The Corsican Woman

Summary (from the publisher): "I did not murder Xavier Rocca. I executed him..."
With those compelling words begins the story of a people bound to an ancient and secretive code of honor - and an extraordinary heroine driven to defy it. She is Sybilia Rocca, brought to an isolated Corsican village at sixteen and forced into marriage with Xavier Rocca's son. Now, one sultry August afternoon twenty years later, she walks into the village square and shoots her influential father-in-law to death. By the laws of Corsican vendetta, Sybilia must pay with her life.

But the Corsican woman is so beautiful and mysterious that a visiting American has made her his obsession. Soon Jock Walters will begin his own desperate fight to save her, following a trail of compulsion and desire back to World War II, to a love both tender and tragic, and to an act of betrayal more shocking and more terrible than anything this man can imagine.

Review: There are only three other reviews of this 1988 novel on Goodreads and one of them labels this novel erotica. Let me set the record straight and let you know that this novel is most certainly not erotica. In fact, it was almost disappointingly  barely PG13.  The Corsican Woman folows the sad story of Sybilia Rocca, a young woman in Corsica who is forced into an arranged marriage at 16 to the (gay) son of the powerful Xavier Rocca. Sybilia makes the best of her situation, and ends up helping with the resistance in WWII and falls in love with Robin, an American military man. After her husband's death, Sybilia conceives a child with Robin, who then mysteriously disappears, leaving Sybilia branded a whore, in this masochistic and vendatta driven society.

The frame introduction and concluding sections of this story are told from the point of view of Jock Walters, an American archaeoligist who falls for her, wishes to free Sybilia after she kills her father-in-law and find out why she did it. Jock's is the only part of the story told in the first person and so I had more insight into him as a character, but he's the character I cared the least about. Sybilia clearly never loved him in return and I didn't have a vested interest in his life or concerns. I felt that the focus of the novel should have been on the tension between Robin, Sybilia, and her husband and his lover. 

I've never read or studied about Corsica before so this novel gave some (hopefully accurate) insight into a bit about its history and customs. This novel was disheartening in how sad and pointless Sybilia's pain seemed, but was otherwise a decently entertaining historical fiction story.

Stars: 3