Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

In To Love a Scottish Lord, Hamish and Brendan MacRae finally meet their matches. (Oooh look, a pun.) Mostly, the story is about Hamish, who was captured while trading off the coast of India and systematically tortured for a year before successfully escaping. On his return to Scotland on Brendan’s ship, he takes up residence in an abandoned castle he christens Castle Gloom. He’s determined to be a hermit—a hermit with a paralyzed arm, at that—but Brendan has other ideas. In short order Brendan is back at the castle with an assload of supplies, a cook, a carpenter and a hot brunette who’s been dubbed the Angel of Inverness for her healing prowess.

Mary Gilly is that rarest of romance novel creatures: a widow who genuinely loved her much older husband, and her sex life was decidedly better-than-ho-hum. No clichés in this book involving virgin widows or orgasm-less wives who wouldn’t know what to do with a friendly penis if it poked her in the face. Mary’s husband was a goldsmith, and his death left her very well off. (He also left her a sociopathic apprentice with an unhealthy obsession with Mary, but more on him later.) Mary had been feeling just a bit restless when lo and behold, along comes a most interesting case for her to handle.

Sparks fly when Hamish and Mary first meet, of course. And initially Hamish mightily resists her efforts to treat him, of course. But within a few days of meeting each other they’re humping like crazed monkeys, of course. And Mary gets to see in gruesome detail what the Indians did to Hamish, but she doesn’t so much as flinch nor does it diminish his attractiveness to her—of course.

Then Hamish comes up with a radical idea: dismiss everyone from the castle, including Brendan, have Mary write to her friends and the apprentice, Charles, to let them know that this particular patient is going to need more time than expected, and this way they can boink all over the castle, all they want. And Mary is like, yeah, crazy monkey sex, woo! And has Brendan deliver letters to her best friend, Elspeth, and Charles, Creepy Apprentice Par Excellence.

Two things result from this errand:

1. Brendan falls head over heels for the very comely Elspeth.



2. Charles tips over the edge from “kinda creepy” to “full-on batshit insane.”

He stirs up rumors that Mary killed her husband, and successfully has her arrested for murder. His plan? He has some evidence that he’s willing to withhold, as long as Mary marries him. And she won’t, of course. Then Hamish comes galloping down to Inverness to find her and eventually is forced to recount a pretty grisly incident from his travails in India in an effort to save Mary, only I don’t get how the anecdote is supposed to help Mary at all; it just seems like a really weird plot device to get Hamish to open up on a Deep Dark Secret that’s been gnawing away at him and Hinted At Darkly through most of the book.

But in the end, this Mary-being-unfairly-incarcerated plot is resolved in a rather surprising way, so props to Ranney for not doing the expected thing

So, OK, the title of the book puzzles me a little because neither Hamish nor Brendan is a lord, though their oldest brother, Alisdair, is an earl. I’m thinking To Love a Scottish Guy Who’s Closely Related to a Lord and Might Actually Succeed to the Title if the Two Eldest Brothers Kick The Bucket, Which is Pretty Unlikely However Since The Two of Them Gave Up the Relatively Dangerous Business of Seafaring for Tamer Pursuits, and Technically the Title is English and Not Scottish Anyway would’ve been too unwieldy. But this isn’t a complaint, just a riff I decided to stick in here because I thought it was pretty funny and didn’t want to waste it.

One of the things that did actually bother me about the book, though, was Mary’s relentless perfection. Is she a wonderfully progressive healer for the time? Check. Is she patient and warm? Check. Is she hot? Check. Is she boobtacular? Check. Does she have some adorable yet meaningless flaw, like, ohhhh, a fear of stairs and heights that she overcomes to treat Hamish? Check. I liked Mary, but I also found her kind of boring.

I liked Hamish a bit better, but even he came across as just a bit too much of a paragon. He’s horribly tortured and indelibly marked by a dark-skinned race while coming from a culture and time that does not look kindly on dark-skinned furriners—in fact, a culture and time which subscribes to the idea that dark-skinned furriners are sub-human, barbaric and inferior in every way even before said furriners brandish their implements of torture. Yet he harbors no bitterness or hatred towards his captors. While entirely commendable of him, I also found it very hard to swallow. He is also realistically skittish about engaging in any sort of relationship beyond the sexual, at least at first, but within weeks of meeting Mary, he’s in love and willing to marry her. This is not believable behavior for a man who’s undergone the trauma he has.

