Book Review: The Heir (Windham #1) by Grace Burrowes
I can’t even begin to describe this book. Or maybe I can: The Heir is a hot mess and could be the worst book I’ve ever attempted to read.
It was the author’s first published book and she has churned out a lot since. I hope she’s improved. The author’s notes claim Burrowes is a pen name for a ‘prolific and award winning author of historical romances’. My guess would be the awards might be something like ‘Worst Fanfic of 2009’.
The plot jumps around but the general gist is our hero, a duke, falls in love with our heroine, the housekeeper. You’d think that their differing positions in society would be the conflict, right? No. No one cares about that aspect at all. Everyone in the duke’s extremely extensive family encourages the match. Alas, our heroine has a secret past which is keeping her from agreeing to marry the hero. I read until I found out what the secret was but trust me, it isn’t worth wasting your eyesight to discover.
Characterisation is something Burrowes has only heard about in her Writing a Romance Novel 101 lesson. I found it difficult to form any sort of connection with the heroine, in particular. Burrowes also distracted me further by adding various other characters. All will, I assume, ‘star’ in the other Windham books. There were so many that, in the end, I completely skimmed those scenes and didn’t bother even trying to keep a spreadsheet of who was who except for perhaps our heroine’s deaf and mute sister and the hero’s gay but not gay piano playing brother.
Burrowes apparently gets the word romance mixed up with the word sex. Seriously? I can’t even imagine there’d be more sex scenes in the Shades of Gray books. Every chapter has something included but we’re supposed to know they really really love each other because they clean each other off and spoon afterwards. Ugh.
Nothing is actually sexy or romantic, and there’s no sense or point to any of the scenes. (Actually, I think I could have almost interpreted some scenes as date rape. Ugh.)
Every corny trope gets a go. Caught in the rain, having to share a bed when caught in that rain, hurt/comfort, the hero needing a sponge bath to bring down a fever… I can’t even. The opening scene of the heroine mistakenly thinking the hero is sexually attacking her sister is ridiculous to the extreme and so jumbled that I didn’t even know what was going on for a minute.
And historical? Well… Certainly there was no historical accuracy. One or two historical errors might be forgivable, but Burrowes can’t even get the simplest things like food and drink correct. Lemonade? Iced tea? Marzipan? Cookies? Muffins? WTF?
I was reading this for a Book of the Month challenge on Goodreads. This is the only reason I made it to around the 75% mark. Depressingly, I checked and I’d actually paid money for this book (I’d bought it some time ago and that’s why I decided to join in with the challenge). It might have hurt less if it had been free.
½ a star out of 5? Did not finish.
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