TEST
I first picked up Desire’s Blossom when I was ten years old. I was curious about the books with the ugly covers that my sister loved so much. I chose Desire’s Blossom because I read from the back cover blurb that it was partially set in China.
I didn’t read another romance book for six years after that little experience.
Then I recently decided to re-read this book. Can’t be as bad as I remembered it to be, I thought. And it wasn’t. It was worse.
Where to begin, where to begin…. First of all, there is the plot. Letitia Taylor is shipwrecked off the shores of Foochow when she is ten years old, and is rescued by Tak-Ming, the youngest son of the powerful Mandarin Yeung. The Mandarin decides to keep this foreign devil so he can give her away to the Emperor Tao Kuang when she is old enough. She is henceforth called Lee-Lee, and her appearance is completely made over so she appears Chinese — her red hair is dyed black, and rice powder is applied liberally to her face.
Lee-Lee blossoms into a beautiful woman with big, bouncy breasts (Edwards makes sure we never, ever forget the magnificence of Lee-Lee’s Amazing Bosom). She plans to run away to America with her adopted brother and rescuer, Tak-Ming. To make enough money to sail to America, Tak-Ming engages in the illegal opium trade with various people, including the tall, dark and handsome American, Timothy Hendricks. Lee-Lee, who followed Tak-Ming on this little escapade, catches a glimpse of the Very Virile Timothy (Edwards makes sure we never, ever, ever forget the magnificence of Hendricks’ Amazing Virility) and falls in love. On the spot, she decides she wants to meet the American, no matter what.
The rest of the plot can basically be summarized this way:
- Lee-Lee and Timothy meet and have mind-blowing sex. (This happens about, oh, half an hour into their first meeting. No, I’m not kidding.)
- Timothy grows skittish, assumes Lee-Lee is merely using him to help her and her “lover,” Tak-Ming, reach America. He abandons her.
- Lee-Lee and Timothy reunite by extremely improbable circumstances and have mind-blowing sex.
- Timothy grows skittish, assumes Lee-Lee is truly in love with Tak-Ming, and leaves her.
- Lee-Lee and Timothy reunite by extremely improbable circumstances and have mind-blowing sex.
- Timothy grows skittish once again, yadda yadda yadda.
- Reunion. Mind-blowing sex.
- Rinse and repeat.
Along the way, Lee-Lee and Tak Ming survive two shipwrecks, are miraculously rescued both times, travel all the way from China just in time for the San Francisco gold rush, and sail on to New York. Lee-Lee also speaks perfect English after eight years of speaking mostly Chinese. What a little linguist she must be. I’ve gone a mere three years without speaking Chinese, and I’m already having a hard time carrying on a conversation with my mother when she calls.
But the plot isn’t the worst element. Sure, the book has more Big Misunderstandings than you can shake a stick at, but then so do Judith McNaught novels. There are masses and masses of logical impossibilities and factual inaccuracies, but the same applies to Tonight or Never by Dara Joy, which is permanently on my keeper shelf. The bad plot is greatly exacerbated by the horrible writing and the cardboard characterization. The constant abuse of the Chinese language certainly didn’t help either.
Edwards is a big fan of the ellipsis and the exclamation point. They appear at the strangest, most inappropriate moments. I submit the following for your perusal:
“She had even pretended to be a man while on the opium-carrying ship! Even though dressed again like a man this night, she at least admitted to being a woman, which she most surely was!”
“She had known that Timothy was a man of wealth, but to own such an elaborate showcase of a house and… not… even… be married?”
“Two pirate junk ships were attacking Tak-Ming’s opium-carrying ship! And it was already obvious who was the victor in this battle. And it was not Tak-Ming!”
The dialogue is so jerky and wooden that after a while, I kept picturing the characters talking like a badly dubbed Bruce Lee movie, or a cheesy manga cartoon like Speed Racer. You know, when the characters’ mouths don’t match the words being formed, and they speak reallyreallyreallyfast with lots of redundancies? Then too, the characters act with no rhyme or reason. Timothy’s jealousy of Tak-Ming is mainly fueled by his past experience with a woman named Cathalina Unser. We are never told much about this experience, apart from the fact that it’s about a decade old, and that poor little Timmy has been irreparably hurt and can never trust any woman again. He can also see Tak-Ming’s attraction to Lee-Lee and, being an intelligent adult male, immediately assumes that the attraction is acknowledged and reciprocated on her part.
Lee-Lee is supposedly feisty and fiery, but she seems merely irritating and, occasionally, too stupid to live. In the beginning of the book, for example, she tries to get Timothy’s attention by jumping in front of his carriage. In the middle of the night. While dressed as a man. And needless to say, the two of them never talk about the important issues. If they had, the obstacles in their way would have been eliminated within the first 50 pages. The whole book is 494 pages of silly action and pointless dialogue.
Chinese is also used in very strange ways in the book. I don’t speak much Mandarin, but I know enough to know that some of the words don’t make sense. “Ai” doesn’t mean “yes” in Mandarin, nor does “nay” mean “no.” As far as I know, the closest phonetic equivalents to the most common forms of yes and no are “Sze” and “Pu-sze.” And since Edwards insisted on using “ai” and “nay” every time Lee-Lee speaks, it became very annoying very fast.
Even when Edwards got the words right, she still used them in very odd contexts. Chinese and English don’t mix very well just because the two are structured so differently. That’s not to say that the two languages don’t influence one another in a bilingual situation, but they happen in specific sentence structures and in specific ways. Read Amy Tan if you want to see an excellent example of how Mandarin is incorporated into English. Read Cassie Edwards if you want to become very, very confused about the Chinese language.
Frankly, I’m hard-pressed to find one good thing about this book. There are a couple of accurate facts in the book, such as the discovery and application of iodine, but then those passages sounded like they were lifted straight from the encyclopedia.
I honestly didn’t expect this book to be so bad. My memory told me it was really cheesy, but I didn’t realize that reading it would be the equivalent of listening to nothing but Britney Spears for three weeks straight. I could feel my brain cells screaming as they died a slow, agonizing death when I came across yet another inane phrase. It took me almost three weeks to finish this book — this from a person who can usually finish a 400-page book in a day, two days tops.
‘Nuff said.
Grade: F
Book Type: Historical Romance
Sensuality: Hot
Review Date: 16/10/99
Publication Date: 1999
Related Reviews
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.