Flight into Fantasy

Y’all know that I love some cheese with my romance. It’s why books featuring snard make me happy, despite the fact that nutella and male excreta should never go together. It’s also why, despite the fact that her books couldn’t possibly be more derivitive if they tried, I am in love with Bianca D’arc’s Dragon Knights series. I gulped down the first of these ebooks last year, one after the other, and only recently picked up the sixth, Fire Drake, because I’d heard there was a seventh. (Note that, yes, I did buy the book in e-format, but I’m linking you directly to the info page for the print because I’m just that awesome!)

Basically, the premise of this series is the Dragonriders of Pern, only with lots more on-screen sexing and an excuse for menage a trois scenes between two hot specimens of beefcake and one lucky lady. Because, you see, dragons form telepathic bonds with male knights, only when the dragons find their mates, the men have to have a woman in the picture so that they don’t need to get their boy cooties all over each other.

Fire Drake is not an acception to this premise. Drake of the Five Lands returns to Draconia, which as you might surmise is the home of all these dragons and their partners. He’s come to deliver a message that the royal princes are in danger. He plans on making his pronouncement and getting the hell out of there, because he left Draconia under less than ideal circumstances, but of course that doesn’t happen. Drake must come to grips with his father, a man who never approved of him, and face the young dragon he left pining for him years ago. Complicating matters is Krysta, a guardswoman who intrigues him, but who also seems to intrigue his best friend and rival, Mace. Of course, the threat to the princes is soon realized, and Drake, Krysta and Mace must go on a quest to find the abducted prince, a quest that will ultimately bring them closer together and change all of their destinies.

What I especially like about these books is that they are pure wish fulfillment, escapist fun. D’Arc’s worldbuilding, while nowhere near original, is still good enough that I’d love to visit Draconia, hang out in the dragons’ lairs, fly on dragonback, and yes, find two studly men to make me feel really, really good. It would just be cool, and I would much rather read fantasy where the author has an attitude of, “Wow, this would be awesome!” than fantasy that tries to be so freaking serious all the time. And while, if I think about Draconian society and how it would actually work out in the real world, I find myself not buying the concept that two men absolutely must find their one true soulmate woman, while I am immersed in the story I don’t care, and, in fact, I find D’Arc’s handling of the menage a trois, where the two men have no interest in each other, to be better than most and so I buy it.

As for this book in particular, it’s really Drake’s story. Drake could be an obnoxious Marty Stu under different circumstances, but he suffers from enough self-doubt to make him relatable, though I did wonder why none of the other characters didn’t bonk him upside the head for being so whiny about how he didn’t deserve to be a dragon knight. Mace and Krysta were also fun to read about. Mace was a shade underdeveloped, but he was basically a nice beta hero, and I liked the rivalry that characterized his friendship with Drake, as it gave them more depth. And Krysta, being a warrior woman, embodies one of my favorite heroine archetypes. I wouldn’t quite go so far as to call her a kick-ass heroine, but I liked that she held her own and wasn’t in constant need of being rescued.

As for the plot, it wasn’t quite as tight as some of the others in the series. I got the impression D’Arc was making things up as she went along, and sometimes this worked, but sometimes I was left wondering where she was going with any of her plotting. There’s a pretty major story arc throughout the series that is no closer to being resolved, but I hope there will be more progress in the next book. The author’s influences are patently obvious, but her world is just a cool place, and I enjoy my time there. This story was no exception, and it rates a B.

Other Opinions

If any of you have read this series, let me know what you think of it!

I should start out this review with a disclaimer. I don’t work with kids. I’m not a parent. I once was a kid my very own self, but so were we all. So I am not really qualified to talk about what it’s actually like to raise kids.

Nonetheless, I find the process of child-rearing fascinating in a detached, I-don’t-really-know-if-I-really-want-to-do-that kind of way. Which was what led me to pick up Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s fascinating Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children. The authors basically assert that much of the thinking parents have had about children in the last few decades might be more harmful than helpful. They back these assertions up by talking to lots of scholars, and there’s quite an extended section at the back on notes and resources.

Some of their premises are fairly counterintuitive. They say that praising kids for being smart actually encourages them to do less well than they might already. I found this a bit hard to swallow until I thought about it. I remember a teacher telling me once that I was good at math. This seemed like a patently false statement to my fourteen-year-old self. I was not good at math. I hated math! Math was hard! So maybe I understood the core concepts, but they didn’t come easily to me, so how could I be good at math? At the time I would have much rather done something I did excel at, like an English assignment. The result was that I hated classes where I actually had to study when I was in high school, because I felt I shouldn’t have to study. I was, after all, smart. This proved detrimental to me when I first attended college, and it’s only been in recent years, having returned to school, that I’ve picked up on better study habits. Maybe if someone had tried Bronson and Merryman’s suggestion, that of praising kids for specific things they did well and praising their effort at doing them, I would have been more successful.

Some of their other assertions made more sense to me. The authors talk about how teens release melatonin later at night than do adults and younger children, and that they would benefit from having school start an hour later. I know that I certainly would have. I also thought the section on the Tools preschool program was fascinating in its approach.

I found this to be a fascinating book and a surprisingly quick read. I’m not sure it will work for many parents, and I don’t know if I’d feel differently about what I’ve read if I had kids, but I think it provides lots of food for thought.

Final Grade: B.

P.S. The authors have a website, which looks very interesting!

P.P.S. I got this from Bookshare.

