Jennie Lucas

Can you say stupid? I thought you could. Holy crap, this is the sort of book that gives Harlequins a bad name. This girl was so stupid I kept flashing on a girl I knew in high school who got upset and cried when I tried to convince her Germany and the USSR were separate countries. Weak, whining, whimpering idiot with irrational motivations for everything she did.

"I hate him. He lied to me and knocked me up. But he's hot and he's touching me and my lady bits are getting dampish. Therefore I show more must love him!"

And him? He kidnaps her from her wedding and flies her to Brazil in her wedding dress. I don't know about the rest of you but I didn't take my passport to my wedding tucked in my bustier. No mention ever made of it. She escapes from his car and immediately gets lost in a favela. Now if he was a rich as all that, they weren't anywhere near the favelas on the way to his mansion/hotel on the beach. The favelas are on the other side of the mountains from the ritzy part of Rio. While running she immediately meets up with evil guys who know the hero from his life on the streets. Right...there are 6.3 million people in Rio. And then he forces her to marry him. She says 'no' to the priest during the ceremony and he believes the hero when he tells him "aw she's just shy." I gotta think that even priests in the rainforest are a bit more savvy and dedicated than that. So illegal marriage anyone?

And what kind of a word is biskreta? Now I speak European Portuguese not Brazilian but the letter K is not used in any version of Portuguese except in wholly borrowed foreign words. I looked it up in my Brazilian dictionary and the closest I could come was bisca which is defined as a sarcastic criticism. (just talked to my Brazilian friend, she's never heard of the interjection biskreta.)

I'm all for angst but angst with out any rationale or real pain behind it is just laughable.

So shall I try this author again? Well I gave one 5 stars and one 2 stars and this one 1 star. I could get lucky again but I'm kind of gun shy after this one. We'll see. show less

WTF??? I picked this up at the library and sucked it down in a couple of hours. Really liked it. Imagine my surprise to find that I had DNF'd this one a while ago. Here is my original review:

too much betrayal and revenge.

So... what's different? I must have been in the mood for it I guess. Big shrug here.

So my review this time around is:

I liked the amnesia bit here. I am a sucker for amnesia stories in general and this one was well done. I loved how she was so changed from her previous show more personality and how he couldn't help falling in love with her even though he was out for revenge. The story was told mainly from the hero's POV which I prefer. I really loved the hero. He really had a reason for his desire for revenge unlike most hokey revenge themed books. But he could not continue to be mean to her. Awww...

And there was a surprising twist that made the revenge element way more interesting. show less

Classic HP. Very good revenge plot which had an actual, pretty solid reason for the revenge. A twist at the end that was surprising and yet foreshadowed enough not to have come out of nowhere. Arrogant hero fell hard for the heroine. The heroine tried hard to resist him but he was pretty hard to resist. He was not as ass to her so she had reason to fall for him. There was a spot where the author could have gone all Disney fairy tale but chose not to make everyone so nicey nice and I show more appreciated that. If you're an HP fan you should like this one show less

Hmm...I don't really know what to say about this book. It was full of typical HP melodrama. Don't look at motivations too closely or you'll see right through them. There was kidnapping, and virginity and bad reputations built on tabloid rumors, poorly conceived revenge, medieval escape tunnels etc. The basic ingredients. Put in a bowl stir with a spoon. Nothing outstanding here. But comfort food of a sort. The type of thing that you can read in front of the TV and not miss much of the show show more or the book.

Two things bothered me enough to mention though. One, there is a scene where she is trying on her wedding dress and he comes in and sees her. She tries to get out of sight because of the whole bad luck thing and he chases her down because she is just so sexy and beautiful. Okay that was pretty hot. Then he tears her dress down the front! Because he just can't wait for her hotness long enough to find the zipper! But she's okay with it even though she's spent all afternoon picking it out and it is the dress of every childhood fantasy. WTF? Why do these women never get mad at guys ripping up their clothes? I'm not thinking sexy, I'm thinking about hitting him over the head with the closest lamp.

Second, at the end Marcos comes to Tamsin two days after he gives up his revenge etc. The guy he was after, who had just stolen her brother's wife, got exiled anyway even though Marcos gave up his revenge to be with Tamsin. It's been TWO DAYS and the author has the hero tell the heroine that "the last he'd heard, Aziz was working at a petrol station and Camilla was a dog washer in Cairo." That's just ridiculous. First of all that sentence made it sound like it had been months since this all happened. Second no fancy schmancy sheikh type person would get a job that quickly. "What I'm exiled? No more riches and harems and power for me? No prob, I'll just get a menial job. Don't know why I didn't think of it sooner."

There's no way a woman as money hungry as Camilla would have stayed in Cairo to wash dogs. She'd have conned some old geezer out of a plane ticket back to London and then schemed up something to land her a sugar daddy of some sort. People like her don't work unless it's on their backs. show less