Lisa J. Yarde

I don't really know what I want to rate this book, maybe a 3.4 or 3.5. It takes awhile to get interesting and well I had a hard time letting it keep my attention. Can I say maybe it was because I knew nothing about the history of Moorish Spain.

I do now, I had to read some facts about this time, like what the heck are Moors doing in Spain...

Fatima the main character was just a child when she was married to her cousin Faraj. He was older then her by 8 to 10 years. Fatima was a spoiled child, her father let her have every little whim, her mother though tried to make her see that her father wasn't the great man that Fatima saw him as.

Faraj wasn't easy to like either, but he got there before Fatima.

When the time came to actually get to their relationship, they both had matured in many ways, even though Fatima still acted childish sometimes. Maybe because they grew into their love, it made it seem more real, the last 3/4 of the book was really good...I think I was about 36% into the book.

I am hesitant to pick up the second one, but I am sort of hoping the story would be getting from the point where the author stopped.… (mehr)

I had an ARC of Sultana by Lisa J. Yarde sitting so long my shelf that I felt guilty about not reading it.

There were some positive things about this book, it was very well researched. Now I have some knowledge about 13th Century Moorish Spain, the clothes, customs and the royal families. I have to thank the author for that. In the back of the bock are some helpful charts like the one that gives the modern day name for the place identified in the book. Also, there is a great glossary and list of the characters in the front with concise descriptions.

At the beginning of the book, the child Fatima was only eight years old when she was kidnapped. Fatima been married Farij earlier on the same day. She seemed intelligent and loyal to the family that she missed.

But I had a load of trouble with the writing. There were awkwardly worded sentences that made me stop and think about they could be worded better. I found this annoying and often lost the flow of the story. Also the descriptions of the food were great and made me hungry. But I thought that the emotions of Fatima and Fariq were put down in a superficial manner.

I love historical fiction but not so much romance. I think the roots of romance are there but again not very developed. I thought that the feelings could have been expressed in such a way that I could connect with the main characters but I was not able to connect even to Fatima.

The author’s passion for history of this area and time period comes out in this book. However, I think it could have benefits from more re-writing. I think that she could do it but gave up too soon on editing.

I cannot recommend this book. I am hoping that the writing has been improved in her next book.

.… (mehr)

The Burning Candle is a fictionalized story of real people living in eleventh century Europe. The details are well researched, and Lisa Yarde does an excellent job of capturing this period in history.

Young Isabel is born into a time when women are possessions and love has little to do with marriage. We follow her life from the age of eleven, when she is married off to a fifty year old man. I enjoyed the interplay with the characters and the honesty in the way the era is portrayed. We see the power religious leaders held within the communities, as well as how little power women had over their own lives. Yarde's writing style is engaging, easily drawing me into the story.

On the down side, I thought the plot moved a bit slowly at times. And, for me, Isabel didn't evolve enough as a character. This made it difficult for me to read the scenes when she interacted with her much older husband. I had to skip the sex scenes completely, because my brain kept screaming 'pedophile'. Isabel was, at that point, mid to late teens. Despite her husband being much older, I know it was common at that time in history for young women to marry older men. But her character still felt like that eleven year old girl we'd started out with, and I had trouble seeing her as the 'adult' woman she'd become.… (mehr)