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Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

A Place of Storms – Married Forced by Blackmail in France

October 11, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

At first I was not terribly impressed with Sara Craven’s A Place of Storms. It didn’t affect me the way some of her other books do, but after a bit I found myself wanting to re-read and I enjoyed the story more each time I read it.

A Place of Storms is one of Sara Craven’s earliest Harlequin Presents novels, written in 1978 and has her trademark strong emotion and well-done characters. English Andrea and older Frenchman Blaise are interesting people we want to know although the character development is not quite as strong as in Craven’s later novels.

Andrea is used to helping her flighty cousin Clare avoid richly deserved trouble and now Clare wants her help to avoid a marriage of convenience to an unknown distant relation, Blaise. Blaise is blackmailing Clare with her letters promising to marry him, to force her into marriage even though they never met. Clare now is engaged to a wonderful man and doesn’t want any part of scandal and certainly not a temporary marriage!

What neither Clare nor Andrea know is that Blaise is desperate to marry to secure custody of his nephew from his unscrupulous ex-fiancé – who is the boy’s aunt, greedy and heartless, unwilling to marry a poor man or one with a scarred face.

Blaise lives in a crumbling chateau where every bedroom room leaks, the bathrooms are ancient and fussy and the furniture huge and is barely eking a living from his vineyards. Plus Blaise himself is scarred inside and on his face from the fire in the family’s former island plantation home that killed his brother.

Blaise isn’t a particularly attractive potential husband. Unfortunately for Andrea he is also not dumb. He researched Clare’s family before asking her to marry him and knows all about Clare, her father’s ill health and her cousin Andrea and knows immediately who Andrea is when she arrives at his chateau to retrieve Clare’s foolish letters.

Andrea is shocked to see the dilapidated state of the house and by Blaise’s intention to foist not just a marriage of convenience but a 5 year old nephew onto her cousin. She is terrified because Blaise is attractive and she recognizes the huge potential he has to hurt her emotionally. Blaise will use every trick and pressure possible to get his own way and confronts Andrea when he finds her going through his dresser, threatening endless scandal and publicity if she will not marry him. Andrea agrees, assuming that he is offering the paper marriage he offered to her cousin and that he stressed the evening she met him. Fortunately for our novel, he is intending and demanding far more, a real marriage in every way.

We now have the set up for a delicious romance: A man who is ruthless and determined to marry the woman who is determined not to lose her heart. But wait! There is still more! Sara Craven has three other characters that add complexity.

  • Alan is researching the Gallic wars and lives in the chateau’s gatehouse. He is the neutral character who is a friend to Andrea and not any threat to Blaise and Andrea’s marriage.
  • Five year old nephew Phillipe lost his parents and now must live with his scarred uncle; Phillipe is not a strong child, he is polite but timid.
  • His aunt Simone is nasty, vindictive and cruel, tells Phillipe stories about a distant ancestor who threw his wife’s bastard son out of the tower window and makes him frightened of his uncle Blaise, claiming Blaise will kill him for the non-existent insurance money. Andrea learns only after a week or so that Simone and Blaise had been engaged until Blaise was scarred.

The author hints that Blaise was disillusioned about Simone even before he got hurt in the fire, but Simone implies that she dumped him because of the scar. There is no love lost between them now. Simone tries her best to make trouble with Phillipe and trouble between Andrea and Blaise and even tries to drag Alan into the mix. She’s the arch-Other Woman and nasty.

The real story is how Andrea and Blaise end up in love. Craven only tells us through Andrea’s eyes so we don’t get a good idea how Blaise feels. He calls Andrea “his heart” or “his love” (in French of course) and gives her a beautiful nightgown for a wedding gift and tries to seduce her a couple of time but we don’t see many loving gestures or comments. In fact he’s mean and uses kisses and threatens forced seduction to punish Andrea. He tells her to obey him and threatens but does not do violence. Try to ignore these (thankfully) outdated elements and enjoy the story.

One indicator of a good story and great characters is that I want to put myself in there, to come up with what I would say to Blaise, how I would react. He has a nasty habit of threatening Andrea sexually, and claiming the high ground. For instance, when he is trying to seduce her Blaise says “be a little merciful. Don’t force me to take you like this.” Andrea should say “No one is forcing you Blaise. If you don’t want to feel like a rapist then don’t be one!” (He wasn’t raping her, but he was trying to gain a response Andrea didn’t want to give.) Or when he tells her that he didn’t offer her a paper marriage as he did to her cousin, Andrea should have reminded him that he did exactly that the first night they met, and he claimed he knew who she was at the time. OK, I’m splitting hairs here but some of these overly domineering types give me a pain!

