Vanquished
Hope Tarr
Medallion Press
ISBN 1-932815-75-9

Callie Rivers is a suffragist, through and through, but unlike most other suffragists, she's well born and hence untouchable by the local media, unless a scandal of her own making should erupt. Hadrian St. Claire is a handsome, charming, and desperate photographer, hired to bring about that very scandal.

But inside, Callie is a woman wanting to learn how to be a real woman, and inside Hadrian is a man who wants to be loved for who he is, not who he's pretending to be. Can these two people, from two totally different worlds, find happiness, with or without each other?

Hope Tarr situates this novel carefully in the early twentieth century, and she has obviously done her homework. The dialogue is well-written, the plot flows through the book without interruption, and the characters are true to their history. Perhaps the major flaw is the coincidental factors that play throughout the book...but because I don't want to give anything away, I can only say that some of them seem too much-So-and-so just happened to be engaged to X, So-and-so Two just happened to know Y, that kind of thing. Overlooking that, however, the book is a romp through a historical period with enough explicit sex scenes to keep the reader entertained, but not so much sex that it overrides everything else. All in all, it's a great book full of charming and desperate characters.

Reviewed by:
Ann M. Beardsley

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