Look, sometimes you just have to meet a book where it is. This story is absolutely ridiculous, and filled to the brim with so many stereotypes that if you think about it too hard, your head will spin. Our tragic little heroine, Celia, is perfectly tragic and ethereal and of course everyone who comes into contact with her absolutely adores her. Her wicked stepmother, Isobel, is evil incarnate, selfish and conniving and a total bitch to poor dear Celia. She never loved Celia's father, only married him for his money, and is livid when he dies and she learns that he tied up all his money in a trust for Celia. She hatches a plan to marry Celia off to one of her cronies, Fulke Withers, so that she can have control of Celia's money. Of course she has red hair (and its mentioned several times that she's slovenly and prances around like a painted whore).

Celia was neglected by her father during his lifetime and ill-treated by Isobel after his death. She has been isolated at Storm Castle for most of her life, only going away to boarding school as a teenager and then returning to be a slave to her baby stepbrother. She's basically Rapunzel, locked in her gloomy, gothic turret tower, waiting for her prince to come rescue her.

Her prince is a dark-haired French fisherman named Paul, whom she meets quite by chance one day. On the second day of their friendship, they declare their undying love for each other and start working on plans to get Celia out of Storm Castle so that they can marry. Isobel, of course, forbids it, which only fuels the young lovers' passion. As this all takes place during 1940, there is the backdrop of WWII and the stormy Cornish coast to add to the drama.

And boy is there plenty of drama: attempted rape, abduction, car crashes, elopement, fire, storms, blackmail, secret war missions, bribery. The romance is thin and simplistic by comparison. It was a bit of a mixture of a Disney princess story, a gothic romance, and a really bad, trashy novel that gives romance a bad reputation. Yet it all, somehow, worked for me on some level. Maybe I was just in the right mood, but I couldn't help rooting for silly Celia to free herself from her evil stepmother's clutches and finally marry her dearly beloved Paul.

I can't say I'd recommend this to anyone, but I don't regret buying it or reading it, and am happy to have it in my vintage romance collection. ( )