| Plot Summary of A Pirate's Love |
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"As a child Tristan saw his mother raped and killed by Don Miguel De Bastida and has sworn revenge. Bettina Verlaine is being sent to a Carribean island to wed an unknown plantation owner, but her ship is boarded by Tristan's pirates. He captures her and rapes her repeatedly until she becomes pregnant. She tries to escape several times and is captured by Bastida in the end. Tristan rescues her, kills his enemy and marries the woman who somehow believes that rape can lead to a romantic hapy ending if she accepts it."
Inger, Resident Scholar
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"A Pirate's Love is the story of a young French girl named Bettina Verlaine, who is forced into an arranged marriage by her mother and stepfather, to Comte Pierre de Lambert. On the voyage to marry the Comte, Bettina's ship is captured by pirates and the captain, Tristan holds them captive, or so she believes. Tristan makes a deal with her: if she has sex with him, and does not fight him in anyway, he will spare her crew. Bettina is forced to agree, but thinks of the encounter as rape, which is what it turns out to be.
Bettina then finds out that she and her elderly servant woman, Maddie, are the only ones Tristan has captured, and that he lied about killing any of the men on the original ship. So Bettina is trapped, and dishonored, time after time, as Tristan continues to force himself on her, yet, Lindsey makes a weak attempt to portray this as Bettina just fighting her real feelings for the pirate, and actually liking the sex.
She manages to escape a few times, and at one point, meets the Comte, but when she overhears him saying that he will not marry her, now that she has been dishonored, Bettina realizes that Tristan might be a better man after all.
Bettina eventually finds out she is pregnant, and because of a series of misunderstandings, Tristan thinks the child is the Comte's. There are also a few inconsequential subplots: Tristan is looking for some man named Don Miguel, who killed his parents, and Bettina's mother admits that her real father is some friend of Tristan's.
Rape is not romantic. I don't know where Johanna Lindsey got that idea, or why this particular book is so vile, when many of her others are not. But I just found myself wondering, if Bettina had only stayed in her cabin, then the pirates would never have seen her, and her first time may have been with her husband, and not some scuzzy pirate."
Nicole Garrett, Resident Scholar
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