I tried, but the constant jumping around in time (present day, flashback to teen years, flash forward a year, flashback again) was disorienting and haI tried, but the constant jumping around in time (present day, flashback to teen years, flash forward a year, flashback again) was disorienting and hard to follow. Dominic's behavior was totally unacceptable, and Diana kept getting back with him anyway, which made me lose respect for her and which made no sense since she was supposed to be a smart cookie. I didn't like the constant melodrama, found the characters unlikeable, and just couldn't get invested in the story. Big ol' NOPE. ...more
I devoured the whole Ivy Years series during a 5 day long-weekend (one thing transcontinental flights are good for is reading), and I'm not usually a I devoured the whole Ivy Years series during a 5 day long-weekend (one thing transcontinental flights are good for is reading), and I'm not usually a fan of the New Adult genre. These books were a pleasant surprise. The Year We Fell Down is the first in the series, and it tells the story of Corey Callahan and Adam Hartley, two students who meet when they are neighbors in Harkness College's (modeled after Yale) handicapped student dorm. Hartley's injury is temporary: he has badly broken his leg, which lands him in a cast for twelve weeks and costs him a season playing hockey. Callahan's disability is more significant and more permanent: also a hockey player, a bad fall left her with a spinal cord injury that has left her unable to feel her lower extremities. Though she can walk (with great effort and the assistance of cumbersome braces and crutches), she is most often in a wheelchair.
There were a lot of things I loved about this story. First, it felt like nothing I'd ever read before. The "disability" trope isn't uncommon, but usually a main character is stricken with a scar or something disfiguring but which doesn't impact his/her physical abilities, or something like blindness or deafness, which doesn't impact his/her attractiveness. Corey is recovering from an injury that has changed, permanently, both her physical ability and the way she and others see her, and there's no miracle cure. She can walk (with great effort and perseverance), but she's never going to skate again.
I loved Corey's attitude, and the thought-provoking way the author addressed her disability. Nothing is sugar-coated. Corey is honest and sometimes angry about her condition. She gets annoyed when she goes to the dining hall and can't see over the counters to see what's being served, and how, in her chair, her line of sight is exactly at everyone else's butt level. She gets frustrated when she goes to a party and can't move around to mingle, and when she gets separated from her chair, she has to do an embarrassing butt-skoot down several flights of stairs to get back to it. And yet she goes to the dining hall and to the parties anyway. Her parents would rather have kept her home, or at least at a closer, more modern school with better handicap access, but Corey has dreamed of going to Harkness forever, and she's determined to live her dreams.
I also love that Corey doesn't let romance or heartbreak stand in the way of her studies. She is a serious student without being a geek, and when Hartley blows her off when his long-time girlfriend comes home from a semester abroad, Corey doesn't slink off somewhere to sulk: she studies her ass off. Neither does she wait around for Hartley to discover the error of his ways and come crawling back to her: Corey realizes it was a mistake to rely so heavily on Hartley for social interaction, and she joins an intermural water polo team in an effort to get out more. In short, Corey is brave, and smart, and frankly pretty awesome, without being an angsty Mary Sue.
I didn't love Hartley so much. For much of the first part of the book, he moves in on Corey despite the fact that he's got an absentee girlfriend. (And the girlfriend is annoyingly one-dimensional, such that Hartley's attraction, even when he explains that it's more than just her looks, does not reflect well on him at all.) However, he eventually owns his sins in a way that is satisfying even as it did not entirely win me over.
The sex scenes are few but they're great: funny and sexy and frank.
One thing I didn't love about this book is the tidy conclusion to Hartley's family dilemma. He's never met his father, a wealthy society scion who got his mom (a waitress at the country club) knocked up and then didn't pay his child support. Hartley dates Stacia, the one-dimensional rich girlfriend, because she lives in his dad's neighborhood. At the end of the story, Hartley's dad shows up writing huge checks for back child support and full of promises to make things right, and it was all just a little too neat and Pollyanna-ish for the rest of the story. Reading on in the series, it seems like these late-entering characters who show up to tie up the thorniest plots with a neat and tidy little bow seem to be a recurring theme in the Ivy Years series, and it's a theme I could have done without.
Bottom line: This is easily the best New Adult book I've ever read--(Caveat: Most of the other NA books I've tried, I've hated)--and it's also one of the most refreshingly original contemporary romances I've ever read, so I highly recommend it.
