Awaken, My Love (Brava historical romance) [Paperback]

How often do you think what it would be like to live in somebody elses shoes.This is what happened to Elaine Metcliffe.American,married to a man who's knowledge of sex only ran to groping in the dark which made her feel unloved. Plain slightly overweight,stick in the mud Elaine wakes up to find herself in Morrigan Mortimer's body.She was now young, beautiful and married to a handsome hot blooded English Baron.Only in Victorian England not in her 20th century native America. If you have always regarded victorians as starch and stern faced think again. Charles could have so easily have been a 21st century man. His ideas were quite modern even for victorian England. If you like a love story with plenty of racy sex which is normally only confined to the bedroom this is the book for you. The twist to the story combines sorcery and slightly sinister family members.

It is the mark of good writing, when a novel can make the reader feel for the characters. I felt real anger towards both the characters and the author who in my opinion should write erotica without any pretence of being a romance novelist. There are so many american writers who seem to be obsessed with writing about England's past and while it makes a change to read a historical novel that isn't about Lord Muck and Lady Fitzthingy during the regency era; the main characters is this novel are primarily concerned with getting laid, not falling in love.

Elaine Metcliffe is an overweight thiry-nine year old; hardly middle aged in my opinion, but that is how she is portrayed by the author, and in a cold loveless marriage where neither she nor her husband share any affection or happiness. So of course she is surprised to wake up one morning and find herself in the body of lovely nineteen year old Morrigan in 19th century England. Charles Mortimer who has been married to Morrigan for a year and all his attempts to bed his new wife, have met with blatant refusal. She barely speaks to him, and refuses to accept anything from him, not his wedding ring, not the lovely clothing he has provided her with and especially not the pleasures of the marriage bed that he is so eager to show to her. Frustrated, Charles rapes his wife, and this is how the reader first meets him, the morning after. He is filled not with anger or repugnance at his own actions but he is still angry with his wife for her coldness towards him. He like so many men of his time, does not see his action as rape, but as his right. The author doesn't bother to dwell on this seemingly unimportant aspect of his character. He barely knows his wife. He fell for her watching her dancing in the woods while she was unaware that she was being observed. At the time, she seemed fey and lovely to him now he hates her for continual rejection and he's racked with sexual frustration. So we hear his inner rants. How dare, his wife reject his advances when he took the trouble to study the bloody karma sutra in India? He's taken Morrigan from poverty to a grand house with servants and everything she could wish for so why doesn't she love him?

When Elaine realises what has happened to her and that she is really in another time and place she is terrified of speaking in her southern accent, so pretends to have a throat infection so that no one will suspect anything is wrong. Now Charles finds that Morrigan is shaking with passion at his touch, wearing her wedding ring, and no longer rejecting him. So of course he falls 'in love'.

I could only stomach this book until three quarters of the way through it when suddenly the author decides to add another plot twist, and turn the happless Morrigan into the villan of the piece. By this time, the reader has discovered enough of Morrigan's past to know that she is the victim, having endured a hellish childhood and upbringing. I was angry with the author for making a villan of a character who had a childhood, and relatives that made Jane Eyre's seen cosy and loving.

It made no sense and if an author wants to write a novel about two lonely people who want to have sex, they shouldn't dress it up with the pretense of being a romance. Charles was hardly romantic material, he fell in love with his wife's physical beauty and had no idea what was going on in her head. He was completely selfish and when the opportunity came for protecting his wife from her awful, abusive nurse, and even worse family came, he failed to see their vindictive natures and their true potential for harm, showing an amazing lact of perception. In a romance the reader is supposed to fall in love with the 'hero' too at least a little, and this book failed utterly to make this reader feel for all but one character.

After reading "A Lady's Pleasure" (which was hot, awesome and original) I was really hoping to like this "Awaken, My Love." But this book is absolute drivel from the beginning to the end. It was consistent in being ludicrous. Like a moron, I kept reading, hoping it will get better but the author never veered from the path of being ridiculous-in-a-bad-way that seemed to be the theme of the book.

I didn't mind Elaine in the opening scene, it was nice to open with a heroine masturbating and confront the topic from the get go. I hoped she'd be able to find someone who would be more willing and able to satisfy her and appreciate her when she meets the hero. But when she somehow travels back in time to Victorian England after being married for 17 years in the 20th century, she still acts like some virginal debutante from, well... from Victorian times. A little Too Stupid To Live.

There were too many of the requisite (and tired) scenes in time travel stories, where the time traveller essentially says something like, "Omigod, there's no running water?" It's one scene like that after another. And she never speaks, coz apparently she's afraid of being found out that she isn't British or Scottish or mute. I mean seriously, if she was so afraid of talking she had loads of opportunity to try speaking and listening to her own voice when she was alone in her own room. Does she do this? No, she lets some religious nut job of a maid to bully her around. Then her husband comes and though she is attracted to him all she does is squeak. Wtf? What was the point of getting a heroine from the modern times to go back to the past if she was going to act like a Victorian prude anyway? For someone who thinks she has a "feminist" aspect to her character Elaine seems to love being a pathetic doormat. Even to her servants.

And wow, is she ambivalent about her relationship with her husband Charles. Not only does she not talk to him or anyone (which makes it difficult for her to figure out what's going on) but she seems confused. If she has sex with him, would that be adultery? He isn't her inept husband, but the hot husband of the woman whose body she's taken over. So where was the sexual liberation then? She wanted Charles to treat her like a cherished wife but she's not going to perform any of her "wifely duties," because that would be WRONG. Never mind that in her current reality Charles IS her husband and she has the hots for him. She was constantly alternating between being a childish and disagreeable woman to a hypocritical girl. She can't even decide if she wants to go back to her staid marriage in the 20th century or not, let alone figure out how to do so. And she makes way too many assumptions without voicing her thoughts.

But when about a third of the way into the book she receives a note from the owner of the body she inhabited, I had my "WTF?" moment. So 70% of the book is all about being embarrassed to use the chamber pot (once she FINALLY starts talking) and being ambivalent about what she wants from her 19th century husband, things take a turn from ridiculously bad to ridiculously dumb. So Morrigan (the original owner of Elaine's 19th century body) starts blackmailing her and Elaine once more is paralyzed with indecision. By this point I was just hoping it would end soon.

So bad plot, annoying characters and then it was never fully explained how she arrived in 19th century in the first place so it also has an unsatisfying ending. When I got to the epilogue all I wanted was to read something else just so that this was not the last book I read! Buy the book only if you want to be left feeling baffled and annoyed.