Sara Craven creates a moody, atmospheric setting too, using the gloomy old chateau set in a gorgeous hilly region of France to heighten the tension. Andrea tries to brighten the place with lighter paints and fabrics while Simone uses the setting and old history to frighten Phillipe.

Overall, on second or third or fourth reading I have to give this one 4 stars. I got my copy from Thriftbooks.com and as of this writing Amazon has copies but it is not available on Archive.org.

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Filed Under: Sara Craven Tagged With: English Romance, Harlequin Romance, Romance Novels, Sara Craven

Hired by the Playboy and Unspoken Desire by Penny Jordan

May 25, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

These two romances by Penny Jordan feature likeble characters facing echoes from their past filled with emotional bludgeons.

Gemma in Hired by the Playboy has rich, snobby parents with whom she has little in common. Years earlier she had made friends with Luke from the wrong side of the tracks, an older guy that she spent a summer sharing everything she had picked up about the construction industry and polite etiquette. Their summer friendship ended when she asked him to teach her how to kiss in case her brother’s friend should be interested. Of course that spawned emotional trouble for her!

Now Luke is rich and even her mother invites him to larger gatherings. Gemma never realizes that Luke had been on the edge of falling in love with her years earlier and believes Luke only tolerates her. Events progress, the two fall into bed and end up married.

Unspoken Desire is less believable from both a plot and an emotional perspective. Rebecca was in love with older 2nd cousin Fraser and when she was 18 Fraser’s bother Rory had an affair while his new wife was expecting twins and convinced Rebecca that she should take the fall with Fraser as the other woman. Of course Fraser was livid and full of contempt for Rebecca; she naively thought he’d realize that the story was a lie and that Rory was sleeping with Fraser’s girlfriend, not with Rebecca.

The action centers around Rory’s 8-year old twins whom Rory ignores; the only use he has for his children is if he can use them as weapons to hurt Fraser, the brother he hates. Eventually Fraser learns the truth about Rebecca and he and Rebecca end up married and with the twins.

Both novels are preposterous in terms of plot and both have over-the-top emotional stories. Yet they work. Author Jordan makes us care about these people and her excellent secondary characters.

For example, Gemma’s snobby mother and father are stereotypes, true, but Jordan makes them people we can visualize acting as these do. Little snippets give the story verisimilitude. For example, Gemma learned to ride as a child but when her mother realized the other students in her riding class were from families just like theirs – and not the country gentry – she lost interest in Gemma’s riding. Why spend the time and money to ride if it won’t result in social advancement? This is a good way to show us snobbery instead of telling us.

Rory, the twins and Aunt Maud are great characters in Unspoken Desire. Rory is a cad, selfish, uncaring, jealous, hating, but charming. The twins are alone, essentially abandoned by their parents and reliant on Fraser, Aunt Maud and each other for any friendship or caring. Jordan shows us how they act.

Jordan makes good use of sexual awareness that simmers just below the surface and gets in the way of the two main characters as they try to navigate through painful memories. In both books she allows the characters to come together; making love initially causes even more problems that eventually get explained away.

I’m going to give both books 3 stars for the emotional content.

Filed Under: Romance Fiction Tagged With: Harlequin Romance, Penny Jordan, Romance, Romance Novels

A Scandalous Innocent by Penny Jordan

May 25, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

A Scandalous Innocent combines an unusual plot and girl-meets-boy set up with enjoyable characters who connect emotionally with each other and with us readers. It made a nice change from a run of romances I’ve read the past few days that revolved around sex. This book revolves around people.

There are a few problems with the book, mostly due to the fact it is a Harlequin and thus short, with little time to develop a love affair with trust and commitment. There is little room to explore what could have been a rich plot.

Part of the plot confuses me. Lark is on trial in England’s High Court because her cousin Gary embezzled tens of thousands of pounds from his employer, then took poison and blamed Lark for the embezzlement, claimed she had blackmailed and coerced him. Lark is alone in the world, terrified and the case has gotten immense press coverage. Of course everyone thinks she is guilty.

