Marna

by Norah Hess

A HIDDEN BEAUTY
In the backwoods of Kentucky, on the eve of the American Revolution, brothels thrived and men had their way with the local Indian beauties. Marna, untamed and innocent, was forced to disguise her charms to escape their unquenchable lust. But concealing her good looks behind a mask of soot and hiding her voluptuous figure couldn't prevent her lecherous grandfather from wanting to sell her body. A loveless marriage to a rugged hunter seemed to be her only escape from a life of prostitution. Yet Marna was determined to be happy, even if it meant living with a man who grimaced at the sight of her.

Matt Barton loved his life of freedom, until a poisonous snake bite changed everything. Suddenly he found himself bound by a sense of duty to marry the wild girl who had saved his life. Despite her ragged looks and feisty spirit, Matt found himself yearning for her and the comfortable home she offered. Though jealous of the many men who wanted to have her body for their own, Matt was the last to see Marna's true beauty. It was a tumultuous time, and in the wild woods where anything could happen, was it too late for Matt to win back the heart of the woman he loved?

Genres: Historical Romance, Historical, Westerns, Abuse

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1980

About the author

Always a daydreamer, and often scolded for it by the grandmother who raised her, Norah Hess always wanted to be a writer. At eighteen, she was sent to Chicago to live with an aunt after her grandmother's death. It was there that she met her husband. After raising three children, Norah decided to write her first novel, and since then has had fifteen published romances. After her husband passed away, she and her two cats moved to Palm Springs, where the desert and mountains inspire her to write her Western romances.

Reviews

[SmittenKitten · Rating 2 out of 5]

Heroine: Marna – a 15yr old woods girl, keeps her face dirty to hide her beauty

Hero: Matt – a 35yr old trapper (yeah, that’s right – a 20 year age difference!), raised by his grandfather

Villain: Cole – a creepy fellow trapper who makes a couple of unsuccessful attempts to rape Marna

Plot: Lecherous grandpa wants to sell Marna’s body to his friends, so grandma arranges a shot-gun wedding between Marna and Matt, the trapper whose life Marna saved from a snake bite. Grandma tells Marna to continue keeping her face dirty while married, so other men will not realize how beautiful she is and want to ravish her.

SPOILER ALERT

Review: This is not a good book, but worth reading because it is so deliciously trashy! This is the first book I’ve read where the hero is the one who is TSTL. Oh let me count the ways…

1) He doesn’t consummate the marriage because of a little dirt on Marna’s face... because that makes her not as pretty as the other women he's bedded... even though he admits to being attracted to her body. Matt - Ever heard of throwing a paperbag over it? Or how hard is it to ask the girl to wash her face? As a result, Matt does not stay in the cabin with Marna at night.

2) The villain sneaks in the cabin, strips Marna naked, beats her unconscious, and nearly succeeds in raping her. Obviously someone needs to protect this chick, but does our hero realize that? Of course not. The very next night, Matt leaves Marna alone again and she is nearly mauled to death by a mountain lion.

3) Matt has the revelation that he “loves” her. So what do you do when the person you love is on their death bed from being mauled by a big cat (and let’s not forget this is just after having been beaten up and nearly raped the night before)? Why not go to the whorehouse? Matt feels guilty that Marna does not have a nice bed to recover in, so he goes to the whorehouse and propositions the madam – if he can rock her world in bed, then she will literally give him her bed. Huh? Clearly Matt’s got some messed up priorities.

4) He drops off the new bed for Marna and then leaves – no good-bye, no nothing. Two nights in a row your wife has been seriously molested and injured because you were not around and you think it is a good idea to leave town?

5) Matt decides to come back and stops at the whorehouse again… this time to “bargain” for clothes for Marna. Just what every wife wants – secondhand clothes from the slut her husband is banging. He even brings the madam back home with him!! But, before he even dismounts his horse, he happens to catch another man steal a kiss from Marna – furiously, he turns around and goes back to the whorehouse.

6) Matt eventually comes back, gets jealous from the attention Marna is receiving from other men (one of which who is her father, but Matt doesn’t know that). He assumes she is cheating, so he calls her a few choice words while attempting to rape her (but of course, she gives in and ends up liking it). The next morning as he is leaving camp again, he says to Marna’s father who is coming in for a visit: “She won’t do you any good for a while. I rode the hell out of her all night.”

And the list goes on, but I got tired of counting!

This is a great book for those of us who enjoy a ridiculous, OTT romance. It seems like Norah Hess threw in any extra trashy detail she could come up with on each of the characters - many OTT facts that served no purpose towards advancing the plot, except to maybe demonstrate the sexual prowess of the male characters. For example, there is a quite hilarious scene describing the hero loosing his virginity at the tender age of twelve (thanks to grandpop). I think what made the book most entertaining was the backwoods setting and characters that reminded me of the Clampett's before they ever made it to Beverly Hills.

