Beautiful Skye O’Malley falls in love with Niall Burke on the eve of her marriage to another man, but even someone as adventurous as she cannot imagine the twists and turns her life will take on her way back to him.
Sometimes you just want to lay back, turn off your brain, and enjoy a rollicking adventure full of romance, drama, and a surprising amount of politics. Bertrice Small’s work fits the bill perfectly, and in the life of Skye O’Malley, her best known heroine, we get plenty of all of those.
Skye’s a compelling protagonist – wildly beautiful, passionate, and clever as are many of the heroines in bodice rippers, but unlike many of them very much the main character of her own life, and her many husbands and lovers play second fiddle in her story. It’s as much fun to watch Skye outwit her enemies and get revenge on those who’ve wronged her as it is to watch her bring all manner of men under her spell. Small also has a surprising knack for sneaking actual history into her books, like a parent sneaking veggies into their toddler’s pizza.
Of course, Small’s prose is infamously purple – and the phrase ‘honey oven,’ which certainly doesn’t refer to any place where bread is baked, is used far too often for my taste. The endless descriptions of food puts you in mind George R R Martin. It’s definitely a hardcore bodice ripper, with lots of violence, sexual and otherwise, but that’s not something I personally mind. Skye also ends the book in the arms of the most boring of her lovers, but it is my understanding that this situation is remedied in the second book, which I do intend to read. Maybe after a short break though, once my head’s stopped spinning.
I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Justine Eyre. I thought she did a good job with voicing the many, many characters and the half dozen accents they all speak in.