I was confused because the case appears to combine civil elements – the former employer hired the prosecuting counsel – and criminal because Lark faces prison if convicted. No one had to prove Lark was guilty, instead she had to prove her innocence. No one had to determine where the money went; Lark clearly didn’t have it. There should have been a paper trail, bank deposits or if not then some evidence she used drugs or gambled or sent money to a numbered account. Author Jordan wrote a romance, not a crime story but the disconnects bothered me.

It turns out the prosecuting counsel, James Wolfe, recognized Lark’s innate innocence and convinced the employer to drop the case and asked his mother to hire Lark as her assistant. Of course he and Lark fall in love and we have the usual passionate encounters mixed with distrust and fear.

I particularly liked the tension between Lark and James. She wants to love him but he terrified her at trial and Lark thinks that James believes her guilty. We can put ourselves in her shoes and imagine how it would feel to be in love with someone we think believes us conniving, cruel and vicious, greedy. Of course James could have cleared this up right away, and in fact he tried but Lark couldn’t bear to listen

Jordan complicates the plot with spoiled Charlotte who informs Lark that James and she are engaged. Add that to the mix and we have potent distrust and fear.

The romance rings true despite the melodramatic backdrop. We can see how James would see Lark and her response to him and we can enjoy and sympathize as they learn to trust each other and allow love to overcome past distrust and fear.

I would like to see Jordan rewrite this story outside the Harlequin format confines. She hints that Lark’s aunt and uncle – the embezzler’s parents who took Lark in when her parents died – may have been unscrupulous with her inheritance. Lark remembers the large house and car, lovely antiques and her aunt’s avaricious disappointment when Lark took her mother’s heirloom dresser set with her when she left home.

I would have reading James’ point of view on the romance and the legal case. The romance from the man’s point of view would have gone through the evidence, or lack thereof, and compared Gary’s deathbed accusation with Lark’s obvious lack of money, the absence of lovers’ trysts, few phone calls, and he could have dug into the blackmail claims. How exactly could Lark blackmail her cousin?

Lark suspects Gary had a rich man’s wife as his mistress and that he might have embezzled for her sake. Again, we don’t have any idea what happens to this other lady or whether Lark is right. As a longer novel, with more resolved plot and side stories and more time to develop the characters this could be a wonderful treat.

As a Harlequin novel A Scandalous Innocent suffers from the brevity, the focus on sexual attraction and the hurried brush off of the underlying crime. A sentence says it all: “Despite the time they had spent together, it seemed almost as though they had no point of contact other than as lovers.” It is still quite a good story and I enjoyed reading it.

4 Stars

Filed Under: Romance Fiction Tagged With: Harlequin Romance, Penny Jordan, Romance Novels

The Trusting Game by Penny Jordan

May 11, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

Christa has turned the fabric business she inherited from her great aunt into a profitable design enterprise and she is a member of her local chamber of commerce where Daniel Geshard is speaking this month about his motivational course that trains people to trust their coworkers. Christa wants none of this; after all her best friend married a con artist, supposedly a motivational coach, and got taken to the cleaners, eventually to suicide.

After Daniel’s talk Christa stands up to ask him for his success metrics, can he prove that his course is effective? He can’t, instead challenges her to attend and see what she thinks afterwards. The other chamber members pressure her to accept and off we go to the Welsh mountains where Daniel will take her canoeing, mountain hiking and more, putting her in positions where she must trust and rely on someone else.

Daniel and Christa are instantly and deeply attracted, and given this is a Harlequin, end up as lovers. There are a few hitches, mostly around Christa’s unwillingness to trust Daniel, until Christa goes back home and Daniel overhears one of the chamber members taunting Christa that Daniel romanced her in order to get a successful outcome. Christa doesn’t believe this but Daniel thinks she does, etc., etc., etc. Typical romance where the two characters really don’t know each other well and are quick to take offense or to run off.

I’ve experience with business programs of the day, having gone through enough to know that while they often have merit, the quick and easy courses lack substance and the more difficult ones require long term commitment and usually fail because they do not result in change. It was easy for me to share Christa’s skepticism!

Even though I appreciated Christa’s point of view, she became whiny and obsessed with being too frightened to believe that Daniel had anything more in mind than a quick seduction and course success. That made the story tedious and hard to see why Daniel bothered with her.

