Pirate's Bride (Liberty's Ladies, #1)

by Lynette Vinet

[Angie]

Pirate's Bride is one of those books that has a lot of great stuff going for it, but then it turns into a big ol' mess. I was really enjoying it in the beginning, despite a few issues, and it's a bodice ripper! An actual bodice was ripped! Bethlyn was married off to Ian when she was 14. He left immediately after the wedding and seven years later, Bethlyn has had enough. She's spent a lot of time acting scandalously to get her husband's attention, but he just doesn't care. So, she's off to America to find him and get an annulment!

Obviously, Bethlyn's ship has to be raided by pirates, and noting the title of the book, her husband is their captain. He wears a mask though, and it's been seven long years. She's no longer a child, so he doesn't recognize her at all. And he thinks she's a prostitute, because when he took the ship was locked below deck with the female cargo! Mistaken identity at its finest (kind of)! Needless to say, Ian and Bethlyn cheat on each other with each other, which I thought was great.

What wasn't so great was that the romance gets all nicely wrapped up at 50%. There were a few other plot threads that needed to be wrapped up, but by around 65%, I'd had enough. Some real history plot was taking over, since this does take place when the colonies are trying to gain independence from England, and some real people from history show up. That's fine, except that the book should have been over by now! On top of that, the romance drama started back up, but it was the same drama of Ian not believing Bethlyn about something, doing some underhanded stuff which leads him to believing her, her threatening a divorce, and then cheating on each other with each other again! Enough! Then there's a bunch of time jumps of 5 months, 8 months, zero to baby in ten pages, and all kinds of madness and more months! Stop!

Pirate's Bride started off pretty good. I definitely had issues with how Ian treated Bethlyn and how she just took it because she loved him, so this was never going to get more than three stars. The mistaken identity trope is one of my favorites, so I had fun with that. But once the couple was officially reunited, I mentally checked out. There was way too much going on and too many new POVs, so it got messy and really boring. Even the one super crazy, completely unnecessary plot twist bored me. Maybe if it had happened earlier and didn't get dragged out by month and months and months, I would have liked it more.

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