I've had Monica McCarty's "Special Ops in kilts" Highland Guard series in my TBR for a long time, and moved it to the top of the list in the days leadI've had Monica McCarty's "Special Ops in kilts" Highland Guard series in my TBR for a long time, and moved it to the top of the list in the days leading up to Scotland's September 18, 2014 vote on whether or not to remain part of the United Kingdom, because what's more appropriate on the verge of a vote for Scottish Independence than to read about Robert the Bruce's 1306-07 struggle for Scottish Independence?
The Hawk is the second book in the series, and holy moly, it is Chock Full of Crazy. If you are a stickler for historical accuracy or have a low tolerance for plot ridiculousness, this is not the book for you. There is a scene in which the hero and heroine sail across the Irish Sea in a fierce storm in the middle of the night in the dead of winter in a ten foot skiff cobbled together with scrap wood and seal grease and sailed with a freaking bedsheet, and when the mast breaks, they're all, "Oooh, this is sexy!" and they lay down in the bottom of the boat and get it on. Some people would be annoyed by this kind of thing: I just laughed and rolled my eyes so hard I nearly strained a muscle.
If you have a high tolerance for ridiculousness, though, this book can give you a heck of a ride: there are kidnappings, chase scenes, narrow escapes, hand-to-hand combat, dangerous missions, spies, and lots and lots of boats (I'm a sucker for boats). Erik "Hawk" MacSorley can sail anything and swim like a fish. He's also gorgeous and charming and basically sex-on-a-stick. He gets around, and makes no bones about it. He is trying to gather Irish soldiers to assist in Robert the Bruce's uprising against England's Edward I, and is having a secret rendezvous with Irish militants when Ellie accidentally swims into the cave where they're hatching their plans. (Yes, she's swimming. At night. In January. Chock Full of Crazy, I tell you.) Hawk can't let her go because he doesn't know what she's heard, and he can't leave her to be raped and killed by the Irish (who are great when you need a hand in a fight, but you can't trust 'em around the ladies), so he takes her with him as a captive.
Ellie mistakenly believes Hawk is a pirate, and that he'd take advantage if he knew she was the wealthy daughter of an earl aligned with the English, so she tells him she's a lowly nursemaid. This mutual mistake of identity persists throughout much of the novel.
Ellie is also (as the story keeps telling us over and over and over again) painfully plain and not at all Hawk's usual type. I know that it's supposed to be romantic when Adonis falls for Plain Jane despite her lack of looks, but whatever: all of that handwringing about how-can-anyone-so-perfect-possibly-look-twice-at-me? (on Ellie's part) and I-can't-believe-my-staff-is-rising-for-this-chick-who-barely-has-any-boobs (on Hawk's part) really doesn't reflect well on either of them.
That said, Ellie is really smart and has plenty of starch in her collar, and Hawk is funny and charming and noble, so their romance mostly worked for me even despite the annoying Plain Jane trope and their inexplicable tendency to get hot and bothered in circumstances which seem cold, wet, and uncomfortable to me. (See the infamous Boat Scene, referenced above.)
I liked the first three quarters of the book much better than the end, where the lovers were separated and the plot bogged down in the skirmishes between Robert's and Edward's battalions, but on the whole, this was a fun (albeit completely absurd) read....more
Code Name Cassandra picks up right where When Lightning Strikes leaves off. Sixteen-year-old Jess has gotten the press off her back by telling the worCode Name Cassandra picks up right where When Lightning Strikes leaves off. Sixteen-year-old Jess has gotten the press off her back by telling the world her psychic ability to find missing people vanished as quickly as it had arrived, but the feds don't believe her: there's still a white van parked on her street, and she's sure they're bugging her calls. To escape this scrutiny (and also to avoid toiling away at her father's restaurant all summer), Jess takes a summer job as a counselor at a camp for musically gifted kids, but of course trouble follows her even into the wilds of Northern Indiana.
