Captive Rose

Title: Captive Rose (1991)
Author: Miriam Minger (Avon)
Period: Medieval (1272 Syria/England)
Grade: D+

Reading Captive Rose I immediately noticed how much of the plot it shares with one of my all-time favorite romances, Tamara Leigh's Pagan Bride. Minger wrote her book four years earlier, but it is by far the weaker of the two. Her lyrical description of Damascus is beautiful and offers great insight into the Islamic history of female physicians. However, her witless and uninteresting characters sink this romance.

Leila, English by birth, has been raised in the harems and cultures of Damascus. Her step-father purchased (and later married) her mother at a slave auction after her father death during a Holy Land pilgrimage. Leila is engaged to her step-brother and has trained to be physician by her step-father. When assisting at the prison she encounters injured Crusader, Guy. Eve, Leila's mother, dupes him into abducting her daughter and returning her to England and the care of her older brother. The same brother who was Guy's former childhood friend and now is his mortal enemy.

Leila is furious over being forced to leave the only world she's ever known. And in bad romance heroine fashion she attempts to escape and endangers herself repeatedly on the journey. Guy falls in love with her anyway and becomes a doormat for her poor behavior and temper tantrums. She drugs him. He rapes her. But he also buys her pretty clothes and likes poetry so he can't be all bad. Right ladies? They marry to thwart her brother’s evil schemes, but she still continues an ill-conceived plan to return to Syria despite having no funds and no escort. It is hard to believe someone as naive and dopey as Leila could be a physician in any era. On the historical romance heroine intelligence scale she falls somewhere between cocker spaniel and potted plant.

Captive Rose is bad, but it is still the better of the two Minger's I've ever read. If this is her best effort I'll be avoiding her like the plague in the future.