Marked: River Romance Volume 1
Cora Craighead, the heroine of Jeanne Hardt’s debut novel Marked, is a poor Alabama girl who dreams of adventure on the riverboats that ply the Mississippi. Her dreams become real when her father gives her to a kindly riverboat captain in payment for a gambling debt. The captain wants a son and schools Cora in the ways of the flesh. The moment she meets Douglas Denton, though, she instantly understands love, and the remainder of the novel is a romantic riverboat adventure.
Cora is more a passenger than a captain; things do not happen to her so much as around her. “This was more exciting than any book she’s read,” Cora thinks, and that is about the gist of her character: more reader than actor.
A murder and the mystery of her birth finally become relevant two-thirds of the way through the novel, but these sub-plots seem tacked on, easily resolved. This is a romance novel, and in that regard it does not disappoint. The instant attraction between Cora and Douglas is electric and real, and the torture that society puts them through (as they must wait until their wedding night to consummate their love) is both painful and exquisite. It is a testament to Hardt’s storytelling skill that the novel comes off so well.
