A DARING PASSION by Rosemary Rogers

PUBLISHER: HQN, 2007

GENRE: Fiction/Historical Romance

SETTING: England/France

MY GRADE: B-

SYNOPSIS: Headstrong but sheltered, Raine Wimbourne longs for adventure--and when her ailing father reveals a closely guarded secret, she seizes her chance. Disguised as England's most notorious highwayman, Raine vows to uphold her father's legacy as champion of the poor. Then a midnight encounter with the powerful Philippe Gautier shows her the price of protecting her family's honor...

 Philippe Gautier has a mission of his own--and the beautiful impostor he's delivering to justice may hold the key to saving his brother's life. He will stop at nothing to keep Raine close. But as they travel from the town houses of London to the streets of France, can he convince his untamed captive to risk it all on the promise of passion? 

MY THOUGHTS: The years this took place weren't mentioned but Napoleon was so it's gotta be the early 1800's but he works for King George IV, doing dirty deed for, so I have no clue. I'm not sure of the timespan either. Early on it jumped ahead two months and later there was some traveling to France, so let's say at least three months. Then the last chapter jumps ahead one year to Portugal.

Philippe is on a mission to find out who framed his younger brother Jean-Pierre, who's been sent to Newgate prison, accused of treason. Raine's dragged along for the ride from early on. The "free Jean-Pierre" plot took over this entire story and I got a bit bored with it, hence the B-. It just never let up. So it's fair to say I was disappointed in this. Oddly enough we never even meet Jean-Pierre!

Raine is a typical headstrong Rosemary Rogers heroine. She's got amber hair and "dark" eyes. Her mother died when she was little and she was raised by her almost-forty-year-old father, who's a secret criminal. Raine's been unaware of that until recently. Her age isn't given but since her mother died sixteen years ago when Raine was little and she'd been in a convent for the past seven years, she's at least in her early twenties, I would think. We only got one incident of her being the highwayman, "The Knave of Knightsbridge", which was disappointing.

Philippe has dark hair and green eyes and is thirty-one. He's from France but has lived mostly in Portugal. He's arrogant, self-centered, for the most part, arrogant, and possessive. Everything I could ask for in a fictional hero. He's an investor and does do good things for people, so he's got a good side to him as well. He kidnaps Raine and cares nothing for her feelings. They bicker a lot but get along alright when they're not.

Carlos is his good younger friend whom he grew up with in Portugal. They're like brothers but Carlos is not a good friend. He's let it be known to Philippe that he's interested in Raine. He's let Raine know several times that he wants her, has kissed her, and is having inappropriate thoughts about her, "He wanted to tug off that delicate ivory gown and reveal the slender beauty that was hidden beneath." 

Rosemary died in November 2019.

LEMONADE by Nina Pennacchi, Translated by Scott P. Sheridan

PUBLISHER: AmazonCrossing, 7/2015
ORIGINAL PUB: 2011 in Italian
GENRE: Fiction/Historical Romance
SETTING: England, 1826
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: As a young woman in Victorian England, Anna Champion knows all too well the social mores that value prettiness over sense, and etiquette over honesty. But when she stands up to the boorishness of dashing Christopher Davenport at a summertime ball, Anna unwittingly attracts his wrath—and becomes entangled in his malicious scheming.

After a lifetime of harboring shame and resentment, Christopher, a ruthless con artist, wants revenge, and unfortunately for Anna, he’s decided that she will be the perfect pawn in his terrible plot. With a fierceness of spirit uncommon in well-bred young ladies in the nineteenth century, Anna will have to use her intelligence and courage to protect her loved ones. But can she also save herself?

MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: I've finally read the worst anti-hero ever. I think this is the only romance novel where I wished the main couple didn't have a happily ever after. It should have been titled, "How to Survive a Madman" instead. Spoiler about the book's title; it comes from someone spilling lemonade on someone and someone else getting lemonade dumped on them.

Christopher is twenty-five and out for blood. He's tall, has dark hair and blue eyes. He's a wealthy financier and land owner. He grew up in a brothel for his first five years of life, then he hit the streets for awhile until a family that knew his mother took him in. The subplot is about him seeking revenge on his biological father, with help from his cousin Matthew, for causing his young prostitute mother's suicide twenty years previous. His plan is twisted and plays out at the very end. That part was my favorite of the whole story.

Christopher is a very violent, ugly person, and rotten to the core, like his father. To call him damaged would be an understatement. He rapes Anna multiple times and hits her repeatedly in the face for about nine pages (p. 133-142) during the same incident. He shoves her into a bookcase on page 65 and on page 68 he grabs her by the wrists and shoves her back into the same bookcase. Later on in a carriage he sits next to her and grabs her by the back of her hair to make her look up at him. Another time he grabs her by the nape of the neck and pulls her hair. She smacked him twice too at other times, one of which is before the rape. He practically forces her to marry him and threatens her throughout the marriage with various things, using her family has leverage. She's truly trapped.

Anna is maybe twenty, I'm not exactly sure, has brown hair and amber eyes. She's very strong in this situation and is really stuck with Christopher, who's terrorizing her. She lives with her father and is the oldest of four siblings. Her father is practically dying and thinks the world of Christopher, not knowing he's abusive. We don't know anything about Anna's background or where her mother is. I supposed she died.

