heart couldn’t understand why the author had to write such a predictable story. Did she lose a bet or something?
Oh well, this isn’t a bad option if you want some kind of well-written same old, I suppose. Maybe I should go read something more violent until I feel better.
