Flight into Fantasy

I finished a series today!

I feel like this is something to be celebrated because I’m a fairly slow reader and I’m easily distracted by shiny things. Plus, now that I’ve started reviewing full-time, though I get to pick and choose what I review I’m still learning to compartmentalize my non-review books. And since there are so many series out these days, following a ton of them seems difficult.
Anyway, today I finished the last of the Sons of Destiny books by Jean Johnson. I’ll probably have reviews for the third and fourth books posted over at TGBTU, but I figured squeeing about finally being done was definitely of the awesome.

Also, the Sons of Destiny series all will be published either by the end of this year or in early 2009, according to the impression I got from the author’s website. The fifth book is scheduled to be released in June, and I’m looking forward to it with eager anticipation, the kind of eager anticipation I last reserved for the Harry Potter books. In fact, the only book I am anticipating *more* would be the fifth in the Song of Ice and Fire series, which will probably come out around the time that pigs start to fly.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about the depressing number of series I’ve started but not finished: The In Death books, the Dresden Files, the Psi-Changeling books by Nalini Singh, Marjorie Liu’s Dirk and Steele series, hell, the Miles Vorkosigan books (although in that case it’s more because Miles is one of my very few fictional character crushes and I’m not entirely ready to give him up just yet.)

Anyway, after being thoroughly depressed by the mount of series I’ve started but not finished, I thought, ‘Well, you know, you do have books TBR that are the first volumes of series that are not out yet. Maybe I should become a J. C. Wilder fangirl and try her Coven series from Samhain. Or I could read the first book in Melissa Lopez’s Netherworld series, also from Samhain, and Sarah Reinke’s vampire romance, which is part of a series and the title of which has escaped me.
Or, you know, I could ignore this topic altogether and just keep reading. I already promised that the next few books I read would be review books so that Sybil doesn’t kill me.

Title: Geek Love
Author: Katharine Dunn
Genre: contemporary fiction
Grade: A+
Reason for Reading: Honestly? I wanted something that wasn’t a romance, and I’d read this book before, so I decided to go with my random yen to reread it.

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

The novel is the story of a traveling circus run by Aloysius “Al” Binewski and his wife, “Crystal” Lil. When Al’s circus begins to fail, the couple devise an idea to breed their own freak show, using various drugs and radioactive material to alter the genes of their children. Who emerges are Arturo (“Arty”), a boy with flippers for hands and feet; Electra (“Elly”) and Iphigenia (“Iphy”) the Siamese Twins; Olympia (“Oly”) the hunchback albino dwarf; and Fortunato (“Chick”), the normal looking telekinetic baby of the family — as well as a number of still-borns kept preserved in jars in a special wing of the freak show. The story is told by Oly in the form of a novel written for her daughter Miranda.

My Thoughts: A word of warning: This is not a romance. There is no HEA. There are casual mentions of rape, incest, torture and murder within these pages. This is one of those novels that genre writers like to pick on when they talk about literary fiction. But I love it, precisely because of the fact that it’s a macabre, gruesome book.

The story centers around the Binewski family, who own a traveling carnival. Father Al and mother Lil have decided it is economical and profitable to breed their own freaks, and so they do. There is Arturo, the Aqua Boy, who has flippers for hands and feet. There are the twins, Electra and Iphigenia, Siamese twins, Olympia, the book’s narrator, who feels that as an albino hunchback dwarf her freakishness is rather prosaic, and then there’s Fortunato, who is perhaps the strangest out of all of them. The Binewskis on the surface seem to be a typical nuclear family–well, apart from the fact that they set out to breed freakish children–and then the reader is drawn beneath the surface and gradually the picture that is revealed turns out not to be very pretty.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it is about this book that works so well for me, but I think that, in essence, it’s the writing style. By turns it is lyrical and vulgar, and the combination is oddly compelling. Dunn has a deft hand at characterization, too, and describes her characters with an economy of words that nonetheless brings them to life. For example, she says of Arturo: “His favorite trick at the ages of three and four was to put his face close to the glass, bulging his eyes out at the audience, opening and closing his mouth like a river bass, and then to turn his back and paddle off, revealing the turd trailing from his muscular little buttocks. Al and Lil laughed about it later, but at the time it caused them great consternation as well as the nuisance of sterilizing the tank more often than usual. As the years passed, Arty donned trunks and became more sophisticated, but it’s been said, with some truth, that his attitude never really changed.” And my other favorite quote is in reference to the Chick: “The dumb little fuck was supposed to be so goddamn sensitive, how come he couldn’t figure it out? All he had to do to make me like him was need me. All he had to do to make Arty like him was drop dead.”

