Customer Reviews

Enchantress Mine

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Mairin lost her mother when she was born, but soon her father came and took her from Ireland to England where she lived as the apple of his eye until the wicked stepmother came along. Nothing limited Blanche's hatred of her stepchild, and when Mairin's father died, Blanche immediately sold her to a slaver, thinking the little girl will soon be lost in far away Turkey; and she would have been, if a kindly Englishman had not seen her and bought her as a replacement for his own dead child.

Mairin and her servant, Dagda, truly are at home with her new family. Her adoptive parents and brother love her immediately, and when she is of marriageable age, a wedding to a Byzantine prince is planned. Before she can truly become Basil's wife, he is killed by a past lover. Sent home, Mairin manages the estate left to her when her father and brother die in the wars until Josselin, a knight of the Conquerer's, comes and to claim both her home and heart. However, Mairin's beauty of body and soul has won another man's heart, a dangerous Viking who will stop at nothing to have her.

*** Once more, Ms Small has penned a fairy tale for adults. Though both hailed and critisized for her use of sensuality, I would not term her books erotic. Passion is kept within appropriate bounds, as a symbol of love, not pure lust. Mairin, like all of her heroines, has a gallantry that would shame one of the knights, yet is feminine in every way. ***
Amanda Killgore

I have always enjoyed Bertrice Small's book. They are written with such flare and feeling. She pulls the reader right along with her heroines in the story. We not only read, but feel the story along with the characters. This story is no different. The lives of Small's characters never follow the normal path, but go along different paths, that one would normally not think of. This story is not any different. You begin to think that it is a fairy tale about a child with a wicked stepmother. Who is sold to a slaver. That would be the end of a life, but no. Her life gets better, not worse and things happen that you would never imagine. There is love scenes, but they are part of the story, not put in because the writer needs to fill space. If you like a different romanic story that you can not put down, you will not be disappointed with this or any other of Bertrice Small's books.

I like the way Bertrice Small injects her romance with a lot of historical background, unlike many romance authors. I REALLY REALLY REALLY could have used without the word enchantress being used every other page or more often ... I KNOW the title, use the phrase once or twice but it was so overused it was irritating and detracted from an otherwise good book

I think when the author cooked up this book, her recipe was this: Take a huge pile of schmaltz. Add way too much sugar, till it's sickly-sweet in places, and a handful of nuts. Stir unevenly. Leave it half-baked, and serve barely lukewarm, never hot.

Forgive me if I find the result of this recipe too hard to swallow!

Where do I start in explaining why I detest this book so much? Okay, let's begin with the heroine, Mairin. She is constantly vaunted as being perfect, incredibly beautiful, intelligent and good -- and I mean CONSTANTLY, like on every page. EVERYONE she meets fawns on her and praises her. She herself even thinks about how beautiful she is, and mentions her beauty to others. Okay, I'll admit it, I'm not fond of vain women. But more to the point, I hate praise that isn't deserved. I didn't think she was the least bit perfect. In fact, I thought her as far from perfect as Pluto is from the sun, at least in the brains and personality departments. She came off as dumb and dull, sometimes to the extreme. Getting back to her alleged beauty, though, I was REALLY revolted by the fact that so many men were said to have coveted her in the first hundred pages of the book, during which time she was aged between five and thirteen years old. The way her beauty is described in those pages is in an adult way, in terms of sensuality...I mean, ick, she's just a little kid! She was sold into slavery with lewd intentions at age five, married at thirteen and first made love to, more or less, at fourteen...am I the only one who thinks it's wrong in a romance book to have a child doing these sorts of things, especially with much older men? Also, at age five Mairin made very long speeches full of very long words...she did not at any point sound like a five year old. In fact, she sounded like a grown-up at every age...her character was very unrealistically written. Still, in spite of her apparent maturity, she shouldn't have been doing so many grown up things with men. That's just wrong!

If you want more grossness, try these other plot twists from the book: Mairin's husband kisses the blood stains (along with the other bodily fluids mixed with them, assumedly) from her body when she loses her maidenhead. Or try this excerpt: 'her hands smoothing down his back, tangling within his tawny hair.' Ew! Back hair! Or her second husband Josselin threatening to beat her (on more than one occasion), and both of them, and her mother, treating it as a funny joke (strange -- personally, I don't think wife bashing is amusing), or when, on the second last page, Josselin nastily berates his infant son because of jealousy, and his wife smilingly goes along with it (not exactly the happy ending I was after.) I also thought it in bad taste that practically every time Mairin and Josselin canoodled, Mairin talked about her lovemaking experiences with her previous husband. And furthermore, when she did that, Josselin didn't seem to mind or get in the least bit jealous. That didn't make sense to me. What man wants to hear a woman talking about how good her ex was in bed, least of all while she and her current beau are getting intimate? But in the book, Josselin didn't take offence...he just went on telling Mairin how perfect she was, like everyone always did. And there were other things in the book that I didn't understand, like how Mairin was supposed to have been the first redheaded woman the Byzantine empire had ever seen, and people were amazed by her, and flocked to see her. Firstly, I doubt they had never seen a redhead before in such a cosmopolitan place. Secondly, she was there with her redheaded mother...why did no one ever notice her mother, or make a fuss of her? And I don't get why Mairin's home of Aelfleah is described in the first half of the book as a worthless, unimportant, usually forgotten, out-of-the-way holding, then in the rest of the book as an important, strategic, valuable holding. I mean, huh? There were other contradictions, too, like when Mairin is described one minute as an innocent, then the next as someone who has learnt all about the facts of life from her parents. Or like when Mairin is said to be oblivious to how beautiful she is, then the next minute is described as fully understanding just how great her own beauty is.