Other Opinions

• Five Minutes for Books

I have to hand it to John Green. If anyone else were to write a book about some guy who dated girls with the same name and then pined and sulked for the whole book about how they kept dumping him, I think I probably would laugh and give it a pass. But this is exactly the premise of An Abundance of Katherines, and I really enjoyed it! It wasn’t the awesome, life-changing book that Looking for Alaska was, but, since it effectively got me out of a reading slump, I won’t hold that against the book.

Colin Singleton, our narrator, is a child prodigy. He has a talent for anagrams, and a propensity for dating girls named Katherine. After Katherine Xix breaks up with him, he mopes around for a while until his best friend, Hassan, convinces him they should take a road trip. This lands them in Gutshot, Tennessee, where they stumble into jobs recording the town’s history.

By all rights, I should have found Colin annoying. He spends much of the book focused on Katherine, and on how it is just his destiny to be dumped by girls, yada yada yada. But I couldn’t dislike him, because his mind was fascinating. I liked how he just randomly spewed forth trivia, and had to constantly be pulled back on task. He’s so obviously a dork, but as a girl with a definite love for geeky men, I wanted to hug him at the same time that I wanted to shake him.

While Colin was fascinating, I loved Hassan. Hassan provides a nice foil, and I appreciated that he read like a real teenage guy. I also liked that he regularly called Colin on his bullshit, and that his word for when it was time to close a subject was ‘dingleberries’. He definitely reminded me of some of the guys I knew growing up, and I really want to know what happened to him.

The rest of the characters generally worked for me. I thought Colin’s eventual love interest was an interesting character in her own right, and not the manic pixie dream girl type I’d been sort of afraid would show up after having read Looking for Alaska. I also liked that the major landowner in Gutshot wasn’t a heartless villain. The only sour note was the meathead jock, who was predictably a jerk in predictable ways.

The plot is fairly character-driven, so not a whole lot happens aside from the initial road trip and a few episodic events that happen once Colin and Hassan get to Gutshot. The focus is pretty explicitly on Colin coming to terms with his relationships and growing up, and I loved it. By the end of the book, I was happy and satisfied.

I also have to mention the setting. John Green writes about the South with obvious affection, and I liked that he chose not to populate Gutshot with stereotypical rednecks. The place came alive for me, and while I’m not sure Tennessee in summer is the kind of place I actually want to visit, I enjoyed seeing it with the obvious love that Green has for the South.

John Green writes young adult fiction that transcends stereotypes about the genre. His characters are smart and they feel authentic. Their issues may not be the subjects of Lifetime movies of the week, but they are real. The books are ultimately about hope and self-realization, and, even for this reader, who is retreating further and further from her teenage years with every passing day, they are relevant. Not to mention they are excellent reads. If you haven’t tried John Green, you really should.

Final Grade: B+

P.S. I actually plunked down cash for this book.

Other Opinions:

Lots of people have read and reviewed this book, so I refer you to the most excellent Book Blogger’s Search Engine!

Happy Sunday, everyone!

Yesterday I did my own personal readathon. All I did was read, something I haven’t allowed myself to do for quite a while, unless we’re talking about reading stuff for class. I figured it was just easier to immerse myself in books than deal with the RL stuff I’m worrying about, which largely involves things I can’t control. Reading provides an escape from those worries. Unfortunately, my impromptu readathon means I haven’t done any of the other things I meant to do Saturday.

One of the things I discovered about my massive TBR pile is that I enjoy certain themes. So on a whim I decided that the first week in March is going to be Beauty and the Beast week over at this blog. I’ll be reviewing several different takes on the Beauty and the Beast story. So far, I’ve got two YA novels and two adult fantasy novels, and I’m hoping to work in a romance with that theme if I can find one I like… which shouldn’t be difficult considering how much I enjoy that trope. In fact, I’d love recommendations from any of y’all!

And now we come to the list of books I’ve finished this week.

• Courting Disaster by Kathleen O’Reilly: (Review here.)
• The Mercy Room by Gilles Rozier, translated by Anthea Bell (Review here.)
• An Abundance of Katherines by John Green: John Green’s books make me happy. I’ve only got one more to read, and then I think I will happily join his legions of adoring fans. I’ll be reviewing this one tomorrow.
• Nurture-Shock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman: I find the process of child development fascinating, and I thought this book presented some interesting ideas, most of which were counterintuitive, but all of which made sense. I’ll review this one on Tuesday.
• Crazy Beautiful by Lauren Baratz-Logsted: This is the first of my Beauty and the Beast themed books, and I’ll review it next Monday. In brief: I liked it but it had a few flaws that were kind of eyeroll-inducing.

Right now, I’m reading:

• Empress by Karen Miller: This one I’ll be reading for a while since (1) it’s epic fantasy and (2) I’m validating it for Bookshare. So far I’m really liking it.
• Fire Drake by Bianca D’arc: This is one of those fantasy romance series that I love despite the fact that it’s not only cheesy as hell but the author’s influences are so obvious as to be transparent. This book has more of a complex plot than some of the others, and it took me longer to get into, but now I’m hooked.
• The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness: I do want to finish this one. I even started it last week, but then I got sick and I decided that a book where the characters spend all their time having their heads screwed with was not my idea of a comfort read. I will probably get back to it sooner rather than later, though, because I’m dying to know what happens to Todd and Viola!

