Nicole Jordan 'To Seduce a Bride'

With genre fiction it's my experience that if you fall out of the lovely suspension-of-disbelief bubble more than once or twice, the book becomes open to regular book criticisms and will fail miserably. This can happen due to bad writing, crazy plot twists, poor characterization, etc. I think this is what makes reviewing romance novels more prone to personal opinion than reviewing non-genre fiction. What keeps you in that bubble can be very idiosyncratic.

Anyway, To Seduce A Bride was terrible. I'm a sucker for the feisty independent heroine who rides and shoots and likes books. But Heath Griffin is so unbelievably condescending and smug, yikes. He tries to convince Lily to marry him for the entire book and when he finally figures out that he can't force her to TRUST him (emphasis mine) his last ditch effort is to publish his betrothal to a female friend to jolt Lily into coming after him. NICE! I lost interest way before this point, the endless telling, instead of showing, how wonderful these two were just wore me down.

There is a relatively uninteresting subplot concerning the demi-monde of Regency London. I think the author was very excited to discover all the different terms Regency Britain had for this group.

Historical Romance 2008: 2 of 5 Cyprians.

image by Greg Tucker stolen from Salon.com