To The Victor Go The Spoils - JotItDown

An engaging well-written fic in which Dean is seized by giant angel Castiel to be his 'treasure'.

I'm calling it quits on this one. I have picked it up twice since winter break started and it is just not working for me. For people interested in military historical fiction, this will probably be a great book for you. For me, however, the endless drilling and marching is too much. I'm done waiting for something to happen. Break is too short for me to keep reading books that aren't working. I might come back at a different time. 

I was given a copy, in exchange for an honest review.

This is the first book I've read from S.N. McKibben, so I was surprised when I quickly found myself enthralled within the story. I was lost within the telling of what happens after war, when a king dies & his wife & daughter are left in the clutches of the winner.

WOW what a story, I NEED to read more. 'The Spoils of Allsveil' is book 2 in the "Dark Heart Heroes" series, I did read this series out of order but it still made sense to me when reading it. I plan on checking out the rest of S.N.McKibben's other works.

19th century Hawaii -- The waves lap dangerously close to the abandoned baby--abandoned by the Molokai leper colony of the late 1800s. That baby will be at the center of an alternately tense and bittersweet romantic struggle between Eden Derrington and Rafe Easton. Eden and Rafe are in love, but Baby Kip may very well endanger their future together.

Amazon.com

Hawaii, 1891. Rafe Easton, heir to a sugarcane plantation, finds an abandoned baby boy on the coast of Molokai, the Hawaiian leper colony. Not wanting to see an innocent child suffer, Rafe takes the child back to the mainland. The boy (assumed to have been born to lepers), given the name Kip, is tested and initial tests show him to be free of leprosy. Unfortunately, the law at that time says that all citizens must be certified free of leprosy through the Board of Health before they are allowed to reside on the mainland. Even so, Rafe refuses to take the child back to Molokai, instead deciding to start adoption proceedings.

Meanwhile, Rafe's fiancee, Eden (a nurse specializing in tropical diseases and representative for the Board of Health) is assigned the task of trying to get Kip away from Rafe and back to Molokai until he is "officially" cleared of leprosy. There's also tension between her and Rafe due to her desire to work with her father, a doctor, on the leper colony. Rafe prefers her to stay on the mainland, marry him and settle into domesticity. 

While I did enjoy the themes of family politics & loyalties, late 19th century politics and social norms, and the history of the leper colonies (specifically the shoddy treatment of lepers by their govt.), I found that I never really became attached to any of the characters, at least not as much as I had hoped. Eden especially got overly preachy for me -- even the characters in the story were telling her to pull back! I realize this is meant to be Christian fiction but even so, it was a bit much for me. The heavy-handed references to the Garden of Eden were cringe-worthy.. almost like the author saying "Did you get that reference? Did you? DID you?" Yes. I got it. Thanks. I will try out the next book in the series to see if I get more into the series, sometimes it takes a book or two for a series to hit its stride.