This Is All I Ask (de Piaget Series #5) Book

If I read the book 25 years ago, I think I would've liked it.

The story started out promisingly enough. Twenty-one-year old woman who's been kept as a virtual prisoner by horribly abusive father is sprung from her nightmare home by a marriage offer from a knight friend of her deceased warrior brother. She goes along because she has no choice, even though her husband to be has a fearsome reputation as a dark dragon-like creature. Of course, as she gets to know her new husband, she learns he's not the monster she feared and they fall in love.

The book could've been an interesting character-driven story but, unfortunately, it felt in execution for me. The heroine is about as emotionally developed as a 12-year-old which is understandable considering her upbringing, but it doesn't make her very interesting. On the contrary, her portrayal seemed to be built on a bunch of stereotypes. She's the girl who thinks she's ugly but we find out she really isn't, she's tomboyish enough to play with a sword--but from what I read she really doesn't know how to use it nor does she have the presence of mind to keep from dropping it at the first sign of threat. I had to remind myself again-and -again of the heroine abusive past, and be understanding of her annoying and puzzlingly inconsistent behavior and constant tears. And speaking of tears...We get not only constant tears from our heroine, we also get teary-eyed hero, that is when he gets tired of constant shouting.

Thanks goodness for witches whose magic made the leads fall in love. Without their outside intervention, it's hard to imagine a more unlikely outcome if one considers numerous misunderstandings and wrong assumptions.

The book is 432-pages long and the magical falling in love happens half-way through. The rest of the story felt more like a page-filler that took things off course and didn't do anything to promote the development of relationship.