This week I abandoned Bitterwood by James Maxey. I got all the way to chapter 3 this time before the patently obvious symbolism, the cheesy and trite dialogue, and the fact that all of the female characters so far introduced have the depth of cardboard got on my freaking nerves!

I hope the rest of you have an awesome Sunday and a great week!

A couple of notes: This review contains a few spoilers, and it’s necessary for me to use some gender-neutral pronouns throughout. I’ve chosen a set that I prefer, but if you’re using a screenreader and notice the slight mispronunciation, I swear I actually mean the spellings I use.

What motivates people to acts of compassion? Why do people stand idly by while atrocities are committed? These are some of the questions that Gilles Rozier tackles in The Mercy Room. He doesn’t offer answers to any of these questions, which makes for a compelling, albeit quite dark, read that I still haven’t entirely processed.

A German teacher living in Nazi-occupied France is compelled to translate documents for the Germans. The teacher’s gender is never identified, which is a bit of a distracting storytelling device, but nonetheless an effective one. The teacher doesn’t resist hir orders, and one day, while s/he is waiting for the German officer to give hir more documents to translate, s/he stumbles across Herman, a Jewish former soldier. Compelled by his handsome looks, the teacher spirits Herman to hir home, hiding him for two years in a cellar.

The teacher is not a likeable character. Y’all know that I have to have likeable characters to root for in my fiction, but nonetheless I found hir compelling. Maybe it was just that I couldn’t believe any person with even an ounce of compassion could say or think the things that go through hir head. The teacher is obsessed with the fact that hir sister is sleeping with an SS officer. S/he has a loveless marriage which in the end results in hir spouse committing suicide, to which hir only response is along the lines of, “Wow, that was tacky.” And s/he humiliates Herman, by giving him a pair of hir underwear as well as a pair of hir spouses, so that he has to alternate between wearing men’s and women’s undergarments, and then justifies hir behavior by telling us s/he could have behaved worse.

I came away from this book with the sense that I wasn’t supposed to like these characters and that the story was really a vehicle for Rozier to explore some complex issues. The Hollocaust is a fascinating time in history, because it’s a time when people were both horrifyingly, monstrously cruel, and yet so many people showed great compassion. Yet, Rozier argues that even in compassion, people can be cruel, and it’s made me wonder about all the other stories I have read about people who helped the Jews and resisted the Nazis. What motivated them to do so? How did they react to having such absolute power over another human being? Those are chilling questions, and ones I won’t easily forget. I also appreciated the fact that Rozier delves into what it was like to be a random citizen of Nazi-occupied Europe. The motivations for the characters not doing more to resist made sense to me, and again I was left wondering what I would be willing to do if I ever found myself in such a situation. Sadly, the answer is that I don’t know.

I’m not sure how to grade this book. The writing was lovely and accessible in a way that I never seem to figure translations will be, and there were lots of exdellent ideas. But I’m not sure I’m inclined to reread it, because I don’t know if I can endure another period of time in the teacher’s head. So I think I’ll give this a B+.

P.S. I validated this for Bookshare

Warning: This review contains a few spoilers. Feel free to skip if this isn’t your thing.

When people talk about category romances, there are names that keep coming up over and over again of authors whose books are awesome. One name I keep hearing is Kathleen O’Reilly. I’d heard that she writes good characters with real problems. And so, when the motherlode of Harlequins got submitted to Bookshare, I opted to proofread one of Ms. O’Reilly’s books, Courting Disaster. From this experience, I’ve decided that Ms. O’Reilly is an author to watch out for, since I enjoyed this book.

Demetri Lucas is a racecar driver with a penchant for fast cars and faster women. One day, while visiting his friend, Hugh Preston, whose horseracing business is in jeopardy, Elizabeth Innis literally runs into him. Elizabeth is a successful country singer, who has built her reputation on being squeaky-clean and above reproach. Sparks immediately fly, but they are both drawn to each other by a common goal, namely keeping Quest Stables, the company Hugh Preston owns, in the black.

I really liked Elizabeth in particular. Her voice was unique, something I can’t always say for the heroines of romance novels. Elizabeth, though, I could imagine perfectly. It’s obvious that Ms. O’Reilly enjoyed writing her, because I had a lot of fun in her POV. For someone so famous, she has a down-to-earth way of looking at the world that I found endearing.

Demetri was also interesting, though I didn’t connect with him as well as I did Elizabeth. I liked that, though he had good reason to angst, he tended to be a bit of an adrenaline junkie, because God save me from yet another whiny romance hero. I also appreciated that there were people aside from Elizabeth who found his playboy behavior problematic. Further, I liked that Ms. O’Reilly didn’t actually focus on how skanktastic all the other women in Demetri’s life were. Because from the moment he meets Elizabeth, his focus is entirely on her, and I believed that persistance. The two of them had some great chemistry even though the sex scenes, while present, were of the non-explicit variety.

I also liked the way Ms. O’Reilly handled the issues the couple faced. Elizabeth and Demetri both have fathers with whom they have horrible relationships, and those relationships aren’t mended at book’s end. I also liked that it was Demetri who had to make sacrifices for Elizabeth, and that those sacrifices made sense and weren’t just tacked on for the sake of an HEA. Demetri really is getting too old to race, and his motivations for doing so aren’t exactly the best, so I thought his choosing to retire was a sign that he’d grown up.

