Lawson’s review of Bound by Your Touch by Meredith Duran
Historical romance released by Pocket 30 Jun 09
Duran’s first book, Duke of Shadows, was a great debut and a powerful story. If you haven’t read it, you should, though it is a stand alone book and has no relation to this story. After reading this one, it’s clear that Duran puts a lot of research into her books and tries as hard as possible to get details that help make the story. While I didn’t know the exact year, there were enough details to help give a general time frame in the 1880s.
Lydia Boyce is the oldest of three sisters and hoping to get her youngest sister Antonia married this season so that she can go join her father on his digs in Egypt. Her middle sister, Sophie, is already married and helping give Antonia a season with her husband’s money. While trying to raise funds for her father by giving a lecture at the Archeological society, Lydia is rudely interrupted by James Durham, Viscount Sanburne. Lydia gives James a scathing setdown and embarrasses him publicly (and in front of his father) and disparages of ever getting funding to help her father’s digs.
James has a conspiracy theory on his mind after the incident at the Archeological Society and sets out to prove that Lydia, her father and possibly his own father set him up to be a laughingstock in the academic world, since he’s far too popular to be shunned by society. Instead he and Lydia find someone passing off fake artifacts in London and are forced to work together because someone has done worse things than sending forgeries from Egypt.
In all of this James begins to see the shy, vulnerable woman behind Lydia’s bookish exterior and Lydia sees a hurt, troubled man beneath James’ devil-may-care antics. Their search for the truth encompasses some foreign intrigue, foreign policy and the discovery about their own family’s actions and how that has shaped their own lives. Both James and Lydia are forced to accept their family situations and perhaps the fact that being themselves is the best freedom of all.
There’s a lot of heavy emotional baggage that both James and Lydia have to deal with. Lydia had been serious about a man who ended up marrying her sister. She’s felt betrayed for many years by her sister’s actions and when the truth comes out it’s refreshing to see both characters had their own motivations, though Sophie comes out as the more selfish one. The other thing is the abandonment the sisters feel due to the fact that their father is always in Egypt instead of London. Lydia feels it most of all because she has molded her life to fit her father’s antiquities trade and her studies to one day join him on a dig.
James has a horrible relationship with his father, always trying to get attention away from his father and punish his father for a past mistake that happened to his sister. He’s seen as mad and his sister has been put in the country for a horrific act of hers that James blames himself for. He thinks his father is keeping her locked away and this drives a wedge in the father-son relationship. James also feels as though he’s a prisoner of society since he’s always being watched and is expected to behave a certain way at all times.
The roles in society and how James and Lydia deal with them in their own way is rather interesting. Lydia is almost the stereotypical spinster in the fact that she’s always done things propriety dictates and is rather prudish about behavior and thinks this is what will get her younger sister to marry. James hates that because he has a title and wealth he has duties and chafes under the social strictures that ostracized his sister. While it seemed okay, when Lydia is able to let herself go, it sadly shows that she’s been pretending to be someone else for most of the book and hasn’t ever really been true to herself.
The other thing that was a bit off, is the fact that both fathers end up the opposite of how they started off as. To give details would spoil the story, but what Lydia and James believe about their respective fathers gets so turned around it doesn’t ring true for the rest of the characterization of James, Lydia or their families. It comes across as trying to give the hero and heroine too much to overcome to get to the happy ending at the end.
The historical feel of the book was excellent though. There were plenty of descriptions of events not only in London but around the world to give a Victorian feeling to the story. What I enjoyed most was the idea that being a bookish sort, Lydia would be the type to expound upon her own opinions about Home Rule (that would be Ireland), the poor, the Egypt situation and others if she happened to find herself at the same dinner party as Gladstone.
I’m interested to see where the story continues going as the next book, out in July, follows Phin Granville who has a part in this story and is a school friend of James’. Phin works in a secretive fashion for the government and his motivations for being who he is do seem rather interesting. Be sure to be on the lookout at the end of the month for Phin’s story.
Grade: C+
Summary:
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Silver-tongued Viscount Sanburne is London’s favorite scapegrace. Alas, Lydia Boyce has no interest in being charmed. When his latest escapade exposes a plot to ruin her family, she vows to handle it herself. Certainly she requires no help from a too-handsome dilettante whose main achievement is being scandalous.
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But Sanburne’s golden charisma masks a sharper mind and darker history than she realizes. He shocks Lydia by breaking past her prim facade to the woman beneath . . . and the hidden fire no man has ever recognized. But as she follows him into a world of intrigue, she will learn that the greatest danger lies within—in the shadowy, secret motives of his heart.
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Read an excerpt
