A Frank Review of M.L. Tyndall's The Blue Enchantress

From the author, ML Tyndall, who sports this bumper sticker:

My Other Car is a Pirate Ship.

MaryLu Tyndall maybe missed her true calling as a cruise ship captain because her fifth novel, just like her first four, takes her readers there. The Blue Enchantress is Book Two of the Charles Towne Belles series (Barbour, 2009) and follows Hope Westcott, the second of three sisters living in early 18th Century Charles Towne.

Hope’s big problem is her beauty, and she knows how to use what her momma gave her. But The Blue Enchantress opens with Hope's manipulations having landed her in a bit of trouble—she is on the auction block at a Caribbean port’s slave market.

Nathaniel Mason, an acquaintance Hope spurned in Charles Towne, strolls into the market while looking to buy cargo for his merchant vessel. The kindhearted man enters into a bidding war and gets more than he Hopes for.

With brilliant characterization, we learn by page twenty-three how Hope's beauty is skin deep yet ugly to the bone. She’s repulsively dead set in her ways and the reader wonders if a life of indentured servitude wouldn’t have suited Hope Westcott justly. Then, like peeling back an onion, the reader learns how her flaws came honestly, and extend from a motherless childhood. Just like real life, judging too harshly can get the reader in a pickle.

From the Chapter One human trafficking market to the end, one can see and smell the Caribbean. A mastery of era expressions, like “Oh, fodders,” “Sink me,” and “Shallow as a basin,” adds subtle flavor and realism. Action is augmented with taut intrapersonal conflict in The Blue Enchantress.

If you have not yet read any of Tyndall’s pirate-romances and you are a fiction fan, put her on your list. This woman is fun and she is very, very, good.

Format: Paperback Number of Pages: 320 Vendor: Barbour Publishing Publication Date: 2009

ISBN-13: 9781602601574 Series: Charles Towne Belles

MaryLu's website: www.mltyndall.com