Sarah's Library

 27/6 - I was thinking this was a two and a half to three star read, not completely dreadful, but populated by too much purple prose to be truly enjoyable, but then I read some of the other reviews that talked about her mistakes regarding the geography of Houston and Cozumel, and the Maya culture. Those kinds of mistakes are pretty unforgivable. If you're going to use a culture and specific real-life locations in your book then you had better do your research and represent them in a way that natives of the location or culture would be happy with, otherwise you're not showing them the respect they deserve. It would be like a movie set in a South American jungle being filmed in a redwood forest, anyone who's been to either place would know immediately that they were being lied to and would feel like the people behind the movie were trying to trick them into believing something that was clearly not true. That's how I feel about what Lowell's done with this book. I was very disappointed with the story before I even knew about the inaccuracies because of the dreadful metaphors and overly flowery descriptive writing. I've long been a fan of Lowell's, but this reminded me of her early 80s works with the eye-rollingly bad metaphors

'His face was as hard as anything she'd ever seen carved in stone. And as compelling.'

*sigh*
But this was written in 2012, not 1982, and unfortunately the only difference between this book and one of her 80s books that always seemed to feature 'hard men' and horses is that a condom was mentioned in both of the sex scenes, which would have been unlikely in books like Beautiful Dreamer. You'd think her writing style would mature with age and experience...