Shanna by Kathleen E Woodiwiss

DNF

The April book for the Historical Hellions book club hosted by Jess and Samantha was Shanna by Kathleen E Woodiwiss. Kathleen is known as the first mas market romance writer that pioneered romance and more specifically historical romance that we have today. I was really excited to finally read something from her, and had heard this was one of her better books that didn't really have too many problematic issues.

Unfortunately, this is my first DNF (did not finish) of, pretty much, all time. I made it about 1/3 of the way through. I was pushing myself to continue to get it done by the live show, but I had to set it down and read something else. First off, I enjoyed the writing style. It's a little more flowery than I prefer and a lot of the dialogue was phonetically written for each character's accent. While those things usually bother me, it didn't as much with this. Maybe because I knew going in this was an old book (published in the 1970s). 

I absolutely adored our Hero Ruark Beauchamp. I was constantly pleased while reading that he was such a good and outstanding hero. It's very surprising to me that he was written in the time he was, especially with the type of heroes that were popular during that time. I also enjoyed a lot of the side characters. The trope and overall idea of the book really intrigued me as well. Shanna is being told to find someone to marry by her father, but wants to wait for love. Her time limit is almost up, so she decides to find someone on death row with a prominent name and marry him before he passes. She'll allow for some luxury before his death, and in return she gets his name. Hijinks occur and he ends up not dying. I want this book with these tropes.

Why was this book a DNF? Shanna herself. She absolutely drove me insane and I could not get behind her, her actions and the way that she treated Ruark. It was emotional whiplash and she was all over the place. One minute she's trying to seduce him, he realizes what she's doing and plays along. Then she gets angry at him and turns very spiteful because he was seduced. That's just one example and she did things like that constantly. She'd go to see Ruark expecting intimate moments but then lash out at him. She's the one that instigated it! Shanna really just was not a good person and too wrapped up in herself. I kept trying to push. When I originally set the book down, I had thoughts of continuing to read it, but just taking my time. I wanted to not allow myself to get angry or frustrated and was thinking to try spacing it out between other books. However during the live it was made clear to me that she doesn't really change until the last 100 ~ 150 pages of the book. To read through a 650+ page book and only get character growth from our heroine in the last little chunk is not something that I want to read through.

In the past I would push myself, but as I've become more active in the romance community I really do feel like I need to DNF books that I'm not enjoying. I would much rather spend my time reading something I enjoy. There were a couple books I probably should've DNFed earlier this year, but with this one I just had to finally cave. I cannot and will not get behind a heroine that strings our hero along and is just horrible to him. If he was more of the archetype of the hero during that time and they were both contentious with each other, that's one thing. She doesn't deserve him and I really don't understand why he is so supportive of her and loving when she treats him so horrible. 

Okay, let me calm down and end this rant. As for statistics, as this is my first DNF and I wanted to go over how I'm tracking it. It's not being counted as a book read in my totals or factored into any of the averages. I will add what pages I read (just over 200) to my total pages for the month since they were pages I read. I will also include it in the stats for genre, decade and format. I'm keeping these because even though it's a DNF, I'm more interested in how those spreads will look at the end of the year. For the rest of my stats it's listed as a DNF and not factored in. I will end up manually adding the pages read (I didn't want to have to redo ALL of my formulas for this year). I am interested in trying another Kathleen E Woodiwiss, but I might wait for some reviews from booktubers and bookstagrammers that I trust before diving in. And there is a small chance I'll pick this back up at some point in the distant future, but it's not in my plans.

Have you read Shanna?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: Shanna, Kathleen E Woodiwiss, DNF, eBook, 200 pages read, published in 1977