This book, and this series, is hardly groundbreaking, but I'm still entertained enough to keep reading the next book -- and Meg Cabot's poor grammar didn't bother me as much in this one (but maybe I'm just building up a tolerance for it). ...more
Chaotic Plot Wore Me Out Ashley Bowman has always been impetuous, but even she is a little shocked when she chains herself to a palm tree in the FloriChaotic Plot Wore Me Out Ashley Bowman has always been impetuous, but even she is a little shocked when she chains herself to a palm tree in the Florida Keys hours before a hurricane is due to blow in. It’s all with the hope of saving her childhood home from a heartless Miami developer. But the moment she meets Roman Díaz she realizes he does have a heart—it’s just encased in ice. Ashley’s determined to get Roman to crack . . . even if she has to drag him all over the eastern seaboard to do it. Roman can hardly believe he’s been talked into driving across the country with this brazen wild child in a skimpy bikini. He tells himself he had no choice—Ashley insists he meets the elderly snowbirds whose community will be displaced by his career-making development deal. But in truth he knows that there’s something about Ashley that makes him want to get a little wild himself . . . and the closer they get, the more tempted he becomes.
I love Ruthie Knox, but this is not her best work. There's waaaaaay too much going on in this plot: 1) Hero, Roman, wrestling with Daddy Issues with not one, not two, but three different father figures. 2) Heroine, Ashley, with her own Daddy Issues, roiling with grief over her grandmother's death and the impending destruction (at real estate developer Roman's hands) of her grandmother's run down resort in the Florida Keys, which Ashley had expected to inherit. 3) Roman's girlfriend, Carmen, an uptight Daddy's Girl whose soul is deeply encased in ice and attitude. 4) An absolute zoo of supporting characters, most of whom cluttered up the plot rather than contributing much to the story: Ashley's neglectful-yet-controlling Republican Senator Dad, Roman's judgmental and uber-rich Cuban immigrant real estate magnate mentor, the inhabitants of a hippie commune in Georgia (including a 300-lb alligator named Flossie), a cantankerous old codger from Pennsylvania coal country in love with a free-spirited artist from Wisconsin, a Rock God, his wife and baby and Nana-in-law (whom Ruthie Knox's readers will recognize from her Camelot series), and so many others I could barely keep track.
It took me a long time to warm up to both main characters: Roman because of his apparent greed and conspicuous consumerism (he drives a Cadillac Escalade, which he loves more than his fiancee), and because he was so emotionally-constipated I initially wondered he might be on the Autism spectrum, and Ashley because she seemed so flaky and childish. She's never held a job or maintained a relationship for more than a few months and she has no idea what she wants to do with her life. However, as the fight 'em or fuck 'em / slap-slap kiss-kiss dynamic evolved, I began to enjoy the developing romance: Roman and Ashley see each other differently and more honestly than others see them, and together they help each other be more authentic and just generally better people, which is one of the hallmarks of a healthy relationship.
However, I never warmed up to the chaotic plot. This is a quest story in which Ashley drives Roman across the country from Florida to Wisconsin, stopping along to way to meet and collect Ashley's grandmother's friends. The goal is that these people will help Ashley convince Roman that the ramshackle resort is too great to demolish to make way for a bigger, more modern resort, but like all of Ashley's plans, this one is vague, and as a plot device, it just feels busy, unfocused, and contrived. The road trip portion of this story reminded me of Ruthie Knox's debut novel, Ride With Me, in which the main characters are on a cross-country bike trip, but Ride With Me felt fresh and clever whereas this just felt scattered, literally, all over the map.
Among the chaos, there were scenes and subplots I really enjoyed, including Ashley and Roman's stay at the hippie commune, and the way Roman broke off his engagement to Carmen (and the infidelity aspect of this plot could have been really dicey, but miraculously wasn't) and the awkwardness, honesty, and maturity of the ex-lovers' relationship after the split. There was plenty of humor and plenty of heart-tugging emotion throughout the story, but my overall impression is that this could have been a much better book with a tighter plot.
*** I received a free ARC from NetGalley and Loveswept in exchange for my honest review.***...more
Last week when I posted my review of Outlander, I wondered whether it would be smart to press on with the series in one epic reading binge, or whetherLast week when I posted my review of Outlander, I wondered whether it would be smart to press on with the series in one epic reading binge, or whether, due to their epic length and the difficult emotional content, it would be smarter to take them slowly... as if I could. A longstanding joke in my family is that I was absent the day they handed out will power, and sure enough, even as I knew it would probably be too much for me emotionally, I devoured Dragonfly in Amber and then Voyager. And maybe it was too much of a good thing, or maybe it was just that I hit a wall and had no more empathy to waste on Jamie and Claire and their endless trevails, but I reached a point midway in this book where I just could not willingly suspend my disbelief any longer.
