Blog Tour Review | Blackmoore | Julianne Donaldson

Title: Blackmoore
Author: Julianne Donaldson
Genre: Historical Romance
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Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Release date: September 9, 2013
Source: ARC from the publisher via NetGalley

Summary: Kate Worthington knows her heart and she knows she will never marry. Her plan is to travel to India instead—if only to find peace for her restless spirit and to escape the family she abhors. But Kate’s meddlesome mother has other plans. She makes a bargain with Kate: India, yes, but only after Kate has secured—and rejected—three marriage proposals.

Kate journeys to the stately manor of Blackmoore determined to fulfill her end of the bargain and enlists the help of her dearest childhood friend, Henry Delafield. But when it comes to matters of love, bargains are meaningless and plans are changeable. There on the wild lands of Blackmoore, Kate must face the truth that has kept her heart captive. Will the proposal she is determined to reject actually be the one thing that will set her heart free?

Set in Northern England in 1820, Blackmoore is a Regency romance that tells the story of a young woman struggling to learn how to follow her heart. It is Wuthering Heights meets Little Women with a delicious must-read twist.

Friends, I was a big fan of Julianne Donaldson‘s first book, last year’s EDENBROOKE. I love historical romances, and Julianne gets the tension and the emotions JUST RIGHT. If you are a frequent historical romance reader like I am, BLACKMOORE will be missing a pretty common element: sex. But I’m telling you, as someone who enjoys those kinds of historical romances, that you won’t miss it. Really. The relationship between Kate and Henry is full of tingly bits without it. BLACKMOORE has just about everything that I love in my historical romances. I think that EDENBROOKE is still a touch better, but I was far from disappointed.

So our main character is Kate. She’s BFFs with the brother and sister who live essentially next door–Sylvia and Henry. (HENRY. *swoons*) Her own family is kind of a mess: her elder sister was embroiled in a scandal some years before that continues to taint her sister’s reputations, and her mother is basically horrible. In the wake of some things in Kate’s past that we learn about as BLACKMOORE moves on, she has refused to marry. Vehemently. But she also desperately wants to go to India with her aunt to get away from it all, and so her social-climbing, gold-digging, major flirt of a mother strikes a bargain with her. Kate must accept and decline three proposals before her mother lets her go. This cannot end well. Especially when Kate enlists her long-time friend, Henry’s, help.

The relationship at the center of BLACKMOORE is a pretty great one. Kate and Henry have been best friends for a long time. They have private jokes, they share important memories, they’ve been constant sources of support for one another, and it’s PLAINLY obvious (to me, anyway) that Henry ADORES Kate. There’s some history with their mother’s, and some other drama going on with Henry that puts up roadblocks to their being together, but they have incredible chemistry. Julianne Donaldson created a great companionship between them and it makes BLACKMOORE pretty special.

As separate characters, though, I found myself liking Henry a bit more. Kate is stubborn–an acknowledged fact–and I sometimes wanted to shake her out of it. Her refusal to get married seemed like it became less and less like Kate’s actual feelings and more like her making a point for the point’s sake. Her mother was atrocious, though, so I can understand her fervent desire to get out of dodge. Henry, though, was just a dream. Warm and friendly and confident. It’s with guys like him that I don’t understand why the girl doesn’t just DIE over them.

I did feel bad for Kate at various points in BLACKMOORE though. Her mother is a cow, her sisters are too much like their mother, her best friend Sylvia is changing, Henry is still subject to his own mother’s wishes, and Kate’s only wish for herself is freedom. It’s kind of bleak, to be honest. Thankfully, Kate has Henry. And also her cat, Cora. And she finally gets to go to Henry’s family’s summer home on the moors, Blackmoore.

Once I started reading BLACKMOORE, friends, I could barely put it down. It was a quick, satisfying, sweetly emotional read with a romance built on the most solid of foundations: friendship. The drama surrounding Kate and Henry sometimes seemed to border melodrama, but I found them to be so well-suited and likable that I can forgive some of the other things that niggled me. Admittedly, there weren’t very many anyway. Julianne Donaldson has a way with romances, friends. Big fan.

About The Author: Julianne Donaldson grew up as the daughter of a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot. She learned how to ski in the Italian Alps, visited East Berlin before the wall came down, and spent three years living next to a 500-year-old castle. After earning a degree in English, she turned her attention to writing about distant times and places. She lives in Utah with her husband and four children.

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