So on one hand, I’m kind of glad Ranney was all classy and avoided hysterics and melodrama, but on the other hand: DUDE. Torture. An abandoned castle. Madness. A little bit of melodrama and a longer recovery period for Hamish would not have been amiss.

I also took an inordinately long time to finish this book because I kept falling asleep about 10, 20 pages after I started reading. I finally figured out that it was all the internal musing that was doing me in. Not a whole lot happens in this book, at least until Mary gets arrested in the last third or so of the novel. Mostly, Mary and Hamish talk, have some sex, then they ponder. A lot. Zzzzzz.

When I wasn’t falling asleep, I was looking crap up in reference books and on the Internet. Now this is not at all Ranney’s fault—the things I’m going to nitpick on are hardly worth mentioning at all, and are a result of me being rabidly anal-retentive about really stupid things, and I never know what is going to set me off, or why. Regardless, here’s some of the stuff that bothered me:

• Brendan and Mary are on a first-name basis right off the bat. WHOA. That’s some intimacy going on here—I mean, this is in an era when married couples addressed each other as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” To illustrate: quite far into Mr. Impossible, the hero is babbling at the heroine and all of a sudden he breaks off and blurts out “And I don’t even know your first name!” or words to such effect—and then I realized that all this time the hero HAD been properly referring to the heroine as Mrs. Pembroke, and I thought YES, finally, a historical romance that gets that right. So yeah. Guy calling a woman who’s not even remotely related to him by her first name? Major protocol violation. And if the guy who does it isn’t even going to be the one who ends up with her? Pointless major protocol violation.
• Apparently Mary has some morphine laying around. OK, cool—except morphine wasn’t identified and isolated from opium until 1803, just over 20 years after this book begins, and even then its use wasn’t widespread until the 20th century, when hypodermic needles came into common use. Laudanum or straight-up opium were how people got their RDA of morphine back in the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Some other word usage bothered me, like tumor and influenza. There’s nothing wrong with using these words; according to the etymological dictionary I consulted, they were certainly coined well before the story took place. I guess I would’ve preferred words that sounded more convincing for the time period like “grippe” (which ironically enough was coined after influenza) or “ague.” I know, I KNOW—how stupid is this nitpick? Incredibly fucking stupid. But I can’t help myself. It’s a disease with me, a disease, I tell you.
• OK, so Hamish has only one usable arm; his left arm is completely paralyzed due to some nasty shit the Indians inflicted on him. But in the beginning of the book, Mary notices that Hamish is dressed immaculately, down to a neatly-tied stock at his throat. Eh?!? Just about anyone would be hard-pressed to put on and button their pants with only one usable arm, much less tie off a jaunty neckcloth.

OK, I’m done beating up on the book now. Seriously, though, it wasn’t a bad book. I didn’t dislike the characters, even if I found them somewhat hard to believe in. And once Mary got arrested, I stopped falling asleep every 20 pages and was all “HOLY CRAP WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT?” Ranney also gets one thing very, very right: the sex. It’s sexy, and beautiful, and emotional, and just about everything sex should be in a romance novel. If the rest of the book had been as good as the sex, it would’ve been an A-, easy.

But like I said before, loads of people like this book quite a bit better than I do. Probably because they don’t have an obnoxious Nitpicking Monster residing within them who shows up at inconvenient moments to ruin their shit.




Notes:
The Highland Lords novels, in the order in which they were published:

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love

Riona isn’t quite that lucky. During a ball, she’s lured into the garden by the smarmy and extremely broke Harold MacDougal, who then attempts to compromise her to force her into marrying him. He doesn’t succeed in so much as stealing a kiss—Riona, to her credit, kicks him in the nuts while he’s trying it and this is one of the few satisfying blows she gets in, from here on out it’s sheer frustration watching her helplessness, baby—but he does succeed in mussing her up. And of course that’s enough evidence of her ruined virtue for the rest of society, and perhaps even more importantly, in the all-powerful Mrs. Parker’s eyes.

Riona initially resists the attempted manipulation, but Harold insists on spreading ugly false rumors about what they did in the garden. She realizes that the scandal of being both ruined and unmarried would in turn ruin Maureen’s chances at marrying her British captain, but balancing her personal happiness with that of her sister’s proves to be a much harder task than she had bargained for. She eventually acquiesces—reluctantly—to Harold’s suit.

Riona’s mother decides to enlist help with Riona’s mulishness from an old friend and former tenant of hers, Fergus MacRae, who was something of a father-figure to her girls while he lived with them. Fergus, however, is otherwise occupied by his impending wedding, so he sends his nephew James in his stead.

