RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE

I LIVE!

It’s been a very strange, extremely trying few months, but I think I’m ready to hop back in the saddle and ride. My husband is one of the sorts of people who reads in times of stress to relax, but I need to be relaxed to read. Picking up a book when my wits are scrambled results in re-reading a single paragraph for an hour before I realize I’m not getting anywhere. Reading when I’m out of charity with the world makes every misused homonym, tired cliche and authorial shortcut into a table-pounding WHY DON’T WE HAVE ANY FUCKING STANDARDS ANYMORE tirade, and that’s no fun either. So for the first third of this year I’ve been playing games and just zoning the fuck out and ignoring shit. (For anyone curious about the games, they were the indie games Terraria and Towns. Both were a ton of sandbox fun.)

Anyways. Sonomalass has a great idea in a recent post on her blog:

So here’s what I’m going to try. Below I have listed the books that I plan to read, or have recently read and plan to review, in the next few months. If one or more of those titles is one you’re interested in reading and talking about, leave a comment to that effect. (I’m likely to prioritize those books, to be honest.) When I post my reactions, I will tag the tweet with “#onthesamepage.” I’ll do my best to let you know that I have posted, so that you can come comment, and we can have a discussion.

Like her, I also feel out of step with the review blog zeitgeist. I not only don’t have any of the books people are talking about, I don’t want to have them. Rather than have another table-pounding, Record Store Clerk Taste® moment, creating our own group experience sounds like a lot of fun. I don’t own any of the books on her list, but I could see my way towards buying the Grant, Lin or Morgan books if lots of other people are reading them. When your TBR is at 225, what’s a few more, right?

Working off what I do already own, here’s what I’m looking to read soon:

• Innocent Hearts by Radlclyffe – Lesbian romance set in 1860s Montana. I’m a sucker for westerns, and I’m always looking for f/f or lesbian romance. 
• True by Erin McCarthy – A New Adult novel about a privileged, virgin heroine and the working-class, “bad boy” hero her friends pay to sleep with her. I don’t expect to like it, but I want to talk about it for the DA book club. 
• The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold – A fantasy novel I grabbed in a sale on everyone’s recommendation.  
• The Theory of Attraction by Delphine Dryden – Sure, it’s another maledom BDSM ero rom, but no one’s a billionaire and the hero seems to be on the Autism spectrum. 
• Outlaw in Paradise by Patricia Gaffney – Gunslinger hero, saloon-owning heroine. Hello gorgeous. Where you been all my life?  
• Something Like Normal by Trish Doller – New Adult novel from the POV of a young man back from serving Afghanistan. I’ve heard only good things.  
• The Wedding Fling by Meg Maguire – I keep hoping every new Maguire book is the one where she plots as good as she writes.  

What do you think? Anyone want to read these too?

Lightning Round: November 2012

The Petrov Proposal
by Maisey Yates

One day on Twitter, I was talking to Jane from DA about Harlequin’s new Kiss line, which debuts next year. I said that “if they’re like HP’s with non-asshole heroes and grown-up heroines, I’ll be in heaven.” That basically describes The Petrov Proposal to a T.

The hero is commitment-averse, but so is the heroine. He’s never arrogant or overbearing and she’s never overmatched or passive. She’s sexually inexperienced, sure, but she’s no naive ingenue. She’s a grown woman with an adult’s understanding of sexuality. There’s verbal sparring, hot makeouts, hotter sex, endearing vulnerable moments and a heartwrenching climax. If it didn’t have that worthless epilogue and that unnecessary Grand Gesture, it’d have been a grade A book.

Still, this one was really, really good. B+

+++

Midnight Scandals
by Carolyn Jewel, Courtney Milan and Sherry Thomas

This was the rare anthology where all the stories were great. The Milan story was the weakest, and I’d still call it an above average read. Carolyn Jewel’s story was my favorite, as the longing and regret was off the charts.

