Stolen Promise
Lisa Marie Wilkinson
Medallion, Mar 2010, $7.95
ISBN 9781605420691
In 1806 England, Jade flees from the Lowara gypsy camp as she rejects a forced commonly bartered marriage to abusive Dimitri. She does not get very far away when she meets half-breed American gypsy Evan Dark. He rejects her pleas to either take her to safety or ignore her; instead Evan takes her back to the Lowara encampment.
However, her family forces the two to marry Roma style as he should not have been with her without a chaperon. Evan proclaims their nuptials as bogus. He returns to the States planning to marry his American fiancée Gloriana Clayton, but brings Jade and her battered (by Dimitri) sister Liberina with him as indentured servants. On his South Carolina plantation Rosefield, Gloriana realizes Evan is falling in love with Jade so she plans to insure he goes through with his marriage to her; doing whatever it takes to get rid of the gypsy.
This is an intriguing historical due to the refreshing concept of a Roma romance crossing the ocean to South Carolina where Evan is local aristocracy in spite of his grandfather’s blood. The story line is driven by the romantic triangle, but that is no contest as Jade is a moral individual trying to do right by her sister while Glory is an avaricious unethical person willing to do anything to further her position in society their respective. Although having Glory with no redeeming quality is a detractor, Lisa Marie Wilkinson provides readers with an entertaining early nineteenth century romance.
Harriet Klausner
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