Sybil’s Review of To the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Lowell
Contemporary Romance by Avon 01 May 1998

Posted 1/30/5 in live journal (I don’t have too many book posts in my lj but there are a few I want to move over)

I read my first Elizabeth Lowell book that I didn’t like. le sigh, that makes me sad. I haven’t read any of her newer books since I am not much into romantic suspense novels but her historical novels are just about the best evah. Her Only Series is the reason I fell in love with westerns.

To the Ends of the Earth was just bad. Bad, bad, bad and made no sense what so ever. Cat is working herself to death to put two teens (her twin sister and brother) through med school and because her grown mother can’t balance a checkbook. ::blink:: take the fucking thing away from her and make the kids take out a few loans. The whole idea is, if she can just make it to January when her mother marries some rich dumbass, all will be fine. I understand the book was written in the 80’s and updated and re-released in the 90’s but please.

And the hero… he is scarred and wounded from his first marriage (as all hero’s are that have been married before) so he has sworn off women. Well other than to fuck them. So whores and mistresses he gets but mutual sex based on pleasure or feelings isn’t something he understands. I am sorry, after you have mind-blowing sex with someone you think you have feelings for and they offer to pay you – find the door. Quick. She didn’t – and he offered AGAIN. He pretty much spent the book pissed off she had to work and waiting for her to ask him for help money wise. And omg -the end of the book is awful, how EL got a HEA in this is beyond me. The whole thing is like a car wreck you can’t understand you are watching. So back to the UBS with this book.

Then again Elizabeth Lowell has made an art form out of hero’s treating their heroines like shit and then somehow making it work. At least for me, she crossed that line in this book and I just couldn’t see it. But that can’t be said for everyone since AAR gave it a DIK review.

Grade: F

A WOMAN OF THE WORLD: Photographer Cat Cochran has been to exotic places most people only dream about — but all she wants to do is settle down and get her life in order. One last assignment and she can put her past behind her — forgetting about her heart’s disastrous misadventures as she loses herself in the natural beauty she has so far only glimpsed through a camera’s lens. But first she must photograph the mysterious and elusive ship designer T.H. Danvers and his awesome creations.

A MAN IN A MILLION: Travis Danvers is dangerous — a millionaire with an athlete’s body; an enigmatic charmer capable of breaking down Cat’s well-constructed defenses with a buccaneer’s arrogance and flourish. She knows she must resist him, for experience has taught her that pain is the eventual price of the pleasure to be found in the arms of such a man. But caught in the waves of a sensual sea, Cat hears sirens whisper seductively, telling her to abandon all caution; to trust and love Travis with all her soul, and to ride with him on the winds of forever.