The anthology features three stories centered around the same country home – Doyle’s Grange – set in three different time periods. Jewel’s story is an angsty second chances story set during the regency. The hero returns to the area after reluctantly parting with her when they were teenagers a decade ago. Wanting a home of her own after her brother comes home with a new wife, the heroine has accepted a local gentleman’s marriage proposal. Of course the hero and heroine discover that time hasn’t exactly dulled their attraction or chemistry at all, which is fun. There’s lots of longing here. Though they may still want each other, they have some heavy stuff in their shared history. B+

Milan set her domestic abuse-themed story in the early Victorian period. After fleeing her father’s house in the wake of an embezzlement scandal, the heroine’s working as a companion to the current lady of the house at Doyle’s Grange. Determined to recover the money her father stole from him, the hero has finally tracked her down. Though he’s certain she’s covering up for her father, he also starts to suspect that she’s not exactly safe at Doyle’s Grange and may not be the villain of the situation. I liked this one, but the romance took a back seat to all the other plot machinations. B-

Thomas’ late-Victorian entry surprised me. Let’s be honest here: the set up is fucking ridiculous. There are meet cutes, and then there’s the heroine mistakenly making out with the hero because he’s a dead ringer for the married man she’s in love with. If that’s not enough, the hero and her obsession are both named Fitz. Don’t tell me. I know. Somehow, I ended up liking the story anyway. It probably helps that I have not read the books these characters are from. It also helps that everyone in the story, heroine included, thinks this set up is ridiculous. There was too much Past Protagonist in this one, but otherwise was a good story of moving beyond first impressions. B-

+++

Beautiful Mess
by Lucy V. Morgan

Clocking in somewhere between a short story and a novella, this vignette started strong then fizzled out. The narrator’s voice is wicked and funny and oozes youthfulness, but the story was incomplete and unsatisfying. The characters also use a lot of language in the “casual bigotry” category – referring to large pumps as being in “tranny sizes,” calling things “retarded,” and so on – which mirrors how most 24 year olds speak to each other, but some readers might want to give it a wide berth because of it.

I’d read another book by this author because I found her voice fresh and contemporary, but I wanted more from this story than I got. C

+++

Room at the Inn
by Ruthie Knox

I only read the Knox novella. The O’Keefe story is a teaser prequel that lacks an HEA/ending, and the Sloane story is a fluffy historical. I’m not interested in either right now.

I loved Room at the Inn a lot… until the ending. I think Grand Gestures are cheap and lazy as a rule, but this one felt even weaker tacked onto the end of such a thoughtful and emotional story. How does staging a humiliating, public scene in a church during Christmas Eve services strike anyone as romantic? How does a narcissistic, emotionally manipulative stunt like a public proposal atone for 16 years of narcissism and emotional abuse? It spoiled what had been a top notch story. The hero’s redemption/change of heart was believable and accounted for, and I could see their HEA, but the church stunt was BS. I’ve mentally edited it to give the story a more satisfying ending with 100% less self-centered manipulation. C

+++

Broken Vows
by Delynn Royer

A marriage of convenience where a heroine promises a retired bounty hunter $20,000 to marry her then divorce her after six months so she can inherit her family’s ranch? Sign me up! To sweeten the deal, the heroine’s a total bitch who has to work on her attitude to win the hero. It’s like it was written just for me.

I do have to warn that the author wrote about the Latino characters totally offensively – “half-breed” is so not an acceptable term – but it was thoughtlessly done, not malicious, and only comes up a few times early in the novel when she’s describing a few side characters. I chose to roll my eyes at the author and keep reading, but other people might want to set the book on fine.

Once I got past that stuff in the early chapters, I really enjoyed the story. Their bickering and bantering is hilarious, and the sexual tension was spicy. Not bad for a $2.99 impulse buy on Amazon. B-

+++

After the Fire
by Kathryn Shay

This is marketed as romance, but it sure didn’t read like one. Rather than focus on a couple as they fall in love, this book follows three firefighter siblings – Mitch, Jenn and Zach – as they deal with the fallout after a particularly destructive fire. All three decide to make changes in their lives: Mitch swears to do something about his dysfunctional marriage, Jenn is determined to become a mother and Zach wants to stop his destructive behavior that’s left him divorced.

I’m really not sure what compelled me to finish this one. The writing was dry and plagued with info dumps about firefighting. I got totally lost spending equal amounts of time in five characters’ heads watching two pairs of them get HEAs and the odd one out get therapy. Mitch’s wife was a cartoonishly one-dimensional villain (a bad mother! a rich girl unsatisfied with middle-class life! takes pride in her appearance!) and I needed more time spent on Jenn’s romance to buy an HEA after she’d already been divorced twice before. And Zach was just shameless sequel bait. Seriously. Not at all interested in the rest of the series. D

+++

Saga, Volume 1
by Brian K. Vaughan (Writer), Fiona Staples (Artist)

When a book opens with a childbirth scene and the first line is the mother yelling, “Am I shitting? It feels like I’m shitting!” how could I not read on?

