*Spoiler Reflections* On Star-Crossed

This post contains spoilers for an awful book called Star-Crossed by Linda Collison.

Have you ever read a book that was well-written enough to keep you reading, but such an awful book that you wonder at the end why you wasted so much time reading it? I had that experience recently when I read Star-Crossed by Linda Collison.

First off, I do not recommend anyone read Star-Crossed. And that isn't just an "oh, this book is laughably awful; don't read it." It's an "oh, this book is bad don't read it." Not only was it annoying, there were a couple of scenes that I skimmed because they made me more than a little uncomfortable.

Now I can get down to the book. The story was dreadful. Yet another example of an authoress who transposes modern ideas about women into previous centuries. A young woman passes herself off as a male ship surgeon's assistant - for months? Yeah, right. I realize that some women managed to pass themselves off as men on ships for at least a time. However, I find it hard to believe that a woman could do it without discovery by anybody. Except, of course, her former boyfriend, who just happens to be on the same ship... Anyway, surely those women who were able to pass themselves off as men were found out by some of their shipmates; the word just didn't got around to the officers for a while.

Not only was the story unoriginal and uninteresting, the men were all wrong. First the "heroine," Patricia Kelley, married an older, not-particularly-handsome doctor (a sort of marriage of convenience, although he was in love with her from the start). I preferred him immensely to the man Patricia was really in love with. Excuse me, she was actually in love with both of them... that is to say, she was in love with Dalton, the bosun's mate, and then fell in love with the doctor sometime after she married said doctor, and then fell back in love with Dalton when her husband died. Right. How stupid can she be?! Her husband may not have been a hundred percent respectful and sensitive all the time, but he was a much better man than Dalton.

Finally, there was the ending. The authoress left the reader with no clear idea of how it ended for Dalton and Patricia. It's assumed that they get married (although judging on how they carried on, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't), but the fact that he's a sailor isn't really reconciled... I mean, Dalton makes a vague suggestion about the two of them going to America and settling down (because America, what with its Indians and stuff, is exciting enough to keep him from getting bored), but that's only a vague suggestion that isn't reiterated later in the book. Very annoying.

Whew. Thanks to anyone who hung with me for this entire post. I just had to get that off my chest. In conclusion, I'll just say that the book was one of the worst I've ever actually finished.