Ishabelle Torry, $2.99, ISBN 979-8201440244
Paranormal Romance, 2022
The plot of Ishabelle Torry’s To Wish Upon a Roman is simple: antique lady Lucy Brady finds herself with a locket left to her by the ever-present dead aunt plot device.
My dearest niece,
Since I have no children of my own, I am honoring a private family tradition. I pass this heirloom to you on one condition; never speak his name. The details have been lost through time, but the rule remains. I repeat—never speak his name.
P.S. I’ll greet your mother and wait for you by her side.
Smiling down upon you always,
Aunt Clarisse.
This is like giving a heroine a big red button and telling her never to press it.
Is anyone shocked that Lucy can’t contain her curiosity?
Lunch time had come and gone as Lucy searched one website after another, determined to decode the entire inscription. Finally, she found one site that allowed her to pick the symbolic letter one at a time as it matched to its suspected coinciding English alphabet. As she decoded each letter, she wrote it down on a piece of paper.
Ah yes, the ever useful mysterious “internet” that lets people find any information they want. What is this? A Lifetime movie?
H A D R I A N M A R I A S…
“Had ria n…Ma…rias” she sounded out. It didn’t make sense. She tried again and again before it came to her. “Hadrian! Hadrian Marias! So, that’s who’s supposed to be trapped in there!”
Boom, she ends up summoning General Hadrian Marias, a Roman warrior from the fourth century.
This story opens with his sadly prematurely aborted perfect love story with his wife Lucia, so gee, I wonder whether there is any link between Lucy and his no doubt now-dead wife…
Anyway, like any sane woman, when confronted with a scary fellow like this, she thinks the whole thing is a prank even when it being a prank makes no sense. Harry demands to be freed from the locket, so she says sure, she can do that if he would be her sex slave for two weeks.
Yup, this is another story that sees the author set up some kind of premise in a half-baked manner only to have everything pointing at the area between the heroine’s legs.
Soon, he has Lucy pouring him coffee, taking him shopping to buy clothes for him, and putting out to him whenever he feels horny, and I start to wonder whether the true story arc here is Harry’s career change from general to gigolo.
The guy starts out as a general and there are talks about evil witches and sorcery, but the story quickly morphs into a suspense-free and super non-magical tale of how women would totally buy everything a guy says and pay for his everything so long as he is hot and dispenses stud service with aplomb.
In the end, this thing feels is an underwritten fish out of water tale that is mis-marketed as a tale of magic and macho men. Anyone wanting to read this thing after reading the plot synopsis should first adjust their expectations significantly or be left with a disgruntled kind of disappointment festering in their heart.