I did have a couple of minor quibbles which are entirely subjective. I rolled my eyes at Demetri being Greek, since category romances seem to be enamored with Greeks for whatever reason. And I wasn’t really sure what Elizabeth did exactly to preserve her squeaky-lean reputation except talk about it a lot.

That all being said, this is a simple romance with no extraneous plots and no extraneous POV switches. Reading the rest of the Thoroughbred Legacy miniseries, of which this is a part, is unnecessary. I’ll definitely be reading more from Ms. O’Reilly, and this book rates a B.

Other Opinions

• Dear Author (It’s the second review)

Once upon a time, there was a book blogger. She was pure as the driven snow, and lived a happy life reading books of all genres, unaware of the dangers that could befall the unwary.

Then one day, the book blogger got herself a twitter, and, recognizing the potential Twitter represented, she made friends with other bloggers. All was well in the land, and the sweet and innocent book blogger reveled in her new friendships, and the book recommendations they brought.

Then, one day, Katiebabs and another book blogger–our narrator cannot remember who–commenced a conversation on Twitter about The Cat Star Chronicles by Cheryl Brooks. Actually, the conversation was specifically about something found with alarming frequency in this series. No, I’m not talking about exclamation points, although those pop up quite frequently. I refer instead to… snard.

Before you ask, snard is what happens when a man in this series finds a woman that he likes very much. While smexing her, he usually emits excretions that taste, according to one of the books, like hazelnut. These cause spontaneous orgasms in the female.

Anyway, our erstwhile book blogger, being a fan of fiction of questionable taste, made haste to acquire the series and read the first four in something like a week, devouring the books the way she has also been known to devour whipped cream straight from the container. (This explains why our intrepid book blogger is not a small woman.) And the books were good. They were engaging, didn’t require a whole lot of brain power, and didn’t seem to take themselves all that seriously. The fourth book, especially, introduced our blogger to a tortured hero she just wanted to hug.

Months passed, and soon there was a new addition to the series, which our intrepid blogger eagerly dived into. And it is this book she–OK I–will review today.

First, a little background on the series. Apparently, the Zetithian race was destroyed a couple of decades ago when their planet was blown up. A band of Zethithian soldiers were captured, however, and sold into slavery. Each of these men endured a lot before finding a woman they were drawn to, women whom they gave their snard to on a regular basis. (And if you think I should be above random references to snard throughout this post… you obviously don’t know me very well.)

Anyway, in this fifth installment of the Cat Star Chronicles, Fugitive, Earth artist Drucilla has come to the idyllic Barada 7 to paint birds after a breakup with her latest gay boyfriend. Apparently, homophobia still runs rampant in Brooks’s future, which makes me sad. Anyway, she soon becomes aware of Manx, who is, you guessed it, a Zetithian. Manx thinks Drucilla smells wonderful and wants to boink her ASAP, but there’s a bounty on his head. So, needless to say, wacky hijinks ensue.

There’s a lot to like here–at least if you’re a reader like me who enjoys an element of cheese in her fiction. Manx and Drucilla are both quite likeable, and even though I didn’t buy the chemistry completely, I wasn’t sorry they ended up together. There are also great secondary characters, including couples from previous books, some precocious children, and a garulous alien. I enjoyed reading about all these people immensely, and am sad that I have no idea when the next book will come out so I can see what else Ms. Brooks has in store for them. Because there’s definitely a few loose ends I’d like to see explored. I hope there is at least one Zetithian female wandering around, because I really want to meet one. And the answer of who destroyed the Zetithian home world is still not revealed.

That all being said, I do have significant quibbles. In the first place, I feel that there was way too much going on, and that an editor could have been a bit more strenuous in tightening things up. There were way too many POV shifts to characters whose heads I didn’t need to be in. And I don’t actually want to read sex scenes involving previous characters. They had their books. It’s time to keep them out of the spotlight.

The other thing that bugged me was that the sex scenes were raunchy. I don’t read erotic romance for loving descriptions of how much the heroine wants the hero to smear her face and body with his snard; I don’t care how much like hazelnut the stuff tastes. And when I wasn’t reading raunchy sex, I was reading repetitive sex. I know there are only so many ways to say that nutella-flavored excreta has awesome effects. But surely saying so over and over and over and over and over again rather ruins the effect.

The result of all this was that, while I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, it took me a while to finish, and I didn’t think it had the same campy quality that the other books in the series had, which I liked so much. The end result is a mixed bag, and so I’m going to have to give it a C+.

Other Opinions

• The Bookgirl
• Kylee’s Journal
• Cheeky Reads
• The Book Binge

Whenever I tell people they shouldn’t paint romance novels with the same brush, I inevitably end up recommending Marjorie M Liu. I’ve been a huge fan of her Dirk and Steele series of paranormal romantic thrillers since I first read them a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I’m not caught up with the series. I tend to hoarde books from my favorite authors, which is why it’s taken me this long to read Eye of Heaven, the fifth book in the Dirk and Steele series.

The premise: The members of Dirk and Steele are all people with special abilities. Blue Perreneau, an electrokenetic, is no exception. He’s been tracking Santoso, a human flesh peddler, but is injured before he can affect a capture. After he recovers, he is summoned to the bedside of his dying father, who wants Blue to recover the half-brother he didn’t know about. If Blue, who has always had an adversarial relationship with his father, to put it mildly, doesn’t do this, then his father will make sure that Dirk and Steele’s dealings are compromised. So Blue tracks his brother to Las Vegas, where he’s working for a small circus. Blue joins the circus as an electrician, and almost immediately meets Iris McGillis, a leopard shapeshifter. But it’s not all glitz and glamor, as there are people who very badly want to use Blue and Iris for their own ends.

