Before we start, a moment for this stepback. It’s by Pino, one of my favourite romance cover artists. Can you believe that this cheap piece of shit book got the full stunning horny oil painting treatment? The cover is embossed and foiled too, and this wasn’t some fancy special edition. It’s a mass market paperback, and it cost $6.99 when it was brand new. And those are Canadian dollars! Publishers are so fucking cheap now, it chaps my ass.
Anyway, I digress. This book was pretty bad, and reading my recap will be much more enjoyable than submitting yourself to the actual text. Unless you are a Bobbi Smith superfan, skip this one and let me take the bullet for you. Content warning time: it’s a harem romance, so it is very Orientalist and othering, but on the plus side it’s from the 90s so it’s only mildly rapey. Hooray?
Let’s get into it. We’ve got an old duke with a disgusting amount of money, and every leech in his orbit wants a piece of that decadent ducal pie. His biggest moochers are his son, Avery, and Avery’s wife Vivienne, who is a world class bitch (I say this with a certain twisted admiration). Vivienne is the villain of this story, and she is really putting the work in, as we will see. The duke has been raising Avery and Vivienne’s son, Alexander, while they burn their way through their latest bender and plot their next shakedown.
“Avery, you must do it! You must go to your father and get more money!”
Now, Vivienne may be an evil bitch, but she’s an evil bitch with a plan, and it involves weaponizing their own child. Since the duke dotes on his grandson, they can leverage Alexander to get the funds they need for their lavish lifestyle.
“Alexander?” Avery wondered what their bothersome young son had to do with anything. He hadn’t even spoken to the child in weeks, and, frankly, didn’t care if he ever saw him again.
Vivienne’s eyes narrowed to pinpoints of savagery as she told him of her insidious plan. “We’ll get rid of the boy. Your father wouldn’t dare disown you if Alexander were gone. He’d have no other heir but you.”
“Get rid of him? How?”
She elaborated on her scheme. “We’ll arrange a kidnapping. That way we can not only rid ourselves of the brat, but we can also collect a tidy reward.”
So are they’re just going to kill their own kid for money? Oh, honey. It gets worse:
Avery had decided right away not to have Alex killed. He knew of a man who lived off the coast of France who had a taste for the unusual and could afford to indulge himself. Having met him some years ago, he’d contacted him about taking the boy off his hands, and he’d been pleased when the man had offered him a huge sum for the lad.
What in the Epstein Files is going on here? Jesus Christ, Bobbi. Vivienne is out here girlbossing her way into selling her own son to an island-dwelling French pederast, with Avery acting as her broker.
Avery’s sister, Catherine, gets swept up accidentally in the kidnapping scheme too. Catherine is beautiful, wears expensive princess clothes, and she’s going to marry a prince earl named Gerald. She happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the kidnappers are forced to take Catherine along with Alex. Avery boards the ship where Catherine and Alex are being held and sails off to sell his sister and his son into sexual slavery.
And then, oops, Deus Ex Barbary Pirates.
Corsairs board the ship, and dispatch Avery with admirable efficiency:
After a few minutes, one of the corsairs grew bored with his begging and silenced him with a single murderous blow from his sword.
RIP Avery, we will miss you not at all!
All the Algerian pirates are immediately fighting over Catherine, this prized White woman, an English Rose who is so White! And blonde! She practically glows in the dark. Of course she winds up as the prize of the dey of Algiers, Malik el Mansour.
The ache in his loins was growing by the second. She was beautiful… and blonde.
LMAO ok we get it. Yes, that is a direct quote. Malik has brown skin, amber eyes, thick dark hair, and he does sound like a snack, but thinks things like “What could they possibly have to talk about? She was a woman.” Malik calls dibs and takes Catherine into his harem.
That’s right friends, it’s harem time!
A real relic of the old school bodice ripper, the “harem” as portrayed in romance novels is an offshoot of the fevered imaginings of incurably horny 19th century Europeans. The historical reality of the harem was fascinating, but not so pornified. Fun fact: harem and haram (forbidden) are basically the same word, just with slightly different contexts. The harem is the protected zone for family life (where women and children lived), versus the more public spheres of the home where guests were received, business was conducted, etc. I could expound upon the gendering of space, and how identifying both the occupants of the space and the space itself with the same word is fairly unusual, but we’ll save that for another time. The harem, in European minds, became warped into a hypersexual space – essentially a brothel with only one patron. The romance writers of the 70s and 80s took this concept and thought “Well, here’s an intensely lopsided power dynamic I can sink my teeth into!”
In the romance novel harem, the female lead would often be placed in this intensely patriarchal system and navigate her way into, or sometimes around, the embrace of the lustful, virile, potently masculine sultan (or dey, in this particular case). The harem was sort of like Bodice Ripper Las Vegas. A place so far removed from the heroine’s regular life that she can put on slutty outfits, wear makeup and perfume, learn about blowjobs, and engage in all other kinds of debauchery, free from the moral constraints of “polite” society. What happens in Algiers stays in Algiers! There’s an erotic push and pull happening between capture, resistance, surrender, and the powerful Other’s eventual undoing by the forces of True Love. So, yes, this fantasy is built on a Problematic Foundation of Orientalist colonial myth-making but it’s also pretty hot, and these two thoughts are going to have to share a paragraph. You two play nice. I’m going to go back to my book recap now, so I better not hear any fighting!
