There were some really romantic scenes in this book, like they have sex in the middle of a thunder storm on a ship in a scene that's reminiscent of the one in Anne Stuart's Lord of Danger (a book I LOVE), but then there are some really gruesome, icky, awful, HORRIBLE scenes in this book. One wants to bang and one wants to rage and set the world on fire. Big Sean and Little Sean are in constant conflict. The tone of this book is all over the place because while it's clear that Sean has a soft spot for Kit because of her age (she's, like, seventeen or eighteen at the start of the book- he kidnaps her en route to her last year of boarding school, I think, which represents a whole other school of ick entirely), he also treats her like a total monster whenever he remembers who she is and what she represents. The hero, Sean, has good reason to hate Kit's father, as he was responsible for a British-led genocideĪgainst his Irish town, including the death and rape After which, he wraps up her soiled underwear to be delivered via courier to her father in a Haha! Got you! moment that rivals Game of Thrones in terms of callousness played for shock value Well, within the first 100 pages, the hero punches the heroine in the nose and then rapes her. Trigger warnings are going to be marked out with spoilers as this review discuses physical and sexual violence.

But I have a soft spot for older books and I was super curious to see what made readers of this book basically evenly split between love and hate. I'd heard that it was totally over the top crazysauce in terms of content, and very much Not For Today's Audience(TM). In case you didn't know, copies of this book go for $100+ on eBay, so as soon as I stopped screaming, I was like, MUST READ NOW because this book, like Teresa Denys's The Silver Devil, was on my Romance Reader Bucket List, and I had despaired of ever getting a copy. A few months ago, I was thrifting and happened to find a very cheap copy of a very good condition of Stormfire, which was published in the early 1980s by Avon and has a gorgeous Pino Daeni cover.

Stormfire monson