Bound by the Heart in Bodice Ripper Readers Anonymous

Jan 19, 2016 mark monday rated it liked it

Shelves: romantica, cough-historical-cough, ripped-bodices

CAPTAIN SEXY'S GUIDE TO FINDING YOUR ONE TRUE LOVE

1. Rescue a damsel in distress. Preferably one floating in shark-infested waters with her little brother and who will disguise her upper crust background by calling herself a governess. You can take your shirt off when coming to her rescue; she'll love that!

2. Take the damsel back to your cabin. Give her some time to get acquainted with her surroundings and then when the inevitable whining starts, promptly ~~rape~~ ravish her. She'll love that!

3. CAPTAIN SEXY'S GUIDE TO FINDING YOUR ONE TRUE LOVE

1. Rescue a damsel in distress. Preferably one floating in shark-infested waters with her little brother and who will disguise her upper crust background by calling herself a governess. You can take your shirt off when coming to her rescue; she'll love that!

2. Take the damsel back to your cabin. Give her some time to get acquainted with her surroundings and then when the inevitable whining starts, promptly ~~rape~~ ravish her. She'll love that!

3. Continue ~~raping~~ ravishing her throughout the next few days. She'll love that!

4. Take her to your island hideaway and install her as an honored guest in your island mansion. Seduce her with your eyes and hints of your manly hairy chest. She won't be able to resist you because all of that ~~raping~~ ravishing will have proven how much you love her. Take her in your arms and declare that love. She'll love that!

5. Respect her request to be sent home to her father's island mansion where she is engaged to some uptight asshole. Eventually find out that she has given birth to your child; visit her at night so you can both declare your mutual love; steal the child in an effort to lure her to your ship; quickly sail away with her and your child on board. She'll love that!

6. Be together forever. She'll love that!

7. At one point tell her that if she hadn't pretended to be a governess and was instead honest about her upper crust background, she probably wouldn't have been ~~raped~~ ravished in the first place. But then LOL and say that it probably still would have happened because she's so super-hot. She'll love that!

♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?♥?

so Bound by the Heart marks two things for me: (1) the first in a series of romance novels I plan to read this year because hey I made a goal and I'm going to stick with it, and (2) the first time I was able to compartmentalize rape in a book, separate it from the rest of the narrative, and so actually enjoy the book. that second item does not exactly fill me with pride. but if I'm going to read a bunch of romance novels, it appears that I'm just going to have to get over it. I still don't quite understand why rape appeared to be featured so much in romance novels from (recently) bygone eras, but I do know that those torrid romances with their intense emotions and and historical settings are just more appealing to me than sweet romances set in the modern days.

Canham makes compartmentalization easy by creating a heroine who is almost entirely two-dimensional and whose actions are often so eye-rolling and ridiculous that she barely exists as an understandable character. this is supposed to be the reader stand-in? I think not! Summer Cambridge is so often insipid and petulant and prone to foolish decisions and eager to say ridiculous things out loud that she felt more like a running joke than a person. she does have her positive moments of quick thinking and loyalty and bravery, so fortunately she's not a total pain to read about. but the sad misogynist truth of the matter is that I was able to quickly forget the fact that she was repeatedly raped in the beginning of the novel because the author appears completely disinterested in giving her anything but the slightest bit of logic or agency. when Summer begins to look at those rapes as the beginning of her love affair with the hottest man she's ever met, all I could do was shrug and say Well, er, okaaaaaay.

so an easy 1 star for this novel, right? wrong! compartmentalization saved the day! yay?

I really liked the rest of this book because it was all about PRIVATEERS ♥ BATTLES AT SEA ♥ CANNONS FIRING ♥ BRAVE CREW MEMBERS ♥ SHIPS SINKING ♥ MILITARY INTRIGUES ♥ MARITIME TACTICS ♥ THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR ♥ BURNING VENGEANCE ♥ SECRET IDENTITIES ♥ SNEAKY FRENCHMEN ♥ DASTARDLY ENGLISHMEN ♥ CUNNING AMERICANS ♥ DARING RESCUES ♥ ACTION ♥ ACTION ♥ ACTION ♥!

Marsha Canham fully immerses the reader in this nautical adventure through her excellent use of historical detail and what felt like an encyclopedic understanding of how ships of a certain time period operate and do battle. this felt like an old-fashioned tale of daring deeds at sea, with an irritating romance shoehorned in. did this book really appeal to the romance readers of 1984? I hate being a gender essentialist, but much of the time it felt like it was written for guys who liked the Aubrey-Maturin series. and Canham is far from a bad writer when it comes to all of the adventure. her prose is quite muscular.

so thanks to the wonders of compartmentalization, I dub thee a 3 star book! I liked it. but then why do I feel ashamed? ...more

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Jul 09, 2009 Sherron rated it it was amazing

Shelves: keeper, pirates

4.5 Not the ebook version. Loved it.

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Aug 29, 2015 BRNTerri rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: no-longer-own, historical-romance, bodice-ripper, rape

PUBLISHER: Avon, 10/1984
GENRE: Fiction/Historical Romance
SETTING: Caribbean & Barbados, 1811/12
BODICE RIPPER? Yes
AUTHOR SITE: link
MY GRADE: D

MY THOUGHTS: I'm reviewing the out of print paperback from 1984, not the rewritten e-book, which has the rape scene removed.

Summer is blond with gray-green eyes. Her age was never given so I'll assume she's in her early twenties. She's a typical, slightly boring heroine. Not very feisty like I prefer, especially in these older books.

The American he ...more

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