Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: The Knight and the Rose

Author: Isolde Martyn

Narrator: Jerome Pride

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 20 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-01-14

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 7 votes

Genres: Romance, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Trapped in a violent marriage to Sir Fulk de Enderby, a veteran of the wars against Robert the Bruce, Lady Johanna Fitz Henry has one last chance to escape. If a stranger can be found who is willing to swear to a court that she was secretly wed to him before her match to Fulk, Johanna will be set free.

Gervase de Laval, a fleeing bounty hunter, is discovered on Fitz Henry land and made an offer he cannot refuse. Pose as Johanna's long-lost love or he and his badly wounded companion will be hanged as traitors. Forced to play out the masquerade, the two conspirators are drawn into a dangerous web of deceit that reaches the highest echelons of the English court.

Members Reviews:

Enjoyable

I found the language and the history quite captivating and enjoyed the book on the whole. For me it lost pace about three quarters of the way through and did border on a little too long and too slow. This was a shame as the romance was beautifully set up and the portrayal of women was excellent.

Too Long

The vocabulary was inconsistent, varying from the time period to modern. The book was too long. By the the time it ended I did not care how the author resolved the situation.

Mediaeval mayhem

Lady Johanna FitzHenry is a beautiful willful young woman who has been married to her fathers' former companion in arms, a cruel, merciless brute of a man whose idea of getting her with child is to beat her savagely on a daily basis and to rape her nightly. Johanna and her mother devise a plan which will be her only legal escape from the marriage..to convince a man to swear that he had married her, before her forced marriage to her sadistic husband.

By chance, a young man stumbles on to Johannas' parents land, supposedly a scholar but actually a soldier fighting on the opposite side to the current regime. In reurn for help for him and his wounded comrade, Gervase de Laval agrees to the scheme and goes through an examination by a church court which agrees to annul the marriage. Following this, Johanna returns to her parents' home while Gervase follows his feudal lord into battle against the Scots. Four years later, he returns and, after many arguments and much wrangling, the happy pair are reunited.

Personally, I would have loved to have given this shrewish girl a good slap around the legs to put an end to her incessant screeching and bad mouthing of everyone in sight.Yes, she WAS treated shamefully and most cruelly, but as she never ceased her persistant goading of Gervase and was always ready with sarcastic remarks that could be heard all over the castle, I just wonder that he didn't rise off into the sunset forever !

Beauty Abused

As soon as I finished this novel, I immediately went looking for more by the same author. This was truly an historical romance. Inspired by a real Medieval divorce case, the story is about Johanna, so abused by her cruel husband that she is ready to face death to escape. Fate sends her home to her mother, who blackmails a "captured" rebel by forcing him to play Joanna's first husband in a conspiracy to release Joanna from her hideous marriage. Trapped in a situation not of his making, Geraint finds himself falling in love with the icy Joanna, longing to melt her reserve, heal her psychic wounds and become her protector. Unfortunately, his real obligations lie elsewhere, with powerful men, and their paths must part.