If you see me at #RT14, say hello

I’m going to be attending the RT con in New Orleans next week, where I hope to meet many of the wonderful people I’ve talked romance with over the years. While it’s absolutely no secret that I’m a disabled woman, I don’t think many people realize *how* disabled I am. You know I’m disabled, but you don’t know. It’s like knowing the Grand Canyon is big, but it’s not until you see it in person that you realize that the Grand Canyon is BIG.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take pity on you guys and try to give you some idea of what to expect if and when you bump into me. Maybe this will keep the awkward surprised silences to a minimum and let us get right down to the chit-chat.

• That’s me in the picture. I’m getting my hair done the Friday before RT so the orange will be nice and bright and I might even bring that teal dress, so I should be pretty easy to identify. If there’s another orange-haired woman in a wheelchair at RT, I’ll have to fight her. There can be only one.
• My hands, arms and shoulders are pretty wasted thanks to muscle atrophy. I have a difficult time lifting my arms up and my thumbs are basically decorative. If you go in for a handshake, it’ll take me a bit to lift my arm and I’m just going to flop my bony hand into yours. You won’t break me if you shake my hand. If you skip the handshake, that’s cool too.
• Muscle weakness and spasticity slurs my speech. I sound like someone who’s both drunk and stoned. I’m also kind of quiet, since I don’t breathe very strongly either. I’m hard to understand and I know it. If you don’t understand something I said, I’d rather you ask me to repeat it than have you pretend you heard me.
• I eat like a savage animal. Again, muscle weakness makes eating difficult. If you have the misfortune to eat near me while I’m eating, I chew with my mouth open, eat with my hands and cough, gag and straight-up choke on my food. (Ask Olivia Waite sometime. Poor thing watched me choke on some sushi rice I inhaled and didn’t know where to look.) Making me laugh or talk during a meal makes it much more likely I aspirate some crud and start choking. Just FYI.
• If you see me struggling with something and want to help me, please ask first. I’m not shy about asking for or accepting help, so I’ll answer truthfully. If I say I don’t need help, I’m not just being nice. (I’m never just being nice.)
• I am a hugger. Head pats are a no-go, however.
• Last but not least, please walk responsibly. Don’t walk backwards or stop suddenly when you’re in a crowd. My chair weighs 350 lbs with me in it and my metal footrest will not feel nice on your achilles. My face is also about hand and elbow height, so watch your hands while talking or smoking as well. And please don’t textwalk into my lap. It’s super awkward for everyone involved.

Hope to see you at #RT14, and don’t be afraid to say hi. I don’t bite. ;-)

True by Erin McCarthy

I will start by saying that I only read this because I got it for free and I wanted to be able to offer a counterpoint to what I saw as a determination to sweep the book’s problematic elements under the rug and dismiss its critics as oversensitive. I didn’t start it with an open mind: based on the first chapter posted at Dear Author, I fully expected to not only dislike the book, but to hate it. In the end, the book proved so unenjoyable for me that I couldn’t finish it.

What made it so unenjoyable for me ended up not being all the problematic stereotypes – although there were plenty of those, believe you me – it was the awkward writing. McCarthy wrote some of the weirdest dialog and prose I’ve read in a while. She had questionable metaphors (“Fear flooded my mouth.”), not-quite-similes (“She made those fuzzy circle scarves that were like an acrylic barrier between your skin and the wind.”) and really mangled the whole first-person narration thing. For example, there’s this line shared in the middle of an account of her being sexually assaulted: “I had long, dark-red hair, which made it easy for him to entwine his fingers to control my head and my neck, holding me so I couldn’t move.” Unless red hair has extra grip than other colored hair – and my heart goes out to gingers everywhere if it does – the middle of a traumatic event is the wrong time to info dump about her hair color.

If you can hang with her writing, your reward is a steaming pile of stereotypes about race and poverty. The first chapter is lousy with it.

“It was too far to walk back to the dorms, and it was the kind of off-campus neighborhood that had my dad raising his eyebrows and suggesting I go to college in some cow town like Bowling Green, where there were no dirty couches on sagging front porches and no residents’ smoking crack in full view of the street.

So walking back was not happening, because I didn’t smoke crack and I was no risk-taker. At all.

Yet sitting there alone with Grant while my roommates were off having a good time almost seemed riskier than strolling through the ghetto. Because it was sort of like perching over a public toilet seat without actually touching anything. It was difficult. Awkward.”

