Customer Reviews

The Sheikh's Virgin Bride (Arabian Nights)

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

 

 

Description from the book back cover:

Desert passion! Petra has gone to the desert kingdom of Zuran to meet her grandfather - only to discover he's arranged for her to marry the rich, eligible Sheikh Rashid, whom she's never met! Petra's plan is to ruin her own reputation so that Rashid won't want to marry her - and so she asks Blaize, a gorgeous man at her hotel, to pose as her lover ... Blaize is perfect as a pretend lover - and he proves to be an expert lover for real, too! Then she makes a chilling discover: Blaize, the charming, intelligent man to whom she's just lost her virginity, is none other than the man she's supposed to be marrying - Sheikh Rashid!

This book is definitely worth your time! The characters come alive and the romance is dreamy.

I liked the book. It had a good storyline. I would recommend it and I did. I gave it to my grandma to read. She's a very good author.

In this book, Petra is described as "mature" because she was orphaned at 17, and has jet-setted across Europe and Australia since then. However, there is little evidence of any maturity. She is childish, selfish, self-righteous, intolerant, and stereotypes Rashid as a beach bum gigolo undeserving of any respect. Petra has absolutely no compassion whatsoever. She immediately thinks the worst of him in any situation (that he is a money-grubbing promiscuous male slut), jumps to conclusions, and as far as I can tell, has no redeeming qualities aside from being attractive and rigidly, self-righteously virginal (in other books, it's actually possible to be virginal and a nice/admirable person at the same time). Petra is usually yelling, accusing, or panicking in this story.

The hero, Rashid "Blaize" is devastatingly sexy, but as to his actions, he acts very cruelly towards her, taunting her, making her panic.

The characters were not likable for me - she was too childish, he was too mean at times - and the plot suffers from two very difficult to believe twists: Implausibly and unrealistically, in a sudden blinding moment, emerging from her total lack of respect for Blaize, Petra realizes she loves him. And we learn that underneath his cruel manner, Blaize has secretly loved Petra all along because of her ideals (oh, is that why he was so mean to her?).

There were some stereotypes, like Petra feels a longing for home and roots because she's part British, but also feels a longing for a nomadic lifestyle because she's part Arabic. (Could one also say that a character has a taste for conquest because they're British and a taste for being colonized because they're part Egyptian? It sounds pretty absurd to me.)

This was my first Penny Jordan book, and will be my last. I much preferred the other book I got at the same time, "The Arabian Love-Child" by Michelle Reid.

A friend loaned me the book. Thank goodness I didn't spend money on it. The author writes like a 15 year old. So many exclamation points. All that it was missing was text-speak and it would be a bad teen's diary. Ms. Jordan, bad, uninspired, hackneyed, trite, and cliched dialog and inner monologue cannot be rescued, resuscitated, or otherwise improved simply by adding an exclamation point. The premise was sound, the execution horrible. I generally read romance novels but by much more skilled authors. Are all Harlequin novels this bad? I don't think so as I've read some of this type of short romances before that, because of their brevity, were not fulfilling as far as plot development went but they weren't painful to read. Avoid this book unless you want to turn it into a game using liquor and the exclamation points. You want good romance, try Jessica Bird aka JR Ward, Vivi Anna, Julia Quinn, Lisa Kelypas, Mary Balogh, or Katie MacAlister.