The only reason this book didn't get an A from me is because it's a bit slow-moving and Christopher needed to do more groveling throughout the book, not just at the very end. That could have made him an even better character, and I feel he was a great anti-hero. The story, both with Anna and the subplot, is very interesting to me but it fails miserably as a romance, but that's alright with me. Christopher and Anna are just the type of characters I love to read about. He's a disaster and she's got a very strong constitution. I like that the prologue starts out with a gruesome scene. That scene is what sets five-year-old Christopher off on a deadly mission twenty years later.

There are a couple mistakes in the print book, like a couple of sentences are missing a word, a word is misspelled, and once instead of calling Daniel Chris' half-brother, he's called his step-brother. This isn't self-published. It's professionally published/edited through Amazon imprint AmazonCrossing so mistakes like that shouldn't happen.

THE DOLL GRAVEYARD by Lois Ruby

PUBLISHER: Scholastic, 6/2014
GENRE: Children's Paranormal Fiction
SETTING: Connecticut, USA
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: The house at Cinder Creek hides many secrets. Shelby and Brian Tate have heard heated voices crying out in the night. They've noticed the unsettling way things move around on their own. But the most chilling thing about their new home is the cemetery someone's built out back. The graves are tiny, only big enough for dolls.

Soon Shelby's learning all about them. Betsy Anne's angelic appearance hides a raging fire behind her eyes, while Baby Daisy changes faces as quickly as she changes moods. And Miss Amelia's cracked porcelain skin and twisted lips only hint at the pain she once endured at the hands of a very angry girl. If Shelby can help the dolls find peace, she and her family might actually be happy at Cinder Creek. But if she can't--the dolls will have their revenge...

MY THOUGHTS: This story is told through almost twelve-year-old precocious Shelby. She lives with her nine-year-old brother, Brian. They move into an old manor with their divorced mother, Serena. It was left to them at the beginning of the story by Serena's aunt Amelia, who's dying. She leaves Shelby to figure out a mystery that she knows nothing about by giving her a doll named Isabella's hat.

Dolls are buried in graves outside and they're in a horseshoe shaped pattern. They end up back inside the house in their dollhouse multiple times even after being reburied. Shelby has to figure out where a doll named Lady is and why she wasn't in the graveyard with the other dolls, and to figure out what really happened to Sadie, a little girl who owned the dolls and lived in that house decades before. Was it murder or natural causes?

The target audience for this book is grades 4-6 but I think that's too young an age group for the subject matter, as it involves the supernatural and talk of the possible murder of a child who lived there years before. The main character sounds more like a teenager or adult, so it didn't seem like a sixth grader was talking, and she's very witty. There's also writings in a journal from an eleven-year-old girl named Emily and she too sounded too mature. Her grammar is perfect, as is her punctuation and spelling. That's not likely accurate for someone so young to be 100% perfect in their writing.

There were quite a lot of characters in this 246-page book, at least fifteen, unless I miscounted, and if an adult can have trouble keeping up with who's who, and they will, an elementary school child certainly will. The dark subject matter combined with Shelby's upbeat personality didn't really mesh well for me. This would have worked better if it had been a young adult book. And I don't think the plot fully made since. I'm a little confused by it but I did enjoy it more than not.

BEING LOLITA by Alisson Wood

PUBLISHER: Flatiron, 8/2020
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: A dark romance evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story.

“Have you ever read Lolita?” So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson’s metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing—and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North.

Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon becomes the backdrop to a connection that blooms from a simple crush into a forbidden romance. But as Mr. North’s hold on her tightens, Alisson is forced to evaluate how much of their narrative is actually a disturbing fiction.

In the wake of what becomes a deeply abusive relationship, Alisson is faced again and again with the story of her past, from rereading Lolita in college to working with teenage girls to becoming a professor of creative writing. It is only with that distance and perspective that she understands the ultimate power language has had on her—and how to harness that power to tell her own true story.

Being Lolita is a stunning coming-of-age memoir that shines a bright light on our shifting perceptions of consent, vulnerability, and power. This is the story of what happens when a young woman realizes her entire narrative must be rewritten—and then takes back the pen to rewrite it.

MY THOUGHTS: The twenty-six-year-old dark-haired and green-eyed English teacher, Nick North, was emotionally abusive and childish, throwing tantrums during arguments. Nothing sexual happened between them, not even kissing, until after she turned 18 and graduated high school, except one conversation about bra and penis size while she was seventeen. I don't feel like she took any responsibility for her part in their inappropriate two-year relationship that started in 2001, when she was less than four months away from her eighteenth birthday, and continued while she was away at college five hours away.

I'd have liked to have known more about her teenage depression, suicide and cutting but she basically just glossed over it as well as glossed over a later rape. How did you make your parents aware of your depression in middle school? When did the cutting start? We weren't made aware of any childhood abuse so I'd like to know what she thought brought on the cutting. I don't recall her mentioning depression while Nick was in her life so I'm assuming it didn't get worse.

She made a couple of comments that really bother me. She said, on page 143, that "for all intents and purposes" she was still "pubescent" and was a "child" when she was eighteen. No, ma'am, you're a legal adult at eighteen years of age. Seems like she's calling him a pedophile, which he wasn't, at least not in her situation. Who knows what he was doing with other underage girls. On page 147 she said that once during sex with Nick it was painful but she didn't tell him to stop and that she later told herself his not stopping was her fault. She's right; it is her fault he didn't stop because he didn't know she wanted him to, so why even make that comment? On page 190, she said that at a party her first weekend at college she was drunk and had sex with a guy. She said she "didn't understand" what she'd done. How could you not?

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.