This is mostly a prologue, like many volume 1 comic trades are, but I’m hooked. From the kickass Alana to her laid-back husband Marko to the ethically-complex bounty hunter The Will and his sidekick Lying Cat (a cat that says only “Lying” when someone isn’t speaking the truth) to the wide variety of side characters, I want to see more of this universe caught up in a war between Alana’s home planet and the moon Marko is from.

That a copy of a romance novel, complete with clinch-style cover, looks to play a role in the effort to hunt down Alana and Marko only sweetens the deal.B

+++

Owning Wednesday
by Annabel Joseph

This was a frustrating read for me. On the one hand, you’ve got moments like this:

But just before she came, the man fucking stopped.

She actually sobbed then. “Daniel, no! Please! Please don’t do this to me. You’ll kill me.”

“Kill you? ‘Here lies Wednesday, total drama queen.’ I’ll visit every week and leave butt plugs on your grave.”

Just about the only thing rarer than a negative pregnancy test in romance is humor and playfulness in BDSM scenes, and I loved that this book went there. It was a unique D/s relationship between two individuals. It even eschewed the collar. Instead, Wednesday wore garters and stockings when their D/s dynamic was “on.”

But, on the other hand, the book is 90% sex scene and 10% Wednesday and Daniel hurting each other with their actions. I like sex as much as the next girl, but if it’s not advancing the plot, I’m bored rather quickly. A lot of it felt gratuitous. And Wednesday and Daniel? While I appreciated that she had a backbone and stood up to Daniel’s obsessive, controlling behaviors, I never felt that the problems were ever resolved. By the end, they still appeared to me as two insecure people mindfucking each other.

So, this one was a mixed bag. I’m being generous by rating it as average, I think. It’s a case of great idea, poor execution. C

+++

Offside
by Juliana Stone

This was a strange little book. While I enjoyed reading about a heroine who’s a serious hockey player, and the sexual tension was expertly paced, the book was exceedingly over the top. Everything in it is turned up to 11. The sexist backlash over her joining the men’s beer league, her dementia-addled father pointing a shotgun at the hero while her grandfather’s drawers fall down, the triplet sisters being named Billie-Jo, Bobbi-Jo and Betty-Jo, the prodigal triplet returning just in time to toss a drama bomb – all of these moments felt scripted. It was like the author was poking me in the ribs and saying “ISN’T THAT JUST ZANY?”

I started off entertained, then I was being indulgent, but by the end I was rolling my eyes at the blatant manipulation. It’s a fun book if you don’t try to pin real world logic onto it, but the ending was just a stunt too far for me. C

Dear good lord, what have I done?

Starting with the BooksOnBoard 50% off sale on Black Friday and ending with yesterday’s 50% off sale at Harlequin, I, uh, bought some books. To share my shame with you all, I’ve listed them all below. And, please, if you see me buying books at all before summertime, call the authorities.

1. The Law and Kate Malone by Charlene Sands
2. Abbie’s Outlaw by Victoria Bylin
3. The Darkest of Secrets by Kate Hewitt
4. The Husband She Never Knew by Kate Hewitt
5. Doukakis’s Apprentice by Sarah Morgan
6. Secrets of Castillo del Arco by Trish Morey
7. The Wedding Fling by Meg Maguire
8. A Natural Father by Sarah Mayberry
9. The Other Side of Us by Sarah Mayberry
10. The Time of Her Life by Jeanie London
11. Back to the Good Fortune Diner by Vicki Essex
12. Heat Of The Night by Elle Kennedy
13. The Heat is On by Elle Kennedy
14. Feeling Hot by Elle Kennedy
15. Getting Hotter by Elle Kennedy
16. The Lady’s Secret by Joanna Chambers
17. Captive Bride by Bonnie Dee
18. Renegade Most Wanted by Carol Arens
19. Meant To Be Married by Ruth Wind
20. Christmas on Snowbird Mountain by Fay Robinson
21. Restraint by Charlotte Stein
22. Cassie’s Grand Plan by Emmie Dark
23. Grease Monkey Jive by Ainslie Paton
24. Rio Grande Wedding by Ruth Wind
25. The S Before Ex by Mira Lyn Kelly
26. The Way Back by Stephanie Doyle
27. Silent Surrender by Barbara J. Hancock
28. His Virgin Acquisition by Maisey Yates
29. A Royal World Apart by Maisey Yates
30. Marriage Made on Paper by Maisey Yates
31. With This Fling by Kelly Hunter
32. The Wedding Plan by Abby Gaines
33. In His Eyes by Emmie Dark
34. Sunrise Over Texas by M.J. Fredrick

