Liviania‘s review of The King’s Champion by Catherine March (no author site available)
Historical Romance released from Harlequin Historical 1 Jul 08

In 1289, nine-year-old Eleanor Raven meets Troye de Valois. The handsome knight makes a strong impression on the young girl. When he later rescues her from a rape, her young crush intensifies. However, nothing deeper blooms because Troye just married a Jewess. Later, when he rescues her from a rape again, King Edward I forces the knight to marry Eleanor. Eleanor quickly discovers her dreams have not come true because Troye still loves and mourns his first wife.

This first part moves slowly. Eleanor is a silly young girl. When she first sets out naively escorted through a dangerous area and nearly gets raped, it’s believable and it seems as if she grows from the experience. Then she naively walks escorted towards an area exclusive to men in an unfamiliar place. Second her love for Troye starts as a clearly shallow crush. It’s hard to root for her happiness with him during this section because he’s clearly smitten with Isabeau.

Once they’re married, the story does not more much faster but it becomes more interesting. Troye and Eleanor’s marriage is an unhappy one. When he’s with Eleanor, he’s stuck in the past. Even when not on the battlefront he prefers to spend his time away from their bed. At first he does not even realize Eleanor’s unhappiness because she does not know how to tell him what she wants. She’s a fairly simple girl who acts as a lady of her time should. She knows little about men and has no clue how to relate the husband she wanted so much.

March’s treatment of their sex life surprised me. I’m used to the perfect first time, the simultaneous orgasms, the silly euphemisms. While the last is present in The King’s Champion, the first two are not. For Eleanor, there is no orgasm whatsoever until she finally realizes she can do it herself late in the novel. When they have sex, Troye attends to only his pleasure and stops as soon as he orgasms. Eleanor does not stop this for a long time because she does enjoy it until he suddenly stops, but eventually she decides to end the meaningless sex. Eleanor is the kind of person who grows slowly, and she really does not come into her own until she puts her foot down and demands Troye stop treating her like a whore.

Time spent away from his wife, fighting in Scotland, help Troye to realize he does care for and love Eleanor. They end satisfied with their marriage and far wiser than they were in the prologue. March did well with Troye’s grief. She treated his relationship with Isabeau respectfully and neither drew his mourning out too long nor ended it too quickly.

The King’s Champion is not a sweet romance. It’s a slow build to a loveless marriage of two people who need time to reconcile their differences. I found the relationship worthwhile and interesting, partially because of the unhappiness. I enjoyed the tone of the last two thirds, but others might not. I do think March would have done herself a favor by making the first third of the book much shorter.

Grade: C

Groomed to be the wife of a knight of good standing, nothing is more alluring to Eleanor than a powerful, courageous man. And she has found him in Troye de Valois, one of the king’s own elite guard.

Now, with Ellie’s reputation unwittingly compromised, King Edward commands her marriage. She’s overjoyed that her husband is to be none other than Troye. He has long lived in her heart and dreams. But those dreams are soon shattered when he reveals his anger at this forced marriage, and the emotions she is reawakening in him….
read an excerpt