The plot here is like a trainwreck. It is told alternately during the present day and in flashbacks as Olympia remembers her life. We can tell right away that life has been neither easy nor kind to Oly, but the journey to the point where everything falls apart for her is still a compelling read. Most of the compellingness of the plot has to do with the sheer train-wreck potential that these characters are. Reading about them is like watching a freak show–you’re not quite sure what they’re going to do, but you’re fairly certain it won’t be ordinary or forgetable. This is also one of maybe three books ever that succeeded in making me cry. I count that as a positive, since it demonstrates that Ms. Dunn did an excellent job with characterization.

I’m still not entirely sure that I’ve articulated all the things I love about this book, but if you’re up for an odd, visceral read, this is definitely the book to try.

Title: Taming Heather
Author: Lorie O’Clare
Genre: paranormal erotic romance
Grade: C
Reason for Reading: I bought this ebook a couple of years ago on the strength of an excerpt I read on the Ellora’s Cave readers yahoo group, to which I no longer subscribe because OMG the traffic!
Synopsis:

Heather Graham had one thing in mind—furthering her career. And an exposé on the werewolves in her community would do just that. All she needed was to get up close and personal with one of them, and she could write an article that would give her front-page coverage across the nation. Her career would skyrocket! And Marc McAllister was just the man—and werewolf—to help her do it.

But when Marc realizes Heather’s flirty behavior exists solely so she can exploit werewolves in her newspaper, he decides it’s time to show little Miss Graham exactly how a werewolf behaves. And Marc McAllister isn’t just any werewolf, but purebred Cariboo Lunewulf—wild, strong, aggressive and the quintessential alpha male.

In a clash of wills, bodies and souls, Marc and Heather set off enough sparks to start a raging fire. Drawing the wild side out of Marc hits Heather with a bolt of lust that won’t go away. Unexpectedly for Marc, he may just have met his match in the little spitfire.

But their biggest hurdle may not be with each other, but from another direction entirely.

My Thoughts: Well, I imagine that the fact that I probably b ought this book two years ago and have only now actually finished it says a lot for the meh reaction that I experienced. It’s not a bad story, but neither is it the best thing I’ve read.

The characters were likeable enough, although Heather Graham kept dropping me out of the story because isn’t that the name of a pretty famous Harlequin author I’ve never read? And you know, reading along and thinking, ‘Hmm, Heather Graham. I have one of her books in the TBR. What was it about again? Let me pause and do a google search.” is not condusive to the fact that I am being rivetted.

Anyway, book Heather is certainly not the worst heroine I’ve run across lately, but I thought that the lengths she went to to cover her werewolf story were a bit TSTL. Her storyline also progresses the way I expected it to, with no real depth of characterization.

Marc was drawn slightly better. He was a dominant, sexual man, and I thought that the chemistry between himself and Heather was pretty intense. I also really liked the fact that he really does seem to be primally attuned to his inner beast.

I also liked the werewolves that are featured here. They seem genuinely fierce and primal creatures, not simply guys who like to run around on the full moon and howl. I didn’t really understand the politics of this particular werewolf pack, but that’s OK. It’s not particularly important to the story.

There is some sequel-baiting that was pretty obvious but not excessively annoying, and I’m not entirely certain if I’m going to fall for it or not and read th3e rest of this series. Overall, I think I could like the kinds of stories Lorie O’Clare tells, but this one was pretty forgetable.

Title: Candles Burning
Author: Tabitha King and Michael McDowell
Genre: Horror
Grade: A-
Reason for Reading: I validated the book for Bookshare, and though I only really skimmed it on validation, I thought the story looked fascinating.

