Lisa ValdezReseñas

didn't finish. this book is in need of a plot.

Passion is the first book in Lisa Valdez’s Passion Quartet. Our heroine, Passion, is a commoner, the daughter of a vicar. She’s also a widow who endured an unhappy marriage. While browsing the exhibits at the Crystal Palace one day, she’s rescued from being clobbered by a falling potted palm by a man who awakens a side of herself she’d thought lost. His mere touch inflames her in such a way that she can’t resist the pull of his allure, so when he draws her behind an ornate screen, she eagerly accepts all that he has to offer. They make love right there in the museum and make plans to do the same for the next few days. When Passion’s visits to the Crystal Palace come to an end, Mark insists that they must continue to see each other and starts climbing the trellis to her bedroom window every night. Soon, their encounters deepen far beyond mere sex until they both know that they don’t want to live without one another. But Mark is being blackmailed by a social-climbing commoner who has dirt on his mother. He doesn’t care much about the woman who birthed him, but if the information gets out it would hurt his brother as well, something he’s determined not to let happen. But the price that’s being exacted from him is nothing short of marriage to the vile blackmailer’s daughter. Mark plans to do what he must to protect his family, while hoping to keep Passion as his mistress. But when Passion discovers that his betrothed is none other than her own beloved cousin, she can’t bring herself to continue their affair, leaving them both brokenhearted.

Passion had a loving upbringing, but she lost her mother at a young age and then helped raise her two younger sisters. She always knew that she had a passionate side, but her marriage left her unhappy and sexually unfulfilled. She learned to shut down that side of herself and in the two years since, she’s been the dutiful widow, handling family and other obligations, but never allowing herself to think of having a man in her life again. When she meets Mark at the Crystal Palace, he reignites a flame she thought had burned out a long time ago, and she can’t resist indulging in a little discreet pleasure. In doing so, he takes her to heights of ecstasy she thought never to reach. She understands that it’s a temporary arrangement and thinks she’ll be okay with that. But when Mark insists that their affair continue after her visits to the Crystal Palace end, it leads to her becoming more and more invested in their relationship until she knows she’s fallen in love with him. Later she’s devastated to discover that he’s betrothed to her cousin. He trusts her completely with the entire sordid story of the blackmail scheme and doesn’t believe that anything need change between them. However, Passion adores her cousin so much, she can’t bring herself to do such a thing to her even though it breaks her own heart and Mark’s to say good-bye. Passion is sweet, kind, and loving toward everyone. She adores her two sisters and her cousin and is very close to all of them, entrusting her sisters with all her deepest secrets. She’s a woman who lives up to her name with an intensely passionate side that has had no outlet until Mark comes along. I love how she embraces that side of herself, reveling in their love affair and thoroughly enjoying their sexual encounters. But most of all, she’s a woman who loves with her whole heart and isn’t afraid to give that devotion to others, and Mark is someone who desperately needs the love she has to offer.

In contrast, Mark’s father was a good man but Mark grew up with a selfish mother who hated him simply because she’d been forced into a marriage with his father and Mark was his father’s son. As a little boy he begged for her love and never received it, which broke my heart. He’s vowed never to beg for love again and doesn’t really even believe in the concept. Instead, he’s indulged in a string of meaningless affairs, never staying with a woman for more than a few months before tiring of her and moving on. When he meets Passion at the Crystal Palace, merely touching her to pull her out of the way of the falling palm tree is a visceral experience, so he can’t resist seeing how far things can go between them. When she fully embraces his lusty overtures, he becomes more and more entangled in emotions he doesn’t recognize. He simply knows that he doesn’t want to live without her. But his wicked mother’s former friend is in possession of a letter his mother wrote to her many years ago, in which she confessed to Mark’s brother being the product of an affair with her gardener. Now the vile, social-climbing woman is using the letter to blackmail Mark into marrying her daughter, Charlotte, so that the girl will have a title. At first Mark is resistant, but when he realizes how much it will hurt his brother if the truth comes out, he temporarily capitulates, while hiring a young thief who he charges with finding the letter in hope of eventually getting out of the engagement. When it looks like there may be no out for him, he decides to marry Charlotte while keeping Passion as his mistress, but when it comes to light that the two women are related, Passion refuses to continue their affair.