To add to my shame, three of these books - The Law and Kate Malone, Abbie’s Outlaw and Renegade Most Wanted – are Harlequin Historicals. I’ve read maybe a handful of books in that line that I didn’t hate, and I think Carla Kelly wrote them. That’s what a sucker I am for historical westerns.

Also of note is how many straight up Presents are in this pile. I hope buying seven high-angst Presents doesn’t add regret to my already heaping portion of shame. I’m not totally sure why I bought so many.

Of the Superromances I picked up in this sale, only Mayberry is an author I’ve read before (and Fay Robinson, but that book’s a reissue of an old book.) I read and really enjoyed the Emmie Dark, and have high hopes for the others based on the samples I’ve read. Looking forward especially to the Vicki Essex book, as it has a Chinese-American heroine and the author is of Asian descent herself. Well, and because the sample was excellent.

Guess I better get reading…
 

Rio Grande Wedding by Ruth Wind

This is another Harlequin I grabbed during the BooksOnBoard Black Friday sale. I saw the words “Green card groom,” and immediately downloaded the sample. Marriages of convenience are one of my very favorite romance tropes, so I was an easy sell.

Widowed nurse Molly Sheffield finds a wounded migrant worker on her property and takes it upon herself to nurse him back to health after he begs her not to call an ambulance. Undocumented immigrant Alejandro Sosa hates to burden the strange woman who’s rescued him, but he can’t risk deportation – not while his eight year old niece is stranded alone in the wilderness after an immigration raid. Struck by Alejandro’s devotion to his niece, or perhaps due to four lonely years alone on her secluded New Mexico farm, Molly decides to do everything she can to keep him together with his niece in America, even if her deputy sheriff brother suspects they’re marrying only to secure a green card.

I really enjoyed this modern take on a marriage of convenience. Wind – who also writes as Barbara Samuel – treats the heady subject with a lot of sensitivity and avoids any grandstanding. Molly’s brother is the story’s antagonist, but he remains sympathetic or at least relatable even with his zero tolerance approach to illegal immigration. Alejandro isn’t some Woobie forced into the role of victim, he’s got some misgivings and doubts over whether he’s making the right decision to work as a migrant laborer in the US. I liked all the characters more for having some flaws.

Where the book wasn’t perfect was in the timing. Everything in the book takes place over a very short period of time. I can buy a week-long whirlwind romance ok, but resolving immigration status, family drama, a gunshot wound *and* tuberculosis as well within a week is a bit much. I really enjoyed the hero and heroine, but I had to put my “this is fantasy” glasses on to digest the neat and tidy ending. B-

~65,000 words
Published October 1st 1999 by Silhouette Intimate Moments

In His Eyes by Emmie Dark

Fans of angst and second chances would like this book. The heroine returns to her hometown after leaving ten years ago as a troubled teenager. Intending only to stay long enough to bury her grandfather, bottle his wine and sell his estate off, her plans hit a snag of sorts in the shape of the estate’s neighbor. The hero wants to add her grandfather’s vineyard to his estate’s holdings, but with their messy shared history, secrets come out and what once seemed so straightforward turns out to be anything but.

Lots of emotion in this one. The secrets behind Zoe’s banishment as a teenager are a big ones, with shockwaves that leave cracks in both of their adult lives. Their revelation forces them to reexamine assumptions they’d labored under for ten years and unleashes all sorts of feelings they don’t really want to deal with right now. Upstanding, responsible Hugh just wants to buy her family’s vineyard and get back to his role as CEO of his family’s winemaking business. Restless, rebellious Zoe wants to wrap up their business then get back to California, and away from the bad memories. Walking down memory lane is hugely uncomfortable for them, but they just can’t seem to stop the momentum and go back to how they were before the secrets came out.

