Features
- Cover Type: Mass Market Paperback with 400 pages
- Published by: HarperTorch April 3, 1996
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0061081523
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0061081521
-
Book Dimensions:
6.6 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
- Weighs: 7.2 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Lord Rand Malkin has a problem: traumatized by the horrors he witnessed in the Napoleonic Wars, he is unable to walk. Despising himself as a useless cripple, he is determined to end his life?but he can't bring himself to commit suicide until he succeeds in bedding gorgeous Sylvan Miles, the spirited nurse hired to care for him by his brother the duke. Sylvan, though, is plagued by scandal: Eager to escape her social-climbing nouveau-riche father, she, too, had joined the war effort to nurse wounded soldiers?only to be branded a whore by society for her efforts. Shunned and reviled, she sees the Duke of Clairmont's job as her salvation. But Clairmont Court, she soon discovers, is no safe haven. Her new home is stalked by both a troubled ghost and a mysterious prowler who brutally assaults the local women. And Rand himself, cantankerous and rude, is no prize?even if he is devilishly attractive. Dodd's (The Greatest Lover in All England) breathless narrative style only adds to the confusion generated by this setup, and readers may at times feel lost and bewildered, but Sylvan is a charming and admirable heroine, and her relationship with Rand is charged with well-wrought and electric eroticism.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Haunted by dreams of the soldiers she couldn't save, Sylvan Miles accepts the challenge to nurse a paralyzed, war-damaged nobleman and ends up finding love and healing herself. The setting is pure early Victoria Holt; the heroine is unconventional and uncompromising; and the hero is angry, tormented, and occasionally charming in this gothically inclined historical, rife with family ghosts and unexpected passion. Readers might also enjoy Mary Jo Putney's historicals. Dodd (The Greatest Lover in All England, HarperMonogram: HarperPaperbacks, 1994) is a former Romance Writers of America Golden Heart winner.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Reader ReviewsI usually love Christina Dodd's books as her stories are interesting and the characters are well-developed. However, 2 of her books I recently read have similar plot devices that I feel torpedo the story. In the case of Heaven and Earth I loved the story of Sylvan and Rand -- she had been hired by Rand's brother(the duke of something or other) to help rehabilitate Rand after the Battle of Waterloo had left him paralyzed. As the daughter of a wealthy merchant and a field nurse at Waterloo, Sylvan found herself ostracized. When she arrives at the ducal estate, there are ghosts (for a gothic touch), a misogynistic minster, and attacks on the family's attempt to begin the Industrial Revolution in the local village. Sylvan is a bold, sardonic character and one is in full sympathy. Then she and Rand marry and in order to persuade her to go to London for her own safety he insults her gravely and deeply in the way that only a lover could and she duly flees. This is the moment the book falls apart for me and continues to fall apart nearly to the very end -- especially when Rand goes to London to retrieve her, he assumes that she will have figured out he was "just joking" -- and that it was all a ruse. And immediately after retrieving her they have sex in the carriage. Honestly. This plot is similar to Rules of Surrender, in my opinion, when the "hero" degrades the woman and causes a personality change to make her do something "for her own good". I don't enjoy this type of "romance" and was especially disappointed after the first 1/2 was so great.
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