The Defiant Bride by Leslie Hachtel #review

Pages -  181 

Published -  May 18, 2015

Sold by -  Amazon Digital Services LLC

Genre -   Medieval Historical Romance

Language -  0/5

Sexual Content -  3/5

Narrative -  3rd P

Furious at being used as a political pawn, the Lady Dariana defies King Henry VII by faking her own death to avoid marrying a man she has never met. Praying the king will not retaliate against her father, she seeks refuge in the forest and learns to fend for herself. When William, a warrior knight, is felled by an arrow, she saves his life and arranges his rescue before fleeing to avoid discovery.
William awakes from his injury to be told he imagined the beautiful woman in the forest. Besotted and determined to make her his own, he hunts her down and tricks her into marrying him, intent on turning her defiance into love. But even as he begins to succeed, their enemies join forces to end the marriage—even if it means that Dariana must die.
When Dariana is abducted, William must track her down to fight for her life and their happiness. And, Dariana, once the most defiant of brides, must channel her own strength of will into survival, both for herself—and for the child she now carries.

The review option at Goodreads is 3-stars for LIKED, so that is what I gave it there, but here, my LIKED is 4 Hearts.

And, yes, this was flawed.

Most annoying was the inexplicable fact that every single instance of OFF was spelled OF, and every single instance of MATTER was spelled MATER.

You wouldn't think those two words come up often in a body of work, but you would be surprised if you read this novel.

It just seemed (to me) as if the author typed swiftly with the mistaken assumption of going back to fill in the missing consonants but failed to do so.

"siting in a place assigned according"
"and bated her eyelashes at him."
"the earl was biter because his"
"and pated her arm."

As for this sentence, I have no idea what is implied by it.

"The screams of the dead and dying"

Also, there were several instances where the author seemed to forget what was happening in a single scene.

"with a hand on her arm." and then "He touched her arm," followed by "and jerked his hand back."

The author also inserted her opinion a few times as well, which annoys this particular reader.

First, the story takes place in Tudor England, and the author even includes mention of Henry VII being swiftly proceeded by his son, Henry VIII all within the course of the novel.

Yet the author felt it her duty to mention how unfair life was for a woman of that time, and how awful women had it, and that "Women were nothing more than property, to be used as a means of exchange,"

Yeesh.

Later, she got a jab in against the Catholic Church by stating that Henry VIII was doing wonderful things by dismantling the Catholic Church of its accumulated wealth, along with other things.

😣

HOWEVER

Despite these issues, and despite their making for a difficult read, I still LIKED this story.

I enjoyed the characters, the plot, and the outcome.

Which, as usual, goes against the MAJORITY grain of other reviewers.

Those who didn't like this novel all agreed that the heroine, Lady Dariana, was a shrew and a childish spoiled brat who argued unceasingly with the hero, William, right up to the bitter end.

My thinking is that they may have mistaken this novel for another because, as I recall, Lady Dariana was simply adamant about not being wed to a foreigner, whom she didn't know and wasn't going to fall madly in love with, so she runs away in protest, fakes her death, and lives with the help of an aunt in the woods for close to a year.

Then Knight William happens by, is felled by an arrow, and Lady Dariana nurses him back to health before enlisting her aunt's aid in getting rid of him before he discovers her secret.

William can't forget the pretty woman who saved him and doesn't believe the aunt, who insists he was imagining things due to a high fever.

He returns to the woods in search of Lady Dariana, he finds her, and he takes her with him to his castle, where he insists they get married in order to not only save her from her fate but also to soothe his manly desires.

Again, a majority of the negative reviewers had a problem with this, insisting that William was a chauvinistic pig who forced Lady Dariana to do all manner of things against her will.

Good grief.

😵

I heartily disagree with the feminist logic... AGAIN.

This is a Romance Novel, yes?

It is also set in Tudor England, yes?

And, yes, I have no doubt that some women back then weren't too thrilled with their lot in life, but in a fictional novel, it should be neither here nor there UNLESS the author's intention is to turn the heroine into a raving shrew (which, as I've pointed out, a majority of our Feminist-Minded readers don't seem to care for, either).

But, Lady Dariana was not a shrew or a raving bitch, and perhaps a headstrong, spoiled young lady whose father bent to her every whim up to a point, and that Lady Dariana chose to run, hide, fake her death, and live in the obscure unknown of the wilderness in order to avoid "a fate worse than death."

I enjoyed William's character, his attitude, and his smarts.

And, I felt that Lady Dariana would slowly but surely allow William to win her heart with his chivalry, his friendly nature, and his patience.

My only gripe, I guess, would be that Lady Dariana capitulated a bit too easily and too swiftly to William and his charms... marrying him right away and then consummating said union without so much as a gasp or shiver of fear.

Despite that, it was still ROMANTIC how these two came together, and I read Romance Novels for that aspect of the story to occur.

Without it, I may as well have chosen to read non-fiction or a horror story.

I could argue as well that the antagonist in this plot didn't fare too well with the author, and that it seemed (to me) as if she chose to follow a rules/guidelines chart for antagonists.

He was William's half-brother, and it was mentioned a few times that he looked quite similar to William as well.

Yet, the author gave him bad breath.

Why?

For me, it would have been a far more enjoyable read to have the antagonist, who looks similar to our dashing hero, to kind of mirror William and thus add intrigue, drama, and mystery for the reader.

The antagonist needs to maintain his sociopath mentality and his determination to succeed at evil, but why give him unflattering characteristics if he's already doomed to fail?

It just seems silly and unnatural to me.

I thought that the author did a good job of character development with even the aside characters, I remember them now and pictured them easily in my head as I read the story, and these help a reader to enjoy the story all the more.

Yes, I would recommend this to anyone interested in a Historical Romance, and I look forward to reading another of Miss Hachtel's novels... providing they are not laced with the above-mentioned issues because once was too much for this particular (picky) reader.