Shaykitteh's World of Books

I cried.

I got angry.

I remembered things that had happened in my past that are better left unmentioned. While I was not abused as a child, the same can't be said about my adult life. The emotional and mental scars take a long time to fade and are difficult to bypass. It becomes difficult to love. To trust. To show affection. You spend so much of your day wearing a façade that it's easier to try to make yourself forget because you don't want to make someone else angry by slipping and showing your real feelings.

Luckily, it's easier today for abused women (or abused men, they do exist) to get the help that they need. In my case, it took a phone call and I then had an army or people to help me move, and health insurance and friends took care of the therapy.

In Katerina's case, it wasn't so easy. Woman were considered the property of their father if they weren't married, or their husband if they were. To save Katerina, Christopher would need to marry her, a woman he had only known for a few weeks, in order to protect her from her father. But if he didn't save her, he might then have to live with the knowledge that a woman died because of his inaction.

This book is not just a love story set in London in the 1840s. It's also the story of knowing that while you can't save everyone, you might be able to save one person. It's the story of showing that people can be brave enough to push past their fear and learn to trust again, and that being abused won't turn you into an abuser in return. It's a story about choices.

I would love to read more books about the characters featured in this story... Not only Kat and Christopher, but the friends and family who were instrumental in saving Katerina, and the people who raised Christopher to be the type of person who would marry a woman he barely knew to save her from certain death.

While this is not a comfortable book to read, I think it's an important one. The author manages to fit a story of child abuse and obsession into a love story built in a believable world. It's obvious that the time period and places were researched as they are as true as someone who didn't live in that time can tell. The characters are well developed, the sex scenes are fun to read, and the multiple messages in the book regarding the rights of workers and woman are weaved in so well that they aren't preachy. This is not the first book that I have read by this author, and it will not be my last, since she puts her heart and soul into everything that she writes.

NOTE: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If Keeping Katerina is a book that interests you, you can find the kindle version available at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D1FTFAC/?tag=shasworofboo-20.

If you enjoyed my review, I would appreciate if you could mark it as being helpful on Amazon as well, as this is useful to both the reviewer and the author. I have included the link to the Amazon review in the Source section at the bottom of this review.