I’m not totally sure what my favorite comparison was, to be honest. Using a racially charged word like “ghetto” along with the also fraught crack-smoking was some primo shit, but parallelling a poor neighborhood and a gross toilet seat was also pretty amazing. Just in case you missed the POOR NEIGHBORHOOD IS FULL OF BLACK PEOPLE vibe, the chapter closes out with a throwaway fried chicken reference (“… I followed Tyler down the metal stairs, the smell of fried foods strong in the hallway…”) I don’t think any of this was necessary to establish 1. that the heroine can’t leave the apartment on her own or 2. that she’s fairly sheltered and unaware of her privilege. Seeing as how all the protagonists are white, I don’t see how any of the racial imagery was relevant.

And I’m gonna go ahead and say this in all caps: SEXUAL ASSAULT ISN’T A MEET CUTE. Seriously. While she’s in this apartment she can’t leave on her own, a friend of the hero’s roommate tries to force fellatio on the heroine. He’s stopped by the hero swooping as her white knight. It serves no purpose but to introduce the hero and heroine and make the hero look like a champion. No one calls the cops, (although I get that, as cops are almost useless with SA) and the heroine doesn’t seem to react to it much. Directly after it, she accepts a ride home, alone, from the hero, who she doesn’t know. Makes perfect sense in Romance Logic, since we know he’s the hero, but I found her willingness to trust her own character judgement so quickly just bizarre. The would-be-rapist shows up again halfway through the book to sow some drama, and that’s about it. It’s a pretty superficial plot device.

I didn’t finish it, so I can’t say from personal experience, but I’m pretty sure there’s a generous helping of ableism as well in the form of the hero’s younger brother, who has Down Syndrome. I did notice everyone spoke to him like they would to a puppy, but all the dialog was so forced that I’m wary of attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence. And don’t even get me going on the portrayal of poverty. The hero is trying to work his way out of poverty caused by his mother’s drug addiction. Because this is Romancelandia, OF COURSE they’re poor because their parents were lazy, bad people who had the weak character to fall prey to addiction. This one gets an F, for fuck you.

~60,000 words
Published May 7th, 2013 by Penguin

Curve Ball by Charlotte Stein

This is a short little novella so there’s not a ton to discuss. It’s a girl-carries-a-flame-for-her-older-brother’s-friend story featuring a curvy heroine and a muscular hero, but the story is almost inconsequential. The beauty of this book is in the telling.

It’s told in first-person present tense from the heroine’s point of view, which I typically loathe. Stein, however puts on a clinic for How It Should Be Done. The heroine’s personality is front and center, pouring from the little asides and stream of consciousness. You feel all of her emotions along with her as she puzzles them out with the reader. Occasionally she breaks out in Pratchett-like lists, at one point making me break out in hysterical laughter in the middle of some seriously hot sexual tension:

c) There is something pressing into the small of my back, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t a tube of Rolos. And if it is, he really needs to tell me where he bought such an enormous packet.
I love Rolos.

If this were an HFN rather than an HEA, I’d give it five stars. The emotion and passion was just completely awesome and the narration was pitch-fucking-perfect. I just thought the ILYs at the end felt rushed and unnecessary. B+

—-

I will add a caveat or a content note to this, as it deals with fat in a way that some people might find problematic.

Early in the story, Steven, the hero, tells a story using a lot of fat-phobic and fat-shaming language:

‘So I picked up this cute little fat chick,’
…
‘And I mean, she was a big girl. I could hardly get my arms around her waist.’
…
‘And her arse … Man, her arse was the size of a small planet.’
‘But the best part was these thighs she had … These big, billowing thighs.’
‘It was like an avalanche of flesh, on top of me. At one point, I was genuinely afraid for my life – one false move and I could have been crushed.’
…
‘But then it turned out that she was a total maniac who liked to eat paint. Thank God she was heavy … I didn’t have to run all that fast to get away from her.’

The heroine, being fat (“Anything over a size two would likely make the grade, in his eyes, and I passed that stage around 12 levels ago. You could times his ideal size by seven and still not get where I’m at.”), naturally takes offense at his language and blows up, effectively telling him to go fuck himself. Now, he’s immediately sorry he’s hurt her feelings, and I think a later conversation gives his comments some context that make them more about the girl he’s disparaging than a dig at fatness, but YMMV.

I liked how body image was used in the story, for the most part. I thought Judy was insecure about her body without ever drifting into self-loathing. She frequently frets about Steven’s opinion of her body, but seems to also view his potential rejection as his own damn problem, and not a measure of her self-worth. The story also seems to avoid the common “a man loves your body, therefore you’re lovable” pitfall I often see in fat romance. It does a good job of showing that Steven’s attracted to Judy in particular, and that’s the source of his affinity for a curvy woman (‘I really like curvy girls.’ He pauses, right before the kicker. Then he delivers it, with all the punch he can muster. ‘Probably because of you.’)

I am, as many of you know, skinny as a toothpick, and really haven’t got any experience with “extra” weight, so if you read this differently, I’m all ears.

~18,000 words
Published January 21st 2013 by Xcite Books

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