Synopsis:

An extraordinary southern saga begun by Michael McDowell and finished after his death by Tabitha King.

Known for his chilling Blackwater series, author Michael McDowell left behind the unfinished manuscript for Candles Burning upon his death in 1999. In the spirit of the ghost stories that Michael loved, Tabitha King has taken up where he left off, weaving a Southern gothic fabric of murder, guilt, innocence, corruption, and survival, in the voices of the living and the dead.

Calliope “Calley” Dakin is just seven when her beloved father is tortured, murdered, and dismembered by two women with no discernible motivation. In the aftermath, Calley and her mother find themselves caught up in inexplicable events that exile them to Pensacola Beach, where-in a house that’s a dead ringer for Calley’s late great-grandmother’s house-a woman awaits their presence. For Calley is no normal little girl.

My Thoughts: I don’t read horror all that often. Mostly because even when it’s good horror I really don’t think I’d enjoy a constant diet of books that scare me. That being said, the horror in this book is largely subtle. There are a few supernatural events, but nothing is scarier here than the horror of the things people will do to each other.

I adored Calley as a heroine. She starts out the book a typical bratty seven-year-old who is wise beyond her years. She hears and sees things that nobody else around her does. She was a fascinating little girl, and I loved her narrative voice and the wry way in which she told the story. I especially loved that she didn’t sugar-coat her life. She knows as well as the reader does that her mother is a selfish, vain, shallow woman who really doesn’t like her very much, but Calley loves her in spite of all that.

The plot unfolds slowly, but rather than bog the story down with its deliberate pacing, it kept me drawn in. This is not a book to read quickly, and in fact I have a feeling I will be rereading it again at some point, because I’m pretty sure there are a lot of nuances I missed the first time around. McDowell and King manage to convey a definite sense of atmosphere here. Obviously, the book takes place in a time and place before I was born, but I really felt like I understood the South of the 1950’s as I read, and it was a horrible, fascinating place.

If I have any quibbles, it’s that the answers, when they are all revealed, all happen in a rush, and there’s not really any big major confrontation. I think I would have preferred for the last bit of the book to have been drawn out just a little bit more so that I could digest what had actually happened.

Aside from that, though, this book very much deserves the A grade, and I recommend it highly for anyone who enjoys Southern gothic stories.

I was going to post this review over at TGBTU, but I think I’ll post it over here instead since the book in question has already been reviewed by someone over there and I do have the second book in the series for review once I get around to it.

Title: Sunfire: Pure Wildfire, Book 1
Author: Lynne Connolly
Genre: Erotic paranormal romance
Grade: B+
Reason for Reading: I was assigned Ms. Connolly’s forthcoming release, Icefire, for review, and I prefer to read series in order.

Synopsis:

Rock meets classical. Paranormal meets mortal. Will anybody get out alive? The members of rock band Pure Wildfire are firebird shape-shifters. Manager John Westfall will sacrifice anything for the power they wield, even his daughter Corinne.

Corinne attracts Aidan in a way he’s never known before. He’ll do anything to release her from Westfall’s trap. He offers her marriage, but Aidan wants more from Corinne — he wants her heart. And he’ll give her his in return.

Classical guitarist Corinne is desperate to escape her father’s control. She loves Aidan but craves her freedom — can she trust him to give it to her? Can she trust the wild man of rock with her heart? There’s only one way to find out. Dive into the wildfire!

My Thoughts: I really enjoyed this book, and the primary reason I did was because of the hero.

Aidan Hawthorne, a name I absolutely adore, is the guitarist for the popular rock group, Sunfire. He also happens to be a shape-shifting firebird, and not only that, but he’s that rarest of all firebirds, the Phoenix. I don’t often go gaga over the heroes in my books, but I think a lot of that is simply because I don’t find a lot of them particularly sexy. Aidan, however, is totally the kind of guy that I would hook up with in real life if he showed up. He’s got a wonderful combination of tenderness and wild masculinity, and I just wanted to smuggle him away and take him home.

