The book started with a white guy raised in Egypt who was acclimating himself to be an English duke who were having nightmares and one of it include a green-eyed red-haired woman. Apparently the duke never had a woman before and so he went to a brothel asking for a virgin and specifically didn't want anybody similar to his nightmare lady. Of course, obviously he didn't get what he want. So, the girl he deflowered unceremoniously turns out to be a lady who want to escape from an arrange marriage and run away to go to school in America but the duke found out that she was the daughter of an Earl who is the nightmare man of his dream who abused him as a child and who at the same time psychologically abusing his own family. So the duke announced that he slept with the girl and want to marry her while plotting to end the nightmare guy's life.

The blurb does look like it came from Edith Maude Hull's The Sheik but then it went away from conventional Sheikh romance I've ever read. The language style took sometime to get used to but I became hooked by the layered characterizations. It is fascinating to read the circumstances bringing the characters together and tackling the harder subject of rape as it is without romanticising it one bit. The book is probably not everyone's cup of tea but for a sheikh pulpy romance novel, this one probably the most memorable one I've ever read. I don't even care for the 19th century Arabic exoticism and borrowed element from The Mummy and The Sheik. But the ending is quite nerve-wrecking.

Fuller review much later. ( )

The book started with a white guy raised in Egypt who was acclimating himself to be an English duke who were having nightmares and one of it include a green-eyed red-haired woman. Apparently the duke never had a woman before and so he went to a brothel asking for a virgin and specifically didn't want anybody similar to his nightmare lady. Of course, obviously he didn't get what he want. So, the girl he deflowered unceremoniously turns out to be a lady who want to escape from an arrange marriage and run away to go to school in America but the duke found out that she was the daughter of an Earl who is the nightmare man of his dream who abused him as a child and who at the same time psychologically abusing his own family. So the duke announced that he slept with the girl and want to marry her while plotting to end the nightmare guy's life.

The blurb does look like it came from Edith Maude Hull's The Sheik but then it went away from conventional Sheikh romance I've ever read. The language style took sometime to get used to but I became hooked by the layered characterizations. It is fascinating to read the circumstances bringing the characters together and tackling the harder subject of rape as it is without romanticising it one bit. The book is probably not everyone's cup of tea but for a sheikh pulpy romance novel, this one probably the most memorable one I've ever read. I don't even care for the 19th century Arabic exoticism and borrowed element from The Mummy and The Sheik. But the ending is quite nerve-wrecking.

Fuller review much later. ( )