I thought Dark did a good job pacing the characters through their journey of rediscovery. She dispenses bits of intrigue and backstory gradually throughout the story, neither character ever launches into a monologue of angst nor are the salient details dangled just out of the reader’s grasp over and over. I felt that the characters discussed and processed their feelings in ways that were unique to their personalities – Zoe giving up information and emotion only under duress, and Hugh relentlessly pursuing further discussion to try to make things right. It’s a dynamic that not only suits the storytelling, it shows me a couple well-matched for an HEA. Their communication styles complement each other perfectly.

The dialog felt a little forced at times, especially when Mr. Plot Expediter Morris is on screen, and I didn’t love how the conflict was finally resolved. I wanted more initiative from Zoe after she flew back to California. That Hugh instead flew to her to make a declaration felt more like the author indulging her own love of the Grand Gesture than the natural outcome for the characters. It was heavy on the style and short on substance. It’s also SOP for the genre.

I picked this up on a whim during an ebook sale, and I’m glad I did. This new-to-me author is now on my list of Harlequin authors to keep an eye on. B-

~75,000 words
Published August 1st 2012 by Harlequin Superromance

Lightning Round: October 2012

Chasing Rainbows
by Victoria Lynne

I am a sucker for road romances, foul-mouthed gunslinger heroines, gambler heroes and anything set in the old west, so this scratched all my itches. It also had some fabulous, slow-burning sexual tension that more recent books just don’t seem to have the patience for anymore.

I just found the heroine almost Mary Sue-ish. She spends the bulk of the book being acted upon rather than driving her share of the action, then seems to be rewarded in the end for being such a good person before. For a heroine who was supposed to be a rough-and-tumble outlaw, she constantly needed the hero to bail her out after  she charged into things half-cocked.

I had a lot fun reading it, but it wasn’t the best book it could’ve been. C+ 

+++

Never Stay Past Midnight
by Mira Lyn Kelly

This author’s books are consistently enjoyable for me (Wild Fling or a Wedding Ring? even got a rare 5* review from me on Goodreads) so just seeing that she has a new book out is enough to get me to buy without so much as a glance at the blurb or the reviews.

Never Stay Past Midnight had all the elements I love this author for. The heroine’s a grown-up with an adult’s life, libido and responsibilities. The hero’s wealthy and successful, but human. Both are reluctant to commit to a relationship, but neither’s reluctance stems from blanket judgments of the other’s gender, or any high-angst disavowals of the existence of love. They just got unresolved baggage from lives that didn’t come with training wheels.

Unfortunately, the strength of that conflict and the depth of their feelings on commitment made the rushed ending unsatisfying. While their fling that became more was charming and believable, the hero’s abrupt about-face on a serious bone of contention weakened the story. B+

+++

Texas Destiny
by Lorraine Heath

The heroine heads west to Texas as a mail-order bride after the Civil War destroys her home and family in Georgia. She expects to be met at the train station by her fiance, but is instead met by his younger brother. After falling from a horse and breaking his leg, her fiance couldn’t make the three-week trek each way himself. Hijnks ensue.

Starts slow with a metric fuck ton of angst over the hero’s scars, goes nuts with adjectives and flowery metaphors, but nails yearning and sexual tension like a boss. The end waffled more than an IHOP, but I was invested like whoa. B-

+++

The Marshal And Mrs. O’Malley
by Julianne MacLean

While I enjoyed the main couple and their romance immensely – there are real obstacles to their getting together and the yearning was palpable – the suspense plot lacked, well, suspense, and the heroine’s son was the most convenient plot moppet of all time. OF ALL TIME.

Highly entertaining, but uneven and unmemorable. C

 

 

+++

Katrakis’s Sweet Prize
by Caitlin Crews

All of the standard Presents tropes that I usually enjoy – revenge, self-made men, yachting on the Mediterranean, shitbag family drama – were accounted for in this book, but it very much did not work for me at all.

