REVIEW: Bound by the Heart by Marsha Canham (1984)

★★★★★

Review for the original 1984 edition:
I can see why this gets so many raves. It has adventure, white-knuckle battle scenes, and a very violent and dramatic love triangle that involves rape, adultery, love and hatred and insanity. The characters, historical setting, main plot, and subplots all fit. It was a tightly-written story with a flair in the writing that harkened back to the old swashbuckler flicks of the 40s and 50s.

The story even starts with action, as Summer Cambridge and her young brother Michael are adrift on the flotsam of their storm-wrecked ship in the Caribbean. Enter the hero, privateer Morgan Wade, who pulls them aboard against his better judgment and deals with Summer's immature intractability (and threats of disrupting his ship/kingdom by parading about above deck) by raping her and sending her into spirals of ecstasy. (Need you ask what got changed in Canham's re-edit?)

Complicating things is the fact that Summer's father is a British colonial governor, and he would rather keep his daughter's kidnapping by a pirate wanted by the British Navy on the downlow and away from the gossips. Summer, despite her body's pining for the handsome Morgan, decides to enter the marriage chosen for her and hope for the best. Of course you know that things won't go easy....

I know most reviews are about the hero and heroine, but I have to say that I thought the best character in the entire story was Summer's husband and Morgan's nemesis, Commodore Bennett Winfield. Age of Sail stuff gives me a girl-boner anyway, and "Master and Commander" is, like, one of the best films EVAH, so Winfield's character and Canham's two epic battle scenes had me purring like a kitten. But on a serious note, Winfield was a dynamic villain with a character arc that had me more sad for his downfall at the end of the story than glad that Summer and Morgan get their overdue HEA. It's a no-brainer that the good guys would win, but I wasn't expecting to see the bad guy given so much time in the spotlight. His decline from staid and smart officer into an Ahab was pretty gripping. Too bad more romances didn't have such a well-constructed adversary for the hero and heroine to fight against.

Winfield first appears as a courtly officer who is ambitious and dedicated to his career, but he makes Summer melt with his ardor and refusal to take advantage of her innocence. Blond-haired and blue-eyed with a charming smile, he's the very image of a very proper gentleman and an officer who has a career that can only go one way: up.

Winfield on the outside:


As the story progresses, the internal layers of his character are gradually revealed: his weakness for one woman, his cold calculation, his autocratic streak, his deep years-long resentment of Morgan Wade and his single-minded and destructive obsession with killing him.

Winfield on the inside:
 

I thought that Winfield overshadowed Morgan Wade's character for the first half of the book, and even after Morgan appeared more often in the story, it was Winfield's character that still had my complete interest. After an initial squee over Morgan Wade during the first sea battle, I wasn't feeling much substance to his character and found Winfield the far more nuanced guy. Perhaps the revised edition by Canham makes Morgan's character more substantial in the beginning, and for that reason alone I would consider reading it, although I'm not normally interested in reading books that have been tinkered with to suit political correctness.

At any rate, I highly recommend this to any romance fan who likes plentiful action in their historicals, a dynamic style, and would like to see secondary characters that don't seem like token sidekicks or lame clichés.