What I appreciate about Ms. Liu’s writing is that there’s always stuff happening. I’m never bored when I read her books, and this one was no exception. There’s a lot going on in this book, and I found the mystery and thriller elements quite riveting for the most part. I honestly didn’t know how Ms. Liu was going to resolve the plot threads she put into place, and there were a few twists I really enjoyed. For the most part, everything is resolved satisfactorily, although not every thread worked for me. There was, for example, an element of tension having to do with a couple from a previous book that I thought would make for some interesting moral quandries, but that plot thread was literally solved with a deus ex machina. And there were a few times where I rolled my eyes as yet another set of goons attempted to kidnap Iris. It seemed like she was either about to be kidnapped, in danger of being kidnapped, kidnapped, or recovering from being kidnapped throughout the book.

The romance element also works well for me. It’s not very explicit–at least compared to other books I’ve read–but I bought the chemistry between Iris and Blue. It didn’t even bother me that they declared their love within a few days of knowing each other, because those were some action-packed days, what with all the kidnapping going on.

I haven’t talked much about the characters. Iris is awesome. Being a leopard shape-shifter, she has an affinity for the big cats she performs with. But, aside from the cats, all she’s known in life is her mother, who disappeared two years ago with little explanation. That combination of toughness and vulnerability always works for me, and this time was no exception. I also appreciated that, while Iris does get kidnapped an awful lot, she never brings it on herself by doing something mind-numbingly stupid.

Blue is also great. He’s not my favorite Dirk and Steele hero–that title goes to the very bookish gargoyle hero of The Wild Road , but Blue is interesting in his own right. I liked reading about his struggles to come to terms with his relationship with his father. By the end of the book, he understands the man a little better, though he’s still got a few issues. And the relationship between Blue and his brother, Daniel, works very well and comes about quite naturally.

The secondary characters are also, for the most part, very interesting. I found Iris’s mother fascinating for reasons that would involve spoilers, and even Blue’s father isn’t a complete villain. Daniel also has a lot to deal with, and I hope we’re not done seeing the last of him. Former Dirk and Steele heroes also make brief appearances–not enough to disrupt the flow of the story but their presence definitely provides something to the plot.

If you’re interested in this series, each book stands perfectly well on its own. They don’t need to be read in order, though, series purist that I am, I always feel that books are better enjoyed if you read them in order.

This isn’t my favorite entry into the series. But it’s great for those who like thrills in addition to their romances. The leads are likeable, there’s a lot of action, and the world-building is excellent. I rate this one a strong B.

Other Opinions

• All About Romance

Happy Sunday, everyone! If you have a partner, I hope you’re enjoying your Valentine’s Day. If you, like me, do not, I hope you’re at least going to buy yourself some chocolate.

Sorry for the stream-of-conscious rambling style of this post. I can’t be bothered to write a coherent essay. I’ve been feeling low-grade nausea all day, and I’m really hoping I’m not about to get sick, because that would suck.

Around the blogosphere this week I’ve noticed a few conversations about cliques in blogland. To be honest, I think cliques happen no matter what community you belong to. It’s just how people operate. And I take a pretty zen view of the whole thing. I know I’m small potatoes in blogland, and I’m cool with that. I could probably increase my page ranking, do more contests, etc. if I wanted to. But I don’t really feel the need. And I consider a handful of bloggers and authors to be friends, but I don’t want to make my blog a popularity contest. I don’t have the time in the first place, and in the second, I don’t know what I’d do with minions and fangirls if I had them.

Of course, sometimes those sentiments are a little easier to maintain than at other times. For example, all the talk on the blogosphere about the book blogger convention does depress me. I am a poor college student. I simply can’t afford to go, and even if I did go, while it would be awesome to meet my fellow book bloggers, I’d still have to deal with the fact that I’d be going to New York. By myself. As a blind person. Even the thought makes my introverted soul weep a little. But man, it would be so much fun to get together and talk about books with other people who are as passionate about them as I am! And, since there aren’t many local bloggers in my area–if there are any at all–it’s never going to happen, and that thought does depress me, because I do feel like I’ll always be on the outside looking in.

Anyway, enough about that. I wanted to start keeping better track of what I’m currently reading, more for my own reference than anything else.

Books I need to review:

• Eye of Heaven by Marjorie Liu

Books I’m currently reading:

• Fugitive by Cheryl Brooks – I’m a little over halfway through this one, so I’ll probably finish it today I love Brooks’s cheesy futuristic romance series, but this one suffers from plotting that’s all over the place. Also, the sex scenes are increasingly unsexy.
• Bitterwood by James Maxey: This is a validation for Bookshare. It’s surprisingly good so far, but I’m not far into it.
• Love by Toni Morrison: I got this from the Library, and I’m not sure whether I’m going to finish it. It has an interesting premise, and God knows I don’t read enough books by and about people of color, but I’m just not in the mood for something so literary.

So that’s my Sunday. How are the rest of you? Read anything awesome lately?

I decided I needed a new theme… three hours ago. I have simple criteria. I want one I can use with tags, I wanted something that would let me edit my posts, and I didn’t want something complicated.

Of course, it would be much easier, having installed this theme, if Wordpress would consent to let me actually, oh, I don’t know, post things.

