GENRE: Historical Fiction
SETTING: England, India
SERIES: Eden, #3
MY GRADE: D
SYNOPSIS: John Murrey Eden came home to bury the man and legend of his father -- and to claim a castle ands destiny named Eden.
Standing amid the bea...more John Murrey Eden came home to bury the man and legend of his father -- and to claim a castle ands destiny named Eden.
Standing amid the beauty of all that would one day be his to rule, was the woman that should never have been his to love -- the Lady of Eden, the mistress of his father...
From their tragic, forbidden love, a woman fled into the tormented darkness of endless guilt, and a man wandered around the world searching for honor without sorrow, the future without the past, and love without end.
MY THOUGHTS: This is the third in a series of seven. I can't remember much about the two previous ones since I read them 13 years ago. It's taken me 13 years to want to read this one because the other two were awful. This one was a huge letdown. Took me exactly 2 weeks to get though it. The timespan is 10 years. The first 302 pages were very good and kept my attention. It went downhill quickly after that when John, who was 15 when this began, went off to fight in the Crimean war at age 17 then was in India for many years. That part of the book lasted 163 pages but it felt like 300. I couldn't have cared less about what was happening and there was just no point to it. Not one word of it was interesting. Then there was another 200 pages after that after John returned home to England, now age 25, and most of that was uninteresting.
Harriet is a main character and was in the previous book. I don't have this written in my notes but I think she was in her late 20's, the age 27 is coming to mind, in the previous book, so she would be 42-ish at the start of this. After a horrific revelation, she does something very disturbing to herself (page 193 of hardcover, chapter "Eden Castle, May 2, 1852) and banishes herself to her bedroom for years. That revelation lead to another horrific act. After her banishment, she's practically forgotten about until the last few pages. There's a scene on the very last page regarding her that almost made me cry. There's so much more that could have been done with her character that wasn't.
James Eden is Harriet's abusive alcoholic husband, father of young Richard and Mary, and uncle to John, brother to his father, Edward. His character is short lived, unfortunately.
There's a bad character in here that I really like, Morley Johnson. He's stealing from the Eden estate, whom he works for. There's also a violent scene in which he rapes and beats a women in the face. He too is forgotten about until the very end of the story. I like that he gets away with his bad deeds because he's got dirt on someone else. We find out what happens with him in the next in the series, The Women of Eden.
Lila Harrington was a teenager when she had a brief encounter with John and I mean a very short meeting with him outside one day before he went off to war. She writes to John while he's at war but I don't know why. She doesn't really know him and has only met him once and saw him one other time in the street, so why's she writing to him for years? And why does John get in touch with her when he returns and marry her? Bizarre to me. She's another character who was brought on then forgotten about until the end of the story. She's interesting because she has visions and some think she's a witch. What's the point of making a character that way if the author's not going to do anything with it other than simply tell us?
John leaves for war mostly, I think, to escape something bad that's revealed shortly before. He forgets about his young cousins and forgets Elizabeth, who was a friend of his father, she helped raise him and is the only mother figure in his life. I'm puzzled by why the author had him do that. Characters are brought on only to be put on the back burner until the end. If most of the war section had been cut out this would have been a pretty good book.
See my reviews for the first four in the series:
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