Mary Jo Putney is often hit or miss with me. Sometimes she sucks me in and I almost miss my stop because I’m so involved in the book. Sometimes I stay up all freaking night to read her novel because it is that good, despite the fact that I have to get up early and go somewhere by 8am. Sometimes, I am thoroughly “meh” about the entire plot and could stop in the middle and not miss it at all. This book sucked in a good way – it sucked me in and damn if I didn’t almost end up in Queens.

The Bartered Bride is the sequel to Shattered Rainbows, the story of Michael Kenyon and Catherine Melbourne -only instead of following a secondary character from Rainbows, Putney advances a good number of years and tells Catherine’s daughter’s story. Alexandra is first seen as a major secondary character in Rainbows, and as a heroine in her own right, one must get used to the idea of a grown up version of the same young girl from the previous novel. Lucky for me, enough time had passed since I read Shattered Rainbows so the jump was easier. But had I read them back to back, it would have been slightly difficult.

It does beg the question: what is it about young girls in romance novels that makes them slightly squicky heroines in their own right? I suspect for my brain, it’s the idea that once the novel ends, the story ends. Hero marries heroine, they all live happily ever after. The. End. The characters stay young, beautiful, and perfectly happy in my mind, and this may be one of the reasons I find recurring collections of past novel characters slightly irritating. No, Bob and Jane are living in Bulltestershire Manor and are YOUNG and HAPPY and they do not age gracefully and have sixteen children all under the age of ten!. I think it is that *I* don’t want to characters to age, and I resent an author forcing me to age them in my mental picture.

I think Putney was aware that a grown up child from a previous novel suffering as a heroine the way Alexandra does in this novel would give a good number of readers a major case of the squees. In Rainbows, Alex was called “Amy,” until she decided to change her own name, according to her own telling, and demanded everyone call her Alex. The name change might have been Putney’s attempt to encourage readers to separate the young girl from Rainbows from the heroine in The Bartered Bride. Because Alex sure does suffer a good bit in this book, and no one would want to see a young girl they liked from a previous novel fall into such circumstances.

I will warn you, there is rape, abuse, and a good deal of sexual trauma in this book, and if this is something you are sensitive to, I suggest you avoid this novel entirely.

But aside from the often difficult subject matter, The Bartered Bride is a roller coaster ride of a book, specifically because so freaking much happens it’s amazing that it takes place of a matter of months. I mean, woo damn. Name a convention commonly found in a European historical novel, and I will bet you a Butterfinger that it’s in this book. Kidnapping? Slavery? Young children? Older children? Grown up children? Past characters aiding the present hero and heroine? Villains up to no damn good in horrible ways? Disinheritances? Lack of sexual confidence? If you like adventure romances that take place over several countries instead of romances that insist on keeping the characters in Hymenshire all the time, this is the book for you.

The hero, Gavin, is a Britain-born, Scottish-raised American sea captain; Alexandra is the daughter of Catherine Kenyon, as I mentioned, and is now a widow herself with a 12 (I think) year old daughter, Katie. Katie is alternately precocious,  all-too-wise, and the only sign of her acting appropriate for her age is her loathing of her “lessons.”

Gavin first encounters Alex in a slave market on an island in the Pacific while touring the central village with the Sultan, a shrewd and somewhat sociopathic man. Gavin makes the mistake of asking to buy the slave so he can set her free, and the sultan realizes he can use Alex as a bargaining chip in his desire to have Gavin serve as his liaison to the European market, an idea Gavin is opposed to, having guessed that working for the Sultan would be an unfair, tenous arrangement at best, and downright dangerous at worst.

The sultan and Gavin return to the palace, and Gavin finds Alex in a cage in his room: she is to be the prize in a challenge between the Sultan, who has never lost, and Gavin. If Gavin wins, he is free to take Alex with him. If the Sultan wins, Gavin is his slave, along with Alex.

The terms of the challenge are not insurmountable but certainly extremely difficult, and the last challenge places Gavin and Alex in – well, not to give away too much, but places them in a rather forced horizontal position, not the best thing for an honorable English gentleman, and a woman who has already been sexually assaulted several times while in captivity.

I will tell you that Gavin does win, and he and Alex locate her daughter and return to England to face their feelings for one another, and society at large, which would not be all too welcoming to a woman with such a tattered sexual past.

The sexual past is the challenge for me here: on one hand, this book dealt with real issues and managed to sustain an engaging storyline that travels from multiple countries to multiple societies and illustrates some of the differences in those societies. However, I do recall on several occasions thinking, “When is this angst going to come to an end?”

I’m not talking about the personal angst experienced by Alex. She had sexual issues to deal with throughout the book and I found them realistic and somewhat admirably dealt with by the author. But one catastrophe after another smacked these two over the head, to the point where you wanted the villains, all the many varieties of them, to experience hell-on-earth style punishment just to vindicate all the suffering the protagonists had to endure.

On the other hand, Putney is a master at describing emotional encounters, and the scenes between Alex and Gavin are wonderful, as are the scenes that develop their relationship. I’d have to say that The Bartered Bride is often more of an adventure book than a romance, but the romance is a solid element that provides a great deal of healing and does soothe the angst when it gets to be too much. And the adventure itself is intelligent reading, with a romance between two intelligent protagonists, so I found it perfectly enjoyable.