It wasn’t so silly that I stopped reading it, but pretty damn close. It was the way they treated the whole “mistress” thing, like it was a job position. It was really absurd. She not only walks up to him and says, “I had heard you were between mistresses at present. I had so hoped to be the next.” There was also this bizarre exchange:

“While I appreciate your list of rules and regulations, and will make every effort to follow them, being a mistress is much more than the ability to follow orders.” She traced the strong line of his jaw, the proud jut of his chin, with a lazy fingertip—though she felt as far from lazy as it was possible to feel. She kept on. “A good mistress must anticipate her partner’s needs. She must adapt to his moods, and follow his lead. It is like a complicated dance, is it not?”

Is this a Presents, or D/s erotica? As I told Liz, in a contemporary setting, “mistress” should be used like “pooch,” that is, only in tabloid headlines. D

+++

Easy
by Tammara Webber

Anyone who wanted to like Beautiful Disaster but just couldn’t hang with the deeply internalized misogyny and textbook abuser archetype hero need to read this book. Everyone else needs to read this book too, but those readers especially deserve to treat themselves. It’s well written and populated with fully-developed characters. A strong theme of respect and empowerment for women runs throughout without ever getting preachy (oh, well, never bad preachy, anyway.) The heroine is self-saving and the hero is just a beautiful person. A-

All They Need by Sarah Mayberry

If I had to highlight just one thing Mayberry does that elevates her books above the rest, I would have to choose the way she writes disagreements. Her characters act out at each other from a place of insecurity that feels true to the complicated, flawed little monkeys we all are. They say the same stupid things and make the same silly mistakes we all do, then get to resolve them like we’d all love to. The end result is a powerful, engrossing story where you’re rooting for the couple with your whole heart.

Our heroine is Melanie Porter, recently divorced and the new owner of a string of vacation cottages. It’s been 18 months since she’d left her wealthy husband and she’s slowly undoing the damage he’d wreaked on her self-esteem and emotional state with his constant verbal abuse. When our hero arrives with his girlfriend to stay in one of her cottages she finds she’s still got a long way to go. Flynn Randall was present at the Melbourne society party that proved to be the end of her marriage, and despite he and his girlfriend being perfectly friendly to her, she still can’t help the panic and worry that she doesn’t measure up and that they’re silently judging her. Little does she know, though, that she wouldn’t be the only one feeling awkward that day.

You see, Flynn had come to the area just to meet with a real estate agent about Summerlea, a historic estate with famous gardens that he’s coveted since he was a young boy. When he gets back to the cottage, however, he discovers that his girlfriend had another goal in mind. Blindsided by her heartfelt marriage proposal, he realizes how thoughtless he’s been with her feelings. Preoccupied with his father’s recent diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and his taking the reins of the family company as its CEO, he’d fallen into a comfortable relationship without considering what expectations she might have. After awkwardly turning her down, he returns their key to Mel, and heads back home.

They meet again when Flynn comes up to inspect Summerlea, which he’s decided to buy, and thus begins the courtship dance of one gun-shy divorcee and a guy with way too much on his plate to be looking for love.

Before I get into the disagreements I alluded to in the first paragraph, I should point out that the characters do something fairly rare in romance – they share a passion for a particular hobby. Both Flynn and Mel are avid gardeners and gardening plays a major role in their romance. It’s the safe topic of conversation and the window to their hidden selves at the same time. It’s an excuse for Mel to visit Flynn without breaking her no dating rule. It’s how Flynn ends up meeting all of Mel’s family. And it never feels contrived because you see their love of gardening is genuine. You can just tell that well after their HEA, they’ll be working together on their enormous gardens in companionable silence.

And thank heavens they had something neutral to talk about, because they’d have died of mixed signals without it. This was sort of a bizarro world romance in that the heroine was the commitment-averse headcase running hot then cold and the hero was the self-sacrificing, ever patient rock willing to do what it takes to win her love. Her ex-husband all but obliterated her sense of self and she’s scared to death of getting involved with a guy again. The panic rears its head when she and Flynn first try making out in her kitchen:

She started pushing his jeans down, her hands frantic. He smiled against her mouth.

“Slow down, babe. We’ve got all night,” he murmured. His tone was light, but his words hit her like a slap.

Suddenly she could hear Owen’s voice in her head, cold with condemnation and disgust.

Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’d like to take the lead now and again?

It’s not a porn shoot, Mel. Do you have to make so much noise?

Could you at least try to pretend you’re not always gagging for it? And you wonder why I don’t like you talking to other men.

