I started to skim quite a bit at around 60% some lovely writing but I was mostly bored. ( )

The heroine had a neglectful childhood. Her father was so focused on his studies and his patients that she knew the only way to get any attention was to develop the same passion and she did. Now, after his death, the young mousy and break hearted heroine has a chance to escape London and the violent betrayal she's suffered at the hands of a man she loved. She knows it's wrong to pretend to be a man but it was the only way she though to be taken seriously in her field of helping deaf people speak. Upon her arrival to the entirely gloomy and suffocating castle, she's greeted with more than just anger but open horror and disgust. The servant plead and beg for her to leave and though she's unnerved by the evil presence she feels inhabits the keep, she's determined to say. She's determined to help the slow adult male who's mute from terror and the horrors of his childhood and more than that, she's determined to help his horrible tortured elder brother. The hero has survived the horrors of his childhood at the hands of his governess, a cruel sadistic maniac who became obsessed with a boy not yet 15. But it's made him into a cold, distant and cruel man himself. He's learned to take pleasure in the discomfort and sometimes pain in others. It's made clear from the beginning that he truly is a spiteful and mean master but the heroine sees a light within him, no matter how small and dim. She knows that deep down he has the potential to be a decent man. He has love in him, though he doesn't know it. She sees it with his treatment of his simple minded brother. But she's not stupid or naïve. Life has made her distrustful of pretty men and she knows that he's just a harsh and cruel as the man she loved back in London, just is different ways. From their first meeting, the whole atmosphere in the setting is dark and suspenseful and everything is unsettled. The ghost of the previous governess, the woman whom is to blame for every single painful memory in both brothers minds, is said to haunt the keep. She will not rest until she has her obsessed dead and cold as she is. But the author was very good as putting you off. Sometimes you think she's a ghost, sometimes she think she's alive and sneaking around the castle. You were always on the edge of your seat and just as horrible confused as the heroine. I really and truly felt bad for her. From the jump she's plagued with having to deal with mental instability from both brothers as well as someone playing cruel tricks on her and making her question her own sanity. And she loves a man she admits she doesn't like and who frightens her on occasion. I absolutely LOVED this book. This was so beautifully written-the words flowed by water and carried me away as I got lost in the story. My god it was dramatic but it was heaven for me. There couldn't possibly be a more tortured and beaten down hero than this one and I loved that though finally he was able to find peace he was still the tense stern master he always was. I like it when a character stays true to who they are but are able to grow and evolve over the course of the story. He wasn't a good man, even towards the end he did things that made me question if he was fitting of salvation. But there were those times when as the reader I could feel his pain and suffering leap out at me and I couldn't possible find it in me to turn my back on him. It must be how the heroine felt. She had to use all her goodness and everything in her to pull him out of the darkness. I also loved the villain, strange as it is to like a character so evil. But I didn't like her as a person, of course not, but she was perfect as the villain. Because she was present but absent at the same time. She was hanging over the lives of all these people and it's not even clear until the end whether she's alive or not! I was disturbed by what she did to those boys and disgusted by how her actions changed the lives of the hero and his brother forever. They can never be the same after met her. This book was one hell of a rollercoaster ride and I'm exhausted mentally from reading it, it was so focus on mental issues and the psychological. But I know this book will stay with me for some time until I read it again. ( )

http://jacescribbles.blogspot.com/2007/07/gentle-from-night-by-meagan-mckinney.h... ( )