Customer Reviews

Moonlight and Shadow

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

 

 

Martyn starts out with this wonderful, interesting heroine. Despite her desperate situation and seeming lack of choices, she is still a strong, intelligent woman who finds the only way out of a treacherous situation. I like Heloise a lot more in the beginning than the end. Once the king is crowned, Martyn shifts hats from romance author to historian and the main characters become merely a vessel to retell the events. Heloise is mysteriously tamed, losing all the bite that made her character interesting. Not to mention she has psychic talents that appear when convenient to the plot in the first 300 or so pages, but don't ever appear to be as big a deal to anyone other than Heloise and her love interest.

I couldn't make myself finish the last fifty pages. The last fifty in a 457-page book! Even after investing 400 pages of reading, I no longer cared about the characters. Maybe it picks up in the end. I don't know. I've read one of her other books, The Knight and the Rose, and didn't find it nearly as much of a chore to finish it.

I bought this book because it came recommended by the store. It had promise in the first few pages. The author does provide a detailed backround for her plot. However the characters are flimsy & cliche. The writing gets very choppy & leaps all over the place. By page 309 (Where I stopped)
they had kissed twice, fought about her *maybe* being a witch & then argued about their anulment 100 times. Enough with the tension & agnst already! This is supposed to be a romance after all! This book had no flow, no imagination & was just about the single most irritating thing I have ever read. I'm taking it back for a refund tommorow.

In 1483, merchant Sir Dudley Ballaster forces his oldest daughter Heloise and Sir Miles Rushden to marry at sword point. Not longer after exchanging, vows, Miles flees for Wales with plans to annul the marriage.

Dudley informs his daughter that she must find refuge with her new spouse as he no longer will take care of her. Heloise follows Miles to his residence amidst the Duke of Buckingham's estate. Under disguise, Heloise gets inside and soon charms everyone whom comes into contact with her including her runaway husband. Miles wonders what happened to him as he loves his wife and wants her by his side forever.

On the surface, MOONLIGHT AND SHADOW is a typical fifteenth century romance. However, adding depth to the strong romance is historical personage and events from the real world in which a fragile peace ending the War of the Roses needs very little to break back into civil war. It is the effortless ability to interweave real people and occurrences into her story lines as she has done with this wonderful novel that makes Isolde Martyn highly regarded and her books so appreciated by more than just sub-genre fans.

Harriet Klausner

I think that the book started off really nicely, but it was just so focused on the facts that I couldn't really focus on the actual story part of the book! I wish that I could have gotten a chance to enjoy the characters more, instead of having to focus so much on the history. To much time was focused on the history. It did have a fun story line though. I don't think I will read it again though.

Having read the other reviews on this book i felt compelled to offer my own opinion. Firstly, living in Australia i got the book until the title The Silver Bride which actually comes with a much classier cover than the one on this site. And because of this I didn't actually realise that it was meant to be a romance book, but I must say having read as just a book I throughly enjoyed it.

Although it may be true that you lose some of Heloise's spark as it gets further through the book I still enjoyed the elements of romance and the historical elements of the book, and I think that if you don't actually read it as a romance book but rather as a book that is historically intersting with some romance thrown in then you will love it like I do. It is actually a very clever and interesting book, and i must say to the other reviewer you should have read the last 50 pages because Heloise's "spark" does come back.

This book is now one of my favourite books :)

The writing style of Martyn is somewhat unique, in the very least. Somehow, I think it captures the historical sense of the book. However, there were times where I had to re-read a sentence a few times before I got it, or really understood what it was saying at all. I've read worse writing, so it was fairly tolerable.

Moving on to the characters: As a few have already stated, the heroine of the book, Heloise Ballaster, had a great start. I rather enjoyed her wit, courage, and bravery. However, as the story unfolded, I noticed that her personality took a fall. I found it exceedingly annoying that Heloise could be so forgivable and caring towards the hero, Miles, when he did not deserve it in the least. When I had expected her to put him in his place, or give him what he deserved, she was all forgivingness and 'I like you for some reason.. oh why me?'.

In the very beginning, after their forced marriage, she helped him escape. It was so obvious that her father was uncontrollable (even Miles was terrified of him), and so I was furious to see that Miles had simply left the poor, defenseless woman to the fury of her father and, obviously, his beatings as well.

Aside from that, when she was banished from her house and had to set forth to find him less she want to become a street whore with no money and no future, I was ready to strangle Miles when he didn't have the slightest bit of concern for her. In fact, he couldn't of more bluntly of told her, "I don't care". And then tried his hardest to get rid of her, short of sending her back to her abusive father (which he had threatened to do multiple times). So, if you haven't guessed it yet; I didn't like the hero of this story. I found him to be a cowardly and selfish character, not at all worthy of the hero of a book.

I wouldn't recommend this book; there's plenty else out there that are a better read. But, as stated above, there are also worse.

I won't bore you by telling you how fantastic I thought this book was...just wanted to let you know that in some countries (Australia for example) this book has been sold under a different title - The Silver Bride. Just thought you should know.

Other than that - buy it - it's a great novel by a very talented writer!