Of the MacRae brothers, James is the sensitive, pretty girly-man. He became a ship captain because his brothers did, but he doesn’t feel the same affinity for the seagoing life as his siblings. He maintains a journal, in which he confides his most intimate thoughts in the best angsty, sensitive girly-man prose. Really, if James were a modern man, he’d probably keep a livejournal, listen to bands like The Flaming Lips or Radiohead and have oodles of fangirls who secretly assume he’s gay.

So at any rate, here’s the rest of the plot: James meets Riona. They fall madly in love at first sight. Riona’s mother sees this, tells a big whopping lie about missing livestock and enlists James’ help in catching the imaginary thief in an effort to keep him at the farm longer. A crazy-ass villain with a grudge against the MacRaes makes a quick appearance, but that side-plot is neatly resolved about halfway through the book. James realizes that a farmer’s life is much more fulfilling for him than being a ship captain. Riona and James have OMG HOT SEXX0R. And everyone in the book who realizes how perfect James and Riona are for each other just kind of walk around with their dicks in their hands going “Uh duhhrrrrrr, what do we do, boss, what do we do?” But praise Jah, James finally gets a clue and resolves everything in the last 40 pages of the book.

Despite the rather dismal excuse for conflict in this novel, The Irresistible MacRae is still eminently readable. Like I said before, this story was a nice break from the high drama of the first two books. It also helps that Riona and James are both extremely likeable characters. I like how realistic Riona’s struggles were when it came to weighing her concerns about getting married to Harold the Slimeball vs. her sister’s happiness. Her deep-seated desire to be selfish and tell everyone to fuck off was a nice change from the usual romance novel heroine, who can be quite the martyr, and her eventual capitulation makes her that much more honorable because you realize the cost it exacts on her. And James is adorable. He’s hot, he tries hard to resist Riona before he caves in to his desires, and he also has a nice protective streak to him that’s never obnoxious. I happen to like sensitive girly men, what can I say? Makes a nice change from the usual romance novel heroes, who tend to be hyperkinetic alpha types.

I did bump the grade a half-point lower because of one more issue besides the plot: Ranney’s tendency to dwell on her protagonists’ internal musings was a bit much. YES, I know Riona is unhappy with her choices. YES, I know James is having a hard time resisting Riona even though he knows he should stay away from her. I GET IT. MOVE ON WITH THE STORY, PLZ. It’s all very prettily written, but pretty is as pretty does.

But really, despite all my snarking, you could do a lot worse with a romance novel choice than picking up The Irresistible MacRae. You could, for example, be reading Kill and Tell. If you don’t mind books with lots of introspection and sluggish excuses for plots don’t bother you too much, feel free to give this a shot. I do recommend reading the first two books first, but Ranney handles the backstories skillfully enough that doing so is not strictly necessary.

Notes:
The Highland Lords novels, in the order in which they were published:

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love

It’s 29 years after the events that ended One Man’s Love. Alisdair MacRae, eldest son of Ian and Leitis MacRae and a very successful ship captain, is visiting the ancestral MacRae lands that were abandoned when the clan decided to escape to Nova Scotia instead of suffering the full brunt of British rule in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden. He wants to look at Gilmuir Castle, which he’s heard so much about but never seen in person. But really, the visit is supposed to be a quick detour; he’s on his way south to London to talk to his father’s stepmother. When Ian MacRae (born Alec Landers, heir to the Earl of Sherbourne) decided to commit treason and aid the Scots in defying and eventually escaping the British, his stepmother, Patricia (who aided the escape) had him legally declared dead and her son installed as earl. However, her son is now dead, and Alisdair is presumed to be next in line to inherit. Alisdair has every intention of refusing the earldom. His life, he thinks, is with the sea and with a steady, sturdy woman in Nova Scotia.

Until he rescues a beautiful young woman named Iseabal. Iseabal is the only child of Magnus, laird of the MacRae’s age-old rivals, the Drummonds. The ruins of Gilmuir and the strange, sudden disappearance of the MacRae clan has always stirred her interest, and Iseabal uses every opportunity she has to escape there from the intensely abusive Magnus. Then one day, while exploring the castle, she quite literally falls down a hole. 30-year-old ruins that have been bombed to fuck and back by British cannon are full of holes—who knew? Not Iseabal, apparently. But conveniently enough, Alisdair is right there to yank her out.

