The Flame and the Flower - Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (Birmingham #1)

The second-to-last category of my 2017 romance reading challenge is done, and it was the last category I was dreading, since I saved one I was looking forward to for my final book.  What was the category, you ask?  The bodice ripper.  And when you look up bodice rippers, the name of Woodiwiss abounds, so one of hers seemed like the logical choice to fill this category.  Of course, bodice rippers are known for an abundance of rape and creepy men and unlikable heroines, so I pretty much knew what I was in for going into it.

The story is about Heather, living a life of drudgery with her aunt and uncle until her aunt's brother offers to bring her to London to get her a position teaching at a school--though when they arrive, he promptly attempts to rape her, ending in a struggle in which he's stabbed and Heather flees.  Her flight ends rather abruptly when two sailors get hold of her and take her onto a ship where she meets Brandon Birmingham, the captain, who thinks she's a prostitute and does proceed to rape her, several times, despite her repeatedly telling him no and declaring she's not a prostitute.  So, nice guy.  Heather manages to flee again, back to her aunt and uncle, until it's discovered she's pregnant and they all return to London to force Brandon to marry her, with the help of a family friend.  And then Heather is whisked away to America, where Brandon lives and plans to stay after retiring from his life at sea.

So, this is basically the story of an eighteen-year-old girl falling in love with her rapist, who is nearly twice her age.  Brandon declares that he hates Heather for trapping him into marriage, and that she'll be nothing but a servant to him, but he never treats her as such.  Though he does eventually threaten to rape her again if she doesn't come to him willingly.  So there's that.  Overall, he's not as rapey and creepy as most bodice ripper heroes, but I definitely still would not put in him the categories of "good guy" or "desirable romantic interest" because of the way he basically disregards Heather's feelings while simultaneously panting after her for the entire book.  And, you know, how he says that he raped her eight months ago and she should be over it by now.  Of course, to balance out Brandon's rather mild status are a bunch of other bodice ripper tropes--all other women hating Heather because she has Brandon and they don't and is prettier than them, all the other men wanting to rape Heather because she's pretty and innocent and naive, and a few murders thrown in for good measure.

The writing here is measurably better than the last bodice ripper I read, Savage Ecstasy, which was quite a relief.  I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed this book, but reading it wasn't the form of torture that SE was.  It's all rather purple and melodramatic but again, that's something that I expected of a book in this genre in general.  Heather's feelings for Brandon were completely unrealistic--she's afraid of him for a bit and then gaga over him in quick succession and laughs off her extremely traumatic rape within less than a year.  But that's probably to be expected because Heather doesn't really seem to have much agency at all.  Every now and then she gets mad and stamps her foot or breaks something, but these rages never lead to actual action and she just goes back to doing whatever Brandon wants--or whatever she thinks he wants--the next time he appears on the page.  And then there's the portrayal of people of color--Brandon's housekeeper is black woman who is basically the embodiment of the Mammy stereotype (a la Gone with the Wind; it's a thing in books that take place during the era preceding the Civil War that black women are either portrayed as "the Mammy" or "the Jezebel" with little else to distinguish them) and it's questionable whether or not the "servants" were actually slaves.  They're called servants, but everyone else in the Charleston area has slaves, sooooo...

Obviously, this is a very problematic book.  The portrayal of "romantic rape," the women who are clearly sluts because they want sex but are not Heather, the "all ugly people are bad," the stereotyping of people of color, and all the other things I mentioned above all add up to it.  However, as it wasn't as terrible--in writing, in brutality, in pretty much anything, as the last one I read, sooo...

1.5 stars out of 5.