Tuesday, December 01, 2020

The Time of the Hunter's Moon

The Time of the Hunter's Moon

The Time of the Hunter's Moon 

  - Victoria Holt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

* Mild spoilers *

As far as the story and mystery part is concerned, it was as formulaic and simple as most of Victoria Holt novels, but entertaining nevertheless. My younger self might have found the sinister undertones intriguing, but now I seem to have become a seasoned veteran of mysteries, particularly cozy mysteries, and usually guess the villain in these by 50-60%, sometimes earlier. The long descriptions of the mundane activities of the school became very boring, and I skipped them after a while. She also tends to throw in a brief appearance from an alternate love interest, who is a really nice person but doesn't appeal to the heroine romantically.

What I could not digest was the heroine's attitude and attraction to the undoubtedly vile man who was the male lead. It is rather common in the books of this genre, set in this time period, for the naive young woman to fall for the much older man with a bad reputation (all the while finding an excuse for his past behavior and reforming him for future). In this book however, the said love interest goes a step further, and actually tries to rape her, and later tries (successfully?) to convince her that she had wanted it too and would have relished being intimate with him even in such circumstances. Even more disgusting was her feeling soft just because he didn't fulfill his intentions when she injured her arms trying to break the windows, finding references to this incident and his forceful attentions amusing, and eventually marrying him. In my view, endorsement of such behavior is even more reprehensible when coming from women authors.

It might have been a 2.5 star for the entertainment value, but had to pull down one star for repulsive behavior of the male lead, and the amused acceptance by the female lead.

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