Alisdair doesn’t really think too much of the encounter. Gilmuir and the MacRae land are actually foremost in his mind, especially when he sees the land being grazed over by sheep. He finds out that Magnus Drummond has been ceded the ownership and use of the property, and on impulse he heads over to the Drummond stronghold to buy the land back. Magnus is willing to sell it, on one condition: that Alisdair marry his daughter too. It’s not every day a man gets to marry a woman he pulls out of a hole, but fate has selected Alisdair for just such a destiny.

After the wedding, Alisdair and Iseabal and immediately sail for London, where Alisdair plans to annul the marriage and tell his step-grandmother gently but firmly: Thanks, but no thanks. But on the voyage down the two of them discover Things of Great Hotness about each other. For instance, Alisdair discovers that Iseabal is a sculptor, which he finds to be a turn-on. And Iseabal discovers that Alisdair has a genuine core of kindness and gentleness to him, and that’s a turn-on for her too, especially given her experiences with her father.

And Alisdair’s plans all go awry once he sets foot in London, of course. He doesn’t expect to like Patricia quite so much, for one. He also doesn’t expect the Sherbourne estate to be quite so prosperous. He suddenly realizes that if he accepts the earldom, he’ll have enough money to rebuild Gilmuir and start a shipyard there, and since the MacRae land has become a new obsession of his, he makes an old woman very happy and accepts the title. Similarly, his plans to annul his marriage to Iseabal are abandoned when Patricia, playing matchmaker, makes him aware of what exactly he’s giving up.

The happy couple sail back to Scotland to rebuild their future, except Magnus, as befits a romance novel villain (romances are not known for their multi-dimensional, believable bad guys—I know, SHOCK, HORROR, GASP!), has reneged on the deal and has reclaimed the land. And so begins a battle in earnest,and Iseabal feels herself horrified at the depths her father will sink to—so much so that she begins to doubt that Alisdair can truly love the daughter of the man who is able to commit such atrocities.

But they work it out in the end (I know, SHOCK, HORROR, GASP!), and everybody gets their just desserts. No, trust me. They do. There’s even a really sweet secondary love story involving Fergus, Leitis’s older brother and presumed dead at Culloden in the previous book.

Ranney does a good job of creating characters that aren’t quite your usual, run-of-the-mill romance novel archetypes. Alisdair strikes a nice balance between being confident and assertive on one hand, and being a genuinely nice guy on the other. Iseabal is one of the more interesting characters I’ve encountered lately. Her abuse at the hands of her father has led her to exercise extreme restraint over any outward manifestations of emotion, and her struggle with the repression is presented very believably. Alisdair’s desire and corresponding efforts to break through that restraint are similarly well-portrayed.

The writing style in this book is quite beautiful; it’s lyrical without being overwhelming. Ranney has a very distinct voice, and although I’ll read just about anything she releases, a few of her books have collapsed under the weight of her prose style (My Wicked Fantasy is one book that comes to mind, and Above All Others is actually almost completely unreadable because of it). Thankfully, she manages to avoid that particular pitfall in this book.

When the Laird Returns is a pretty entertaining book. It’s well-written, and it doesn’t insult your intelligence, though it comes close to calling it mean names a couple of times. Check it out. If you’ve read and enjoyed other Karen Ranney novels, look this up. If you’ve never read any Ranney, I suggest trying Upon a Wicked Time or My Beloved to get you hooked, those two books kick ass.

Notes:
The Highland Lords novels, in the order in which they were published:

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love

Ever since he was a child, Alec John Landers, Earl of Sherbourne, has made annual visits with his mother to Gilmuir in Scotland to spend time with his grandfather, who is laird to the MacRae clan. When in Scotland, they don’t acknowledge his English side; instead, he’s known as Ian MacRae and allowed to run wild with all the other MacRae children. Along the way, he develops a boyish tendre for the beautiful and feisty Leitis MacRae. Then on his eleventh birthday, his mom pulls classic Too Stupid To Live shit: she goes off riding alone, despite warnings of recent raids by the rivaling Drummond clan. Of course, beautiful Moira Landers nee MacRae is found dead that same day, presumably killed by the Drummonds. In a fit of pre-pubescent angst, Alec disowns the Scottish side of family and declares hatred of all things Scottish forever.

Fast forward to July of 1746. It’s only three months after the extremely bloody Battle of Culloden. Alec is now a highly regarded colonel in the British army, decorated by none other than the Duke of Cumberland himself. And just as Cumberland was known as “Butcher Cumberland” (and not for his love of a good cut of steak, if you know what I mean), Alec has earned the sobriquet Butcher of Inverness. The Disarming Act is being reinforced with great zeal in Scotland (although I think Ranney might’ve meant the Act of Proscription, which wasn’t enacted until August 1746) and Scots can be jailed for playing the bagpipes, wearing a kilt or a tartan, speaking Gaelic, or expressing any other features unique to Gaelic culture. And oh wondrous fate, Alec finds himself assigned to head the brand-spankin’ new fort that’s been built right next to Gilmuir Castle.

