DIPLOMATS DAUGHTER by Liz Crowe

Publisher: Decadent Publishing
Date published: 06/06/2012
ISBN 978-1-61333-307-5
Contemporary
E-book
Reviewed by Helen
Obtained via Publisher


This story is set in Istanbul in the 1960s with all the repression of females and male domination that era proclaimed.

Vivian Kinkaid is a diplomat’s child with a yen for danger, neglected by her family, and running wild on the streets with the son of some servants. But Vivian’s world comes crashing down when her father discovers her exploits almost simultaneously with her parents’ marriage breaking up.

Fourteen years later she meets up again with Levent Deniz, but has anything really changed?

This story portrays the place and time well with lots of atmosphere and description so we can really understand the town back then. Vivian is a complicated, feisty, troubled heroine, and her personality is well drawn with all its shades of angst, worry and determination. Levant is the perfect hero, large, strong, loving, successful, and appealing, yet with his own worries and challenges which he handles without any of the drama that Vivian brings to the story.

On this level the book is a great story of passion and love, set in a fascinating background. However, the timeline really tied me knots. I don’t know whether I misunderstood some key point or what, but they parted for fourteen years when she was eleven and he fifteen. Now in that time he learns a trade, has a military career and becomes an increasingly successful businessman. So fourteen years is about right. On the other hand she’s still in school (wearing a school uniform) completely under the control of her father.

Now I get that it’s the 1960s in a very male dominated society, but she’s American, not poor, and apparently not Muslim, so at twenty-five I don’t see why she couldn’t have a career, hobbies, anything she wanted to. Also, the parents’ marriage broke up fourteen years ago. Vivian says her father “knocked up his secretary”. So why is the kid only two years old?

This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.