I'm not sure what happened. Having finished Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber, I was already well used to the endless cycle of Jamie and/or Claire finding themselves in mortal peril with no way out, only they do get out, celebrate their narrow escape with sexy times, and then shortly find themselves in mortal peril again. I'd suspended my disbelief quite a bit, and was just enjoying the ride.
Back in December 2011, the DBSA Romance Fiction Podcast (hosted by Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Jane Litte of Dear Author) had an episode about the Ridiculousness Threshold -- that point at which the reader can no longer accept character or plot insanity and no longer enjoys the book. For me, I hit the Ridiculousness Threshold the moment Laoghaire's daughter walks in on Jamie going down on Claire (view spoiler)[ and calls him "Daddy!" (hide spoiler)].
After that, no matter how I tried, I could not silence my inner skeptic. Almost every twist and turn of the convoluted plot made me roll my eyes and think, "Oh, for f***'s sake, seriously?" The entire rest of the book is one absolutely ridiculous coincidence after another, and even in a series where I was willing to believe in time travel and the main characters' repeated skin-of-the-teeth survival against all odds, I just could not believe in pirates and slasher-killers and secret babies and zombies and shipwrecks and all of the rest of the insanity writ large over the 870 pages of this book.
And you know, the hell of it is that even though I'm totally done, and can't shut up my inner critic enough to enjoy reading, I still want to know what happens to Jamie and Claire next. Maybe I can find some Cliffs Notes. ...more
The OUTLANDER series started by accident, when I decided to write a novel for practice, in order to: 1. Learn what
On her website, Diana Gabaldon says:
The OUTLANDER series started by accident, when I decided to write a novel for practice, in order to: 1. Learn what it took to write a novel, and 2. To decide whether I really wanted to do that for real.
I don't know if I've ever read a sentence that made me burn quite so hot with jealousy. I've been "writing novels for practice" for some twenty years, and yet... well, I'm not Diana Gabaldon, obviously.
This book blew me away. I'm an Outlander Noob, and I admit I approached this first book with skeptical trepidation, for three reasons: 1) People love this series, and too many times I have been lured in by hype only to be underwhelmed by my reading experience; 2) I knew these books involve time travel, and prior to this I'd never met a time travel book I actually enjoyed; and 3) these books are huge, and there are so many of them, and so I knew that even if I like the series, I'd be making an enormous reading time commitment (to say nothing of the expense!). Needless to say, I approached with caution.
Well, now I'm throwing caution to the wind. Outlander is awesome... but phew, how exhausting! (And not just because I've stayed up way too late reading for five nights running, either.) At the end of the book, Claire mentions that Job is Jamie's favorite book of the Bible. No wonder! In the course of their travels in less than a year, Claire and Jamie endure calamities and tribulations that rival even Job's epic suffering, and as a reader, I was often white-knuckled and tense with vicarious trauma.
Now I'm in a terrible bind: I really, really want to know what happens next, but there are seven more books, all equally enormous, to say nothing of the spinoffs, and I'm just not sure that helping myself to such a giant helping of vicarious reading trauma would be wise. Those lucky readers who came earlier to the Outlander party have had twenty-three years to spread out the emotional torment, Outlander having first been published in 1991 (about the time I first sat down to try to "write a novel for practice" -- Curse you, Diana Gabaldon!), and so you had to take it in small doses. Here's me, with the whole massive, sleep-depriving, ulcer-inducing, blood-pressure-elevating series at my finger tips with a few clicks of my mouse, and like an addict, I'm not sure I have the will power to resist a lethal hit.
UPDATE: I do have a couple of quibbles, though. I didn't include them earlier, because I don't think they impact my overall rating of the book, but now that I've stewed on things a bit I feel like I have to mention these points, because they really did bother me. A lot.
First: Shortly after their marriage, Jamie takes a strap to Claire because she disobeyed an order. He explains that he has to beat her in order to restore her standing in the Clan (because her disobedience was so public), and while it's true that the other men stop shunning her after her punishment has been served, and while I understand that it's probably a very historically accurate scene (wives having roughly the same legal standing as children in that era, and thus in need of their husband's discipline), I was troubled by the plot's implications that the beating brought Jamie and Claire closer. The resolution of conflict in a relationship brings people closer; not violence. Historically accurate or not, Diana Gabaldon is writing for a modern audience, and I can't help but filter what I read through my own (strongly anti-domestic-violence) lens. I also know that 1991 (when Outlander was first published) was very much on the cusp of the rapetastic bodice-ripper "Old Skool" of the romance genre just beginning to give way to the trend of kinder, gentler heroes and smarter, more independent and self-actualized heroines. In 1991, alph-hole heroes who beat on and raped their lovers were a venerable tradition in romance, and I wonder if Outlander were written today, instead of twenty years ago, if Gabaldon and her editors might not have had second thoughts about the necessity of that scene.
