The Notorious Lady Anne: A Loveswept Historical Romance by Sharon Cullen
My rating: 3 of 5 flames
Emmaline Sutherland is a pirate. Actually, she’s the most feared pirate out there. She goes by the name Lady Anne, and she is amazing at what she does. Her latest plan is to find a ship that is rumored to carry gold, and take it. Oddly enough, it’s not the gold she wants. She’s trying to sink her father’s reputation. (Emmaline’s father is a horrible man, and he deserves everything she wants to do to him). And her father runs Blackwell Shipping lines.
So Emmaline books passage on one of the Blackwell ships and basically spies. She gathers information on the gold, and on the port it will be sailing from. The captain, Nicolas Addison, is a very no-nonsense type of man. He doesn’t believe in Lady Anne, nor a female pirate at all. No woman could be that good at sailing and pirating.
Emmaline proves him wrong.
This goes against everything Nicholas holds dear. Pirates are bad, vengeance is bad, ladies aren’t pirates, etc. But Emmaline shows him there can be a grey area. They fall in love and I did enjoy that. I loved Emmaline’s crew, and I actually really liked the plot about the sugar cane, until the end when it sort of fell flat.
Through it all, Nicolas holds out til the last that ruining the Blackwell shipping line is wrong. Even though he also believes her father is scum, and he thinks he’s scamming his investors. This is where I began having trouble with the book. I kept waiting for Nicholas to realize that they could ruin her father without ruining everyone else, or the whole shipping line. Or that maybe there was another way for her to get her vengeance, but the book stayed the course, so to speak. It was either Nicholas or her revenge. No other way about it.
This made me so mad. For a man who’s spent the whole book learning about grey areas in his black/white life, he never tried to find a grey area for Emmaline. I will say that he realized that he was wrong about women being good at sea, and independent, but that was where his newly expanded viewpoint stopped. Any hint of her wanting to ruin Blackwell, and he would shut down, and go back to his narrow views of Emmaline.
I wanted to like this one more than I did. I spent each page hoping to like it more. As it is, I didn’t dislike it, but I think it could’ve been so much better. This book had the potential to be amazing. A lady pirate?! And she kidnaps the hero?! Come on! How can you go wrong?
This one didn’t necessarily go wrong, per se, and it was an enjoyable read, it just wasn’t as awesome as I’d hoped. Between the purple prose and the parts of the plot that you can spot a mile away, it felt like a ‘90s pirate novel that ought to have Fabio on it. Only the roles were reversed.
But ending on a positive note, it was still a nice read, it has a lady pirate and a kidnapped hero, and for the most part it was enjoyable.
***ARC courtesy of Loveswept