Mark is a man who is starved for affection and who understandably doesn’t trust women, but with Passion everything is different. She speaks to a part of himself that no other woman has, and he absorbs her love with his entire being. I love a man who is as undone by his encounters with his woman as she is, and that’s exactly how it is for Mark. Even though he resists for a while, thinking that he’ll eventually tire of her like all the other women who came before, it gradually becomes clear that he can’t live without her. He’s determined to keep her in his life in any way he can have her, while selflessly protecting his brother who he clearly loves more than anyone else except Passion. When he finally realizes just how much love he has for her, it was a deeply poignant scene with him laying his heart out in a completely vulnerable way. I adore Mark and he’ll definitely be taking a place among my all-time favorite heroes. I just can't resist a tortured hero who find everything he needs and more with the woman of his dreams.

I recall when Passion was first published, it received a lot of buzz, though not all of it good. It seemed to be a very polarizing book with people either loving it and embracing it, or thoroughly hating it because they felt it was too erotic. However, I think it might have simply been a book a little ahead of its time. It was released in 2005, and admittedly it is very steamy and doesn’t shy away from explicit language. I think if it was published just a few years later, it probably wouldn’t have raised so many eyebrows. I personally went into reading it knowing that it was pretty erotic, as well as having heard the hype around it. I’m always nervous about reading popular books, but in this case it turned out to be an awesome read for me. I’m not typically a fan of relationships that start as sex-only, but in this case, it worked very well for me. Each encounter Mark and Passion share deepened their connection until it was beyond obvious that they were passionately in love with one another. The book also wrung a lot of emotion out of me. I knew it had to have a happy ending, but there were times that I almost despaired that it was ever going to happen. The blackmail scheme was very well done, seemingly hemming Mark into a place he’d never get out of, but in the end, good prevailed, leaving me rejoicing with our hero and heroine as they finally find their HEA. I also adored Mark and Passion as characters and felt they were tailor-made for one another. They’ll definitely go down as one of my all-time favorite romance couples. Their love scenes are scorchingly hot, although if I had any criticism of the book, it would be that the language is maybe a teensy bit over the top. Still, I honestly didn’t care, because the story is just that good and the deep, emotional connection I crave in a romance was there in spades. This book is fast turning me into a fan of Lisa Valdez and I very much look forward to reading the second book of the series, Patience, which features Passion’s sister, Patience, and Mark’s brother, Matt, as the hero and heroine.

Note: This book contains explicit language and sexual content, including love scenes in a semi-public place, that could be objectionable to sensitive readers.

I picked this up as a steamy book, and it immediately hits the ground running in that direction. And I kind of settled in for a steamy but pretty shallow story. But bit by bit the connection with the characters and interest in their outcome krept up on me, and by the end I was actually tearing up! The couple has enough exterior hurdles, that they don't need to get in their own way to give the story drama. Often I would expect a character to demure about their true feelings or something, and then they would just out with it instead! They were generally (though not entirely) open and honest with each other, and it was refreshing. Obviously I knew the characters would end up together, but they have some considerable reasons why they don't expect to, and their feelings of longing and love were so touching. Rarely does such a high steam book also develop into a high romance one. This did though. I really enjoyed their feelings for each other and the circumstances that tested them.

Negatives- I will say that the sex scenes perhaps focused too much on the hero's endowment. Nearly every sexual encounter seemed to revolve around it. I've never seen 'womb' and 'cervix' come up so much in a book! lol. And some of the dialogue and attitudes felt too modern. Also, the hero, and his brother to a degree, seemed a bit hostile and aggressive to the non-heroine women around them. They have definite reasons to resent them, but I would still have preferred for their thoughts and actions to be toned down a little. Thinking that he'd like to strangle a female opponent or would threaten one or something. He's not a total ogre, but, perhaps especially for the time when ladies were generally treated with kid gloves, it was a bit much.

Overall though, I found this both entertaining and touching. I'll likely read it again sometime.

This book should have instead been titled "UNNECESSARY ANGST: The Novel". Jez people... I have been told for years to read this, and honestly I should have gone into it with certain expectations considering the time period it was released in. But come on. This was like a teens angsty melodrama, or at least what you think Real Life and True Love is like at that age. I couldn't even laugh at the H/H because they were such awful people, Mark more so than Passion. Seriously, he was a selfish douche-canoe with no redeeming qualities at all. At. All. All of the side characters were either so one-dimensional as to not have even existed in the first place, or such caricatures of "Evil" as to be utterly ridiculous. Ugh... Just... UGH. And all the tears and crying! Some how, this was sexy! And when it wasn't supposed to be sexy it was Moving! I was confused sometimes about which emotion we were being shown, can't lie. And I'm not even going to get into the Heros endowments and all the baggage that came with *that* story point. I, personally, question the physics of most of their sex scenes. Oh god, and then when Mark was getting turned on by the thought of Passion sexually touching her sisters. WTF WAS THAT ABOUT and WHERE THE HELL did that even come from??? I just... I need to stop thinking about this book, like, NOW.