She jerked away from Flynn’s kiss, her whole body tense. She tried to turn away from him but he caught her shoulders.

Baggage: Mel has some.

And so we arrive at why I’m not declaring this a perfect book. I thought Flynn and Mel were great characters working through a perfectly believable and entirely reasonable conflict. However, the book needed to be twenty pages longer to give the conflict more time to resolve. We went from never marrying again, never sharing a home again, full stop, to here’s the spare key to my house, you were right, Flynn, in a single chapter. It was too fast, both for the pace of the narrative and for the characters within the book, since it was dispensed with in just a few weeks. Real problems like theirs deserved more respect. I would have preferred more of a work in progress ending than their neat, tidy HEA. Also, Flynn was kind of too perfect. It’s a precious sort of complaint, but there it is. If he were a heroine, he’d get called a martyr.

All They Need was a delightful read that packed an emotional wallop. I never stopped cheering for them to find their happiness. Not even when they put beetroot and egg on their hamburgers. B+

~75,000 words
Published November 1st, 2011 by Harlequin

Flirting With Intent by Kelly Hunter

One night on Twitter I asked for recommendations for recently published books. I’m slowly working my way through an enormous TBR and was feeling like the books I was reading were not books anyone wants to talk about. Ros Clarke said she really enjoyed this one, and since I generally enjoy this author, that was enough for me to toss it on the reader.

First things first, the back blurb makes the hero look like an emotionally closed off player and the heroine seem like she’s sworn off men after a bitter break up. Neither case applies to the story at all. Not even a little. What we actually have here is an independently wealthy heroine living and working as a social secretary in Hong Kong after her wealthy financier father disappears in the wake of an embezzlement scandal and a similarly privileged hero who now makes a living as a hacker for government intelligence agencies. There’s no heartbreak in her past, he’s anything but a casual user of women, and the story is cute and funny, not dark and angsty.

From the moment they meet at his father’s house, the attraction is sizzling and openly acknowledged.

This time his touch sent desire skittering along her skin, and Ruby frowned as she whipped her fingers away from his. What the hell was that?

Apart from a rhetorical question for she knew desire when she felt it, knew the bite of it and the chaos it could bring. The question now became how could she have let this happen? Between one touch of hands and the next?

To her of all people. Ruby Maguire, who’d been outplaying players her entire life.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lazy smile on a dangerous man. ‘Coffee too hot?’

‘That’s one interpretation.’ Ruby sighed. ‘Regretfully, I’m going to have to ban the touching from now on in. And the teasing. Probably the question time as well. Sorry, Damon. I can’t afford to play with you.’

He wants her, and she wants him, but after years of living with a father who kept more than his fair share of secrets, she doesn’t have the stomach for a man like Damon, who won’t say where he was the week before and can’t say where he’ll be the next.

The set up is a bit fraught, but they work it out through a lot of playful banter. He’s a little manic and awkward, hinting at one point at having ADHD, and she’s a natural-born leader. Whenever he fumbles in an attempt to share more of himself with her, she deftly steers the conversation to allow him to save face. So while the plot tosses heavy objects at them, the tone remains light. Anyone who likes flirtation and courtship should definitely read this one. Their repartee is funny, cute, heartbreaking, angsty and hot, sometimes all at the same time, as they work their way from proximity lust to love.

It wasn’t a perfect book for me, though. For starters, I could’ve done without all the spy woo-woo. I’ve never met a spy plot or character I’ve liked in romance. For whatever reason, they never get me to buy into their spy world. The hero’s hacking performance wasn’t really preposterous — enough hand-waving and vagueness made it so there weren’t enough details to say one way or another how plausible it was — but it wasn’t believable either. I was either annoyed that the spy details were putting the flirting on hold or arching my eyebrows at the convenient lack of specifics.

I also found his family drama distracting and frustrating. It was distracting in that his MIA brother and battle-wounded sister didn’t add anything to his character arc or the romance. They were part of their own little sub-plot. This became frustrating at the end of the book when it’s all left unresolved, I’m assuming as sequel bait.