[Simona · Rating 1 out of 5]

Marna is a skeletal version of ms Hess books. It reads like an uninspired, unfinished draft, completely devoid of any human emotions except hero's jealous rage. All the elements here are the same ones she'll use in her other books but in them they are slightly better handled than in Marna. All the icky points mentioned in the other reviews didn't bother me as much as the lack of a coherent narrative for either the story or its characters. Very disappointed. Though I'd be eager to read if there's anything worse than Marna published as romance before 2000.

[Zubee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trainwreck galore!!! ...
Nothing spells devotion as much as a H who sleeps with a prostitute so he can get h a luxurious bed while she lays injured!!!
Bonus if the prostitute OW becomes h's stepmamma ... And they become the best of friends ...
Christmas must be such an interesting family time!!!

[Mermarie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Spoilers and tl;dr. 2 stars 'cause of some shockingly depraved scenes.

Marna Traver was a Kentucky lass raised in the Ohio Valley & the surrounding regions upon the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Like her deceased mother, Marna is protected by stronghold Hertha; an impoverished Englishwoman turned American opportunist seeking an honest days work and a capable man to call husband.

The gripes that don't matter & lolzy pickin' nits... nothing pisses me off more than being uninspired!

We learn early on that her husband Emery is a rotten bastard whose guts that should have been jigged up for good fishing bait in the early Spring, when bass are peaking & fat for the fry. As Marna's own mother was too beauteous to be left without camouflage least Emery barter his daughter's flesh for a jar of 'shine, Marna experiences the say day-in and day-out apprehension that Emery will eventually catch her without soot and matted hair and view the legendary beauty that would not spare her own mother his full tilted monstrosity. This trope hasn't been used overly much I've discovered; usually beauty is disguised through gender roles, but what I find off-putting is that it's 18th century Appalachia; even traveled roads were just DIRT ROADS; even domesticated areas were mudpit squalor; uncharted and dirt-floor ridden, filthy & EVERYONE is dirty. Even if you bathe regularly, you're still dirty. If you walk around your dirt-floor cabin, you're dirty. If you lifted a hoe to toil over the garden, yep; dirty. I don't reckon Hess realized that everyone was dirty? Back in the hills, if a car drives upto your house/trailer/lean-to, if you stand in the door, your dust shadow will be imprinted on the floor behind you. Fucking serious. Until approximately 20 years ago, a great majority of people who lived up the river in my old hometown, didn't even have electricity. People living in school buses & smokehouses and shacks you could throw a pan through the holes in the wall; still marrying in their family tree--and some families quite PROUD of that fact too. We were little feral children in my youth, I cannot imagine what sort of heathens should have been present in this book, but whatever; back to the book. >;P Marna should have still stirred male attention no matter what state of unkempt disaster. In a world without Bath & Body Works & deodorant, people will not maintain perfect hygiene. The fact that Marna was female, would be plenty reason. I've seen girls who had the facial construction of Rocky from the movie Mask & Hills Have Eyes misc. hunkster; hilljack teeth & patchwork tufts of hair to boot, who paired up with the school misfit at a pep rally in high school and what those two got down to up on the top of the indoor bleachers, can never be unseen.... ever. There's a little or a lot of someone for everyone. In the case of Marna being ridiculed for being so filthy, I call a great colossal bullshit. This time, the gender trope could have worked, because our beloved hero Matt's treeline prevented him from discerning her camouflage loveliness.

I know it shouldn't have hung me up so badly, but I was incensed by that trope being carried on for chapters and chapters... it got old quick, and I wanted her to trip-up whilst fishing and half drown in big tragedy rescue style, to point out that they were all SO WRONG. >:|


The technical & the bad sitcom critical analysis...

Another annoyance that brought my attention; Hertha was supposedly English raised and spoke mountain lingo and dialect moreso than anyone else in the entire novel. Her given graces and sophistication therein passed onto Marna, excusing her of any apparent inadequacies. Oftentimes the lingo and overused dialect can weigh down reading comprehension and I get that, but it only enhanced Hertha in mine eyes. She was a common woman, with down-to-earth character who should have enhanced her surrounding characters, but the rest of the characters seemed to be out of place, or stuck in the wrong era -- somewhat blind to the deplorable state of the mountains and rural living... ? Hertha endured years of beatings, rape and vulgarity due to her husband's weaselly ass, but it didn't seem to sap her of energy, nor will to live. She grew her garden, herbs to cure and treat, kept her farm on lockdown, despite Emery's drunken rampages and heehawing.

