The Wishing Chalice

by Sandra Landry

Escaping to the English countryside to recover from her shattered marriage, Isabel stumbles upon an ancient pewter chalice, which transports her back in time and into the body of Detra, a spirited beauty who is forced, by the king, to surrender her castle and her hand in marriage to a fierce warrior. Original.

Genres: Time Travel, Romance, Historical Romance, Time Travel Romance, Historical, Medieval, Medieval Romance

336 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published February 3, 2004

Reviews

[Preeti ♥︎ Her Bookshelves · Rating 4 out of 5]

A consistently well done time travel story although the h/H chemistry in the beginning made me wonder if I had picked up another medieval soft porn.
But the story has depth and character.

Hunter, Isabel and Détra - and Rupert, and...
The story is based in 14th century Cumbria - both the modern and the medieval characters live in the same area. The castle belongs to the H's newly wed wife and the present day h has come to England to forget a divorce and lives in her grandmother's cottage near the ruins of the castle..
The H's wife Détra is cold and disdainful towards her low born and 'bastard' husband, bestowed on her by the king. (The H has loved her since he was a young village boy and she, the local lady.) She holds him back and the marriage of two weeks, remains unconsummated. The magical chalice belonging to the H's mother works so that these three get their wishes. The h comes upon the chalice in the present and sees a vision of a loving couple (H and Détra) and wishes the same for herself, and so does the H while the wife probably wishes herself rid of her husband. (The vision is actually the H's wish/dream of a happy future with his wife and the chalice fulfills it.)
The h wakes up in the ow's body while the ow travels to future to be in her body. The H is astonished at his wife's softened attitude as well as her changed persona. The h falls for the H but is aware that he thinks of her as Détra, and also she is scared that she might any day get transported back. This uncertainty as well as her feeling of responsibility towards Détra, her body and what she would want, keep her scared of committing fully to the H.
The H is an unbelievably sweet guy for a medieval warrior. The villainous om who wanted Détra, the H's paternity and the raiding Scots make for interesting subplots.

The h's behavior, wonder, acceptance and how she feels her way around the medieval mores is nicely done. The h/H share a sweet and sizzling chemistry. Détra's story, in the future, fascinates and I'd like more than a peek into how she coped and got over her arrogant and supercilious attitude. Her love story with her 'engineer' should be lovely. She's not a vamp as her first marriage was horrible and the peeks given into it intrigue.

[MelissaB · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had an interesting concept: The heroine switched bodies with a woman in the middle ages. Isabel, a woman in present day England, finds a magical chalice and sees an image of a man and woman who are obviously in love. The image makes Isobel wish that a man looked at her with such devotion. Hunter, a man in medieval England also holds the chalice, sees the same image of him and his current wife Detra, and wishes the scene were true because his wife does not like him. The magical chalice was given to Hunter by his mother and is supposed to grant him his heart's wish. So the chalice switches souls and puts Isabel in Detra's body in medieval England and we just assume Detra lands in Isabel's body (well we do find out later this is true).

This is where the story started to get off track. Isabel, now in Detra's body, understandably is very confused when she wakes up in the middle ages. She is pretty sure the chalice brought her there, so her sole motivation for about 80% of the book becomes to FIND THE CHALICE. I swear she spent most of this book looking around the castle for the darn thing.

Hunter is a nice guy who was born a bastard but was given training as a knight. He managed to earn himself a castle and his choice of wife through hard work. He chose Detra, a widowed lady who he had wanted from afar. The story starts two weeks after his marriage with Detra avoiding him and his bed and generally putting him down because he is not good enough for her. Then he makes the wish on the chalice and suddenly Detra is not acting herself anymore and he is hopeful that the chalice is giving him a second chance with her. So he tells the new Detra (actually Isabel), who is feining amnesia because she knows nothing of Detra's life, that they had a good marriage in the hopes that he can work his way into her heart before she remembers her dislike of him.

So basically the rest of the story has Detra/Isabel trying to avoid Hunter and his bed while looking for the chalice. Detra/Isabel hurts Hunter even more because she is intent on not sleeping with him because she really isn't his wife. He gets very tired of her rejection of him and quite frankly so did I because she was attracted to him. Even after she thinks the chalice was thrown to the bottom of a lake, she does not really give Hunter a chance because she fears Detra could somehow switch places with her at any time. She even debates sleeping with a man other than Hunter because she wants to do what Detra would have done and not mess up her life. That was where I started to get really pissed off at the story instead of just bored. Detra/Isobel spent way too much of the story just trying to not mess up the old Detra's life instead of just living. I wanted to see a great romance but this story got way too bogged down in the details of all of the problems associated with a body switch.

Hunter was a great hero and I wanted to see Detra/Isobel decide to be with him no matter what. But instead we had to plod along while she bumbled her way around the castle looking for the chalice, then we had to watch her deny Hunter because of what Detra would feel, then we see her think about sleeping with someone other than her husband because that might have been what Detra wanted, then we see her not allow herself to get pregnant because Detra might come back and not want to be pregnant. The ending was nice once Hunter and Detra/Isobel finally get everything worked out between them but I wish the stupid crap would have been worked out early in the story so we could have focused on the romance instead of working out all the fine points of soul-switching. Next time, just send the heroine in her own body through time and skip all of the other crap.

