A review by ravensandlace
The Merchant's Daughter by Rebecca Hardy

3.0

Title: The Merchant’s Daughter

Author: Rebecca Hardy

Genre: Historical Fiction

Format: ebook

Series: NA

Star Rating: 3 stars

tw: implications of sexual assault, blood, parental death, child loss, arranged marriage, slavery, misogyny, human trafficking, extreme grief, poisoning

So I’ve read the other book by this author, The House of Lost Wives, with my bestie. Nenia. We enjoyed that one so much we decided to try this one. I enjoyed it but it didn’t hold up and it had some flaws. It wasn’t a bad book per se, but it didn’t hold up to the author’s other book.

While I enjoyed the main character, Jenny, she was honestly kind of boring. I loved that she was a reader but that’s the only I liked about her. The book was in first person and she liked to exposition dump. This book could have easily been 100 to 200 pages less if Jenny didn’t have to constantly rehash everything we had just read. 

While I enjoy a slow-burn romance, this one was agonizingly slow. The main character and the love interest, Erasmus, didn’t even kiss until 300 pages in, and honestly, it just felt so unrewarding. They had all this banter, which was so much fun, he had a cute little nickname (Little Mouse, which is a nickname for another character in a certain book). Like the kiss should have had me kicking my feet and squealing. But I had waited so long for it, that I was just over it. I ended up just waiting way too long for it to happen.

Everything about this book was fine but like I mentioned before, everything just kind of dragged. The first half was so well done and I truly enjoyed it but things just got to be so slow towards the end. And then the ending had to be done pretty fast due to the book getting to be pretty long. So the pacing was just off.  Overall, this was good but she’s had better books.