Rhawnie was born in a Romani encampment in Russia, but a murder and an encounter with a man she is fated to follow to the ends of the earth launch her on a path that will see her go halfway across the globe.
It took me way too long to realize that Rhawnie is a corruption of the Indian name Rani, which means ‘queen’.
This is a nice and long and adventurous bodice ripper of the kind I like perfectly. What sets it apart from many others I’ve read is the character of Rhawnie, who is a warm-hearted inveterate liar, more the heroine of a picaresque than a romance. She’s an unapologetic rascal, but you like her all the more for it. Her narration is by turns hilarious and heart-breaking, but she always manages to pick herself up no matter what.
That she admits both to herself and to the reader that the hero Seth is a complete bastard yet she loves him anyway is cathartic – that she’s proven she doesn’t need him but chooses him anyway is touching. I myself am more ambivalent about him, especially since pretty much he lacks as tragic a past as most misogynistic heroes in bodice rippers, and nearly all his problems are of his own making. I rest assured that he is definitely a complete bastard, of course.
Sections of some of Rhawnie’s adventures are less interesting to me that others, and time does take on strange distortions, with several important years passing by in the span of a few pages. The misadventure that leads to the end of the book is a little all over the place, but it does wrap up some dangling plotlines and gives us a suitably satisfying dramatic ending, so I don’t mind so much.