Still plowing through my remaining paper books – now down to only 12 paper historicals (plus one bookshelf of Regencies). Amazing when I look back on the numbers I had just a year or two ago!
Morning Song by Kimberly Cates
(1997, Victorian) 7/9/12
Grade: 3.5
Hannah Gray is on the run with her sister’s son, Pip, trying to escape from his abusive father. She ends up at Ravenscar, where the mysterious and volatile Austen Dante takes them in. Despite Austen’s blustering, Hannah soon discovers the caring heart underneath – but will that be enough to protect them?
An intriguing gothic that suffered a little bit from predictability. I enjoyed the gothic setup, clearly influenced by Jane Eyre and authors like Victoria Holt. Kimberly Cates managed to keep the gothic feeling while still writing the book from the perspective of the heroine and the hero – the usual failing of a traditional gothic. However, the book had a few problems. First, the author piled on one issue after another onto Austen, without enough time to explore them all. (Music! Reading! Father! Friend’s death!) Whenever the drama died down a little bit, the author threw in another “issue”. Paradoxically, this made the book predictable – I got kind of bored in the last third and started skimming. I could predict everything that was going to happen. Overall, this was a good book but it didn’t quite live up to its promise.
The setting of this book wasn’t entirely clear – I had it labeled as a Regency historical at first but the traditional Gothic setting is Victorian, and there were some details that made me think “Victorian” more than “Regency”.
Karen Wheless
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