There were a lot of other faults with the writing of this book. And I don't just say that because it was like an overly-melodramatic soap opera, complete with laughably bad, wooden dialogue and a nonsensical storyline full of predictability and improbability and illogicality and typical soap opera props like a girly heroine who faints and loses her memory. I mean, the author made a LOT of mistakes. Like when Mairin is said to be 14 years old, then ten months later she is supposed to be 16. Or when the author says that Mairin is given a two year old stallion (there's no such thing...it's called a colt until it's four.) Or when Basil kisses Mairin in the garden, then is said to have 'walked from the room'. Also, there is a lot of 'narrative within dialogue', a sin in writing if used to excess, when the characters make long winded speeches to fill the reader in with the plot details, ie. like when Mairin's father gives a speech to his family about their house and family history. Clearly this is done so that the reader will know all about it...problem is, the things he talks about are things his family would surely already know, like the fact that there is a birdcoop right next to the house they've lived in for decades. If they already know stuff like that then why would he be telling them? It's annoying, giving readers the facts this way. Leave all the lengthy narrative out of character dialogue, I say. The author also commits another crime...everytime a character is asked by someone else what has happened to them, the author doesn't gloss over it and just say something like 'she explained her situation', the author lets them explain EVERYTHING in dialogue, rehashing their every action and experience, all of which we've already read about previously. This probably happened about twenty times or more. Even though I already knew what had happened to the characters, I was forced to read about their exploits yet again, over and over. I must have heard Mairin's life story at least a dozen times over! Ugh! Boring! Also, the author felt the need to overuse words. Mairin's husband called her 'enchantress' so many times I wanted to scream! Could he not remember her name, or call her something else for a change? Also, the word celtic was overused...a cross couldn't just be a cross, it had to be a celtic cross. And then there was a celtic heart, and a celtic temper, whatever those are, and all the other celtic things. Ugh! Also, the writer seemed afraid to use commas, and many sentences were made difficult to understand at first glance due to the fact that all the words ran together without any breaks between them. I found it maddening. And don't get me started on what a ridiculous 2-D stereotypical villain the character of Eric Longsword is. Actually, the only really interesting character in the book is Basil...I found it unusual to see a bisexual character in a romance book. But his potential is short lived as unfortunately his character is killed off quickly, after basically admitting that his interest in men was a brief and passing phase -- what a cliche! I almost felt as if he was being punished for his 'deviancy' by the writer when he was killed off.

I hated this book. I'm glad it's over. I will never read it again. And I won't be reading any more of this author's books. Given how juvenile the writing in this book seemed to me, I was surprised to discover that the author is in fact old enough to be a grandmother. (Although, given the frequency with which lavender and lilac scents are described in this book, I should have realised that she was old! Grandmas always love and smell of these scents.) I bear the author no ill will -- she is probably a lovely person. But I really can't stand her writing! And it worries me that someone her age, with grandkids, could write some of the disturbing things she wrote in this about a character who is really only a little girl, but is treated like a sensuous women.

I am a huge Small fan and was excited about this book
However this is a horrible read. The character is overblown and just a bad story.

My book was mailed to me within the time as stated it would be. It was protected by bubble wrap and in perfect condition. I definitely would order again.

This is the first Bertrice Small's book I read and I really have to say it is one of her best.
Fascinating plot, lovely characters (Mairin is a wonderful heroine and the other characters are pleasant and -very important thing- believable), historic accuracy, love scenes wonderfully described and never coarse.... who could ask for more?

Kudos to M.A. Bechaz for an honest, comprehensive review. Never having read Small's work before, I purchased this novel based on the first few positive posts which touted the love scenes as graphic, but tastefully-written and essential to the plot. Had I gotten as far as Bechaz's comments and that of one other intelligent consumer, I would not have bought the book. Alas! It would have been money well saved.

Now, I'm no prude, nor do my tastes run to the prurient. The precise reason I was interested in this work was the technical handling of the love scenes. As a first-time author of a historical romance (and, please, let's not confuse that with a Harlequin Romance, which, I think, Ms. Small has), I am always interested in how other authors handle these descriptions and every other aspect of the novel. I'm also a fan of superb historical romance/historical fiction writers such as Mary Stewart, Sharon Kay Penman, Jack Whyte, and - my favourite - Susanna Kearsley (note the fine Canadian content), so I thought I'd give Small a try.

The title should have been my first clue. Yes, "enchantress" is used far too often throughout, and other words are repeated needlessly in the same sentence or paragraph, to the point of distraction. I agree wholeheartedly with just about every other point Bechaz makes: there are, for certain, several other technical problems with this book.

But back to the love scenes. (Aye, I realize that wasn't a complete sentence. There are some situations in which breaking grammatical rules is quite acceptable.) Okay, you folks who reviewed the book and said the love scenes were well-written. "Releasing his living tribute into her garden of delight"? "Worrying the bud of her womanhood with his tongue"? And, perhaps the most laughable: "Ahhhhh! Ohhhhh! Ohh!"

Really, people?

I actually read these scenes aloud to my friends, with feeling, and we split our sides with uncontrolled mirth.

Perhaps I am betraying a fellow author, breaking some kind of fraternal writers' code or something, but for the life of me, I don't know how this work made it to publication, let alone got through the editing process - if, indeed, there was one at all. It could be that this is a fine example, for aspiring authors, or those who have published their twenty-fifth novel, of what not to write.

In my humble opinion, those thinking of purchasing this book would do well to reconsider. Save your ducats and invest in a work by one of the above-mentioned artists, or their ilk, instead.