Keeper's Book Reviews: Review: Myriah Fire by Claudy Conn

It started with a stolen kiss …

Fiery Myriah Whitney is wild of nature, contrary, and independent. But when her father catches her kissing the handsome Sir Roland (how else is she to determine if he is the one who will make her feel thunder and lightning, hear bells and music?), he declares that her days of headstrong independence are over. She will, he commands, announce her engagement to Sir Roland—immediately.

But in an age where marriages are about alliances rather than affection, practicality not passion, Myriah wants more—she wants to fall in love. And she does not love Sir Roland. So she runs away to her grandfather with her faithful manservant, Tabson, at her side.

A wrong turn in the fog, however, leads to the discovery of an injured young man, and before she knows it Myriah is caught up in world of intrigue and secrets. And when she meets the young man’s older brother, the mysterious Lord Kit Wimborne, the sparks fly. Their first encounter—in his bed, both of them naked, no less!—is an explosion of wills, and it is what finally set Myriah on fire.

She has, it seems, finally found her thunder and lightning…

~Free kindle eBook; 168 pages~

First, I wish to say how much I don't like the cover of this book. When I see that a book is a historical romance, I expect to see a novel with a cover that's pretty and not so...revealing. I get that there's nothing exactly inappropriate about what's shown or anything, but I still have standards when I come to this genre. That being said, Myriah Fire was a cute story about a girl named Myriah with fiery hair.

So this is how my experience with the book went: the first 8% of the novel was pretty interesting, what with Myriah complaining about her lack of love and boredom with the London Season, yada yada. Then from about there until about 23% into the story, I was completely bored out of my mind and constantly had to stop myself from thinking about how terrible the book was. At that point, I found myself hating the author's writing style, and especially the third person format of the novel. In that 15%, I found everyone's voice to be terribly monotone, and had no problem putting the book down to go to sleep. Then today, I picked up the book and voilà, I couldn't stop myself from reading even if I'd tried to. The tone was back to normal, and the yelling scenes between Kit and Myriah were front and center. Those scenes are probably what I like best about historical romances, this one included.

In this genre, I usually find myself liking only the main male and female characters. However, this time I found myself adoring Kit's younger brother - though also a cad - William as well. Though there was never any romance between the two - thank God! - I loved how Myriah liked the younger brother before she even met the older one; that doesn't seem to happen a lot. That's not the only reason I liked Bill though. After all, he was kind, sweet, adorable, and definitely at least a hoot-and-a-half. In fact, I probably couldn't have gotten through half this book without his snide remarks, which I couldn't help but find endearing.

The villain of the story, Sir Roland, was portrayed excellently by Claudy. Somehow, the third person format allows us to see inside Roland's head as well as view him through the eyes of others. It was very interesting to see that while Roland wasn't too bad inside his own head (ignoring the fact that he said he'd keep Myriah on a tighter leash *scrunches nose*), he seems plain evil from other's point of view, especially Lord Kit's. That also played a part in why I didn't see Kit doing what he did at the end of the novel.

I was completely confounded at the end when instead of berating Myriah for running away in the first place and possibly even punishing her, Myriah's father and grandfather instead hugged her to death and agreed to let her marry a person they only met. And that's not even mentioning the fact that they barely even cared that Myriah was the only female living in a bachelor's house for a week or so. Seriously! Adults, get yourselves together!! As weird as it sounds, I'm glad my parents would never let me do that. In all seriousness though, this book gave you everything you'd expect to have in a 168-paged runaway romance, and for that I'm thankful. It also doesn't hurt that the book is free right now; you can purchase it on Amazon by clicking here.

Also, as a sidenote, I really wish historical romances would stop bringing too much sex into their plots...