Grrrrace's Reviews > Witch's Harvest

Alas, my honeymoon with Sara Craven is over. After three good ones, this book (pfffttt), featuring a mousey (but incredibly sexy, once she gets a What Not to Wear style makeover) poor relation in love with her cousin’s macho Brazilian fiancé, started off promising but then completely failed to deliver, mainly because of the idiotic, childish, selfish heroine. We’ve seen this setup plenty of times—Violet Winspear goes full OTT wrecki-drama in Child of Judas by having the poor-relation cousin pull a bold and insane substitute-bride switcharoo at the altar (with punishing results); Betty Neels has the mousey sister deliver the jilting letter and suggest an MoC (with lovelorn results) in the The Hasty Marriage; The Devil’s Bride by Margaret Pargeter has jilted and blind JERK fiancé force the imposter cousin into an MoC with benefits (with punishing results again)… just to name a few. We are on well-trodden terrain here but it usually delivers, so I was off to a happy start. This is one of my favorite tropes--so how did SC screw it up so badly?

In this case, the heroine completely ruined it for me. Most of SC’s heroines, in the books I’ve read, seem to have nitwit tendencies but Abigail is not just a total nitwit , she’s completely self centered and obsessed with the supposed hurt the hero inflicts--because she thinks he doesn't wuv her. The thing is, he is clearly besotted from almost the beginning and despite some alphahole tendencies and vintage behavior, is actually a nice guy most of the time, when he’s not being jealous because of her “friendship” with the douchey American manager of the neighboring Brazilian cocoa farm or being driven crazy by her hot-and-cold behavior towards him. I felt bad for Vasco (although SC shows him in a bad light when he insists on sex, perfunctory and unsatisfying, with his wife a few times, so there’s that). He would have been better off with the heroine’s horrible cousin—who was still a better bet than Abigail ended up being. He even would have been better off with his neighbor, who was known as The Black Widow. And the Big Misunderstanding at the center of their conflict was stupid--literally, one completed sentence on either side would have cleared things up. Weak.

Not only is the heroine a complete brat who focuses incessantly on her supposed woes (mainly that the hero doesn’t love her as she “loves” him), she also keeps vital information from him (about a plant fungus that is potentially devastating to his crops and does indeed wreak near-ruin on his property. She's vapid, stupid, horrid, insipid, and probably a whole bunch of other negative words ending in "id" that I can't think of (oh, and completely id-driven, so that works). She ruined the book for me, despite a hot Latin hero, some interesting information about Brazilian cocoa farms and the many dangers that face them, an exotic locale, and some decent occasional heat. After a handful of SC books that I enjoyed, this one was a dud.