I would say that I want to bleach my brain, but I have read this kind of 80s stuff before, and it is always vaguely disturbing to me that people love/ed it.

EDIT: HOLY SHIT! This book read EXACTLY like the raptastic 80s roms (not the mention that cover), but low-and-behold it was written in 2005?! WTF?? I am just... All a-sputtering... I need to go lie down... Why? Just... Why???

I enjoyed the anonymous sex in crowded museum leading to love ... quickly grabbed my attention and maintained it throughout the story

I just couldn't get into this book. Matthews pursuit of revenge and erotic desire for Patience overwhelmed any romance. I quit after 75 pages.

All of us who enjoy Regency or Victorian romances are willing to suspend disbelief to a certain extent when it comes to steamy illicit sex between the hero and heroine. We know that aristocratic English maidens were not actually behaving the way they do in our favorite novels.

This book, however, asks too much: a clergyman's widowed daughter has sex with a total stranger in the middle of the crowded exhibition at the Crystal Palace. And goes back for more the next day. And the next day. Not only is this a ridiculous premise, the sexual encounters themselves are quick, rather rough, not the least bit romantic, and described in crudely graphic language.

The hero, if he can be called that, is delighted because he's finally found a woman who can take all of his huge cock. I don't know if the method described is physically possible, but it didn't sound like all that much fun.

Once the heroine discovers that her man is actually engaged to her cousin (there's blackmail involved), there's actually a half-way decent story going on, but it's not worth reading the book to find out how it all ends.

So in this late Victorian dom/sub is the will of God hunh?

Who knew.


Actually a pretty good read if you like lots and lots and lots of sex play with some fairly vanilla bondage and games, and some fairly mild discipline stuff. Oh, and eventually some actual sex.

The hero came about thisclose to having me feel like Valdez was going to lose the balancing act between dominance play and really throw across the room annoyance. And some of the play of religious support of bondage and submission was mildly squicky even to me, and if I were at all of a Christian religious bent, I might find it seriously offensive. As it was, I found it silly.

She did manage to pull it off, but she nearly lost me before a wrapup that makes me convince that the hero had learned better.

I may be projecting from the delay, but I can almost see a struggle with the vision of the story and communicating it to the reader.

I'd almost give it 5 stars for heat, two stars for the middle story and a borderline 3/4 stars for pulling it off. (After reading this book, everything has a sexual innuendo.)

I'll gladly buy the next one, Primrose if Valdez finishes it and gets it published.

*** 2½ stars ***

Very nice love story. But descriptions of sex scenes were 'painful'. For me to read and for the heroine to experience. But I could not stop reading, it was like watching a train wreck. You just can not stop...

This is one of those book that are like a train-wreck but you just can't look away. I thought [b:Passion|80760|Passion (Passion Quartet, #1)|Lisa Valdez|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309210494s/80760.jpg|77976] was weird, but [b:Patience|80761|Patience (Passion Quartet, #2)|Lisa Valdez|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309282774s/80761.jpg|77977] reaches another level entirely with brain-washing bdsm training. o.O Although, I am guessing that those who love bdsm historical erotica will enjoy this one.

"Passion" gets off to a great start. Passion and Mark are in the Crystal Palace; the sex is hot; their brief conversations are warm and intense; Mark is delicious and aggressive and crude, Passion is strangely yet so appealingly wise.

The first half of the book is so good that the whole book is worth the read.

Valdez carries the tone of the beginning through the first half of the novel. All of the characters are dancing carefully around one another. The reader knows things the characters don't, and they stoke the tension. It's all very intense, genteel and brutal all at once.

And then, all of a sudden, the whole thing does a 180. Mark is crazy jealous, Passion wants to marry him, the sex scenes disappear - the first half of the book is choked with them - and the remainder of the book is all sentimental flashbacks and crying fits and syrupy sweet declarations of love.

Simultaneously, Valdez's writing deteriorates - the unique individuality of her characters, the spark of her writing, everything that made the beginning of Passion so refreshingly different becomes standard, by-the-book, cookie-cutter romance.

