When I was young, my sister collected many Victoria Holt books and she and I gleefully read them all. I saw this one at the library and brought it home to see if it still gives me the same pleasure that it did then.
Victoria Holt writes romantic adventures--rather gothic, always mysterious. In each of her stories, our heroines unfailingly find themselves endangered by their love situations before their heroes inevitably find them and rescue them and all is well.
In this book Helena Trant, always enchanted by the lore of the Black Forest, meets her doom there--thrice! Once as a schoolgirl and twice as an adult.
I do still enjoy these stories. I find Victoria Holt's dialogue a little stilted, but I have always enjoyed the stolid sensibility of her heroines. They always find themselves in fantastic situations that they somehow digest with British common sense. Still, despite the phlegmatic natures of our leading ladies, the dashing men in their lives find them irresistible and this, of course, leads to all their trouble and then, in the end, to their blissful resolutions.
Victoria Holt doesn't use bad language in her books and she doesn't include sex scenes either (although there are plenty of love scenes, they are not explicit in any way). Her stories are romantic and rather predictable and always entertaining. They may not be quite as enchanting to me now as they were when I was younger, but I still enjoy them.
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