Lady of Fire (1987) by Anita Mills
Grade: B-
Setting: France & England, 1085-1093
Sensuality: PG-13
Pages: 423
Series: 1 of 5
Reason for reading: Last attempt at liking Mills. Forgot who recommended her.
Plot: At 12 years old, Eleanor’s beauty already entrances Prince Henry (son of William the Conqueror), Belesme (our villain), and Roger, her HALF-BROTHER. Eleanor and Roger have always been very close. Then Roger finds out that he is not really related to Eleanor and decides that he wants to marry her and goes away to make his fortune for the next 7 years while Eleanor is hidden away in a convent.
Long Ramblings: I once read a scientific study that it’s pretty much impossible to have romantic feelings for someone if you have lived with that person as brother & sister for the first 5 years of your life. I think I might have found this book more believable if I had read this book 8 years ago when I was ignorant of that fact. Or maybe not considering the way Mills handled everything.
When an author deals in a romance between a couple raised in a sibling environment, they have to do a delicate balancing act between the yum of the forbidden and the barf of the ick. The book crossed into ick because while Roger knew at the beginning of the story that Eleanor is not his sister, he doesnt tell Eleanor of this fact for years and springs this information on her at the last moment. Like while they are bumping uglies type of last moment. So, not cool, dude. Well, maybe it is if you’re Caligula or sumthin’ but otherwise, no.
But that is just one of the problems with this book.
Author Catherine Coulter once said of her medieval romance, Chandra/Warrior Song, that it was a bad book because the Villain outshone the Hero. I had read Chandra and didnt agree. I thought the Villain in that book was one-dimensional and not very interesting. Frankly, I am just not attracted to the bad boys.
However, if I were to apply Coulter’s standard, Lady of Fire is a bad book because Belesme, the villain, is by far the most interesting character in the book. I found Roger, with his ineffectual desperation, slightly lame. Belesme is a gorgeous, cold, cruel, powerful man who commits unspeakable acts throughtout the course of the novel, yet there is something reluctantly touching about his strange code of ethics and unbalanced obssession to marry Eleanor. Despite the fact that I thought he commited acts that made him unredeemable, I was afraid that Belesme was going to show up as the hero in a future book because he had taken over the story by the end with his burning fabulosity. The slightly unresolved ending just added to my fears. (I checked and Mills didn’t write a book about Belesme, for which I am grateful, because I would have had to track that sucker down and turn into a Belesmaniac!)
Mills did keep me turning the pages quickly despite or maybe because of the ick factor. She is a good storyteller and she gives good historical atmosphere. This is the third Mills I have tried (after Autumn Rain, a historical regency, and The Fire & the Fury) and will be the last. None of her H/Hs have ever grabbed me nor any of her plots. She just isnt my cuppa but I did give it a valiant effort.
Content warning to gentle readers: (highlight to read) ——> Rape scene. Some characters engage in incest and skinning/torture. <———-
OMG!! When I started reading your review I was interested in this book but then as I read the spoiler I had flashbacks of VC Andrews and Beatrice Small. Ick!
Have you seen the movie Caligula? Freak sick stuff and apparently it wasn’t far from the truth.
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Never read Andrews or seen Caligula. I have a low ick threshold, I think
Bertrice Small has the villainess committing incest in SKYE O’MALLEY as well as loads of others icky stuff but for some reason it doesnt bother me as much. Probably because the book is so fast-paced and exhausting that I dont have time to dwell on the ickyness.
- seton
ick-factor’s usually don’t bug me… even the incest, I’m weird that way. I’ll never read this book, so no worries…lol
Besides this book goes way beyond my date… 1981
I think you were very generous to give this author three shots…. though the grade you gave it was pretty good.
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Sigh. I was more like you at one time but I’ve gotten more conservative in my dotage. I was about to give it a C+ but decided I have to take it to a B level for Belesme. He really was one of the best villains I have read in a historical in a while, I have to say. Also, technically, Mills is a good writer; I just dont like the stories she tells, that’s all.
- seton
Ick is right. Never read it but totally icked out. Roger sounds like an a$$… dude, thanks for letting the heroine think she’s having sex with her half-brother for MORE than half the book. So not cool.
Sounds like the author wrote a romance novel for Hannibal Lecter with the skinning aspect.
Never been a big fan of incest… never could accept Humbert Humbert as a victim when I read Lolita and never bought into the book, Lolita.
It’s amazing what the novels in the 70s and 80s got away with. Major squick factors.
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LOL. There is a chick on the RT Boards who is really into those 70s bodice rippers. She writes extremely detailed summaries of these books and posts them on the board and LOF is so tame in comparison. I mean she reads books with kidnappings, white slavery, male rapes, gang rapes, pregnant women kicked in the stomach, and all other nasty goodness. I read her summaries and go
We’re gonna have to disagree on LOLITA tho. I think Nabokov does show what a monster Humbert is. That fact that he is self-aware and does it anyway makes it all the more horrible. That’s part of its beauty.
- seton
You know, you’re right about LOLITA. I haven’t read it in a long time but I just remember being so squicked out about Humbert Humbert. It was the people in my class back in the college days who were like oh he’s a victim and a hero… and I was like really?
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Well, I can see where some people might like Humbert. He is, at times, funny and dramatic and can hide what a monster he is very well. He makes a nice case for the tragedy of his lost love, his Annabel Lee, and if people fall for it, so much the better.
I remember everyone in my college class just thinking it’s a funny book. I did, too, but Nabokov’s dark humor isnt for everyone.
- seton
I have read Lolita 3 times and it is one of those books that should be shocking. Humbert was never shown as a hero, but a poor, pathetic man. And Lolita was a pathetic, inane girl. Everyone character in that book was horrible.
I guess we can say how far romance has come in 20 or so years.
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I think LOLITA was shocking back in the 1950s and you’re right — all the main characters were not likable people. It just shows just how sick, obsessed, and NOT really in love Humbert is that Lolita is so vapid, pedestrian, and pretty much everything that Humbert can’t in Americans. One of the many layers of perversity that Nabokov shows in the book.
- seton