The Trusting Game is one of the semi-smutty Harlequins, where the plot and story revolve around instant physical attraction. Will they sleep together? How and when? I’ve read a couple other Penny Jordan romances that have a bit more story, more developed and more likable characters. This one was mediocre.

2 Stars

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Filed Under: Romance Fiction Tagged With: 2 Stars, Penny Jordan, Romance, Romance Novels

October Sky Fantasy by Alledria Hurt

April 12, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

October Sky is a novella by fantasy author Alledria Hurt. She’s written several novels and novellas available on Amazon although this is the first I’ve encountered her.

Most of the story is good, albeit with some potholes in the plot. Emmaline Simmons is an apprentice alchemist; in this story an alchemist works with potions to effect healing or other results. She wakes to hear someone in her mirror talk about the Well of Souls, which in her world is a fall constellation. Eventually she gets pulled through the mirror to help Cedric heal his king. She and Cedric keep one step ahead of the evil chancellor’s guards as they gather the ingredients Emmaline needs to make a healing potion.

The pluses:

  • Emmaline is a compelling character. I cared what happened to her.
  • The idea of brewing potions from herbs and things like werewolf hair to make changes, both good and ill, is intriguing. I’d like to see the author do more with this.
  • Minor characters Mr. Amon and Emmaline’s grandmother were well done, especially given the short novella length.
  • I’m interested in some of the events that weren’t explained. Why was the chancellor so determined to keep the king ill? Who was the stranger who shot grandmother and threatened Mr. Amon? Did Mrs. Snow have any more to do with Emmaline or was this a one-off encounter?
  • The writing style was good. Ms. Hurt crammed a whole lot of story into 44 pages.

The minuses:

  • Plot holes abound. The world on the other side of the mirror is the world of death. So why would the chancellor try to let the king die? Can someone in the land of the dead die again?
  • If the Well of Souls is the gate through which souls pass, then why are there not many undead people wandering Emmaline’s world?
  • Emmaline just happens to have the ingredients to make a sleep-inducing smoke lying around in her dungeon cell. Can we spell plot device? Same when looking for the other ingredients. Of course this is fiction!
  • Cedric, who should have been a major character, served mainly as a foil for Emmaline.

Overall I enjoyed the novella and the pluses outweighed the minuses. I’ll likely look for more by Alledria Hurt.

3+ Stars

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Filed Under: Magic Tagged With: Fantasy

The Scourge of the Swastika – Nazi Horrors by Edward Russell

April 4, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

The Scourge of the Swastika is a hard book to read and hard to review. Author Lord Russell of Liverpool served in the British war crimes trials held after WW2.

The theme of this book is that we can attribute the Nazi horrors directly to the “Master Race” theory, and further to National Socialism’s subsumption of individuals to the state. The Nazi regime treated harshly any Germans who stepped out of line; was it any wonder they treated people from “inferior races” or “subhumans” with no care whatsoever? People deported from occupied countries for slave labor were treated so as to extract maximum work at minimum expenditure, i.e., worked to death.

Lord Russell makes his point by starting from conditions in Germany, the totalitarians at the country, district, county and down to the city block level who ran everything, controlled everything, and restricted speech, property rights, religion. As Russel notes, “It is only when one recalls what was done in Germany between 1933 and 1939 that one can see…the crimes committed during the war in occupied territories.” Hitler used Germany as a test run for the rest of Europe.

From here Lord Russell shows the crimes against prisoners of war, naval crimes such as torpedoing neutral passenger-carrying ships. Until I read this I knew that Germans did not obey the Geneva convention with Russian POWs and had carried on unrestricted submarine warfare, but had not realized the extent of either. The German leadership ordered naval captains to not rescue any passengers or crew who escaped sinking vessels, and later to shoot helpless crew in lifeboats.

The next parts, covering the occupied countries, slave labor, concentration camps and Holocaust, are more familiar to any who have read about WW2. Russell shows the occupiers treated the people in the conquered countries as basically worthless, murdering entire villages, killing 10 or 100 random civilians in reprisals, starving the population. He makes it clear that the Germans knew that these actions were illegal and immoral – or would be viewed that way by impartial outsiders – because they took care to do many of the killings out of sight or to obfuscate the number of dead.