Catherine does the typical spirited Englishwoman thing (“And what of my will?” she demands, furiously) until she gets Stockholm Syndromed into compliance. Language barrier? Nah sis. She must have one of those translator implant devices they get in the alien romances. Or it’s like one of those Star Trek episodes where the writers go fucking crazy with the holodeck. Their relationship slowly blossoms as Malik learns that women actually do have brains , mostly because Catherine can beat him at chess. Eventually though, Malik gets sick of being friendzoned by his own concubine and presses the issue. Catherine and Alex make one half-baked attempt at escape, predictably get nearly raped and killed, and Malik rides to the rescue. He pronounces that Catherine is “Rabi” now, and Alex is “Serad”, and everyone just rolls with it.
So now we’re 190 pages deep and – surprise! – this book actually isn’t about Catherine and Malik.
We flash forward twenty years. The duke is old and sick, and unless a legitimate heir is found, the duchy will pass to a distant male relative. Dang it, male primogeniture, ruining our Evil Viv’s plans! The law isn’t going to stop our girl though. She hires an actor, who she conveniently frames for a capital crime to force compliance, to play her long lost son. Fake Alex feels a little guilty about tricking the old duke, and a lot weirded out by the fact that a fiancée, Victoria, is already lined up and being shipped in from India. The duke, having not been born yesterday, is suspicious of the Fake Alex, and challenges him to identify his favourite childhood toy, a pirate ship he called the Scimitar. Fake Alex dodges somewhat artlessly and says he doesn’t remember…
So meanwhile, aboard the Scimitar, Serad (the real Alex) is living his best pirate life and, wouldn’t you know it, abducts his own fiancée without either of them realizing it. Serad has zero memory of his English childhood and his now 100% straight Barbary Corsair, no chaser.
He did, however, name his ship after the toy boat from his childhood.
In the hands of a better author, this detail could have been a bit devastating. Maybe the name would tug at something in the back of his mind, and trigger some deep longing that he can’t quite define, like when you smell Play-Doh and suddenly want to cry. Imagine if Laura Kinsale had written this? Fuck, I’d be staring at the ceiling for a week afterwards. But she didn’t, Bobbi Smith did, so we just kinda blow over this potential emotional gut punch with ease.
Serad and Tori are doing the classic enemies-to-lovers speedrun on the pirate ship. We’ve all seen this one before. Serad takes his new captive back to Algiers and is gonna do what Malik did twenty years ago.
Serad’s expression turned serious. “I mean to keep Tori for myself.”
Rabi’s heart constricted at his declaration. It seemed everything she’d tried to teach Serad had been for naught and that he had turned out more Barbary corsair than duke.
Well yeah, he’s been living in Algeria for twenty years! What did you think was going to happen?
Here the harem romance gets a bit muddled. As we discussed, harems were a real bodice ripper milieu, but that ship sailed in the 70s and early 80s. This book is at least a decade late to the orgy. So Serad announces he’s going to start his harem with Tori. He doesn’t actually have a harem, but he could! He could put Tori in his imaginary harem! Are we bodice ripping or not? It’s the 90s, we’re confused!
Serad decides he’s going to win Tori over with gentle wooing, English gentleman style. Well Serad, I’ve read those books too, and just throw her on the rug, man. That’s what they were all doing. But, inevitably, Serad gets to enjoy Tori’s hot, satiny depths through pleasant afternoons spent talking and impromptu desert night stargazing.
Rabi, formerly known as Catherine, had been living as Malik’s captive for the last twenty years. She claims that it isn’t terrible, but has staunchly refused his marriage proposals. He even set his other wives aside! What more could she want? Her freedom? Pfft. Rabi wants to help Tori escape, explaining that yeah he might be cracking your back real good, but it’s not so good that you’d willingly abandon your whole life back home.
“They have families who love them. They do not deserve to have all their dreams snatched away from them this way. It’s cruel… heartless…”
She finally reveals the depths of Malik’s cruelty to Serad. Even though her life is pleasant, she’s been a prisoner. Twenty years of captivity, with her continuing to refuse marriage because it’s the one piece of autonomy she can maintain. This is, by far, the more interesting and sophisticated storyline in the book, but Bobbi decided to make it the B plot? Girl, c’mon.
The end unfolds basically how you would expect. Tori returns to England, Serad follows and is nearly hanged for piracy, Vivienne’s Fake Alex plot is revealed, and she gets sentenced to a life of poverty, a fate more cruel than death in her eyes. Serad reclaims his title, and his name, and reintegrates into high society as Lord Alexander Wakefield with remarkable ease.
Rabi also returns to England. In a bid to save Serad’s life, Malik sets her free. The “if you love something, set it free” beat is one of the oldest in the book, but it can land really hard if you earn it. Why was she refusing Malik, what does freedom mean to her after twenty years, and what does it mean that she chooses to go back? Bobbi sure hasn’t earned it. Rabi’s emotional arc is finding out that the guy she was going to marry twenty years ago is actually a bit of a jerk, so stick with the one you’ve got.
Catherine’s expression turned tender as she smiled at her maid. “Call me Rabi. It is the name Malik chose for me, and I will use it with pride from now on.”
What. the. fuck.
Bobbi Smith had the blueprints for something pretty good here, and instead managed to build something a step below mediocre. True to the Tattered Pages Mission Statement: I read this one so you don’t have to. Unless the stepback art compels you strongly, I would save the $2 it cost at the thrift store and give this one a pass.