If you want to read a good time travel, stick to Kiss of the Highlander by Karen Marie Moning. Now that is time travel done right.

[AgentScully · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing, beautiful romance. Even if you dislike time travel (and I do), you won't be sorry if you give this a try. Isabel is a smart and determined heroine, and Hunter is a medieval hunk worth going back 700 years for. Their love scenes are sensuous and full of feeling.

The story starts with Isabel feeling rootless and lonely, recovering from a divorce and miscarriage. She stumbles across a chalice that shows her a handsome medieval couple deeply in love. Impulsively she wishes that she were that woman, and presto she wakes up in that woman's body in 1315. Confused, she fakes amnesia while searching for the chalice to get back to her own time.

Hunter meanwhile has been wishing his new marriage was happy and trying to win his scornful wife's Detra's affection. Faced with her amnesia, he seizes upon the chance to woo his wife anew and finally consummate the marriage. He pretends to Isabel that they're a happy couple. Isabel is attracted to Hunter but resists sex because she doesn't want to sleep with another woman's husband. Moreover she can't find the chalice because Hunter has hidden it, scared that he will lose this newly affectionate wife.

I really felt for Hunter. Poor guy was so longing for love (and sex!) from his wife and a happy marriage. Sure he lied to her about them being a happy couple, and later again about the whereabouts of the chalice, but it was understandable and he apologized both times to Isabel (which makes him a bigger hero in my eyes).

The writing is excellent and the plot is well done. There's just enough angst as Isabel finds herself in 1315, but this is not overdone. The action kicks up a notch half way through, when Isabel finds out Detra was trying to annul her marriage and carrying on with another guy behind Hunter's back. What will happen to Hunter and Isabel's new relationship when Hunter finds out? Also what will happen when the supposedly magic chalice attracts the covetousness of Hunter's enemy? And can Isabel stay in this time, not knowing if Detra is trying to get back?

I really loved this romance. The HEA is very satisfying indeed :-)

[Sherri Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story. I would like to see a story finding out how Detra makes out in the future.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Auj · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it. Even though I feel like it only deserves 3 stars (for being good, no complaints), books I probably liked less I gave 4 stars, so it's only fair. Also I feel bad. But maybe I need to be more selective in the future in which books get 4 stars lol.
Anyways, to the review: what annoyed me was Isabella's persistence on finding the chalice and going back just because it "wasn't fair to steal another woman's husband" or live her life. If I were Isabella, I would have thought well, this was meant to be; I was meant to be with Hunter and this isn't a mistake. Fate. No, Isabella had to worry instead of being happy and basking in her newfound love with Hunter.
What made the plot more interesting was the secondary plot with Rupert wanting and planning on marrying Derta. I gasped when we found that out.
I was hoping that maybe in the epilogue, we would get a glimpse of Derta with her construction worker. How did they meet? How come she was okay with a construction worker? like whattt lmao

Also, I wonder if she was just a cold person in general. It seems weird for her to love another person. Or just cold to Hunter because he was a bastard and she was trying to have the marriage be unconsummated so she could marry Rupert instead.
So I guess Lord Reginald was going to tell Hunter that his dad was not him but Bruce ? Damn, to be the bastard son of a king. So close to being a king one day yourself. RIP
It was a shame that (I think) Rupert and Hunter's fighting upset Reginald, which made him cough and die, before Reginald could reveal Hunter's paternity. I think they speed up his death tbh. However, this was okay because Bruce later told Hunter.

The time travel was believable because it is a magical chalice after all.
Also, the way the author kept describing Hunter when they made love (i.e. his hairy body) made him seem less attractive to me. I don't really like dark. long black hair on a guy.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was nothing special,no depth to characters and the writing very simple ,cliche and formulaic ,some sentences were copied and pasted from other books (ex .her traitorous body ,every fibre of her being and so on) . The next day I’ve finished I’ll forget it and it doesn’t deserve any re read.

[rue · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 5 star for me

Its been a long time for me to actualy rate a 5 star but, this definitely did

It was everything that any HR loving individual would love.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found myself really liking Hunter. A romance is most successful when you really want things to work out and thse two people to get together (as opposed to "meh" or "by all that is sacred on this planet, do NOT let those two near each other unless you want me to throw this book against the wall in disgust"). This one hit me with about half force. I wanted a happy ending for Hunter, which involved him getting the girl. As for Isabel, I could take her or leave her, and I think some of that had to do with the huge difference in the way the two characters were introduced. Isabel starts the story off with a major info dump, letting us know all about her misfortunes and her loneliness. It's hard to develop empathy for a character's back story when you get it all within a couple of pages, and then immediately move on to something else. Hunter, on the other hand, is introduced with Détra, and from their interactions we get a good idea of who he is and the desperation and unhappiness of his situation. He was just a more sympathetic character from the outset, and more or less continued that way. His actions made sense, when sometimes I wanted to smack Isabel upside the head. I still don't understand why she waited so long to tell Hunter that she wasn't Détra, that she had switched places with his wife. He was very understanding about her lost memories, and she had any number of opportunities to come clean. It would have undoubtedly helped with the "oh, I'm so awful, I stole another woman's husband and life" angst.