Things are a mess on MacRae land. The clan, which used to number hundreds of people, is now down to a few dozen starving members. Alec’s childhood sweetheart, Leitis, is alone in the world except for her cranky uncle Hamish. And Hamish isn’t much help or comfort: he stubbornly insists on doing assheaded things like play the bagpipes, which inevitably sends a swarm of English soldiers down from the nearby Fort William to punish the whole village for harboring a criminal. Alec arrives at the village just as the English soldiers, headed by the suitably villainous and ugly Major Sedgewick (they’re always ugly, if they’re not they end up reforming and getting their own sequel), are burning the houses down in an attempt to get the people to reveal where Hamish is hiding.

Alec is sickened by the destruction and orders the fire put out, then has Leitis put under his protection under the guise of using her as a hostage to guarantee Hamish’s future good behavior. He doesn’t dare reveal that he’s really Ian MacRae and no longer quite as fervent in his hatred of the Scots. As for Leitis, she thinks he’s OMG hot and vaguely familiar-looking, but also an Evil Swinish English Oppressor. But dammit, he keeps doing nice things like saving the village and treating her well while she’s under captivity. What’s a poor romance novel heroine to think?

And here’s where the plot gets a little bit silly: Alec decides he needs to do more to help the MacRaes, so he dons a nifty little half-mask, wears all-black clothing, calls himself the Raven and with Leitis’s help starts stealing army supplies from under the soldiers’ very noses and distributing them (the supplies, not the soldiers’ noses) to the village. Besides the rather mind-boggling risks they take and the incredible incompetence the English army shows, one can’t help but wonder why romance heroines (and superhero girlfriends) are so susceptible to being hoodwinked by the flimsiest disguises. But to Ranney’s credit, she quite convincingly portrays how Leitis is fooled. Leitis also can’t quite shake the feeling that the Raven is somebody familiar to her, so she’s not completely brain-dead.

Of course, all hell breaks loose when Leitis finds out who the Raven really is. But the resolution to all the troubles and dilemmas they face (both as a couple, and as a clan) are worked out satisfyingly by the end, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the solution that Alec came up with.

Ranney pulls no punches in describing the privations the MacRaes suffer, and this is probably one of the best features of the book. You get a pretty good sense of how horribly the Highlanders suffered under the British regime after their defeat at Culloden. Some reviewers on Amazon.com complained about how this aspect interfered with their happy fantasyland, but those people are pussies, don’t listen to them. Oh, and nobody in the book speaks in an idiotic brogue. Big, big props to Ranney for avoiding that particular pitfall.

The two main characters are quite well-rendered, Alec more so than Leitis in my opinion. We see how his feelings about the Scots evolve from his impulsive, childish hatred to something a lot more compassionate and complex. Leitis is a pretty standard Feisty Romance Heroine, ready to defy death for the sake of her pride and sassing the hero every chance she gets, but hey, she didn’t annoy me too much, which is a lot more than I can say about most Feisty Romance Heroines.

So anyway, if you like Ranney’s books but you were feeling nervous about the whole Scottish aspect, don’t be—she doesn’t disappoint. I, for one, really enjoyed reading this book. Even the sillier aspects of the plot are treated with some depth and respect. On the other hand, if you like romances that are all love and bunnies and roses or Scottish protagonists who say shit like “ye ken, wee lassie?” all the time, this might not be your cuppa.

Notes:
The Highland Lords novels, in the order in which they were published:

One Man’s Love
When the Laird Returns
The Irresistible MacRae
To Love a Highland Lord
So In Love

Why do romance novel titles suck so hard?

So anyway, on to the review. Here’s some good news: If you really liked Archangel but thought Rachel should’ve dropped the rather stiff-rumped Gabriel for the gorgeous, golden, sweet-natured Obadiah, you’ll be ecstatic because Obadiah finally gets his own story, and it was worth the wait. Shinn weaves together two most excellent stories of two different sets of people falling in love.

The book starts a year and six months after the cataclysmic events that ended Archangel. First, we meet Elizabeth, a wealthy man’s daughter who has fallen on hard times after being orphaned. She currently lives with a cousin on his farm, essentially working as an unpaid servant. When presented with an opportunity to run off to Cedar Hills, a new angel stronghold, she decides to try her luck being an angel-seeker in the hopes she can regain her life of luxury.