Anyway, assuming this goes through, please do let me know what you think, particularly if you’re sighted. Does this theme look OK? Is it easy to read? What should I have my faithful minion fix for me?

Hi, Internet,
I’ve not exactly been in a reading slump so much as I haven’t read anything inspiring lately. I’m in the middle of a couple of books I really enjoy, but I always seem to find other things to do that don’t involve picking them up. Which was why I was quite pleased to see that some kind soul had scanned a whole bunch of recent Harlequins and put them up to be proofread for Bookshare. Harlequins are quick reads–I could read one in an afternoon without working hard, and you never know what you’re going to get. Especially given the fact that Harlequin’s marketing strategy largely involves taking any semblance of mystery away from the reader via their horrendous titles.

The book I picked to read had a horrendous title, though I passed up several other choices that were worse. And, surprisingly, I found Plain Jane and the Playboy by Marie Ferarella to be a pleasant read. It’s not so earth-shattering that you should all go buy it right this second, nor was it as awful as I always expect Harlequin romances to be.

Our basic premise is that Jorge Mendoza is a ladies’ man. He loves women of all shapes, sizes, and, apparently, ages. One night, while at a New Year’s Eve party, he ends up chatting with a local teenager and boasts that he can pick up any woman at the party with no effort. So the kid points out wallflower Jane Gilliam and Jorge does what Jorge does best.

For her part, Jane is surprised that a guy as obviously good-looking and charming as Jorge is showing any interest in her. After an explosive kiss, she’s prepared to enjoy Jorge’s attention, however fleeting, until the aforementioned teenager, rather predictably, makes a mess of things. Jorge spends the rest of the book being drawn to Jane without quite knowing why, and, this being a romance, we all know how it will end.

I’m about to pick several nits with this book, so I wanted to start out by telling you what I liked. Firstly, I basically liked our leads. Jorge wasn’t an asshole, and though Jane has her moments of not being very bright, she’s basically a sweet girl. She has insecurities about Jorge, which I thought were pretty reasonable for the most part, given what a player he is. I also appreciated that the romance ran a pretty true-to-life course, with the couple dating and taking time to get to know each other before they fell into bed. I also thought Jorge and Jane had very good chemistry, even though the book isn’t as explicit as many romances.

Now for the stuff I didn’t like. Some of this isn’t Ms. Ferarella’s fault. It isn’t, for example, her fault that I find the pure-as-driven-snow romance heroine archetype to be extremely tedious. Not only does Jane teach kids how to read, but she volunteers in her spare time, reading to kids in the hospital. Gag me with a spoon. Not that these things are unworthy pursuits. I’m just tired of that archetype. And, of course, Jorge finds Jane refreshingly straightforward and honest and kind, unlike the other women he’s dated, which, since there have allegedly been zillions, must mean someone somewhere doesn’t have a very good opinion of women in general. I also found some of the elements that make this a miniseries annoying. There were several POV shifts to random secondary characters including one prolonged scene in which one guy goes through his pockets so his wife can take his clothes to the dry cleaner. Yeah. Clearly fascinating stuff, that. There seems to be a larger plot going on in the series as a whole, but it wasn’t incorporated very well into this story, so, again, it was just tedious.

Then there’s the stuff Ms. Ferarella could control. There was a lot of telling rather than showing. For example, if Jorge’s such a playboy, I wish we could have seen him in action with other people besides Jane. Alslo, though Jane is shy and a bit bland with Jorge, it’s repeatedly stated that with others she’s warm and gracious, but we only saw her with someone else once or twice, when she demonstrated said graciousness. And some of the writing is downright clunky. Jorge compares Jane at one point to Bambi, because she is so gosh-darn innocent. Is Jorge aware that Bambi is, in fact, a male deer? And then there was my favorite metaphor, in which a girl’s hair is compared to windshield wipers. I laughed. I’m not sure I was supposed to.

Overall, this was a bit of a mixed bag. It was a pleasant read with likeable characters, but I could have wished for less input from secondary characters, a more cohesive integration of the long-term story arc, and a bit more showing instead of telling. This one rates a C.

other Opinions

I couldn’t find any. If I’ve missed your review, feel free to smack me with a wet noodle in the comments.

Hi, Internet,

Back when I was a proto-human, my mom, in an attempt to broaden my reading horizons and introduce me to the world of adult fiction, spent a couple of rainy days reading aloud Thunder Heights by Phyllis A. Whitney. This spawned a meme in my childish heart, and I soon devoured several of her books. Sure, even my ten-year-old brain was well aware that they were formulaic. But it was a formula I enjoyed.

So, when I found out about Aarti’s Flashback c hallenge, I knew that I wanted to reread some Phyllis Whitney and see if I still found her enjoyable. After perusing Bookshare, I selected Columbella, which I remember being kind of confused about when I read it as a girl. Still, there was a deliciously evil villain, and I remember being surprised that Whitney broke away from her formula by having the token love interest be a married man.

Here’s the deal. Jessica Abbott’s vain, shallow, bitchy mother has died. Jessica, a spinster, isn’t quite sure how to cope with this new sense of freedom because she basically took care of her mom during the last few years. So she goes to stay with her aunt in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. After spending time moping on the beach, Jessica is approached by Maud Hampden, a rich island resident. Seems Maud has a problem. She has a skanky whore daughter who, sadly, reproduced. Maud thinks Catherine, the skank whore daughter, is going to exercise an undue influence on Leila, Catherine’s daughter. Catherine’s husband, our token love interest, Kingdon, wants to send Leila back to Colorado, which would solve the problem, but then we wouldn’t have a story. Maud thinks Jessica can exert some positive influence on Leila, thus making her need to go away moot. So off Jessica goes to Hampden House.