I would actually have been interested to learn more about what happened to Détra after having been sent into Isabel's body in the future. Her big wish was to have the independence to be allowed to make her own choices, and while modern times certainly accomodate that, she'd have an awful lot of unfathomable things to adjust to first. Of the two of them, Isabel has the edge, since she at least has some basic idea of what the middle ages were like. Alright, probably an anachronistic idea at best, and she'd still suffer from culture shock, but even with all that, she's better off than Détra.

The external conflict was largely provided by Rupert, trying to screw Hunter over while trying to screw Détra in a very different sense of the word. We don't really hear much from his perspective, so beyond him being petty and obsessive, he doesn't seem to have much personality. As villains go, he was pretty flat, but the complications he provided to the plotline were fairly interesting, since Détra had been scheming with him before Isabel took over his body. Isabel, of course, had no memory of this, but still has to figure out a way to convince Hunter to forgive her for sins she hadn't committed against him, and that his faith in her would be justified in the future.

Time travel is not an uncommon trope in romance fiction, so it takes some good writing (or alternately, some really bad writing, if that's how you'd rather be remembered) to stand out. The Wishing Chalice almost succeeds. Landry's method of body swapping was a nice way to work around some of the issues other time travel stories have, and I was happy to see that although Isabel annoyed me sometimes, she didn't try to take over the world with her spunky and inappropriate-to-the-time attitude, single-handedly forging a new feminist revolution. The dialogue wasn't always of the right period, and I'm thinking Hunter should have been a little more shocked at some of the liberal things his wife initiated in the bedroom, but I was delighted that Détra's body was significantly heavier than Isabel's, and was considered stunningly beautiful. Waifish historical heroines annoy me.

The ending conveniently wrapped everything up in a neat little bow, but managed not to smack of deus ex machina (well, ok, except for the magical chalice at the beginning of the story). Part of the point in reading a romance novel, though, is to get the satisfaction of the happy ending, and there's no doubt of anyone's happiness here. I can believe that Hunter and Isabel would be happy together, and so my fondness for Hunter is satisfied.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

*** Full summary from inside the book ***
Mourn­ing the breakup of her mar­riage, Is­abel re­treats to the serene Eng­lish coun­try­side to find some mea­sure of peace and heal­ing. There she stum­bles upon an an­cient pewter chal­ice—and is thrust cen­turies back in time into the body of an­other woman. Sud­denly she is mar­ried to a total stranger—a fierce war­rior who looks at his "wife" with un­de­ni­able yearn­ing in his eyes...

Hunter had fi­nally achieved his long-de­sired goal when the king gifted him with Win­der­mere cas­tle—and the hand of its beau­ti­ful lady, Détra. But his dream tasted like ashes, for al­though he was now her lord and hus­band, Détra de­spised him and vowed never to love him. But sud­denly, Détra seems to have un­der­gone a swift and be­wil­der­ing change. She claims to have no mem­ory of him, of the cir­cum­stances of their mar­riage and her ha­tred for him, and for­gets even her own name. Now, Hunter has a sec­ond chance—to woo his lady wife with kisses, and se­duce her with plea­sure until noth­ing or no one can keep him from his heart's de­sire—no one, per­haps, but Is­abel...

*** My Thoughts ***
While not my favorite book in the world it still rates high for me, from start to finish I couldn't put this book down. Rather than come out and say 'I'm from the future' like you see in most books, Isabel is in the unique position where her 'soul' is in the past yet her body remains in the present. Kinda hard to pull the future card with that, and lets be honest if you were somehow transported to the past the future card is not one that you would be pulling least you wanted to end up dead or worse. Any who, had Hunter been honest with Isobel about what their marriage was truly like before her 'loss of memory' then this whole book might have played out very differently. As that was not the case we have what was given to us, and I must say that I LOVED the appearance of Robert the Bruce! ;)

3.5 stars!

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I almost passed this over becasuse it is a time travel romance, and those are cheesy more often than not IMO. However, Landry's characters produced an adequate amount of disbelief to make the story credible. There were quite a few twists that made this a fast read. This book was lacking in the humor department, but I still enjoyed the more serious tone as Isabel and Hunter seek an unconditional love.

[Regina · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best time-travel romances I've read. Reminds me of When There is Hope by Jane Goodger in that heroine is transported into another body and into a bad or unwanted marriage. Lots of hurdles for the main couple to overcome, but Isabel/Detra and Hunter's love is true. My only peeve is that Isabel wrestled too long with what she perceived as not being the true woman Hunter loved. 4 stars.

[C Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it the second time and liked it more, a good read, very fascinating and entertaining.

[Monica]

Another of my favorite romances. time travel :)

[Deanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great romance, although I am not a huge fan of time travel, this was handled very well. Nice quick read that kept me entertained.

[Shani · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.3*