The book includes quotations from Hitler and others that clearly direct these horrors. Hans Franck in charge of Poland saw his duty as to turn Poland’s “economic, cultural and political structure into a heap of rubble”, and that Hitler would commend him if he “annihilated another 150,000 Poles.” Hitler wanted to free his people from “the humiliating restrictions imposed by the chimera of conscience and morality”, and it’s obvious that he succeeded with all too many, and those people found places in the SS and other units.

The British government tried to suppress The Scourge of the Swastika, to keep it from being published. I found comments that it was unbecoming for Lord Russell to make money from work he had done in while in service, but the more telling comments make it clear the British wanted to quell some of the anti-German feeling and re-incorporate West Germany into the European family. This was in 1954 when the Cold War was freezing over.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in how National Socialism operated inside and outside Germany or in totalitarian rule and how it descends into barbarism. If you wonder how a country so cultured as to bring us Beethoven can bring us Nazism, then read this. Read this but do not expect entertainment.

5 Stars

Filed Under: Non Fiction Tagged With: History, Nazis, Totalitarianism, WW2 German Behavior

To Hold the Bridge – Old Kingdom Novella and Short Stories by Garth Nix

April 1, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

The wonderful cover on this collection features the bridge from the namesake short story, To Hold the Bridge. I liked this story very much as it had the same flavor as the longer Old Kingdom novels Sabriel, Liriel and Abhorsen. Bridge is the only Old Kingdom story in this collection and I didn’t care for most of the other stories.

To Hold the Bridge gets started with Morghan, penniless orphan who has hiked a couple hundred miles in hope of becoming a cadet of the Worshipful Company of the Greenwash and Field Market Bridge. The company feeds, houses and clothes its cadets and Morghan is hungry, homeless and raggedy. Morghan is able to secure a position and proves his worth when a necromancer attacks the bridge with swarms of undead and vile creatures.

The other good story is A Handful of Ashes, featuring Francesca and Mari, servant /students at the magic college. The head of the college and her spoilt niece both dislike the idea of lower class or poor girls moving up in the world due to hard work and skill. They force Mari to read aloud part of the Old Bylaws, magic contracts that bind the college, and as a side effect, force the poor servant/students to wear ashes on their faces.

Bridge and Ashes have a sense of urgency, similar to the Old Kingdom novels, and underdog characters we identify with. Both are good stories, probably 4 stars on their own.

The Highest Justice is OK. The situation and plot leave me cold but I liked the main character Jess, a girl determined to help her mother have her last wish, even after death.

The rest of the collection is mediocre. I didn’t care for the characters and the plots are unexceptional and I’ve seen several in other anthologies.

I would be very disappointed if I had bought this collection. As a library loan it’s OK but I wouldn’t bother getting it again.

3 Stars

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Filed Under: Magic Tagged With: Fantasy, Garth Nix, Old Kingdom, Short Story Collection

His Official Fiancee – Berta Ruck, English Romance 1913

March 31, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

Website Archive.org has several Berta Ruck novels available to read online or to borrow, and it’s free. Berta Ruck set His Official Fiancee in 1913, in London, a London suburb and the seashore in Wales. The book was published in 1914, likely before the war broke out in August, and Berta does not mention the war or international tensions.

Monica’s father died a year before the novel begins and left nothing except a feckless son wandering the Earth and 20 year old Monica. She used her tiny bit of money to take a business course, shorthand and typing, then got a roommate for a cramped upstairs apartment and a beastly typist job at 25 shillings a week.

The other three office girls and she view their ultimate boss, Mr. Waters, as “Still Waters”, more a machine than a man. Monica is terrified she will be fired when he calls her into his office, but that is not the case. Instead Mr. Waters wants to hire her to pretend to be his fiancee for a year at 10 pounds a year (or 8 times her typist wage). Monica is going to refuse when she gets a telegram from her worthless brother demanding 100 pounds to keep him out of jail.

The plot around the fake engagement is far fetched of course, but get by that and ignore the sentence slamming a Jewish man and you have a gem of a book. Mrs. Ruck creates a lovely world, well-run homes with plenty of money and big gardens, dressing for dinner, unobtrusive servants. Monica appreciates her visit to Mr. Waters’ home even more after living on her own at a miserable wage. Even more than physical comforts, Monica appreciates her future mother-in-law, a wonderful woman, warm-hearted, kind, welcoming.