Next: There is another scene, not too long after, where Jamie tells Claire he wants sex and it doesn't matter whether or not she consents; he wants her, and he will have her, and her opinion on the matter is neither invited nor welcome. (Luckily, she's on board, but it's clear that it wouldn't have mattered if she hadn't been.) That is one of the most fully described sex scenes in the book (usually the sexy times, though numerous, are recounted in glancing detail), and I didn't find it appealing at all.
Finally: Why must the bad guys always be gay?! Actually, I think this is another hold-over from the conventions of Old Skool romance. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, almost without exception, if a character in romantic fiction was revealed to be gay or bisexual, you could take it to the bank that they'd turn out to be a villain in the end. As a bisexual woman in a committed lesbian relationship, I'm so, so glad that this trope is far less common now.
All three of these "quibbles" -- physical abuse, sexual non consent, and homophobia -- are the sort of major pet peeves that usually make me rage quit a book, and the fact that I was willing to tolerate them here (though they made my eyelids twitch) and still enjoy the book as much as I did says a lot. ...more
For the second time in as many months, Rainbow Rowell has kept me up way too late, totally sucked into and thoroughy transported by one of her books (For the second time in as many months, Rainbow Rowell has kept me up way too late, totally sucked into and thoroughy transported by one of her books (the last one was Eleanor & Park). And for the second time, I have been totally in love with the story ... until I got to the end, at which point I thought, "Really? I stayed up until 3:00 AM for this?" With Eleanor & Park, I dismissed my disappointment as shallowness and decided I'd conditioned myself to expect a Happy Ever After in everything, even though some stories don't end happily. Eleanor & Park's ending wasn't happy, but it fit the story, and though I can't say I liked it, I respected what I think Ms. Rowell was trying to do. This time, I'm not as sanguine. This time, I feel a little cheated.
But more on the ending later. I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like Fangirl, because I did. Up until the last 40 pages, I really, really did. It started a little slowly for me. For the first 70 pages or so, I felt like an outsider looking in, not really hooked yet -- probably because I'm almost twenty years past my own college freshman experience, and because the fanfic phenomenon didn't really exist when I came of age, or at least not on the scale it exists now. (Fangirl's protagonist, Cather Avery, is a painfully shy young woman who writes a tremendously popular Harry Potter-esque fan fiction.) I know that that fan fiction is a big thing, but I've always been very skeptical of it, probably because my experience has been limited to Fifty Shades of Grey, which everyone knows started as fan fic of Twilight (and which, in my opinion, took something that was bad to begin with and made it about a zillion times more horrifying). At any rate, I approached Cath's hobby (and thus, this book) with trepidation, because my first instinct was (and is) that writing fan fic is kinda weird. -And you know what? It's totally okay that I think that. Cath knows it's kinda weird. Almost everyone in the story--from her snarky roommate, to her judgey creative writing professor, to her seeking-individuality-at-the-bottom-of-a-tequila-bottle identical twin sister--also thinks it's kinda weird.
The narrative is scattered with excerpts from Cath's fan fic, as well as excerpts from Simon Snow, the Harry Potter-like series upon which it is based, and to be honest, even as I got over my skepticism about Cath's writing I still found myself skimming these sections. They are critical to the structure of the story, so it's not as if Rowell could have left them out, but I found them distracting because we only know enough about Simon Snow to know it's like Harry Potter (boy wizard at magic school fighting epic evil), but different, and not enough to actually follow the Simon Snow mythology or care much about the characters (who the hell is Penelope?).
Once again, I have veered off into what I didn't like about this book, and I really don't mean to keep doing that. (I blame the 2.5 hours of sleep I got after staying up most of the night reading.) Here's what I love: all of the characters are so real and so perfectly... imperfect. I am so tired of the special snowflake female protagonists that populate New Adult fiction, these falsely-modest beautiful girls who effortlessly win over these equally one-dimensional, paragon-of-perfection type guys, and every single other character is just wallpaper as the couple fall in love and go about their business.
