Series: Sons of Sin, #1
Traits & Tropes: mistress; scarred hero; tortured hero; illegitimate hero; bluestocking
Publication Date: 01.01.12
Genre/Setting: Historical; Regency; Devon, England, November 1826
Heat Level: 5.5
Rating: 2/5
Narration Rating: 3/5
In a bid to save her sister from the gambling debts she’s racked up, Sidonie Forsythe has agreed to take her place and spend a week at Castle Craven with its notorious, ruinously scarred master. But instead of the monster she expected, Sidonie finds a kind man in Jonas Merrick and begins to care for him despite hiding a secret that could change everything for him.
Jonas has never been allowed to forget the stain his illegitimacy supposedly places on his character: each view of his face in the mirror is a painful reminder. When Sidonie turns up at his castle in her sister’s place, Jonas is much more eager for seduction than he’d expected. Her innocence thaws some of his hard exterior, but the love growing between them is new and fragile, and possibly not strong enough to survive the threats they’ll face.
I find myself utterly dismayed by this book because, after all the rave reviews it has, I fully expected to love it and yet, I just…didn’t. In fact, there were parts I kind of hated, though there were parts I did like as well, so this review is about to be all over the place and there may be spoilers.
Firstly, I liked the old school, gothic vibes and though the writing style was a bit dramatic, it suited this vibe. Jonas was a textbook tortured hero, the kind that is usually catnip for me. I’m not a fan of mistress tropes but I was fully expecting to love this because of him. He was so lonely and broken under his gruff façade and desperate for love, but unable to trust after the way he was betrayed by basically everyone. Then he receives essentially the same treatment from Sidonie after she fights to break down the wall around his heart. He was a compelling character, but not enough to save this book from how badly Sidonie ruined it for me. She all but demanded trust from Jonas while keeping a life-changing secret from him, ostensibly to use it to save her sister, rather than trusting him to help her. That smacked of hypocrisy, and I was not a fan, but it was just par for the course given Sidonie’s previously hot and cold behavior with Jonas. I think I could’ve written off Sidonie’s erratic behavior as a result of her inexperience and sheltered upbringing, but she was utterly horrible to Jonas for no apparent reason, sending him mixed signals and then literally running away out into a raging storm. She was manipulative, didn’t have two brain cells to rub together, and the swooning virgin bit was just annoying. This was made even worse for me by the fact that Sidonie completely freaked out when Jonas showed interest in her, so he backed off, then she was offended when she thought he didn’t desire her. As if this wasn’t already bizarre enough, Sidonie then had the audacity to tell Jonas his behavior was erratic. I was just utterly perplexed.
I’m not sure why I didn’t DNF, so I’m going to conclude that I’m just incapable, but I actually started liking the last half of this. If I had been reading this rather than listening to the audio, I think I would’ve thrown it down, though I will say the narrator didn’t help things as he often sounded halting and placed emphasis on the wrong syllables. Jonas and Sidonie started having some really good communication and I thought we were getting somewhere and then everything went off the rails again for the last third or so. I never like a third act separation and it was especially horrible here because of course a secret baby must come into play and force them back together in the least romantic way possible. Sidonie was horrible and so was her sister and I was not a fan of the plot device used to rid us of the issue of Jonas’ terrible cousin nor the consequences this had for Jonas. Given the fact that these consequences just melted away after Sidonie finally revealed the information she’d been holding, I was left wondering what the purpose of those scenes even was. I did like that it was Sidonie who had to grovel, but I still don’t think she did enough of it and Jonas deserved more. Sure, he was excruciatingly slow to trust her, but his reasons were fully understandable given his experiences and her treatment of him. In fact, I’m still not really convinced that he’ll ever trust her given that she hid her pregnancy from him despite having intimate knowledge of how Jonas had suffered because of his illegitimacy. This could’ve been such a much better book for me if Sidonie had presented the information she was hiding to Jonas much earlier and they had worked together to set everything to rights. Not only would this scenario have made more sense, but Sidonie might’ve been more likable this way, though that’s a big might. Since that’s not what happened, Sidonie never showed any actual growth, she remained untrustworthy and given to lying and making idiotic decisions.
Neither character felt well-developed and I’m not sure they ever had a truly frank conversation. We’re told by each that they’ve fallen in love with the other, but I never really saw that happen on the page. I still have no idea how Sidonie went from resisting any advance from Jonas, even a tepid nicety, to suddenly wanting to seduce him and be his mistress. I was here for steam, but a lot of this just felt icky. Overall, high hopes for an old school gothic romance were dashed because I didn’t feel the romance here.
https://www.bookbub.com/reviews/553425925
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5032418719
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