One of the telling scenes is when Monica and Mr. Waters stop into her apartment and find her erstwhile admirer, Sydney Vandeleur visiting her roommate Cecily. Before getting her brother’s money demand, Monica had considered falling in love with Sydney, except he was supposedly out of the country, and she was not in love with him. This visit she realizes Sydney is silly, a man content to fritter away his days and his talents, and by contrast Mr. Waters is vigorous, hard-working, and never silly.

It’s fun to read about a pleasant, gracious era, assuming one is upper crust and not laboring for 25 shillings a week. It reminds me of some P G Wodehouse novels, and Sydney is a perfect example of Bertie Wooster’s friends in the Drones Club.

Mrs. Ruck’s style is different from most modern writers yet enjoyable and easy enough to follow. Monica is well-written, full of character and lively determination. She’s realistic enough to know that living on beans is tolerable when one is 21 but quite the opposite when one is 41.

As I read His Official Fiancee I kept thinking of The Great War about to fall upon the people in the story. Both Sydney and Mr. Waters are about 30, unmarried, and Sydney is a drone. Both would be likely called up and given the horrific casualty figures of WWI, likely both would have died in the battles or the diseases afterwards. Our heroine, her friends, her in-laws would have been devastated.

Filed Under: Romance Fiction Tagged With: English Romance, Romance

Bridal Jitters – Harmony Introduction by Jayne Castle

March 30, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

Jayne Castle introduced her unique Harmony world in Bridal Jitters. The story itself is good, not great, however she managed to include a lot of information in a novella about people.

Virginia Burch and Sam Gage are partners, offering a combination service to people exploring the vast underground catacomb under the dead alien city Cadence. Their first client hires Virginia and Sam to remove a large ghost waterfall, but some of the client’s hired hunters instead try to kill them. They escape into what may be an alien cemetery, and eventually turn the tables on their attackers.

Sam and Virginia are not as real as most of Castle’s characters, their romance reads more distant. There are several sex scenes but not a lot that would tell us why they fall in love.

Jayne Castle has a true gift for creating characters we care about and who feel real, and sometimes her stories are so engrossing that it feels as if we are experiencing the characters’ lives, not simply reading about them. Bridal Jitters doesn’t deliver at her usual level, possibly due to the length and the fact she packed in a great deal of background on Harmony.

It’s still a decent story and a very fast read. My library offers Bridal Jitters via Overdrive and you library may be similar. I wouldn’t advise paying for this.

2 Stars

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Filed Under: Paranormal Romance Tagged With: Harmony, Jayne Castle, Jayne Krentz, Paranormal Romance, Paranormal Suspense

The Bastard’s Refuge: Blood of Wrodor – Book One by Brian O’Rourke

March 29, 2020 by Kathy Leave a Comment

I’ve been cleaning out my Kindle library, reading some books that I’ve had for a couple of years, and came across The Bastard’s Refuge. I don’t recall exactly, but it was probably a BookBub special and I didn’t expect much, figured it would be yet another book that I read 10 pages of or so then delete. In fact The Bastard’s Refuge is excellent. Brian O’Rourke created a compelling world with tension, threats, intriguing back story and a far more interesting main character than many fantasy heroes.

Galeran lives at the Abbey of Bronze, a shelter for all high-born bastards, run by warrior monks. He is one day short of 18, and at 18 must either take monastic vows or leave. Noble families have a nasty habit of killing off bastards, either their own or their rivals, so leaving is risky, and it’s difficult since Galeran has no money and the abbey is remote. At the same time his country is under attack by invading Ra-Haizur, a force that includes over 100,000 warriors and skilled sorcerers.

One of those sorcerers is leading a force to capture the abbey and kill all the children and monks, thus eliminating all possible high-born children, even those born illegitimate. Galeran must take all the surviving children and escape to a forest.

And the book ends.

Yes, it ends. Galeran and a couple hundred kids are in a cavern making their way to safety when it ends. It speaks much for this author’s skill that I looked on Amazon to see the next book in the series, despite the horrible, cliffhanger ending. Unfortunately, although The Bastard’s Refuge is noted as Book One there does not seem to be a Book Two. If there were I would buy it.

4 Stars I’d give this a solid 5 stars for completely exceeding my (low) expectations and delivering a well-written fantasy had it not been for the ending.

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Filed Under: Action and Adventure Tagged With: 4 Stars Pretty Good, Cliff Hanger, Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy

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