Captured Book

Beverly Jenkins appears to be a well-loved author, and I have heard really good things about her book Indigo from people whose opinions I trust. So even though pirates aren't usually my thing, and the back cover blurb didn't sound promising (when does it ever?), I had reasonably high hopes for Captured. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the simplistic writing style, the cardboard characters, and the uneven plot.

Take away the sexual content, and this book could easily have been written with fifth graders or even younger readers in mind. The writing felt like it had been dumbed down for a young audience. Everything from major plot points to character motivations to minor details were explained outright - all telling, no showing. The miniature history lessons that peppered the story, most of which served no apparent purpose other than to be informative, added to the sense that I was reading a novel meant for school children.

Perhaps it was that juvenile fiction vibe I got from this book that made the sexual content feel so out of place. On the other hand, Jenkins's bizarre choices of metaphors to describe the characters' sexual experiences didn't help. For instance, after one encounter with Dominic, we were told that "Clare doubted she'd ever be the same after such a novel experience. Even now her breasts were whispering his name." Later on in the book, Clare's nipples started "pleading" with Dominic, so apparently her boobs are pretty vocal. This particular paragraph summed up a lot of my problems with Jenkins's writing style:

Above her, Dominic smiled malely. His manhood was as hard as a ship's mast, and Poseidon knew he wanted to raise her skirts and push his way into paradise but he forced himself to hold off. It wasn't time yet.

The mixture of Greek pagan and Christian metaphors is bad enough, but seeing "male" turned into an adverb annoyed me even more. What does that even mean, to "smile malely?" Of course he smiled malely. He's male. Descriptions should convey a mental image, but I don't know how to picture that one. It just came across as lazy writing.

There was basically no tension in the romantic story line. Dominic abducted Clare and forced her aboard his ship, and within a few days they were in love and never had another disagreement for the rest of the novel. So since the romance was all neatly tied up within the first third of the book, all conflict from there on out was from external forces. In fact, the middle of the book contained virtually no conflict at all. For more than 100 pages, Dominic and Clare just sort of hung out on Dominic's home island, met Dominic's friends and followers, and had lots of really unsexy sex. Then the author suddenly seemed to remember what she was doing before she got sidetracked with Dominic's idyllic island life, and the plot picked back up. Unfortunately, the conclusion of the conflict was so contrived - relying on highly improbable actions on the part of the villains, as well as some unlikely coincidences - that I felt like my intelligence had been grossly insulted.

Although there were a lot of characters in Captured, none of them were fleshed out very well. The villains in particular were so uniformly evil (to the point where they would risk their own interests just for the sake of being jerks) that they weren't convincing. Their motives needed to be more nuanced, or at least better explained. Every character in this book was either good or bad. There were no shades of gray, no delicate handling of the extremely complex issues involved.

This book has, unfortunately, put me off of Beverly Jenkins's writing. Although I've heard very positive things about Indigo, I am very reluctant to try it now that I've read Captured.