Welcome Back, Booklovers! Raiders of the Lost Heart intrigued me because it was promising me an adventure romance which I don't see a lot of. With comparisons to Romancing the Stone and Indiana Jones I knew I had to read this one before the year ended. It did finally inspire me to watch The Lost City out of curiosity wondering if it would have any of those vibes.
Dr. Corrie Mejia is very passionate about finding the lost remains of Chimalli, an Aztec warrior she believes to be one of her ancestors. Which is why she agrees to trek through the Mexican jungles with her enemy Dr. Ford Matthews and play second fiddle despite the fact that she should be leading this expedition. While working on this dig old feelings from college resurface while the stakes get higher in the search for Chimalli.
Corrie and Ford have enough chemistry and there's enough steam to satisfy readers but it's still hard to get into this couple because of how easy they get together. Corrie's anger towards Ford is warranted since he basically slept his way into a fellowship that should've been hers. It felt like the author uses Ford having a dead parent and a dying parent as a way for readers to have instantly sympathy for him and also justify his actions while absolving him from accountability. Corrie so easily forgives him even as he uses her dissertation as a guide for this dig that he'll not only receive the credit for but a substantial amount of money for.
And as much as we are told she's a great archaeologist that's not portrayed on page. At times it felt like the book was actively going against the message it was trying to tell about women being seen as equals in their industries. Even in the author's note Jo Segura mentions that while she likes archeology in actuality it's quite boring so she left that boring stuff out in order to not bore readers. There's much talk from Corrie about not falling into the sexy Latina stereotype yet all she's portrayed as is the sexy Latina with much description of her fabulous breasts and how much the crew is lusting after her. Corrie is also willing to risk her reputation very easily for sex with the man who has screwed her over multiple times in her career to advance his own. And for a professor who taught at Yale, Ford was very bad at doing research which causes them to run into problems later. Which was also wild because so much of archaeology is research!
What started off as an interesting premise ended up fizzling out for this reader.
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