Mark's brother, Matthew, provides the opportunity for many, many conversations about the size of Mark's penis. At first this is kind of fun and masculine. Then I started wondering why the size of Mark's penis is, hands down, the #1 most popular topic of conversation for everyone in the book.

Aside from this, I had a few issues with Valdez's vocabulary. I like dirty talk as much as the next person, and I am really in favor of romance authors that don't fluff their sex scenes up with lots of "turgid manhoods" et cetera, but Valdez's use of slang was really distracting to me. She regularly calls Mark's testicles "cods" - cods? Is there a less sexy word? And that's typical of the whole.

My last comment is - I sort of wonder if Valdez, like many other girls I know and including myself, read the Clan of the Cave Bear series at a tender young age. If you have read the series, you might already have felt a twinge of recognition when I mentioned the slightly abrasive alpha male who can't stop talking about his gigantic penis with his (nicer, more charming) brother. The resemblances multiply.

This book made me wonder if I read the same book that the 5-star reviewers did.

What dreck!

I am by no means squeamish. I lurve the trashy erotic romance, I do, and the hotter the better. Unfortunately, Passion wasn't hot, it was merely profane. I have never read sex scenes that have left me quite so cold.

The plot, when we're treated to it, is fairly tight and satisfying. Valdez does create a sticky situation for the hero, forcing him to choose between his beloved brother and the woman he's grown to love. Passion - and I'm sorry, but that name is just straight-up retarded ridiculous - is also in a bind, as Mark is engaged to her cousin, who she's quite fond of. Valdez certainly did put both her and heroine in a tough spot, pitting them against family they loved.

Unfortunately, the sexxoring takes up 50-60% of the novel, and it is DREADFUL. It's laugh-out-loud ridiculous at times with gems like, "I think my cock is in love with you." I'm sorry, if a man said that to me, I'd laugh in his face and tell him to put his pants back on. The dialog was heavily anachronistic and profane to the point of absurdity. I'm a friggin' working-class hockey fan and I don't drop the F-bomb half as much as these two do, yet I'm supposed to believe this is how an earl and a gentlewoman spoke 150 years ago?

Laughable dialog aside, there was the overly clinical sex. Valdez got her money's worth out of the word cervix, seeing as how it appeared multiple times in every sex scene. Sorry honey, cervix is not a sexy word, especially so when you're making a big deal about this guy's giant schlong banging against it. That sounds painful. I've never winced so much at sex; I was holding a bag of frozen peas to my cooter in sympathy pains.

There was a total lack of sexual tension, since they were banging non-stop, and the romance plot was so relegated to the background that the scant emotional conflict simply could not save this train-wreck.

Really, if you're going to write an erotic romance, shouldn't the sex be erotic?

A very unusual book. The sexual encounters were a little too much for me. I'm not a prude, but this was MUCH! However, once the book really got into the plot it was really quite good. I really liked the characters and their relationship was intense! The character development was very well done. I was very involved in the story by the end.

I think the love scenes were a bit over the top at times and made me wonder if some of it were even possible. :) However, I really liked the development of the story that took it from the over the top (almost unbelievable) passion to real angst over a love that might not even be possible. The last 1/3 of the book was very romantic, and exactly what I like over all the stuff early on. It is a good book though, thanks to the relationship created by the end of the novel.

Passion Elizabeth Dare Redington is a widow whose loveless marriage left her highly insecure and believing she was barren. Mark Hawkmore, Earl of Langley, is a well known architect who lives his life for himself and is completely uncaring how others think of him. They meet at Prince Albert's Crystal Palace exhibit and instantly recognize a powerful sexual attraction. They engage in erotic sex behind a large screen in the furniture exhibit with crowds of people milling around them. Whew, a stranger sex fantasy at it's best!

This book is not your typical romance fare where sex is just gratuitous filler to be skimmed in order to get to the 'real' plot or filled with flowery purple prose. The sex in Passion is raw, explicit and shocking, and I loved it. The most outstanding aspect I noticed was that these highly erotic sex scenes were such an integral part of the plot. In order to fully understand the developing relationship between Mark and Passion, you had to read the sex scenes, not skim them. The typical formula for a romance first introduces the h/h, they meet, get to know each other, get to like each other, and fall in love. THEN they usually have sex sometime after that but it's not necessarily an important part of the story (but I always read it of course, OK, I like the sex part). And there's nothing wrong with this formula. It works so well in many of my favorite books. But Passion is surprising to me because it doesn't follow that formula and it still works beautifully. The language was rather crude and blunt as well for a book set in the Victorian era and I learned several new words (quim, cods, spunk?). Reading is SO educational don't you think :)

Several of these sizzling and extremely explicit sex scenes comprise the first half of the book. The h/h don't even know each other's names but the reader can tell that they are falling in love. I loved Passion's character and was glad to see how Mark's character grows. The last half of the book is equally as engaging and develops the story of how Mark is blackmailed into becoming engaged to Passion's cousin, Charlotte. When Passion discovers her lover, Mark, is Charlotte's fiancé, her reaction was so well written that I shed a few tears. (Grade: A-)

Really nice love story. Mediocre read.

