Tomorrow Comes the Sun

by Elizabeth Renier

When beautiful Crissa Conway was banished to a house on a melancholy moor, "tomorrow" was a vision clouded by anxiety and despair.
But there she met two men who awakened her turbulent emotions: Armanc de Beauvoir, young, gay, and eager to fall in love, and Dr. Paul Leland, aloof, and wary of women. When a witch's curse endangered her sister's life, and the moor itself - eerie and hostile - threatened to claim one suitor's life, Crissa knew that she could not escape the dilemma of committing herself to one man....But which one?

222 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published February 1, 1981

About the author

Pen name of Betty Doreen Baker.

Reviews

[Andzelika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t have high hopes for this book since I had purchased it from an antique store, but It actually exceeded my expectations. The story takes place in a time where women are to be stay at home mothers and men are the ones providing for the family. Seems the Main character Crissa challenges this ideology. She sticks to her own beliefs and defy’s the ideologies of the timeframe.

It’s a sweet romantic book with lots of twists and turns. One in which I did not expect but am so glad it happened. Glad I picked this book up coincidently.

[Igenlode Wordsmith · Rating 3 out of 5]

It starts with an interesting premise; it is not the fiery, strong-minded heroine who has had a passionate love affair, become pregnant and married in secret, but the little sister towards whom she is very protective, and whose young husband has now died in action, leaving her a disgraced widow who is sent off to bear her child in secret at the house of a grim aunt, while the protagonist is obliged to keep her company. The book is set during the Napoleonic Wars, but it is not a 'Regency Romance', any more than D.K. Broster's Mr. Rowl (of which it is inevitably reminiscent, since a major part of the novel deals with the French officers on parole, and the inferior conditions suffered by those who break parole and are imprisoned in the depot at Princeton instead). To be honest the blurb and cover shown on Goodreads would have put me off reading before the start, but in fact this is far more of an old fashioned 'straight' historical novel than it is a genre romance - and unfortunately the rather rushed romance at the end, where Crissa suddenly realises that she is in True Love with the grumpy doctor and not with the French prisoner whom she has befriended, and her sister gets hastily paired off with Armand instead, is the weakest part of it.

What I enjoyed about it, and what attracted me from the first chapter, where Crissa is arguing with her outraged and dictatorial father, is that there are no cardboard evil characters; the book has an unexpected amount of sympathy for the grumpy, elderly and/or physically unattractive people who obstruct the heroine's desires, and even the implacable parole agent turns out in the end to have an understandable motive behind his attitude. The witch with the Evil Eye is ultimately just a pathetic beggar woman who plays on her neighbours' fears in order to avoid starvation. The aunt has no intention of infanticide, whatever Crissa's suspicions of her. But the book is not at all 'cosy'or 'fluffy' either. It is by and large humane and understanding, and set within its period of history without fetishising it.

Unfortunately I did feel that it went downhill quite a lot at the end; it would have been chilling if Crissa had encountered a real ghost of an unhappy escaped prisoner, but the explanation of how he came to vanish entirely after her confused and inexplicable urge to rush towards him left me confused and unconvinced; I felt the author was trying to have her cake and eat it with this 'supernatural' episode. Having heartbroken Hetty casually paired off (presumably to avoid making Crissa's change of heart look bad) felt a bit distasteful. The mineshaft scene is dramatic, but it might have worked better if Crissa's realization of her true feelings came as a consequence of that, rather than as a motive for her to go in the first place...

I have no idea what the reason for the title is!