Cath isn't like that: she's skirting the fine line between social anxiety and mental illness. She is introverted and painfully shy, and she knows (because her father is bipolar) that it wouldn't take much to push her over the line into crazytown. I love that she is both terrified of becoming crazy and sometimes unwilling or unable to make choices to move herself off that path, at least not without help from others (her sister, her dad, her roommate, her writing professor, her boyfriend). I love that she gets help from others, and not just from her boyfriend.
Levi, the boyfriend, isn't a paragon of perfection either. He has a receding hairline and a soft chin. He doesn't wash his hair as often as he ought. He can't read. He very nearly dooms their relationship right out of the starting gate by making a boneheaded, but totally normal, boy mistake. He is such a nice guy, a really lovely human being, but he isn't a Gary Stu because his good manners and sunny disposition are balanced out by real, human, imperfections.
I love Cath and Levi together. As an introvert myself, I totally understood Cath's befuddlement at the way Levi goes around smiling and being nice to people "as if it doesn't cost him anything," and his corresponding bafflement that of course it doesn't cost him anything. At one point, Cath describes Levi as a golden retriever, and I laughed out loud, because one of my best friends is an extrovert and describes herself the same way. In addition to this good friend, my mother and my sister are both extroverts, and when I am in social situations with them, I totally feel as if we are from alternate universes, as if we have nothing in common, as if it makes no sense that we could be friends or share the same DNA. Cath's sense of otherness, of incompatibility, totally resonates with me.
I love that the supporting characters are not just background. Cath's relationships with her family -- her twin sister, her mentally-ill father, her mostly-absent mother -- are fully developed and full of dramatic conflict and resolution even as they are secondary to the developing romance between Cath and Levi. Cath's roommate is snarky and sharp tongued, and a lesser writer could easily have turned her into a stock character whose sole purpose is comic relief, but Reagan, too, is a fully drawn person with her own history and feelings and motivations. She's not solely there to draw Cath out of her introverted shell (though she does an admirable job of it).
Rowell has an amazing gift for dialogue. Her characters are funny and sharp and snarky and poignant and honest, and their conversations move the story along and make the reader feel All The Feelz, and yet the dialogue is always believable, sounding like things real people would actually say in similar situations.
But the ending! *Mournful sigh.* I'm not even sure I can articulate what I found so disappointing. It's not that it leaves loose ends hanging: it doesn't. It's not that it isn't "happy": it is, at least happy for now, which is totally appropriate in a YA/NA romance -- how many of us settle down with our first loves, after all? It just felt really abrupt, and out of sync with the pace of the rest of the book. Fangirl is 436 "pages" long on my Kindle (not including Acknowledgments, etc.). The dramatic conflict is still building up until page 422, which leaves approximately 14 pages to wrap everything up. Roughly half of those fourteen pages are excerpts which, as I mentioned above, I found distracting even as I recognize the point of including them in the story. So, yes, the ending felt sudden, underdeveloped, and too neat and orderly. I subtracted a whole star from my rating just because of that let down. Harsh? Maybe, but is there anything worse than an extremely disappointing ending to a book you love as much as I loved this one?...more
It's a good thing I read book two of this series, The Derby Girl, before reading this, because if I'd read this first I would have given up on the serIt's a good thing I read book two of this series, The Derby Girl, before reading this, because if I'd read this first I would have given up on the series and The Derby Girl is delicious and fun in a way that The Rebound Girl totally isn't. I disliked Whitney, the heroine of this book, more than any character I've read in a long time. She's shallow, abrasive, insensitive, judgmental, emotionally-stunted, bossy, bratty, and cruel. That's actually integral to the plot: she's setting up a medical spa business in a tony Philadelphia suburb, and the townspeople take an instant dislike to her because of her behavior and attitude, which causes all sorts of problems for her fledgeling business. At first, Whitney doesn't care. Her attitude is: "Why waste energy placating people she cared about less than fingernail clippings?" (Loc. 1508) That sums up my problem with Whitney in a nutshell: there should never be people you care about less than fingernail clippings. Whether you know them or not, whether you like them or not, they are people and they deserve basic respect and civility. Anyway, it's no wonder the people of Pleasant Park don't like Whitney: the mystery is why the hero, mild-mannered schoolteacher Matt, apparently does. (It has to be more than sex, if I'm going to become invested in the HEA, and I never found any deeper connection.)
