Review: The Black Morass

The Black Morass by Barbara Devlin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book masquerades as historical romance but in essence it is erotica . The book begins with the pirate who has sworn off pirating for a year in order to attain pardons for him and his men, happens upon a boat on fire with a lone woman survivor on the sinking burning ship. What the pirate does upon seeing the woman is to start plotting how he can take her sexually without even knowing who she is or what kind of woman she is. As it turns out the woman is a lady and a virgin.

It is painfully obvious that the author who wrote this book knows nothing of the stern, stout, higher morals of previous ages. She equates this woman and these characters with the low morals, sexually, of this current day and age. And this is a problem that I run across often in books by authors who write about characters of a previous age. They just do not get the higher morals of that previous age. They do not understand that sex was a forbidden thing outside of marriage, and was looked down upon as a horrible, horrible thing to do. They equate the easy virtue of this age as being the same people had in previous ages. That easy virtue did not exist then. It only exists in the minds of the writers of today.

This attitude is further confirmed by the actions of the woman, and that she eventually gives into the lustful desires of the pirate. There is nothing noble or deep about the  characters in this book. They are shallow and crude. And the author even manages to take the one noble character she seems to have created in this book and turns her into nothing better than a common whore. 

The writer began losing my interest about one third of the way into the book when it became nothing more than a series of sex this and sex that throughout the first half of the book. That's the point where I began starting to skim through the book just to find out how it ended out of pure curiosities sake, and not for any real enjoyment of the book. 

The author doesn't even begin to get into the real meat of the story until well after the halfway point of the book, so the first 2/3 of the book is occupied with sex. By my definition that makes this book more erotica than anything else. It is certainly not Regency or historical romance. It is mostly smut. 

It is only during the last one third of the book that the author endeavors to raise the level of this book above smut and erotica. Alas, her attempts are too little too late. Because the book is mainly erotica and is mainly about sex the first 3/4 of the book. 

The pirate character comes off as a sex fiend, and the heroine comes off as rather stupid. The characters are not all that engaging, and the storyline is simplistic and mainly focused on sex. There just isn't any depth to this book at all. 
This is not a book I would recommend to anyone.

The violence level is low . 
The sex content is high as that is most of the book. 

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