As always, Hunter created sparkling, rich characters. Little details like Ruby’s ever-present headbands or her always changing into flats to avoid the heel clack on hard floors turn the characters into personalities. The times when Ruby and Damon are onscreen together are A+ sort of reading. I just wish there had been less spy and sequel bait filler. B

~45,000 words
Published October 1st 2012 by Harlequin

Same Time Next Summer by Holly Jacobs

There are things I liked about this book, and it’s a different sort of story than you generally get from Superromance, but the way it was written drove me up a goddamned wall.

In a nutshell, this is a second chance story. Sort of. Carolyn and Stephan grew up together, spending their summers as lake cottage neighbors (all women’s fiction requires a lake cottage), then hooked up for a summer fling as teenagers before going on as friends as adults. The bulk of the action takes place when they’re in their early thirties, after a severe injury to Carolyn’s young daughter brings them back together. Left by her cold ex-husband and her unsentimental parents to keep vigil alone over her comatose daughter, Stephan leaves his life in Detroit to be at her side in Cleveland.

One of the things I liked most about the story is Emma, Carolyn’s daughter. As the action opens, she’s lying in a hospital bed in a coma after a car accident. Carolyn is, of course, keeping watch and determined to see her get well, despite everyone telling her that it won’t end happily. The doctor tells her that when comatose people wake up, if they wake up, it’s not like the movies. They wake very, very slowly, and are rarely the same as they were. And what happens? Emma wakes slowly, needs extensive rehab for a long time, and isn’t the same as she once was. She’s weak on one side, has problems speaking and uses a walker for a while. And everyone’s just happy she’s alive. Imagine that. Happiness and disability *can* coexist in a romance novel. Neat.

Where it all goes pear-shaped is in the telling. I can’t really decide when the story is set, or if it’s actually a contemporary. Only the epilogue (and it’s an epilogue that takes treacle to brave new heights) is set in the book’s publication year of 2008. Most of the action is set in 1994, with lots of flashbacks to their childhood together at the lake in the mid-1970s. After the couple hooks up and declares their mutual love and gets married, the book then jumps to 1999, where their actual HEA is delayed by a disagreement over whether or not to have children together (and you already guessed how that ends.)

I found all the time-line jumping annoying and unnecessary. Rather than a single, coherent book, it read like two connected novellas. There’s the 1994 story, then there’s the 1999 sequel. As a result, I felt jerked around. They got what sure appeared to be an HEA only to have the author yank it away and yell, “psych!”

For all its faults, I did sit down and read it straight through without stopping. The characters and the drama was compelling enough, but I just wish the telling was a bit smoother. C

~70,000 words
Published August 1st 2008 by Harlequin

If I’d Never Known Your Love by Georgia Bockoven

First book I’ve ever read that had me literally sobbing. Rest assured, there is an HEA, but it’s a brutal trip there.

The book opens as Evan McDonald is getting ready to fill in for his boss on a business trip to Colombia. After telling his wife Julia “I’m going to miss you. Every minute of every hour…” he’s off on his trip. After the time he said he’d call comes and goes, Julia starts to worry. When she tries to reach him and can’t, panic sets in.

Eventually Julia finds herself in a nightmare scenario. The doting father of their two kids and the love of her life has been kidnapped by paramilitary forces.

This heartwrenching book follows Julia through the years as she works to find Evan and bring him home, while keeping his memory alive and keeping life normal for the kids. Though Evan is absent from the present tense of the book, Bockoven develops his character through the letters Julia writes to him in her journal describing their courtship and love.

After being missing for five years, Julia gets the dreaded phone call – Evan’s body has been found and he’s been dead for five years.

It’s the second half of the book that takes your heart and smashes it up thoroughly. I’ve already told you there’s an HEA, but if I tell any more, I’ll ruin it for you, and this book is too emotional to miss out on a good virgin reading. I have never read a book that made me feel like this book did. Bockoven draws you into the characters of Evan and Julia and I mourned for Evan as much as I mourned for her. Their love, as told through her letters, was so strong and such a once in a lifetime chance that I mourned that loss. I had a pile of tissues around me, and I never cry at books or movies.

The only qualm I had was that the book ended far too quick. We get our HEA, after bawling our eyeballs out in empathy with the heroine, but don’t get to see the heroine really enjoy her second chance. I felt I needed more of a debriefing after the strong emotions she got from me.

I read this book years ago and I still get a little sniffly thinking about it. That should tell you something. B+

~75,000 words
Published August 1st 2007 by Harlequin