Matt's not a perfect character, either. He's too good to be true, willing to take almost unending abuse both from Whitney and from his cheating ex-wife, whose life is still very much entwined with his. (I put this on the "infidelity" shelf not because the hero and heroine aren't faithful to one another, but because they have both been victims of infidelity and they're both working through a lot of baggage related to those earlier betrayals.)
I didn't enjoy the sexytimes in this story because the power dynamic was so uneven: Whitney was unabashedly using Matt, and though he was willing to go along with it for a long time (men put up with a lot for sex), I didn't have any patience with it.
There are brief glimpses of both Jared and Gretchen, the hero and heroine of The Derby Girl, in this book, but in my opinion that's not enough to salvage this book. ...more
When I saw this book, like Meredith Duran's excellent Duke of Shadows, takes place partially in British India (modern Pakistan), I said "sign me up!" When I saw this book, like Meredith Duran's excellent Duke of Shadows, takes place partially in British India (modern Pakistan), I said "sign me up!" Unfortunately, this is not an excellent book.
Bryony Asquith and Leo Marsden grew up on neighboring estates and then found individual acclaim (him as an explorer and mathematician, her as a doctor and surgeon) before marrying. Though it starts as a love match, things quickly go south. (view spoiler)[ Bryony catches Leo in an infidelity the week before they marry; her love and trust is shattered, but she married him anyway for reasons that, frankly, don't make a lot of sense given her character. (hide spoiler)] After a year of marriage, they agree to seek an annulment and go their separate ways. Three years later, they meet again in the wilds of Pakistan against the backdrop of a dangerous civil rebellion.
The first third (roughly) of the book serves mostly to drive the reader crazy with unfamiliar place names and, worse, to make both main characters as unpleasant as possible. Bryony is so cold and abrasive, I wondered if she was autistic. It's hard to believe her claims that she loved Leo once, because she seems so aloof and untouchable. Leo is an arrogant golden boy who uses absurdly florid vocabulary and appears to be all charm and no substance.
As the ex-couple make the difficult trek back toward civilization, a series of flashbacks and difficult conversations reveal that the lovers are more sympathetic than they appear and their attraction has not burned itself out, but it wasn't enough to make me root for their reconciliation.
One of the underlying problems in their marriage was sexual dysfunction: Bryony was cold and rejecting whenever Leo pressed his husbandly rights, so he started raping her in her sleep (because by the time she woke up, she was already too far gone to stop him), and he continued doing so even after she begged him to stop, until Bryony killed a patient due to sleep deprivation and finally physically barred her bedroom door to keep Leo out. (Note the lack of spoiler warning, there: I don't believe in hiding rape scenes. In fact, I think books should come with rape warnings the way many erotic books warn of consent issues, anal play, etc. -And, yes: what Leo did was rape, even though Bryony came, and the fact that she turns around and does the same to him (twice!) during their journey does not make it right.) Since they keep up with the sleep-rapes after reuniting, I had a really hard time believing all that was wrong in their original relationship was right in their second-chance romance.
The Pathan rebellion was not nearly as riveting and gut wrenching as the Sepoy Rebellion in Duran's Duke of Shadows, though it was obvious Ms. Thomas borrowed heavily from that book. Duran's story felt so real and horrible I almost felt like I'd been there--I knew what the battle smelled like, and I tasted Emma's terror--but Thomas seems to have concocted the Pathan uprising because she needed some outside drama to get her protagonists out of their own heads and into the sack. Once the lovers' impasse is resolved, so is the military siege. Both resolutions feel a little bit forced and a lot anticlimactic....more
Jennifer Ashley's Mackenzie series has been one of my favorites for a long time, so I preordered this novella and was excited when it showed up on my Jennifer Ashley's Mackenzie series has been one of my favorites for a long time, so I preordered this novella and was excited when it showed up on my Kindle, but I found it really, really disappointing.
My first objection is the fact that it's a novella. Police Inspector Lloyd Fellows has been a constant presence throughout the whole series. He is the half-brother of Hart, Cameron, Ian, and Mac, all of whom got their own full-length novels. The fact that he only rates a novella is insulting, as if he's less than the others because of his bastardy.
