Donde la pasión nos lleve (Where Passion Leads) Book

DNF

This was my first attempt at reading a Lisa Kleypas novel and I wasn't impressed at all.

The heroine gets raped by the hero. There is no way around it.

I have read novels where rape is present. I know that there is some truth to the idea that noblemen were almost expected to take 'advantage' of lowly house maids. But I need for the authors to address it. On the same side of the coin, the noblemen in those days hardly every married or fell in love with these maids. I felt it was highly contradictory that history wasn't relayed to the fullest extent.

In this novel, I felt like there was little recognition of the fact that what the hero did to the heroine was despicable. The hero is by no means apologetic. Oh no, he feels these pangs of guilt that leads him to offer her passage to France, after which he will return with her and find her a place as a nanny and wash his hands off her. But what about her dreams and prospects for future that were ruined by this senseless and terrible act? It's not his problem. He is after all a nobleman. He owes nothing to someone from her class.

What also angered me was that, I felt as though a point was being made, that it was okay or even better for her to get raped by a nobleman who is handsome, than the lower class ugly dock worker. That he saved her from that worse fate. It wasn't said in so many words. But while she feels nauseated by the foul breath of the dock worker, she watches the handsome sleek bronze body of the hero, after he rapes her.

The story progresses so that predictably, the heroine decides that sleeping with the hero is not such a bad idea after all. No matter how much she was opposed to it before. Honestly, I lost all respect for the heroine, and I never had any for the hero to begin with.