The Duchess and the Dragon


The Duchess and the Dragon - By: Jamie Carie

The Duchess and the Dragon
Jamie Carie
B&H

As Duke of Northumberland, Drake Weston is accustomed to a life of royalty---until a tragic mistake forces him to flee England by ship. Across the sea, humble Pennsylvania Quaker Serena ministers to sick travelers---and never expects to fall in love with one of her patients! Can these two unlikely soulmates find happiness? 

I really wanted to like this book, but…I just couldn’t. I mentioned in my review of Love’s First Light that the main characters’ relationship advanced to the physical way to quickly, and the same happened here, although for whatever reason this book annoyed/offended me even more than the previous one- to tell the truth, I barely finished The Duchess and the Dragon, and I skimmed several parts of it, because I just could not read most of it.

What bothered me was how the characters talked like Christians, but then didn’t act like ones in regard to romance (and the heroine married the hero before he was a Christian- big problem there). It didn't seem like a "love" story in so much as a "lust" story. There's very little to the characters' relationship besides attraction. I also thought that the main character, Serena, set a terrible example to teenage girls. She married a man she barely knew (who carried a lot of secrets and wasn't a Christian) and left her family ( who were also the only characters I happened to like) and though, yes, there were problems, everything turned out all right in the end. I think the author wanted to present a story that said that even if you make mistakes, God will work it for good, but to me it just came across that even if you act foolishly, things will still turn out okay. And Serena's actions were never explicitly portrayed to the reader as wrong, either.

It's not that there wasn't stuff about God in this book- in fact, there was so much in the Christian element department that it was almost worse than if the author hadn’t mentioned Christ at all, because it made the characters seem like hypocrites, at least to me. (There just seems to be something terribly wrong in trying to explain Christ’s love to a man when you can’t keep your hands off of him long enough to do it, okay?) Though I found Jamie Carie’s The Guardian Duke to be very clean, these last two novels have really been a disappointment, and I’m not planning on reading any more of this particular author’s novels in the future. I guess I have a much higher standard of purity than she does.

Objectionable content: For Christian fiction, this book was terrible in regards to sensuality. I would not recommend it at all. I have a higher standard for Christian books, and this was a grave disappointment. 

Rating: 3

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