Smitten by Books

Lynette Curtis, a frequent visitor of the blog, has been kind enough to review Caroline Linden’s, For Your Arms Only and offer up her two cents.

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For Your Arms Only
Author: Caroline Linden
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Pub. Date: November 24, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0061706479
384 pages

He’d never been shot by a woman . . .

He was once a distinguished army officer, a man of honor and heroism. But that was before Alexander Hayes was wrongly accused of treason. Forced to abandon everything he held dear, Alec became a spy for England in an attempt to clear his name. His latest commission sounds simple: locate a retired soldier gone missing. But it also sends him back home, to a family who’d thought him dead for five years—and a woman who’d like to shoot him.

Everything Cressida Turner’s ever heard about Alec tells her that he’s a traitor of the worst kind, and yet this enigmatic, infuriating, and utterly captivating man may be the only person she can trust—and the only one who can find her missing father. With nowhere else to turn, she reluctantly joins forces with Alec, unprepared for both the dangerous secrets that threaten them and the relentless passion that drives them into each other’s arms.

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Lynette’s Two Cents:
The beginning of For Your Arms Only was slow and dragged. It took me two and a half days to read the first one hundred or more pages of this book. Despite the awesome writing (I mean Ms. Linden’s talent just oozes from the page) I wouldn’t have picked For Your Arms Only back up again if I hadn’t promised to review it. However, the middle and end were fabulous. I’d defiantly read this author again, though it’ll be a library read at first. I live in Michigan, the worst economic state in the U.S., so I only purchase books I know I will re-read (I’m a big re-reader). If I read one or two more of her books that I really liked, she’d go on my must-buy list. I can see Caroline Linden as an author who will blow me away eventually, her writing was that good. It was just the story and heroine that bothered me.

Plot: There is a lot of plot inside For Your Arms Only, which normally is a good thing. However, in my humble opinion it felt as if it took way too long to set-up the story. There was too much to focus on, that I ended up losing interest. Near the end, all the plot threads pulled together but I thought they should’ve been woven in more effectively in the beginning so that the reader would care more and not stop reading.
a. Example 1. I had a serious WTF moment in the book. Since it’s back-story I can tell you without spoiling anything. Alexander is accused of being a traitor. Everyone (including Wellington) believes he betrayed the English to the French, yet he is given a job as an English spy. AFTER EVERYONE BELIEVES HE’S A TRAITOR. HUH! That lost all credibility to me. Maybe it’s because of what I do day-to-day on my job, but I lost faith in the author from the moment I read that in the prologue. Everything was explained quite well later on, but that wasn’t until Chapter Eight (Chapter Eight starts on page 91) that the explanation was given. So I spent ninety-one pages thinking this defies credibility. I wish the explanation would’ve been weaved in a little earlier, maybe infuse the information into the prologue or made Chapter Eight the prologue.
b. Example 2. Ms. Linden did a great job with Alexander the hero. I adored him, which is why I kept reading despite some of the problems I had with this book. One thing that bothered me is that when he returned home after five years. NOTHING was said about his return from the dead. No family dramas, nothing. Not a hint of anger from the man who thought he’d inherit. NOTHING. No one broke the rule that we just don’t talk about it, even when it’s just within family. Come on now. I know the English are supposed to have a stiff upper lip, but this was a little too much. I kept waiting for the fight to erupt. It did erupt eventually with his sister Julia but it was to the middle/end of the book. Waiting for something so obvious to happen distracted my reading experience.
c. Example 3. Minor issue that comes not from knowledge of the era but from reading romance novels from the time I was eleven years old. A single woman (even a spinster) going on an overnight trip with a single man during that time-period? It just didn’t seem right to me, felt it was just a device to throw them together. However, I could be wrong and often am.

Characters: I didn’t like the heroine. She got on my last nerve until (you guessed it) the middle/end of the book. Alexander was sent to help her, and she acted like he had the plague. Come on girly. Her justification wasn’t even that she didn’t trust him because he was branded a traitor. She had no reasoning for her dislike and it annoyed me. I also felt that the author spent a little too much time in the beginning channeling Elizabeth and Jane Bennett for Cressida and her sister Cassie. But that’s just my opinion. Again, this changed as the book went along.

Sex Scene: I am so not one of those people who say they skip the sex scenes. Frankly, I think they’re lying. But that’s just me. Me, I read the sex scenes with a highlighter and pencil in my hand so I can scribble notes in the margins. 🙂 Different strokes for different folks. Having said that, this sex scene seemed out of place, it read like I was suddenly transported into an erotic romance novel. I read erotic romance novels, so that didn’t bother me, but the tone seemed wrong and didn’t fit the Cressida I had pictured in my mind. The tough, no nonsense, feisty (Elizabeth Bennett type) heroine. It’s like she turned into a totally different character. That scene didn’t fit tone of the rest of the book.

I know it seems like I didn’t like the book. I did. Once again, the middle and end were great. Ms. Linden can describe a scene that is so vivid that I feel like I’m there. Once the plot issues were ironed out, I was able to sit down and enjoy the story, so that just make me wonder what she’d do with a different book. I can’t wait to see.

Rating Scale:
A – Top 20 in subgenre. I will keep it and re-read it and it will be my precious
B – I’ll re-read my favorite parts
C – Good but I won’t re-read
D – Not my thing
E- I finished it.
F – I did not finish it.

Final Grade: C-