Book #20: Illuminations of the Heart (Whitney Book 3)

Title: Illuminations of the Heart

Author: Joyce diPastena

I feel like my review of this novel needs to come with a disclaimer: I do not read romance novels. I mean, I've read one or two in my life, but probably not in the last two decades. As a genre, they don't do it for me: they feel too predictable, too formulaic and too gag-inducing. And to be fair to Ms. diPastena's novel, this is the first of the five novels in the romance category that I read, so I don't have anything to compare it with.

Now that the disclaimer's out of the way, I'll just say it: I HATED this book. It was obvious at the end of the first chapter what the inevitable outcome of the book would be, but it took 425 pages for the protagonists to end up in one another's arms. And those 425 pages were so rambling, so full of unnecessary overdescriptions, so riddled with minute plot twists that kept the action moving forward at a snail's pace that I heaved (see, romance novel word!) an enormous sigh of relief when I finally finished the book and flung (ooh! another one!) it into my backpack.

So you want a summary? Siri ends up in 12th century France in the custody of Triston, a minor nobleman, after her whole family kicks the bucket in Italy. She's hot for Triston, and he's hot for her, but she looks uncannily like his dead wife, and half of the nobles in rural France have lined up to ravage her. So he has to protect her honor, and she has to make him fall in love with the woman she really is. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? I promise you, it is. I finished reading this book and wondered how it ever found a publisher, and, more importantly, how it found 13 people at Amazon to give it an average of 4.5 stars. But again, I'm not a romance reader. Maybe I'll be able to give a more accurate assessment once I've read all of the romances in the category. But I will be depressed as hell if this is the best of the bunch.