CBR18 Bingo: Clown – Justin is an utter clown for believing that Belinda should have unconditional trust in him when she’s known him for like two weeks.
When orphaned Belinda comes to Salem to stay with her cousin, she little imagines that she will forced to work as a servant, will be swept up into the ongoing witch hysteria, or that she will fall in love with a mysterious stranger.
I picked up this particular bodice ripper because of its setting during the Salem witch trials. It’s a new setting for this genre for me, but it made perfect sense – the bodice ripper is the ultimate women-in-historical-peril tale, and the Salem witch trials can be interpreted that way. It’s a match made in heaven.
This is a pretty entertaining, straightforward read. The heroine is fiesty and beautiful, the hero is brooding, and the villains are dastardly (and one is insane and sexually repressed, naturally). The supporting characters aren’t particularly memorable, but they do their jobs. There’s some historical grounding with the witch trials and the expansion of the Boston colony, but nothing too heavy. The other woman plot actually plays a part in the story as well as supplying the requisite drama.
At the same time, I was pretty frustrated with Justin, who blows hot and cold and is terribly angry with Belinda because she doesn’t automatically trust him despite him, you know, not only being a complete stranger, but as it turns out, an engaged one. But he does realize that behavior was stupid of him in the end, so I’ll cut him some slack. Belinda is a bit on the nose with her ‘rawr! woman power!’ dialogues, but she luckily doesn’t get to ‘not like other girls’ territory.
