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    Storming the Castle: An Original Short Story
    Storming the Castle: An Original Short Story
    Storming the Castle: An Original Short Story
    Audiobook3 hours

    Storming the Castle: An Original Short Story

    Written by Eloisa James

    Narrated by Nicola Barber

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Featuring the handsome and mysterious Wick from A Kiss At Midnight. What Miss Phillipa Damson needs is a good, old fashioned knight in shining armor. What she has is a fiancé she never wanted and a compelling urge to run away. But if she manages to escape, will she find her happily ever after?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateDec 21, 2010
    ISBN9780062083647
    Storming the Castle: An Original Short Story
    Author

    Eloisa James

    Eloisa James is a USA Today and New York Times bestselling author and professor of English literature, who lives with her family in New York, but can sometimes be found in Paris or Italy. She is the mother of two and, in a particularly delicious irony for a romance writer, is married to a genuine Italian knight.

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    Reviews for Storming the Castle

    3.5/5

    113 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      A short sweet read. It had some classic Eloisa James humour, particularly pertaining to the hapless Rodney. It features characters from A Kiss At Midnight, but can easily be read as a standalone book.

      Was it realistic? Not in the slightest. Well-to-do young ladies who are betrothed to baronets don't accompany doctors on their rounds, not even if the doctor is her uncle. They don't sleep with their betrothed before marriage, especially in the stable. They don't take a job as a servant to give themselves time to think about where they want to go with their lives. Butlers, majordomos and even uncles don't hand small babies to total strangers, nor do they accept medical advice from young ladies, especially without questioning their credentials.

      But it was easy to read and entertaining. Perfect if you want something light to read.
    • 3/5
      OK story. Be romance.
    • 3/5
      I was super turned off that the story starts with the heroine losing her virginity to her fiancé, decides the sex was awful and therefore has an epiphany that she doesn’t want to marry the guy and walks out literally without a word and runs away. Mind you, the guy in no way is supposed to be a jerk. Presumably he was utterly devastated, having been in love with her since childhood. She gave him zero thought. So I started out disliking her. The hero she ends up with is too good for her, not being a self-centered jerk as she is. The narrator keeps taking really loud, raspy breaths into the mic. Really abrasive. And she did the hero’s accent in an unappealing way. Halting German-ish. I actually looked up the ebook to see if the author had written his lines using “ze” in place of “the.” She didn’t. That accent decision was ze decision of ze narrator. Sexy, right? The previous book he was in (as a minor character) he was portrayed in a much better voice ( Thank you, Susan Duerden). I was looking forward to the spin-off the author was obviously setting up. That said, the narrator is basically okay. Much better than most. Story: I’m a big EJames fan, and this is not my favorite. Hard to say how much the narrator had to do with it, but definitely not James’s best work.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I truly enjoyed Wick and Philippa's story.
    • 4/5
      Sweet Short and a great little romantic tale.
    • 3/5
      I had mixed feelings about this book.
      On the one hand, the characters were all pretty cute, the love story was nice, it had a happy ending. And I have to take into consideration the author had a limited amount of space, given that this was a novella.
      So here are my thoughts.

      I don't tend to be a fan of books where the love stories happen naturally, with no emotional roadblocks (such as friendship or hatred) to overcome, and this happened naturally.

      The ending was incredibly abrupt. One minute, our heroine is almost going to marry her dreaded ex-fiance, and the next, our hero swoops down on a horse and saves the day. Not sure I was the biggest fan.

      It did make me want to read the prequel, however!
      So all in all, I gave this book 3 stars, because while it wasn't my particular favorite brand of romance novel, it was still a good read.
    • 2/5
      1 ½ stars

      This novella tells the story of Wick’s happily ever after. Wick is a prominent character in the first book in the Fairy Tales series, A Kiss at Midnight. While I enjoyed the first book and the second book in the series I found this novella sort of disappointing. Maybe it was because of the length (98 pages), but I didn’t feel like the characters were developed at all. Wick, we know from A Kiss at Midnight, but we have no idea who Phillipa really is besides that she is a woman in an unhappy engagement who decides to runaway.

      One of my main issues was that quite a bit of time is skipped over and never really accounted for. One minute Phillipa is barging into the castle and the next she’s fully acquainted with the staff because of her “charming” personality. We’re just told Wick and Phillipa talk at night and spend some time together for the past few months, but the reader is never shown these discussions. The discussions and internal dialogue readers are shown are quite lame. It’s the typical “I’m not worthy enough for you!” and “I love you so much I could die, but I can’t be with you!” Lame. Totally Lame. I was so sick of the “I’m not worthy enough for you” dialogue that I was happy when it all ended.

      Another one of my issues was that I really hated how Wick from the moment he sees Phillipa automatically turned his thoughts to marriage. To me this was a complete stretch in his personality. Actually in any person’s personality this would be a stretch. I don’t know of anyone who automatically says “There’s my future spouse” and then proceeds to go on about how unworthy they are. Let’s be real…the average person goes into lust mode first. Maybe the author decided to take this route to keep the novella within a certain page limit, but for me it was an injustice to Wick.

      Lastly, I didn’t care for Phillipa as a heroine. I didn’t find her as strong as she was supposed to be portrayed. I didn’t understand why she gave up her virginity to her fat ass conceited fiancé when it was clear from the beginning that she didn’t care for him, wasn’t attracted to him and didn’t want to marry him. If she was as intelligent as we are told she is I don’t think she would’ve gone this route.

      Overall, I expected and wanted more for Wick. I was disappointed that this story amounted to a lot of “I’m not worthy” dialogue instead of being the funny, light hearted romance I thought it was going to be.
    • 4/5
      fantastically funny and entertaining as usual. Loved it. Loved the spin off of the other Story A Kiss at Midnight. Who doesn't enjoy reading about being swept away by your knight in shining armour or beloved on a white horse!