Grade: A

Alys le Fayre is a bitch. She is a beautiful, golden-haired, manipulative bitch whose idea of fun is to pit against each other the young men who court and woo her. One of these young men is a handsome knight named Lucan Warre. Vicious and popular on the battlefield, Lucan’s only joy in life is Alys and he will do anything in the world for her. Alys, on the other hand, loves Lucan in her own way, but there is nothing more she enjoys than to rile up his jealousy, while flaunting him in front of her other suitors. One of her more ardent suitors, obsessive in his quest to have her, kills Lucan in a tourney. Lucan dies. Unbeknownst to Alys, Lucan’s father was Aengus, king of the Faeries. The King of Faeries punishes her by keeping her imprisoned in the underworld of Faeries for five hundred years. Ha-ha.

Alys is given a chance to redeem herself and save her mortal soul if she could find the one true love of the reincarnated Lucan Warre, now Lucian Warre, the Marquess of Thistlewood, before his faerie essence expires… which is in four months. When his faerie essence expires, he will merely cease to exist and his soul will have no chance of going to heaven. Alys, who has been matchmaking for others for centuries (for practice), knows that she cannot allow such an injustice to happen to Lucian because it was all her fault that he died in the first place and he, more than anyone, deserves happiness. Besides, if she fails, she will have to wander the earth as a ghost for all eternity. She just cannot fail. Period. Unfortunately for her, Lucian is dead inside. All he has inside his chest is a cold lump of coal where his heart should be. How can Alys find for him his one true love if he cannot feel?

Dude, this book rules. Heather Cullman really knows her stuff when it comes to writing about these tortured hero types. When we first encounter Lucian, he is a cold, cold man. He isn’t mean, he isn’t even a dick, he’s just cold. He’s a cold hearted snake. Look into his eyes. Uh-oh… he’s been telling lies. He’s a lover boy, a player… he don’t play by rules. Uh-oh, girl, don’t be a fool now. He has a mistress, but he only has sex with her when it is absolutely necessary and not more than that, and he likes to keep to himself. Oh, and he doesn’t like blondes (unfortunately, Alys is a blonde). Through the machinations of the faeries, Alys somehow becomes his ward and according to the codicil of her “brother” (who saved Lucian from certain death at Waterloo), he must find her a husband. When he first meets Alys, he doesn’t get an insta-boner like other romance heroes at the first sight of the heroine. In fact, he finds her ugly, pale, and as skinny as Lindsay Lohan.

Alys knows that if Lucian cannot feel, he cannot love, so she sets out teaching him how to “feel”. She does this by pissing him off and what fun I had reading about it. She yells at him, disobeys him at every turn (without crossing into the TSTL territory), pushes all his buttons, and I squeal with glee when Lucian gets blue in the face and can barely restrain himself from throttling her. As annoyed as he is with Alys, Lucian realizes that he actually looks forward to their shouting matches and his previously cold dead heart begins to twitch a little. The chemistry between these two is just amazing. Every scene they have together just sizzles. I think my favorite scene in the book is when Lucian is sitting at the hearth in the kitchen (it becomes a ritual for them to raid the kitchen for a snack at midnight) waiting for Alys even though he knows she won’t come, exhausted as she is from the balls and soirees he forces her to attend. He’s just so… awwwww….

Alys, on the other hand, realizes that she’s in love with Lucian, but knows that she lost her chance with him five hundred years ago. She knows she’s not his one true love, so she gets busy finding the right woman for him, though it’s killing her. What she discovers, however, is that love is supposed to be selfless. True love requires sacrifice and she will do everything in her power to find Lucian’s one true love. *sniff*

Oh, man, I love this book. The one quibble I have about it, albeit tiny, is that Alys stays in Lucian’s mansion WITHOUT A CHAPERONE. Isn’t that the type of stuff that is reputation suicide for a society belle? Honestly! Lucian’s sister, grand dame of the ton herself, doesn’t say a word about it. Could it be that Heather Cullman didn’t know that an unmarried woman could not stay under the same roof with an unmarried man without a chaperone even if he has a hundred servants?

Other than that, I think this book kicks ass. It made my shriveled little heart shed a tear.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: A, Romance: Historical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.