"Aphrodite's tears - a gorgeous setting to a mediocre love story
(This is a review I wrote for Netgalley)
. The story is set in the 1970-ties on a Greek Island. The book is freshly written but oozes the style of the old fashioned romance novels written in that era. Apart from one thing: here the main characters sleep with each other or pleasure each other manually and in the yellowed paperbacks I inherited the lights just faded. Still, the "I can only sleep with the man who loves me, can I?" idea is still prevailing here. And because at the beginning of the story she looses her virginity exactly with that guy I was wondering why having a good time with him later on is seemingly so complicated. Not that I am so morally loose that I would say jump in the sack with every juicy dish you see but this Oriel was annoying. Even her love interest voices it at a certain time by stating she has to make up her mind as he is not interested in a woman who pushes him away all the time and then just uses him in bed to push him away again.
This girl was so annoying there was only one reason I finished the book: the gorgeous setting. I am sure the writer had a great time once visiting the Greek Isles on a holiday. National holidays,customs, landscapes and sites are lovingly depicted and with a Greek neighbour that kept me reading. In the story Oriel, in the seventies still the rare female senior archaeologist, goes to Helios to work at the site of an archaeological wreck.
At the end the book picks up speed when the mysteries around deaths in the past are solved.
All in all I think the book has potential but could do with a bit of weeding in the middle section of the romantic developments.
. The story is set in the 1970-ties on a Greek Island. The book is freshly written but oozes the style of the old fashioned romance novels written in that era. Apart from one thing: here the main characters sleep with each other or pleasure each other manually and in the yellowed paperbacks I inherited the lights just faded. Still, the "I can only sleep with the man who loves me, can I?" idea is still prevailing here. And because at the beginning of the story she looses her virginity exactly with that guy I was wondering why having a good time with him later on is seemingly so complicated. Not that I am so morally loose that I would say jump in the sack with every juicy dish you see but this Oriel was annoying. Even her love interest voices it at a certain time by stating she has to make up her mind as he is not interested in a woman who pushes him away all the time and then just uses him in bed to push him away again. This girl was so annoying there was only one reason I finished the book: the gorgeous setting. I am sure the writer had a great time once visiting the Greek Isles on a holiday. National holidays,customs, landscapes and sites are lovingly depicted and with a Greek neighbour that kept me reading. In the story Oriel, in the seventies still the rare female senior archaeologist, goes to Helios to work at the site of an archaeological wreck.
At the end the book picks up speed when the mysteries around deaths in the past are solved.
All in all I think the book has potential but could do with a bit of weeding in the middle section of the romantic developments.
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