The greatest, or visible arc of any of the characters was the 15 year old Indian girl, Dove, who was endlessly abused & manhandled by Matt's trapper co., yet with the aid of Hertha, shed some of her baby troubles and potential burrs & eventually took up arms against the lecher who nearly ended her life. The trapper party were a sorry lot as well; these deconstructed whelps used some type of passive, word-of-mouth law establishing Indian women property of men until they deemed otherwise, which is total hilarity, but it would have been great incentive for Matt to redeem himself as more than some no-account drifter. It didn't. When faced with the camp whore's deaths at the hands of another trapper, he just rolled over and slept it off. Giving it up and a girl workin' don't need much interfering, but a trapper with a score of Indian girl's deaths on his hands; which everyone was AWARE OF, you just ROLL over??? Yeah..bring out the wifebeater an' spittoon, honey--I can't contain my FEELZ. o.O However, that trapper received his comeuppance albeit every showdown, including Dove vs. this lecherous douche, was convoluted and all happenstance. OH, I JUST HAPPEN TO BE PICKING BERRIES....AS I WAS WALKING AROUND THE MEADOWS COLLECTING DANDELIONS singing songs about the sound of music and earthy powpows....that conveniently placeholds me in position to a.) rescue a damsel in distress, or b.) witness an intimate moment for Big Misunderstanding plot-developer.

The villains, baddies and ultimate evilz are very apparent and leave little room to mull over who-dun-it, or machination engineering.



We, as the reader, are told who thinks what, in EVERY head-swap. I guess Hess didn't trust us to use our own judgment and dared us to make any unfair assessments, because it was all written like an outline to a book. She knew who they were, but they just stayed on the shelf; untouched, unused and inanimate. I was so starved for stimulation that during the WTF moments, I actually used it to build on a story with a skeleton crew to work with. This could have been written as an Ode to Johanna Lindsey, but I think JL's brainless twerp of characters actually danced out of the lines instead of preset character dimensions of nothingness. If characters own their types/traits, I don't mind them never exceeding them, but if those traits leave me wanting, poorly constructed and tactless, I generally hope they die off soon.

The characters are written out as if she's brainstorming & making checklists:

* Matt is confused about love, but has a good heart.
* Matt is mean oftentimes, but he will learn to love.
* Emery is an old bastard who needs ran through with a scythe. Everyone KNOWS it. Will die.

* Trapper Corey is a horny jackass who breeds girls into an early grave. Will die.
* Marna, mountain girl who needs rescuing all of the time, 'cause boohoo, step-daddy's lustful leering turned her into a social leper.

Hess writes like she thinks we're stupid, or she's stupid, one or the other. I realize that mountainfolk weren't the most educated of the land, but the adventure of their simplicity could have made poor decision making skills & hoedown knee-jerk lifestyles an exciting ride. These characters have internalization in the text, and no spark; we're told what they're doing and feeling, it's blatantly CLEAR, but they're not genuinely experiencing it; the author is wiggling the string to puppeteer them to the end. It was as if everyone in the book was cursed with phantom pain to bring the h/H back together. Magnetized to make it happen. A long way to the bottom. All the baddies died, the good guy wins... let's ride off into the sunset! Weee! NO. Even bad Westerns were more imaginative!

It's really unfortunate the storyline lacked any real depth or resonance; because of the location & freak-out moments of threatening to bite tits off and weeks in bed due to herbal induced abortions & raped-to-death campgirl bodies piling up... she simply couldn't work her magic into the seams of the characters to make them livable, or the heroine to progress further than her cloistered mentality. When Marna's beauty was revealed, she still became captive to her own inability to find herself capable. First, she hadn't grown into herself due to the ugly-girl-syndrome; then, her beauty stagnated her into actively pursuing her own goals due to mistakes she'd made during her low points. She had her fair share of suitors, but all in all, that low self-esteem beat into her a "I can do no better than him," instead of relying on herself for once. The ones who were dealt the worse, survived and prospered...what was Marna's excuse?

[Celeste · Rating 3 out of 5]

So much drama

I'd like to start by saying, books like these are not at all politically correct. So be forewarned about that right now because we have some seriously effed up stuff that is mentioned that was normal for the time period.

For instance, Marna's mother was 14 when she got married to Marna's father who was 41 at the time. Then she dies in childbirth at 15. Marna herself is 15 when she marries Matt, though the marriage is consummated much later. There is also alot of sa and dub con going on. The villian in the story hurts women and none of the other men, including the H interfere.

The H sleeps with other women after marrying the h, he doesn't apologize or grovel bit does randomly realize he loves his wife cuz she has a hot bod. What follows is a series of cruel taunts, lack of communication and separation of the couple for a good part of the book.

