Book 5: Candle in the Window

Candle in the Window by Christina Dodd was not one of the books I
enjoyed reading. It was boring in a lot of places, offensive at others, or
just meh at the rest.

In medieval England, young blind Lady Sora is living the life of a poor Mary
Sue character at the mercy of her mean stepfather. She gets rescued by
another lord, who wishes Sora to help his son, William, the greatest knight
in all England, recover from his blindness. Sora agrees. William doesn’t
like her at first, and she more or less uses her tongue to make him see that
he’s being hard to deal with.

Of course, William regains his sight completely after less than a third of
the book, and the rest of the novel sort of ambles along pointlessly for too
long. Dodd constructs a plot involving a psychotic nobleman obscessed with
William, and there’s some stupid issues William and Sora have to work out,
but all told I couldn’t be bothered.

Being blind myself, I can say that the portrayal of the blind characters in
this book really really sucks. Most of us, for example, don’t really feel
the need to feel people’s faces to determine what they look like. And poor,
sweet, perfect, angelic Sora has it way too easy. I don’t buy that the
greatest knight in all England would in those days find love with a blind
woman, whether she’d helped him gain confidence or not. It’s not realistic,
but then nothing in this book was.

Oh, and speaking of realism, this book is set around 1160, and it refers to
people speaking the “barbaric English tongue”. And yet, all the serfs speak
in cockney accents. The French *had* Cockney accents? I don’t buy it either.

So, yeah. Pass this one up. The only vaguely appealing thing the book had
going for it were some truly deliciously hot sex scenes. But that isn’t
exactly the stuff of a great novel.

Rating: 70/100 because the sex scenes counted for a lot and the psycho
villain plot did snare me despite my better judgment.