Angel-seekers are essentially groupies. These women do their best to establish sexual relationships with angels, not just because angels are powerful, gorgeous and exotic in their own right, but in the hopes of becoming pregnant. If the pregnancy results in an angelic child, their future and status are assured because angel babies are so rare.

Soon after moving to Cedar Hills, Elizabeth strikes up a relationship with the handsome but rather feckless angel David. She also meets an Edori man named Rufus who works as a construction worker. Rufus was a slave until the archangel Gabriel outlawed the practice. He seems to love her, but he can’t give her an angel baby and the cushy life she’s looking for. Quite the dilemma, eh? (If you can’t guess what the outcome is to this love triangle, you gotta be brain-dead.)

The second love story is a lot more compelling. The angel Obadiah is assigned a new job by the archangel Gabriel: to pacify and negotiate with the Jansai. The Jansai are a people whose primary commerce used to be capturing and selling Edori slaves, and they are not happy with Gabriel’s new interdiction. But Obadiah is happy to accept this thorny commission because he’s more than half in love with Gabriel’s wife, and the assignment allows him distraction and distance from temptation. However, one of his wings is seriously injured on his way back from his first talk with the Jansai leader and he crash-lands in the middle of the desert. Luckily for him, a young Jansai girl, Rebekah, finds him on her way to get water for her family’s caravan.

Rebekah, like all other Jansai females, lives a life so sheltered it’s oppressive. It’s obvious that Shinn modeled the Jansai very closely to wacky fundamentalist Islamic regimes like the Taliban. Jansai women are required to keep all of themselves (including their faces) completely covered when not in the presence of immediate family, and are not allowed to go out in public unaccompanied by male relatives. Women found guilty of being “impure” are put to death. So Obadiah is completely out of Rebekah’s realm of experience, but she has a strong streak of independence to go with her compassion, and so their love story begins: she secretly helps nurse Obadiah back to health in defiance of everything she’s ever been taught, and they eventually become lovers when she returns home—quite the dangerous enterprise for both of them, especially Rebekah. How the two of them achieve their happily-ever-after is quite the suspenseful ride, but the resolution is very, very satisfying, if occasionally heart-stopping.

I really enjoyed this book. It is mostly character-driven, and Shinn does a good job with the people who populate the novel. I loved Obadiah when I first encountered him in Archangel, and I loved the opportunity to finally get into his head and see things from his point view. On the other hand, I found Rebekah and her wishy-washiness regarding Obadiah a little annoying at times, but then I realized that growing up as she did, her feelings about what she was doing and who she was doing it with could hardly be unequivocal. Elizabeth, however, was the character who grew and changed the most, and the transformation was very satisfying to see. She starts out as an unhappy, rather petulant woman who longs most of all for a life of luxurious idleness, and by the end of the book she has matured tremendously and manages to build true happiness from her circumstances.

Shinn also manages to present the angel-seekers with a lot of depth and sympathy. The seekers are generally treated with contempt by both people and angels, but Shinn convincingly shows us why many of these women are driven to do what they do, especially Elizabeth and her circle of friends.

I only have one small beef with the book, and it’s in the way Shinn writes about the Jansai. I know there are cultures that are based on oppression of the weak, and I can buy that these types of cultures don’t always produce the nicest people. I didn’t really have a problem with seeing many of the Jansai men being presented as greedy, brutish and selfish. But not only are they evil oppressors, they’re also FAT. And DIRTY. What the fuck? I think the dirty bit was what bothered me the most, because I grew up in a Muslim country (though I was raised Buddhist and am now officially agnostic), and I’ll tell you what: ritual purity and cleanliness are very important to most Muslim cultures. I would’ve appreciated a little bit more depth and balance to the portrayal of the Jansai; throwing in “fat and dirty” to add to their general villainy essentially pushed the race from being credible to being caricatures.

Anyway, if you enjoyed the previous Samaria novels, what are you waiting for? Go get it; this is one of the best so far. (But just to give you an idea of my tastes: Unlike most other readers, I found Archangel a bit underwhelming and really, really liked Jovah’s Angel.) If you’ve never tried Sharon Shinn and you like love stories set in other worlds, then check her out, she’s one of the best.

Notes:
The Samaria novels, in the order in which they were published:

Archangel
Jovah’s Angel
The Alleluia Files
Angelica
Angel-Seeker