Customer Reviews

Savage Oaks

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

 

 

Suzanne Duprée is a happy convent-educated girl in France. She's got friends and is on good terms with the nuns. But one day her guardian/uncle shows up to tell her he's bought a plantation house for her in Louisiana. She's excited because she will be going to the country where her dead parents came from and, hopefully, she will learn more about them. (Everything about them has been kept a mystery by her "uncle".) While there, she is met and courted by Keith Savage, a neighboring planter, and the starry-eyed girl falls in love. Unfortunately, this is an arranged marriage and Keith, out of anger at being manipulated because he needs Suzanne's money for his plantation, installs a quadroon mistress in a secret location on the property. When Suzanne discovers this, she is torn between love and anger, and Keith's siblings Phillip and Jane have their own pasts that interfere with the present.

This had all the potential of being a solid romance, except it was marred by a weak heroine. Suzanne spends most of the first half of the book obsessing over discovering details about her parents (leading to some pretty dull scenes, including looking at census records), and the last half obsessing about Keith's mistress and how she will leave him soon. I mean, NOW. Wait, tomorrow. Errr, TODAY. Little things kept putting off her resolve - a glance, a warm look, etc.

Of course, it doesn't ever occur to her that she might want to tell him just why she wants to leave so he can rectify the situation if he needs prodding. She gets progressively more angry and depressed that he doesn't send the mistress away without any communication on her part other than a locked bedroom door. And Keith ain't the sharpest crayon in the box anyway, so he's thinking, "Fine, I'll keep the other wench around since I'm not getting any at home." Joy, it's the Big Misunderstanding! Can't get enough of those.

So that was the annoying part, and it was annoying and protracted enough to really bring the whole book down.

I did appreciate all the detail that Ellis put into the book to really pinpoint the time the story takes place. It has the feel of being taken from articles in the Picayune - a lecture tour by Thackeray, local police matters, the weather, violence at the polls, etc. It showed greater effort than some of the generalities that tend to exist in romance, so I liked it. However, I would have liked it better if Ellis had had her characters more directly engaged with what was going on in New Orleans and the current scene. We're told that Keith is ambitious for a political future and he spends two violence-ridden days in the city during Election Day, but it's glossed over in a paragraph. He goes off to Cincinnati to the Democratic Convention, and just as quickly returns. It would have benefited his characterization to have been shown "in the moment" since he was pretty shallow in the depth department. The vapidity of Suzanne made his faults more glaring than they would have been had the heroine been stronger. I did like his more hands-on approach to his plantation, even when Suzanne's money makes him working on the levees and in the fields unnecessary. So that was a plus in his column.

The dramatic peaks were pretty few and far between, the biggest one provided by a flashback of Jane's which really had no bearing on the overall story, so it seemed pointless.

I was considering giving this 2.75 stars, but the ending was bittersweet and realistic, so it pushed the rating up a notch to a round 3. It's nothing spectacular, but there was enough in it for me to like.