A ROSE IN WINTER by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

PUBLISHER: Avon, 12/1982

GENRE: Fiction/Historical Romance

SETTING: England, 1792

MY GRADE: A

SYNOPSIS: Erienne's father had given her hand to the richest suitor. She was now Lady Saxton, mistress of a great manor all but ruined by fire, wife to a man whose mysteriously shrouded form aroused fear and pity. Yet even as she fell in love with her adoring husband, Erienne despaired of freeing her heart from the dashingly handsome Yankee who couldn't forget her. The beautiful Erienne, once filled with young dreams of romance, was now a wife and woman...torn between the two men she loved.

MY THOUGHTS: This was very good but slow until the last 100 pages (of a 564 page book) or so, then it really picked up. Timespan is just a few months.

Erienne is twenty with black hair, violet eyes, and is very spirited. I really like her. She's a very strong character who knows how to stand up to people. She's got an eighteen-year-old brother, Farrell. Her mother died years before. She lives with her horrible father, Avery, who treats her like garbage and reveals secrets to Erienne. He's sheriff but that's just a cover for the bad things he's doing. I found him to be very annoying because he spoke like a country bumpkin and it got on my nerves.

Christopher Seton is cousin to the man she marries, Lord Stuart Sexton. Christopher has russet-brown hair, gray-green eyes and is thirty-three. He's madly in love with Erienne from the start and pursues her, even after she's married. He's been living in American for awhile and most call him 'Yankee.' He's very likable and I absolutely love the way he antagonizes Erienne at every turn. He loves to ruffle her feathers and she falls for it every time. She hates him for wounding her brother and wants nothing to do with him.

Stuart has returned to the semi-burned home, Saxton Hall, after being presumed dead for a few years. He wears a black hood to cover his burned face and gloves to hide his burned hands. Everyone's disturbed by his appearance, most especially Erienne, who's reluctant to consummate their marriage. After marrying him she thought "he looked like he crawled from the pits of hell."

Claudia Talbot's a minor character for most of the story. She's a nasty young woman who resembles Erienne. She has the makings of a good villain and I wish more had been done to make her one.

There's a great twist in the last 150 pages involving Stuart and Christopher that I didn't see coming. Erienne thought she's figured it out (out of nowhere, of course) but it turned out to be something even crazier. I prefer her original thought though I'm happy with the actual twist. There's someone known as a night rider who's out killing people but turns out that person, who I didn't suspect, isn't really the one doing the killings, so that was a bit confusing.

Erienne should have felt some angst because of having to deal with being strongly attracted to Christopher while being married to Stuart but there wasn't any.

I'm so happy with this plot but the book shouldn't have been so long, almost 600 pages. The twist seems unique to me and I liked it a lot. I've read four of her books and this is the only one I've liked. The cover is beautiful and I'm sorry it took me 12.5 years to get around to reading it. 

Other Woodiwiss books I've reviewed:

The Flame and the Flower

The Elusive Flame, sequel to The Flame and the Flower

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.