The formula that I remember is very much in place. Lots of the characters distrust Jessica for no discernible reason. Kingdon starts off cold and autocratic, but eventually he is won over by Jessica’s kindness and her fiery spirit. Leila is a precocious child, pulled in several different directions, torn between her worshipful adoration of her mother and her mom’s skanky ways and her need to be her own person. Sadly, I would much rather have read a YA from Leila’s POV, since she was by far my favorite character.

The characterization isn’t particularly wonderful, though most of the characters do have a few hidden depths. There just isn’t much to a lot of them, even if they go in surprising directions. As I was reading, I kept wishing we were in the heads of characters that were not Jessica, who I actually found rather dull. Maud’s eldest daughter, Edith, for example, was just fascinating. She’s married to a snarky, sometimes cruel man who mostly seems to ignore her but who it’s revealed early on may or may not have had a thing for Catherine, Edith’s sister and the aforementioned skanky whore. Edith exists mostly as a background character, and I found that a shame.

As for Catherine, well, basically, she reminds me of Cathy Dollanganger from Flowers in the Attic. She’s conceited, she has a high opinion of her own beauty, and while she may not have engaged in incest, she’s very good at twisting the knife and tends to get pissy when she doesn’t get what she wants. There is basically nothing redeemable about this character, and her spoiled upbringing is only the flimsiest of justifications. Plus, she’s a skanky whore. And if I never have to read about a woman who likes sex being considered depraved, it will be too soon. Not that I condone Catherine’s behavior–she was happily screwing around with men that were not her husband, which is never OK–I wanted more from her personality than skanky whoreishness.

Even if I didn’t really like Jessica, who was just quite dull, I did appreciate Whitney’s ability to keep things interesting. I was never bored, even though there were several long, descriptive passages. Whitney manages to make even a tropical setting come off as gothic and creepy, which is all to the good. Her only misstep, plotting-wise, was the romance. Like Jessica and Kingdon themselves, it just wasn’t terribly interesting, and I didn’t quite believe it. It was hard to accept that for Kingdon, Jessica wasn’t just a rebound girl. And I found their eventual getting together somewhat hackneyed in its development.

Overall, this one was a mixed bag. I’m not sorry I read it, but I’ve come to appreciate a bit more in the way of nuance from my books. I’m going to have to give this a C.

Other Opinions:

If you, too, have read this book, let me know what you thought of it in the comments.

I haven’t done any memes here on the blog in a while, so I decided it was high time to remedy this fact and see what’s being asked over at Booking Through Thursday.

Here is this week’s question.

How can you encourage a non-reading child to read? What about a teen-ager? Would you require books to be read in the hopes that they would enjoy them once they got into them, or offer incentives, or just suggest interesting books? If you do offer incentives and suggestions and that doesn’t work, would you then require a certain amount of reading? At what point do you just accept that your child is a non-reader?

In the book Gifted Hands by brilliant surgeon Ben Carson, one of the things that turned his life around was his mother’s requirement that he and his brother read books and write book reports for her. That approach worked with him, but I have been afraid to try it. My children don’t need to “turn their lives around,” but they would gain so much from reading and I think they would enjoy it so much if they would just stop telling themselves, “I just don’t like to read.”

OK, so I’m coming at this question as someone who is not affiliated with the publishing industry in any way, and who is not a parent of a child. I just know what worked for me.

First of all, I think it’s important for parents to start young and read to kids. My mom read to me until well past the point where I could read books on my own. She likes to tell people that I had memorized all of Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree and still insisted that she read it. Plus, in this day of so much stimulation and so many activities, reading together allows for a chance to relax and totally immerse yourselves in a story.

As kids get older, and are reading for themselves, I think it’s important to find books that they like and encourage them to read to their interests, even if they’re not yours. That’s where I think the extruded books like the Nancy Drew books, Goosebumps, and the Babysitters Club, which I read in my own childhood, helped. My mom, who is my reading inspiration, doesn’t read most of the sorts of books I do. We share a love of romances, but she likes light, funny historicals and I like dark, angsty paranormals. She also likes pop literature like Jody Picoult, whose books, to me, seem like what would happen if you wrote YA issues books but for adults. I, on the other hand, love science fiction and fantasy, and I adore contemporary YA. Putting all that another way, a child is going to be exposed to a ton of books s/he has no interest in reading as s/he goes through school. (Ugh, just remembering the three times I had to read Orwell’s Animal Farm makes me shudder. And don’t get me started on Lord of the Flies. So handing a kid a book at home and saying, “Here. Read this. Oh and write a book report.” probably isn’t going to work.)

My last suggestion seems patently obvious. Be sure to read yourself. Talk about what you’re reading with your child, why it’s awesome, etc. Talking about books, for me, is what kindles the enthusiasm to keep reading. And I’m sure I could imagine all kinds of excuses to not read, but the friendly and vibrant book blogging community brings me back.