I was also pleased that, given how much I loved Aidan, Corinne worked for me as a heroine. She could have simply been one more martyr heroine, but she wasn’t. I loved watching her slowly realize just how much manipulation her father had done, and I was relieved that she didn’t choose to remain with him out of a sense of blind loyalty. Corinne also deserves some accolades, because I don’t think I could have remained sane with sisters like hers.

I really liked the romance here. We know from the beginning that there’s attraction between Aidan and Corinne, but they move gradually and at a reasonable, logical pace into love. What misunderstandings and conflicts that arise along the way are natural for the progression of their relationship, and the black moment near the end is quite emotional. The sex was hot, and really did enhance the developing relationships. The only caveat I had about the sex scenes was one near the end, where there’s some anal action and Aidan uses soap as a lube, which seems a bit uncomfortable and had me wincing in sympathy.

Connolly does tend to sequel-bait fairly heavily, not a huge surprise considering that this is a series about a rock band. For the most part she succeeds, giving us tantalizing glimpses of the rest of the band, but I never fully got a sense of who they were as people. Well, we learn quite a bit about Aidan’s brother, Ryan, but the rest were inigmas to me for the most part.

As for the non-romance plot, for the most part I liked it. My only real issue was that I felt that Corinne’s father was almost cartoonishly evil, and he was dealt with with such swift efficiency that I wondered why Aidan hadn’t just found some other way to end that particular threat.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a lot, and I’m very much looking forward to reading the second book in this series.

Some months ago, I ran into Sybil on a yahoo group. It soon became clear that we have exactly the opposite taste in books, and so, armed with this knowledge, Sybil has begun twisting my arm, reletlessly, for book reviews. She’s even sweetened the pot with offers of free books–as many as my little heart desires.

So I’ve officially become a staff reviewer for The Good, the Bad, and the Unread.

What does this mean for all four of you who read my blog? Well, I’ll still post reviews over here, especially series books that people have already reviewed at Sybil’s. And there are a few books I do intend to read this month that I wouldn’t post up over there, like Tabitha King’s Candles Burning which is a horror book I’ve started and would love to finish if I didn’t stop being distracted by shiny objects.

Anyway, I do have a few reviews posted over at Sybil’s, so I’ll go ahead and round up those links.

Shannon C.,’s note: My blogging partner, Jaliya, apparently has an adversarial relationship with Wordpress, so I’m posting this on her behalf.

So, I have been telling myself that while Shannon has been out living life to the fullest this weekend, I was going to keep all of you lovely people company. I’m the other half of Team Awesome, except that I have a whole heck of a lot to catch up on because Shannon knows how to give the content like nobody’s business. Also, as she said somewhere below, I keep geting distracted by shiny things. Maybe she won’t be home by the time I remember how to post again and then you all can say that I kept you from boredom the whole weekend long.

I am making an effort to try to be better. I put the pro in procrastination and am working on my follow through! One of the shiny things distracting me is this huge to be read pile. I was going to write out a list but I don’t know how to make it look all shiny and blogtastic, so I’ll mention it the next time around.

The lovely folks at Joyfully Reviewed has a very kickass interview of Lauren Dane whom I love like a kid loves candy. It also helps that she lives in my neck of the woods. Woohoo, go Washington state!

In the interview, she gives the best writing advice ever. It’s especially great for those like me who really really want to write an EBook but are procrastinating out the yinyang or have some serious confidence issues in their writing. “STFU and Write”

I can totally dig that. I have read her Witch’s Knot series and will be gobbling up the next one. I’ve loved that entire series and wish I could have sold the lovely Shannon on the awesomeness that is her books. Reading that interview was a great start to my weekend of which I essentially didn’t do very much. You know how it is…shiny things!

And now for my request. It is rumored that I wish a certain part of a time period which seems to be featured in many romance novels would fall off of a cliff. It’s true. I have tried reading novels set during Regency England. I want to enjoy them. I swear I want to devour such books and talk about the awesomeness that is Regency England. Except I can’t because I really, really hate everything I’ve read. Admittedly, it probably isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things. But there’s only so many virginal heroines yearning to be touched and then getting all pissy when our daring hero looks at them crosseyed. I hate the excessive amount of exclamation points because it really really bothers me. I am not a grammar guru by a long shot, but if I am noticing it then there’s something wrong. The women in the novels that I have read seem so very shrieky and angry and hateful and it makes me want to spit nails. Poor Shannon has had to deal with my rants over the phone.

