I was certain about this one not being a HEA, but Ms. Duran wrote one with such expertise that I am speechless. I can't say I love Nora or Adrian (both have lots of flaws) but I completely understand what they were going through and their love. I loved the book! P.S: I hope this one is made into a movie! the scenes were so vivid! and I don't think the screenplay needs to be tailored much. I certainly could picture everything in my head. It was okay, just a tad overwrought. Duran's a decent writer, but lacks wit or humor in her novels. And romance novels sort of require it, or they become a bit overwrought. I don't require a lot of humor, but a little would be nice. The plot was actually sort of interesting. This one had more plot than most - also a rather detailed depiction of the gender imbalance in Georgian England - circa 1715. Women are treated as little more than male property back then. Leonora Colville, the heroine, has a dilemma - she falls madly in love with a Catholic neighbor, who is also nobility. Their families rip them from each others arms cruelly. Leonora's brother and father believe she is better off married to Lord Towe, an upstanding Anglican Protestant, who is older and more established. Towe abuses her and is rather cruel - most of their marriage (thankfully) is told in brief flashbacks, without too many crushing details. I'm not sure the book could have handled a detailed account. Six years later, the man she loved, Adrian Ferrers, the Earl of Rivenham, has returned to her home to capture her brother - a Jacobite. Leonora is widowed, Towe conveniently for all concerned died. Ferrer's believes, unjustly, that she spurned him - that he'd escaped from his family's chains (literally) only to find her blissfully wedding Towe. Also, apparently her brother beat him within an inch of his life. At any rate, they reunite and the true history of their relationship is revealed. The difficulty I had with the novel was the heroine, who after a certain point - I had an overwhelming desire to smack upside the head. Her family forces her into marriage with a man she despises, the man abuses her, and well...does something else quite horrible. Although I didn't find it that shocking and relatively predictable, but it is climatic turning point when Adrian discovers it at the same time as the reader.At any rate - after all of this, it is hard to understand why Leonora persists in honoring or fighting for her brother and father's cause.Or has any loyalty towards either man. The writer tells us why she's loyal but never shows us. We are told her brother David was kind to her when no one else was - but we don't really see it, instead we see all the horrible things he's done through the eyes of Adrian. When we are in Leonora's pov, it's mainly worrying over where her loyalties should reside, desire for Adrian, self-loathing for not getting over him, and the feeling of being trapped. Leonora's problem is she is a woman. She has no choices and is provided with few in the novel. In some respects the romance is secondary to the social commentary - how women were treated back then by the men. And the abuses of power. Men possessed the power due to physical prowess and as a result, physically forced women to do their bidding. Leonora is continuously attempting to resist this physical force, yet cannot completely. The futility of her resistance threatens at different points to break her. The main source of the conflict between Leonora and Adrian is Leonora's lack of power - the only power she has is to refuse him, to not tell him things. Just as with her brother - her only power is to verbally refuse. And she attempts to make it clear to her brother - that she is not his to use.He doesn't understand this - thinking much like Adrian does that his actions serve only to protect her from a threat. Women in the 1700s did not have the power to chart their own destiny's, they were their families property to be traded at will - or so this writer states. Their choices are limited ones. The romance is a sort of power play between the men and Leonora. How she fights them, without being able to resort to physical force. My quibble is it goes on a bit long. And her loyalty to her brother and family is hard to swallow after a bit, considering how brutally they've treated her. The writer could have made it easier to swallow if she'd shown not told the reader why Leonora loved her brother and father, despite their recent actions. And why she feels she betrayed them with her love for Adrian - besides relying a bit too heavily on the time period to explain it.But, eh, it is a romance novel...so I shouldn't expect too much. Fairly cheap too on the Kindle. Kindle's were made for these types of books.
