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Title: Unforgiven by Mary Balogh ISBN: 0-515-12206-8 Publisher: Jove Pubns Pub. Date: January, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A Clever Title.
Comment: This is romance? Try full-blown alienation. These two people do not like each other. I don't care how much the author tries to proclaim their love. I couldn't find the love scenes -- they waltz together and he appreciates her height? Ok . . .
Skillfully titled, these two characters cannot and will not "forgive" one another. A misunderstanding during their adolescence has developed into hatred. Ms. Balogh urges the reader to consider the characters' inner thoughts -- wishing us to believe these two quarrelsome people love each other! Unfortunately, the message is not delivered! Even at the story's end, the reader reads the love declarations with uneasiness.
Briefly summed -- the tale of a future earl, Kenneth Woodfall, and a wild, independent, free-spirit, Moira Hayes. Throughout one ill-fated summer, our lovers share an obsession, meet in secret, and fall in love. However, something goes terribly wrong and they replace youthful love with aggravated mistrust and betrayal.
Found in these pages is one of the most unconventional consummation scenes ever read in romance reading. They say if you live long enough you will experience it all -- add a new experience to this lady's life.
Mary Balogh may have faltered with the storyline but her writing is still first-rate. Moira's denial of her pregnancy and her waning health are quite believable. The author favorably portrays the book's secondary characters. Balogh has written Moira's betrothed, Sir Edwin Baillie, as a pompous, silly, flabbergasting man -- reminiscent of Jane Austen's Mr. Collins from "Pride and Prejudice". The reader will cherish the brief hilarious scenes featuring this absurd person -- anything to avoid spending time with our two love fragments.
Grace Atkinson, Ontario - Canada.
Rating: 2
Summary: It started off ok but had really fallen flat by page 100
Comment: The heroine's view of the world seems cynical so one is forced to spend too much time with a negative woman prone to an attitude of victimization. One moment she seems to be slipping into self pity and the next she is 'proudly' declaring her independence. These sporatic reversals make her character hard to believe or sympathize with. Ultimately, her character is rather weak and unappealing. I had to stop reading the book when I encountered a truly absurd plot twist that I felt was merely a cheap device the author used to avoid having to think of a sincere way that these two people could fall in love.
Rating: 5
Summary: A 'forced marriage' novel with quite a twist!
Comment: This is the sequel to Balogh's Indiscreet, and worth reading for that reason alone, since Indiscreet introduced the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse', as Rex, Kenneth, Nat and Eden were known during the Peninsular war. For those who wanted to know more about all four characters, this book gives you what you were looking for.
At the end of Indiscreet, we're left with quite a cliffhanger concerning Kenneth: he has to return home to marry a woman who is having his baby and whom he says he dislikes more than he has ever disliked anyone in his life (and this can't be a spoiler, since it's part of the plot summary on the cover of Unforgiven and on this site!). I, for one, was desperate to find out exactly how this had come about.
Kenneth and Moira, we learn right at the start of the book, have known each other for years, but their families have been estranged for generations. We learn that Moira, Kenneth and their respective siblings were friends in secret as children, but it's apparent that something happened which not only tore apart those friendships and the burgeoning love Kenneth and Moira felt for each other, but also renewed the family quarrel with a vengeance.
Moira has just agreed to marry her distant cousin, a prosy, pompous, self-important bore who also happens to be the heir to her family home, at the point when she meets Kenneth again. It's very clear to the reader that their mutual dislike hides a very mutual attraction. However, both suppress it very heavily indeed, and more might never have come of it had Moira not attended the Christmas ball at Dunbarton and overheard some comments about herself spoken by Kenneth's mother and sister. She foolishly goes out to walk home alone in heavy snow...
I have to admit that the circumstances in which the child was conceived made me raise an eyebrow; I still find it a little difficult to accept that Kenneth would propose, and Moira would accept, that particular course of action in those particular circumstances. Nevertheless, that's the premise Balogh went with, and I was able to ignore my reservations and concentrate on the story.
The way in which two stubborn people who did not want to be married to each other, and who can't seem to be able to speak to each other without causing yet more misunderstandings, come to realise that they do actually love each other - and that they can actually *tell* each other that fact - is very well told by Balogh. She does do misunderstood lovers very well indeed.
Unlike some reviewers, I didn't find Moira's behaviour childish, although Kenneth accuses her of that more than once. She's certainly stubborn. And she believes, as we find out later, that she has very good reason to hate him, and therefore she resents the need to ask him for anything at all - and his own imperious, occasionally domineering Earl of Haverford manner doesn't help. As for her refusal to accept at first that she was pregnant, how many of us can exist in a state of denial over something we would rather wasn't happening? And she did face up to the truth eventually.
I did like this book a lot, and will be reading it again. Now for Nat's story in Irresistable!
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Title: Indiscreet by Mary Balogh ISBN: 0515120014 Publisher: Jove Pubns Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Heartless by Mary Balogh ISBN: 0425150119 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: October, 1995 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Silent Melody by Mary Balogh ISBN: 0425158624 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: August, 1997 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Irresistible by Mary Balogh ISBN: 0515123676 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Truly by Mary Balogh ISBN: 0425153290 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: May, 1996 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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