The Lily and the Crown by Roslyn Sinclair

Wonder if this has ever happened with anyone else – it was definitely a first for us.

We picked up this book:

1. Knowing it has the ice queen-cum-age gap (20+ years) trope.
2. Knowing it will have great sex scenes having read The X Ingredient by the same author and having enjoyed it.

Ariana Geiker (Ari) is a shy, hermit-like botanist. She lives on a space station where her father is the commander so she has a larger-than-normal living space which she has mostly converted into a forest.

The book starts with Ari expecting the arrival of the most renowned botanist in the empire and selecting the perfect gift from her plants for him. Before the botanist, however, she finds a ‘slave’ thrust on her. The ‘slave’ is the only survivor captured from a pirate ship. The pirate ship belonged to the most notorious of all pirates, the pirate queen, Mir. (And right away it is obvious that the ‘slave’ is Mir.)

We read a bit till we reached a point where it became obvious that the ‘slave’ was going to be using Ari for her own scheming purposes.

And we couldn’t read it further.

Let us try and explain this.

Ari, right from the first word of the book, is heartbreakingly innocent and gentle. She is a pure soul. In even as much as we read, we felt incredibly protective about her. That everyone didn’t treat her with love and gentleness actually hurt us. That her innocence was going to be abused and misused made us abandon the book (notwithstanding the promise of great sex scenes later in the book).

And that is what we were wondering about at the start of this review – has this happened with anyone else: liking a character so much, feeling so strongly about her that you just cannot countenance anything bad happening to her and rather than read further you abandon the book so that you can preserve and protect her in your imagination?

In the history of DNFs this must be the only positive DNF ever -- liking a character this much can only reflect positively on the author's skill, right?