Passion's Honor

by Diane Wicker Davis

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038075097X
• ISBN13: 9780380750979
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 10 Pages
• Weight: 2.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A little forced but oh, so good

This has always been my favorite Diane Wicker Davis book and one of my favorite historical romances in general. Perhaps it's that the bad guys are so deliciously bad and come to bad ends. Or maybe it's the rock and hard place the hero is in, walking the fine line of honor as he understands it. But it isn't the heroine who seems out of place and overshadowed by a cast of vivid characters; she's too meek, too mild, even given that she's been convent raised from birth. I think I've read too many romance novels - and written a few too many stories myself - because the predictable formula of boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back didn't leave me surprised by any plot twists or turns. Not so for several of my friends when we discussed this in our reading circle way back when this was published. But at the time all I read was historical romances and really, you read about one knight agonizing over his honor or his love and you've pretty much read them all. Which is no reflection on the writing of this one because Diane Wicker Davis has a magnificent grasp of the history she's using and a well-turned phrase so even if the plot was old hat to me, the writing kept it fresh. I have no problems with the brutality of the villain, even toward his own children; this is set in a time when women were chattel and went from father or other male relative to husband and husband again should she be so unlucky as to be widowed with young children or no children. Even his schemes to use her to further a vendetta against the hero's dead father isn't uncommon nor so overblown and rabid the story is crushed under it. And as for his bastard son, the man comes from peasant stock which would make him unwanted by his titled father, but he also has a second strike in not being the vicious strapping brute the father is. I do have a few quibbles with the villainess in her pathological hatred of her second son for the father forcing her to conceive a second time but not the third son who had to be created in the same way; if she didn't want two why would she want three? I get the differences between the two brothers and how her manipulation of her third son works and succeeds, so it has that ring of psychological truth. But if she's as smart and cunning as she's supposed to be, why did it not occur to her that with all her sons dead, their overlord would marry her off without bothering to ask her? I never bought her whole scheming and the reason for it. I don't actively dislike the heroine so much as I feel like smacking her for being clueless. She does her best as written but I think I would have written her differently. I do like the way she does clue in to some things; that the hero plays indifference to his daughter from his first marriage to keep his mother from using her as a pawn against him. But she doesn't seem to truly get that she can be used against him in the same way. Yes, yes, she does do her best in little ways to make his road easier