Patricia Werner (2)

This book took me forever to read. You know why? It was boring. Really, truly dull.

It finally began to get a little more interesting in the last fifty pages, but by then I didn't care.

Gothics aren't known for lightning speeds of action-paced adventure or anything, but this slowly unwinding thing never had much depth to begin with. There wasn't a huge mystery and most of it was spent on her wanting to redecorate the house and fawning over the local island stud. Every small thing was too dramatic. The writing felt a bit stilted and overdone, not adding to the excitement of the story. Characters were decent enough, I suppose, but I never felt that attraction to her main guy. To me there wasn't anything sweet, exciting, or stimulating about him. If anything, he seemed to lack personality.

The back cover of the book states:

"Now, heartbroken by her father's death and the loss of her great love..."

Stop right here. This isn't accurate. The protagonist makes it clear from the start she's not grief-stricken over her father. She hates he's dead of course but keeps bringing up the fact that they weren't close and that she hadn't seen him in years.

In addition, there was no great love lost. She started getting over him minutes within reaching the island.

The end villain(s) turned out a little obvious. There was a very small cast of suspects to wonder about anyway, and while the reasoning behind it wasn't clear from the start, it was easy to see where the villain would pop up from and why.

Not the best start to my challenge of reading 30 Gothics this year, hopefully the next one is much better.
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This is the type of historical fiction mystery romance with gothic elements that would have been my typical guilty pleasure reading as a teenager. Originally published back in 1991, there isn't anything overly original or spectacular about the story, the characters, the writing or the plot development. More of a formula piece of writing than anything else - Young, naive and beautiful heroine? Check. Dashing and brooding landed gentry rescuer/love interest? Check. Crumbling castle? Check. Mysterious noises to be heard at night across the moors? Check. Legends of a family curse? Check.

Heather is your typical annoying female heroine who always manages to find herself in trouble and Sir Byron isn't much better as the leading man. The story is rather lackluster for romance, mystery and gothic. I finally came to the conclusion that this one is a historical fiction mystery with romance and gothic elements and should really only be treated as a bit of escapism reading, or in my case, listening.

One redeeming quality of the audiobook I listened to that I must mention here is great job the narrator, Nadia May, did in creating the different voices of the characters and communicating some of the atmosphere of the story as she read.

Overall, a fun bit of escapism, but nothing special.… (more)