Passion transports the reader from the very first chapter with an explosive encounter between two strangers, Passion Elizabeth Dare and Mark Randolph Hawkmore, Earl of Langley, whose serendipitous meeting at the Crystal Palace Exhibition leads to an affair that’s life altering for them both. Wow. This book was pretty awesome. The fantasy of it all was excellently constructed and still grounded in reality enough to make the book vivid, carnal, and so so hot. Passion is equally memorable in that, instead of two strangers banging away, Passion and Mark are well crafted characters with depth. Their feelings are explored and elaborated upon fully, so that the relationship between them progresses and grows into a romance that's beautiful and moving. Sexy and romantic - the best of both worlds really.

My only complaint is the plot that the author weaves around these two great characters. Mark is being blackmailed into marriage to someone else, while Passion, once she's apprised of the situation, sticks to her high moral standards and is determined to give Mark up, because it turns out he's being forced to marry her cousin, who she doesn't want to see hurt. While their forbidden love, and particularly Mark's anguish at having to give Passion up, almost moved me to tears, the manipulations to which these two subject themselves and to which they are subjected really got on my nerves. Maybe my moral standards just aren't as high as Passion's, but I couldn't fully sympathize with her martyr mentality. It makes for a lot of drama (good drama with larger than life emotions and powerful declarations of undying love left and right) but at the same time it dragged on a bit for me. I also didn't like the villains of the story: Mark's mother and her former friend, the blackmailer. They were simply too evil and one dimensional (though Mark's mother was only slightly less so, she was still mostly a caricature). It made the whole plot seem contrived, an excuse for a lot of tears and moaning from Mark and Passion. And a lot of the dialogue was hard to swallow. Too often I was jarred out of the story thinking people just don't talk like this. Sill, despite these flaws, the author offers a credible and memorable blend of the erotic and the romantic, a difficult balance that she achieves with flair.

O. M. G. Highly, highly recommended, but only if you're not squeamish about sex scenes, and only if you have plenty of ice water on hand--possibly a tubful. Let's see if I can stop raving long enough to give you the gist of the story: a chance meeting between a widow and a strange man leads to sex behind a screen in a... museum? (hey, I wasn't paying all that close attention to the setting--believe me, you wouldn't either. Suffice to say it was public.) And that's just the beginning. You know me & sex scenes--I usually skim. This one, I didn't have to. The book was emotionally honest and really really hot. I can't say enough good about it. I literally couldn't put it down until I finished it.

Highly erotic and an exquisite read.

I have read and re-read Mark and Passion's story, and it still evokes the same emotions as the first time. This is not a gentle love story - the explicit sexual scenes are raw and, to some, crude. I am not bothered by it - in many ways I think it's an honest portrayal when emotions get bared.

This is an old keeper for me, but I realized while I had read it a couple of times in the first year I got it, I hadn't read it since. I reread it in response to A Lady Of Talent, where a similiar plot device was used (hero tied to fiance he did not love, and how to resolve that) to very different effect.
With distance, Passion was as passionate as I remember, but not as engrossing. The hero's enormous cock, described and repeated quite a few times, began to sound a bit abnormal to and certainly something I wouldn't want to have around me! But their totally overwhelming passion, and their love still worked. I liked Passion, even though she was a very unlikely heroine - no victorian woman who was 'good and decent' would just go off and have sex with a man in the Crystal Palace, of all places! But if you were willing to suspend disbelief, Passion was worth spending time with.½

What can I say about this book... It needs a NC-17 rating, for one. I've never read a book that made me think I needed a smut filter. Yet it's also so poetic and sweet that the raunchiness of it all doesn't overwhelm me so much. Still, I think any excerpt of it would really shock the uninitiated.
Passion, the heroine, has a one-day-stand with the hero behind a screen in a public exhibit hall and then all sorts of drama ensues, not the least of which is that her best friend is engaged to him. Blackmail, controlling women, and overdrawn sex scenes make this a quick read.