One Burning Heart is the fourth, and I hope not the last, book in Elizabeth Kingston’s Welsh Blades series. I’ve loved this series since reading the first book nearly 10 years ago, so I was beyond excited when it was out. It is also the first book by Kingston since 2019 – and that’s “the before times” so it feels extra long! I reviewed Desire Lines that year.
I one-clicked it and started reading this book right away. This uncharacteristic speediness on my part paid off big time because the book starts with a bang – or, more accurately, with a banging: a sex scene that signals that everything is about to change for our couple, William and Margaret. They have been married for six years, and have despised each other for just about as long. William and Margaret’s sexual relationship is a proxy for how their feelings for each other change as the story moves along.
William, just a kid in the previous books, is now a powerful marcher lord who is in perpetual scheming mode. He’s planning to curry even more favor with the king by organizing a crusade.
Margaret has spent a lifetime pretending to be an overly pious and brainless lady but in reality she despises what the church has become and has her own ideas about what constitutes good works. Using William’s wealth, she’s scheming to stop said crusade.
As the writer has acknowledged, the characters talk a lot about religion and the plot moves in large part by religious conflict. It’s not preachy at all, but as Kingston said in her newsletter, readers of this book have to be in the mood for religion and politics, which is not too different from the type of conversations I’ve been having in today’s world.
So the ideal reader for this romance would be someone that is in the mood for the religion/politics talk and likes their romance on the hot side – there are quite a few sex scenes, hooray for me, and they go on in some detail. It’s also very much part of their dynamics and discovery of each other, especially at the start of the book. Here’s Margaret marveling at how she’s finally not thinking of Eve and sin after having intercourse:
She thought of how she knew now that this pleasure was not a forbidden fruit, but a sliver of Paradise itself that was meant for human consumption. The story had gotten twisted somewhere. It must have. That was the only explanation for calling this bliss a sin. (…) When his eyes came to hers, she did not shy away or hide. She seemed incapable of pretending anything at all.
“There you are,” he said.
At its core, the book is about being seen for who we are, and being courageous enough to let all the masks fall. There are several references to masks slipping, and Margaret often recalls her mother’s words to her: “A woman’s life is pretending.”
While Margaret is an expertly drawn character, William is less so, and seems to be moved purely by ambition. About three quarters, perhaps more, of the story is told from Margaret’s point of view. Because readers are less privy of what goes on in William’s head and what his true motivations are…
Spoiler for the end
…when he makes a huge love gesture it feels as if it came out of nowhere, robbing me of the pleasure of seeing him come up with that decision on his own.
It was also less awesome that in the end Margaret’s fate was decided largely by the men around her, although I suppose that was par for the course in her day.
After the stellar start, though, the book sagged a little in the middle as both characters plot against their various enemies and I honestly became a little lost, and the end felt a bit rushed.
One Burning Heart is not exactly enemies-to-lovers, but there’s definitely quite a few dashes of the trope throughout the book, as they start off indifferent, at best, about each other and even disgusted by the sides of their personalities they choose to show to each other. However, I love this series, and really liked this book. It is already on my list of best books of 2024, and certainly is one of my most awaited books of recent years.
