She admits that she no longer has any pride where he is concerned, that she would die for him. It was as if the author was like, 'By God! If they won't let me write about the one bodily fluid, I'll just write about the other!' More disturbing still is that all that horse-breaking serves as an allegory for the hero and the heroine's unconventional relationship: by the end of the book she is utterly broken, a shell of her former self. Horses are beaten bloody, a servant is whipped, Ahmed shoots Diana's horse to punish her - twice (once to wound, once to kill), a woman is killed by having a knife driven through her heart, and a man's hand is shattered when his rifle explodes while he was holding it. This book desperately wants to be dirty, and since sex is off the table, it compensates with violence and racism. While reading this book, I kept thinking to myself that this probably would have not just been banned but probably also set on fire if it had been published in the late 70s, when all those absolutely insane bodice rippers were being published and everyone was trying to out-WTF each other. Unfortunately for Diana, her escort has sold her out and she's ridden down and then captured by the eponymous sheik himself, Ahmed Ben Hassan. She turns down a marriage proposal from a desperate admirer (perhaps the first recorded incident of someone being placed in the 'friend zone' - and like most guys in the 'friend zone', he doesn't get the rules), so you know she's independent, and then rejects her brother's suggestion that she perhaps oughtn't to ride through the desert alone, except for a caravan escort of 'natives,' because, again, independent. The only difference is a deliberate omission of sex scenes, but it's clear that they're happening (and it's equally clear that they're nonconsensual).ĭiana Mayo (that last name kills me, by the way - I kept picturing her as a pasty white jar of mayonnaise rolling through the desert) is a tomboyish, independent woman of noble birth who enjoys gallivanting through exotic locales with her rather unwilling and prissy brother, who thinks that she ought to be more submissive and demure. While she was certainly one of the first mainstream authors to publish a widely read romance with an open bedroom door *wink*, THE SHEIK has a shockingly similar formula to the 'modern' bodice ripper, and it was published in 1919. In my review of THE FLAME AND THE FLOWER, I said that Woodiwiss is often credited with writing the first bodice ripper. For more info on this challenge, click here. 💙 I read this for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' New Years 2018 Reading Challenge, for the category of: Classic (Literature) Romance.

The sheik hull