So I’m asking you all to help me. Please give me some ideas of a novel with a hero and a heroine that I can love and want to take home for ravishment. Please make me love a genre that everyone else seems to squee over while I stand on the outside making a sour puss face. I will make you cookies. alright, so you might not want me baking anything that you’re likely to consume, but still, I will be a happy Jal. And then I’ll review that book and comment you up the kazba.

Alright, I’m done now. I always feel like I need to write some spiffy closing remark to these things. I can’t just stop. How do I end a blog post? Peace out? Catch you on the flip side? Word to my maternal unit? Happy trails on the internet express? Time to fizzle in the hizzle? This is really hard. I’m done now!

I’m behind in my blogging by quite a lot–I need to post something my blogging partner wrote because Wordpress hates her right now, I need to point y’all to some of my reviews posted over at The Good, the Bad and the Unread, and I had a few various and sundry other thoughts, but, dude.

KU BEAT MEMPHIS IN THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP NCAA GAME!

I am feeling really proud to be a Jayhawk right now. And let’s not talk about the fact that I didn’t actually watch the game or anything. Because that is not the point! I have no idea what the point actually is, but rock chock Jayhawk anyway!

Title: Shadow Touch: Dirk & Steele, Book 2
Author: Marjorie M. Liu
Genre: Paranormal romance/urban fantasy
Grade: B+
Reason for Reading: I really enjoyed Tiger Eye, and wanted to explore this world Liu has created.

Synopsis: Elena Baxter can heal people with her mind. Artur Loginov, who has a dark past involving the Russian mafia, can read objects with a touch. Both of them are kidnapped by a mysterious organization calling itself the Consortium. The Consortium knows about their abilities, and wants to recruit them for its own nefarious purposes. Elena and Artur end up forming a mental connection while they’re at the consortium’s base of operation, and soon they are involved in an adventure full of intrigue, violence, and a potential love that will last a lifetime.

My Thoughts: This story was quite lovely. Yet again, Ms. Liu integrates her world-building very nicely with the romance. The action keeps moving at a brisk pace, and I found the Consortium to be the creepiest set of villains I’ve read in a romance in quite a while. I also liked that there aren’t very many, “Well, as you know, Bob” type conversations. Liu spells out for the reader what she needs to know, but lets us draw our own conclusions.

I remember that I liked Artur in the last book. He’s done some pretty dispicable things in his past, and he knows and accepts that about himself. Here, we get to delve inside his head, and we find out that he hasn’t had an easy life. A lot of authors would have chosen to make Artur a bucket of near-endless angst, but Ms. Liu doesn’t take him in that direction. He is a strong, sexy, complex man and I was glad he got his HEA.

Elena I couldn’t get into so much. I felt that she wasn’t nearly as well-drawn as Artur, and so she overshadowed him for much of the story. For a while, I thought she would also be the kind of heroine that’s simply full of sweetness and light, incapable of even contemplating doing a bad thing. But even Elena has the lines she won’t cross, and thankfully, she does what she has to. As with the first book, the romance is over relatively quickly. There’s really not much conflict at all between Artur and Elena, and they spend so much time literally inside each other’s heads that one couldn’t have been sustained all that long anyway. that normally would have creeped me out, but I liked how Ms. Liu built up the telepathic connection.

The secondary characters are interesting. We get a few glimpses of some of the old favorites from the Dirk and Steele agency, and we meet a couple of very intriguing shape-shifters, one of whom is the hero in Ms. Liu’s recent Dirk and Steele book, if memory serves. Once again, the introduction of these characters serves the plot, and even in the few scenes where I didn’t so much think that was the case, those scenes were mercifully short.

Overall, I liked this slightly gritty paranormal romance/urban fantasy. The romance is a bit weak, but it’s more than made up for by the well-drawn characters and the high drama, and hopefully it won’t be five months before I pick up the third book in this series.