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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dain not only burns, she shines!!, October 31, 2002
This review is from: To Burn (Mass Market Paperback)
I have long admired Dorchester Publishing, finding I read more and more of their writers such as Melanie Jackson and Trish Jensen. They are fresh, super storytellers and Dorchester gives them the leeway to shine. And Claudia Dain not only shines in this novel, she burns!!! What a super read!! There is a trend toward the light whimsical historicals and I utterly adore to leader of this pack Lynsay Sands. But while I cannot wait for one of her new books to come out, I also love 'heavy' historicals such as Danegeld by Susan Squires (both Dorchester writers), and Claudia Dain gives one super strong historical. Writing of a period that many have overlooked in the romance market: the void left as the Romans pulled out of England and the Saxons rose to power - she paints the canvass not only with strong bold, sure strokes, but with vivid colours. I have been in writers chat several times with Dain, and found her a lively person with a super sense of humour, but she also loves history, and being a history lover myself, I was intrigued recently as she discussed To Burn. So naturally, I rushed out to buy it and am very glad I did. She gives us two very strong alpha leads. She is Melania, the roman woman who detests the loathsome Saxon. He is Wulfred, the Saxon who kills her father and destroys her villa and hates all things Roman. She calls him Oaf, he calls her snake and they utterly HATE each other. He finds her hiding in a bolthole, and sets it afire to force her out. In Valiant, almost Viking mentality, she accepts dying there, because it would be on her own terms, not his. He plans on killing her, but sees that is just want she wants. A quick death in warrior fashion. And since he hates her and all she stands for, he perversely denies her the death she so wants, and makes her his slave intending to break her spirit before he grants her death. But he finds breaking her spirit an impossible task. She is constantly provoking him with diatribes against him and all things Saxon, she scratches, kick and bites anytime he gets near, deliberately trying to provoke his temper into murdering her. She continually tries to kill herself. Not as a Ophelia whiner I-cannot-face-life, but as a strong warrior wanting life and death on her own terms, and if she cannot have life as she knows it, then will faces death with open arms. So Wulfred spend more time tries to stop her, than breaking her spirit. These are two well-drawn, uncompromising characters for an uncompromising period in Britain's history. And this will be a book you will remember long after you put it down. Thank you the super book, Claudia!! And I am off to buy the rest of your works!! WISE Writers and Readers Book of the Month for June 2002
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful prose but no soul, May 20, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: To Burn (Mass Market Paperback)
I've only read two of Claudia Dain's books. The first one varied widely in its pacing and the writing style; this one has a smooth pace and is consistently written with an ear tuned to the music of language. Unfortunately, the characters in "To Burn" are beautiful but not sympathetic. They spend a huge amount of time inside their own heads. I'd rather see them doing something that would make me begin to like them. Logic holes abound. Our heroine professes to be Christian but her sporadic observations of the religion only scratch the surface when the plot deems it convenient and even more, quite unforgiveably, result in a sudden deus ex machina for the ending, a sure sign of lazy plotting and possible disregard for the reader. In the future if I pick up another Dain novel, I'd like to see her give us real motivations for her characters. Why does the hero linger here? It's never convincingly explained. I'd like to see her set her novels in the real time, where people had to work to survive instead of loll about -- especially when their world has just been destroyed. I'd like to see the dialogue written as if real people could have said it. Barbarians shouldn't speak like college professors. I'd like to see logic holes cleaned up: how is it that one person in this novel can learn fluent Latin from a year's stay in a very confined and limited environment, but the heroine's pitiful grasp of Saxon varies from scene to scene and never improves despite being surrounded by Saxons and put in a situation where it is to her advantage to learn what they're saying? Most of all I'd like to see characters whom I could care about and not people who seem to still reside only on the flat surface of a romance novel cover. (Although the gentleman on this book's cover is a fine sight to see. Too bad he was posed so awkwardly.)
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
"To Burn" 's fire fizzled and sputtered..., April 21, 2002
This review is from: To Burn (Mass Market Paperback)
Okay... let me get this straight. Wulfred kills her father,destroys her Villa, and is a rapist and murderer. He hates all things Roman because he was once enslaved in Rome. Melonia watches her father's murderer take charge of her home, she is enslaved, and has to share her home with the "unwashed Saxon masses". There's even a line where Melonia thinks about her father's face was fading from her memory to be replaced with Wolfred's face. Can anyone else say Patty Hearst? It really troubles me to give this low of a rating to an author I've grown to love. Between "The Holding" and "The Marriage Bed", I was hooked. But "To Burn" did nothing for me. The conflict in this book is HUGE. Insurmountable. Beyond resolution in this one book. Both characters hate each other. They're on opposite sides of the fence. North vs South. East vs West. Whichever - they are totally opposed to the other's lifestyle, religion, language, and very existence. I've thought of trying to compare this to a "Romeo and Juliet" kind of story, but that didn't work. Romeo may have killed Juliet's cousin, but he didn't do it in cold blood. The Montague's and the Capulet's may have hated each other for years, but Romeo and Juliet themselves didn't hate each other. So, they hate each other. That's the conflict. Where's the resolution? Neither character grows, accepts, or adapts to the other. She still hates all things Saxon... except Wulfred. He still hates all things Roman... except Melonia. "To Burn" was not what I had hoped for with Ms. Dain's latest book.
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