During this time the h thinks the H is dead and sleeps with another man. Which is never addressed. Actually none of the infidelity is.

Sure Matt saves Marnas life a couple of times but he doesn't apologize for his terrible behavior, and Marna sort of just gives in.

In fact, Caleb and Aaron, the other men in love with her, treat her much better than Matt. I just couldn't root for his dumb ass.

This was just an ok read for me.

[*Book*Crazy* · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book was OK until I got to chapter 9! what a disappointment. not even going to finish this one

[Digital · Rating 1 out of 5]

When bad books happen to good authors.

I can't say this is the worst book ever, but it's damn close. The hero was too stupid to live by far. There were way too many unnecessary obstacles placed in the way of the two main characters. By the time it was all said and done I almost didn't want the two to get together. Hell, they didn't deserve happiness after the suffering I endured reading the book. It was hard for me to track down a copy of this book and now I know why it's so rare. Good books never die but this book should have been taken out of it's misery at conception.

[Kelly Piper · Rating 1 out of 5]

Norah is an amazing writer, but this book is definitely not one of the best. The characters weren't a pair that seemed like they should be together. She is 15 and he is 35 it just isn't believable. They spend most of the book apart and cheating on each other. It was drawn out and got boring in the middle.

[Fragile Veny · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well where should I start?
h is 15 and the H is 35 (gags)

h puts a little dirt on her face and refuses to wash it off to hide her beauty and the H buys it (so realistic!)

h lusts after om and cheats on H by not pulling away from om's kiss earlier. (Don't justify cheating, people.)

H catches h mid kiss and is angry. h is assaulted twice is on death bed... Well not a bed because H gets her a bed by cheating on her with a wh*re (What a saint!)

H catches h again with a man (turns out to be h's father later) and leaves her. Comes back and r*pes her(h was a virgin). But h remembers it as making love. (Well, he clearly f*ed her brains out.)

H again goes away. h gets with another om(I want to know what type of protection they were using because it's the most effective one among all the historical books) but he d*es. (Well he couldn't obviously live, right?)

Meanwhile h's father gets with the wh*re whom the H fu*ked before. Wants to marry her and there is future children talk and h is happy for them. (It's my fault that I was still reading)

H finds out about h's father being her father and reunites with the h.

The end.
(I only finished it because of my OCD)

[Barbara "Cookie" Serfaty Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marna

The love story of Matt and Marna. Marna is raise by her grandparents. Grandfather was evil and her grandmother was a very sweet woman and she was known as a medical woman. When Marna was sixteen, her grandfather wanted to sell her to his friends but her grandmother marry her off to Matt. Will this marry be a great gift or the worse think to happen to Marna?

[Uma · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was awful

I loved Norah Hess's almost all books. But this was one was terrible. Didn't have any spark between hero and heroine. And she was only 15 common 15 top young to be married. I seriously didn't like it

[jacquelyn sigda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had such potential

Marna started off good than quickly flopped. It had such potential to be a great love story but failed miserably. They both slept with other people and I couldn't wait for it to end. Not one of my favorites and I skipped through parts just to finish.

[bobby beasley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marna

Very good read couldn't put it down I have enjoyed reading it and all books written by norah hess I would like to read willow

[Suzan Rudnicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved it

Loved the turmoil not just sex. How foolish pride is that you can loose the love of your life to innuendo

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

To much rape and racism for me to enjoy. He's also the dumbest male Protagonist ever

[Lois Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

So Good I Could Read It Twice

I could not stop reading this book. It is one of the best books that I’ve EVER READ, from start to finish.

[Kathy Sue Stumpf · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I couldn't put it down. Norah Hess hasn't ever disappointed me yet. I have several of her books and will definitely be keeping this one also.

[April · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have been reading tons of smutty romance lately and I normally love Norah Hess but this one was the same lame thing over and over. The guy see her talking to another guy, calls her a whore and storms off. Not good but I still read the whole thing in two days.

[Greeneyes Belle28 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Kymberlee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yuck! Sorry. This could have been a good book with a bit of tweaking (not twerking) and if the "hero" had not been such a twat. :(

[Dave Westrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not good

I love Norah Hess but this has to be one of her worse efforts. Too many farfetched happenings for this to be even remotely believable.

[Helen Vilaranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow!

[Brenda M Ilion · Rating 2 out of 5]

Should have been called Matt instead

Marna is such a doormat for Matt that she easily brushes aside his callous behavior towards her time and time again. The storyline is unnecessarily drawn out for so long and the women in this book are poorly abused sexually and emotionally.