[.ca] To Burn (ISBN 0843949856)

Dain not only burns, she shines!!:
I have long admired Dorchester Publishing, finding I read more and more of their writers such as Melanie Jackson and Trish Jensen. They are fresh, super storytellers and Dorchester gives them the leeway to shine. And Claudia Dain not only shines in this novel, she burns!!! What a super read!! There is a trend toward the light whimsical historicals and I utterly adore to leader of this pack Lynsay Sands. But while I cannot wait for one of her new books to come out, I also love 'heavy' historicals such as Danegeld by Susan Squires (both Dorchester writers), and Claudia Dain gives one super strong historical. Writing of a period that many have overlooked in the romance market: the void left as the Romans pulled out of England and the Saxons rose to power - she paints the canvass not only with strong bold, sure strokes, but with vivid colours. I have been in writers chat several times with Dain, and found her a lively person with a super sense of humour, but she also loves history, and being a history lover myself, I was intrigued recently as she discussed To Burn. So naturally, I rushed out to buy it and am very glad I did. She gives us two very strong alpha leads. She is Melania, the roman woman who detests the loathsome Saxon. He is Wulfred, the Saxon who kills her father and destroys her villa and hates all things Roman. She calls him Oaf, he calls her snake and they utterly HATE each other. He finds her hiding in a bolthole, and sets it afire to force her out. In Valiant, almost Viking mentality, she accepts dying there, because it would be on her own terms, not his. He plans on killing her, but sees that is just want she wants. A quick death in warrior fashion. And since he hates her and all she stands for, he perversely denies her the death she so wants, and makes her his slave intending to break her spirit before he grants her death. But he finds breaking her spirit an impossible task. She is constantly provoking him with diatribes against him and all things Saxon, she scratches, kick and bites anytime he gets near, deliberately trying to provoke his temper into murdering her. She continually tries to kill herself. Not as a Ophelia whiner I-cannot-face-life, but as a strong warrior wanting life and death on her own terms, and if she cannot have life as she knows it, then will faces death with open arms. So Wulfred spend more time tries to stop her, than breaking her spirit. These are two well-drawn, uncompromising characters for an uncompromising period in Britain's history. And this will be a book you will remember long after you put it down. Thank you the super book, Claudia!! And I am off to buy the rest of your works!! WISE Writers and Readers Book of the Month for June 2002

Original setting, compelling story:
Set at the end of the Roman Empire in Britain, the story of Wulfred and Melania are classic romance in setting rarely used. Melania is a Roman whose villa is conquered by Saxon invaders, with Wulfred leading the conquering party. With the death of her father and the loss of her land, Melania defies Wulfred in every way she can imagine. Wulfred, who seeks revenge against any Roman, wants her alive and well to live under his power. Overall, I liked this story. The Roman vs. Saxon history isn't a typical romance setting, therefore it was interesting and engrossing. I liked the creative way Melania thought to thwart her captors-- a strong heroine who didn't "submit" after a token resistance. The only problem I had with this story is that Melania did "get over" the fact that the Saxons killed her father. If it had been a different Saxon group that killed him, it would have been a bit more believable.

Beautiful prose but no soul:
I've only read two of Claudia Dain's books. The first one varied widely in its pacing and the writing style; this one has a smooth pace and is consistently written with an ear tuned to the music of language. Unfortunately, the characters in "To Burn" are beautiful but not sympathetic. They spend a huge amount of time inside their own heads. I'd rather see them doing something that would make me begin to like them. Logic holes abound. Our heroine professes to be Christian but her sporadic observations of the religion only scratch the surface when the plot deems it convenient and even more, quite unforgiveably, result in a sudden deus ex machina for the ending, a sure sign of lazy plotting and possible disregard for the reader. In the future if I pick up another Dain novel, I'd like to see her give us real motivations for her characters. Why does the hero linger here? It's never convincingly explained. I'd like to see her set her novels in the real time, where people had to work to survive instead of loll about -- especially when their world has just been destroyed. I'd like to see the dialogue written as if real people could have said it. Barbarians shouldn't speak like college professors. I'd like to see logic holes cleaned up: how is it that one person in this novel can learn fluent Latin from a year's stay in a very confined and limited environment, but the heroine's pitiful grasp of Saxon varies from scene to scene and never improves despite being surrounded by Saxons and put in a situation where it is to her advantage to learn what they're saying? Most of all I'd like to see characters whom I could care about and not people who seem to still reside only on the flat surface of a romance novel cover. (Although the gentleman on this book's cover is a fine sight to see. Too bad he was posed so awkwardly.)

Warm, but deffinately not burning:
In my opinion this was a decent novel, as far as romance novels go. However, there were a number of holes in the plot that were never addressed. One being the death of Melania's father. Just because it was not Wulfred himself that killed him makes it acceptable?? Was he not the commander? Were people not killed on his orders? He had Melania laying next to her father's mutulated body for some type of perverse visual effect, but she still falls in love with him? Second, Melania constantly tries to kill herself to avoid torture and abuse, but Wulfred never really did anything to her! He stopped her from working, made sure she had good food & rest, no one touched her and then he married her, for crying out loud! For all his talk of making her suffer and such, how does that make sense? And finally where is the dialogue in this book? Most of conversation took place in their heads. I would probably pick up another book by this author, but "To Burn" was just warm at best.

Abysmal:
This book is really abysmal. We get no clear sense of either culture, Roman or Saxon. It is not Medieval, but the Dark ages, and very dark they are too in this book. The two of them snarl like a couple of wolves in heat. There is no sense of genuine commitment or love and the sex is pretty uninteresting. The book is littered with semi-colons I found myself counting them per page, 4 on average at the start of the book. Her heroic struggle: to commit suicide by starving herself or working herself to death? She just ends up seeming like a selfish, short-sighted twit. His heroic struggle? None so far as I can see. Abusing one Roman woman to get even for being made a galley slave is just too trite for words. Not to mention vindictive and foolish. This author really needs to have her very bad habits squashed out of her. The worst offence being that she is still writing bodice ripper style books which could have been done in the 70s or 80s, certainly I can't think why they are getting published in the 2000s. There is little of interest here for the modern, clued-in sensual young woman reader. Non-consensual sex scenes offend me.