Second, throughout the series Fellows has been a dedicated officer of the law, a man of honor and integrity. Now, here he is falsifying evidence, lying to his colleagues and superiors, lying to his supposed beloved. It's very out of character for the man we've come to know over the course of the previous books, and this kind of behavior cheapens him. The story offers an excuse for him to behave this way, but frankly it wasn't enough: the Fellows I thought I knew would have found another way, or been way, way more tortured about playing fast and loose with the truth the way he does here.
Louisa, the heroine, didn't really seem fully formed as a character. She was trapped in a bad situation, but there wasn't much else to her: I didn't really understand her history or motivations, and I didn't feel like I knew her well enough to accept that she'd throw away her dreams of a proper marriage within her own social strata to be with Fellows just because she's got a case of hornypants. I don't mind romances across class or social strata, but in order for me to believe it and buy into the happy ever after, I have to believe that the characters have contemplated the consequences of bucking convention and decided that their love is worth all cost. I'm not convinced Louisa did that, and so I don't trust the HEA ending....more
This romance is loosely based on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Luke grew up on the streets, part of a children's gang of thieves run by a man named FThis romance is loosely based on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Luke grew up on the streets, part of a children's gang of thieves run by a man named Feagan. His bond with his fellow thieves has always been thicker than blood; so much so that when Luke was fourteen, he murdered a man who raped his friend Frannie, and was caught and tried for the murder. However, he was spared from judgment or retribution when an old gentleman stopped the trial and announced that Luke was his long-lost grandson, Lucian Langdon, who had disappeared at the age of six when his parents were murdered by a gang of ruffians. Luke has no memory of this, but played along because he figured it was better to masquerade as an earl's heir than to hang.
Now all grown up, Luke lives an intensely lonely and alcohol-fueled existence, plagued by debilitating headaches. He is snubbed by the aristocracy, who doubt the legitimacy of his claim the earldom he has now inherited, but he is also set apart from his childhood friends, who treat him differently now that he is one of the aristocracy. He longs to marry Frannie, but she is afraid to accept his suit because the world he inhabits is so foreign and intimidating to her.
Enter the Lady Catherine Mabry, who has heard of "the Devil Earl's" reputation for murder, and believes he is the only man who can help her save her best friend from her husband, an abusive brute whose two prior wives died under suspicious circumstances. She attempts to engage Luke's services for the contract killing (though Catherine will not, at first, reveal the target of her murder plot). Luke, with some reservations, agrees so long as Catherine will teach Frannie what she needs to know to feel comfortable as his countess.
Thus we have two of my least favorite plot devices: amnesia (Luke's suspiciously missing childhood memories), and the I'll-help-you-win-another-though-it's-obvious-you-should-be-with-me trope (is there a better name for that?). The latter is especially frustrating because it creates so many tetchy moral issues: whenever Luke kisses Catherine, he betrays Frannie, yet his growing attraction to Catherine is so strong and so obvious that his advances to Frannie feel wrong, too. Thankfully, the reader understands long before Luke does that Frannie's feelings for him are platonic, and the only reason she hasn't rejected his suit is that she doesn't want to hurt his feelings -- which makes the dilemma only slightly more palatable. (After all, Luke doesn't know Frannie doesn't want him, so as far as he knows, he's being unfaithful.)
Even so, I like this book -- and this series -- fairly well. It's nice to escape the endless social whirl and stifling tearooms and ballrooms so common in historical romance, and read about characters less concerned with their reputations and with making good marriages. Luke, Frannie, and the rest of the now-grown Gang of Thieves had a background far removed from the ton, which makes their stories more interesting than the usual Regency fare.
Madeleine Greenway might be my favorite Regency-era heroine ever. Lots of romances feature plucky, spunky, opinionated heroines, but never have I comeMadeleine Greenway might be my favorite Regency-era heroine ever. Lots of romances feature plucky, spunky, opinionated heroines, but never have I come across one as independent, as skilled, as smart, and as competent as Mrs. Greenway.
This book is chock full of dramatic tension to make readers feel ALL the feelz: Colin Eversea's despair and resignation as he climbs the gallows to be executed for a crime he didn't commit, the exhilaration of his unexpected rescue, the horrible, sick suspicion he feels when it looks like his downfall may have been orchestrated by his oldest brother, who is engaged to the woman Colin has loved since childhood... (and all this just in the first few chapters).
My only complaint is that Colin's attachment to his childhood love lingers even after he and Madeleine have become intimate and it's clear they belong together, which felt disloyal to both women, though of course it all comes out right in the end....more
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