Also, accepting a teenager’s priorities is important. Kids these days seem to have so much other stuff going on in their lives, and often I can well imagine why most of them don’t think they have time to read. I think as people get older and start to have other things they commit to which take over their lives, reading is one of the things that tends to get shoved aside. I know it did for me, especially for several years in my twenties. I swear there were a couple of years when I’m not sure I read at all. And I think sometimes that’s OK, as long as you come back to reading in the end. Now that I’m back in college, I still read a lot. Not as much as I’d like to, but my reading totals are nothing to sneeze at. Of course, mostly I don’t read anything that requires my brain to work really hard, but I’m OK with that, because at least I’m reading.

I have no idea how useful my advice is. As I said, I’m neither a parent nor educator, and as the kids in my classes are constantly reminding me, I’m not a teenager anymore, either. But I hope what I have to say is at least useful.

Hi, Internet,

I love romance novels. Partly, I love them because reading them allows me to be a complete mushball in a socially acceptable way. And they are the one genre of fiction everyone derides, and I am ever a supporter of the underdog.

That all being said, some romances, such as those of Meljean Brook and Moira Rogers and Nalini Singh are easier to love than others. This is because these romances feature two likeable leads who are recognizable as relatable people, realistic conflict that keeps them apart, and worldbuilding that isn’t just tacked on for flavor.

Highland Wedding by Hannah Howell didn’t have any of those things going for it. I read it because I was validating it for Bookshare, which is the only way I ever would have finished it. Because, Internet, it was an awful book.

The premise is this. A long, long time ago, in an alternate universe that is supposed to resemble Scotland, sometime in history, although when is never specified, Islaen MacRoth needs a husband. (Incidentally, I have no idea how one pronounces Islaen.) She has her heart set on Sir Ian MacLagan, in true Disney princess fashion. The King decides that it would be awesome if the MacLagans and the MacRoths were allied, in case those pesky English should cause trouble, so he forces Ian to marry Islaen. And here we come to the riveting conflict of the book. You see, Ian was married once, and his first wife died in childbirth, which was apparently an agonizing thing, so he doesn’t want to put any woman, particularly not one as small and delicate as Islaen, through that. Islaen, on the other hand, had a mother who was positively a brood mare, and she is pretty sure she will be one, too. (Spoiler alert: She totally is. But that comes later.) For her part, Islaen sees herself as deformed, and is not sure that Ian will be able to bring himself to do the horizontal tango with someone as ugly as she is.

“What deformity does Islaen have?” you may be asking yourself. “Does she have extra arms? Is she perhaps a hermaphrodite?”

No. No, she is not. Instead–get ready to be horrified–Islaen has huge tracts of land. She decides to come clean to Ian about this, and they have the first of the many sex scenes in this book, after which they are discovered and Islaen’s father and Ian engage in the creepiest dialogue ever involving Islaen’s… assets.

Of course, after the wedding, not all is smooth sailing either. Ian insists Islaen use contraceptive sponges. She doesn’t. And then she gets pregnant, producing triplets. (See what I mean about being a brood mare?)

There’s other stuff that goes on, too. There are several evil skank whores who want Ian for themselves because I guess being broody and not all that bright is a turn on for some girls. There’s one odious fat man (his fatness gives him away as a villain) who keeps trying to rape Islaen. There’s also a crazy former lover of Ian’s ex-wife who decides that Ian must die and *also* wants to rape Islaen.

As for the lovers themselves, their conflicts aren’t the type that could be solved with a simple talk. No, the problem is that neither of these people is all that bright, so a lobotomy would probably be the kindest thing. Ian, for example, is always letting his passions run away from him and boinking Islaen wherever they happen to be, only later checking to see if she’s using contraceptives. For a man who’s dead set against having children–even if it is for the lamest reason ever–he sure is blase about the whole thing, and way too trusting of his wife. And Islaen is just dull. She is meant to be spunky and feisty, but she chases after Ian like a lost puppy, eager for any scraps of affection he hands out. She lacks a personality, and we’re supposed to find her interesting because she is something of a tomboy, having grown up with ten older brothers. Oh, and they both speak in Scotts dialect which, far from seeming truly authentic, came off as overdone. Surely, all the Scotts didn’t use “dinnae” and “wasnae” and the rest of it, especially if they were highborn, as our two leads are.

I haven’t mentioned the secondary characters yet. Sadly, they don’t do very much and fall into predictable patterns. There’s Ian’s friend, Alexander, who is clearly being set up for his own book, there’s the hero and heroine of the previous book. And then there are the two main villains, who are as believable as cardboard.

I was talking to Holly on twitter about this book, and she confessed that Hannah Howell was like crack to her. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t my reaction. My favorite kind of bad story is generally over the top in its awfulness, or it’s so campy that you can’t believe what you’re reading, but you’re entertained anyway. This book was just bad. I was never entertained, I found the conflicts ridiculous, and, if the book hadn’t been an ebook, I’d have wanted to chuck it against a wall. My grade, unfortunately, is an F.

Other Opinions

If any of you have read this book, let me know where you’ve reviewed it. Or, you know, use the comments to tell me I have all the taste of a dead fish. That works, too.

Hi, Internet,

Last year, My Friend Amy, who has only to make a subtle suggestion to spawn memes because she is that awesome, decided to host a book drive to encourage people to buy Nothing but Ghosts by Beth Kephart. I did not buy the book during the book drive, because I am a rebel like that. (Also, I am easily distracted by shiny things and/or lazy, but being a rebel seems cooler somehow.) But buy it I did, and I finally got around to reading it…

…And I did not love it. I was expecting to love it, because Amy did. I was expecting it to be moving and touching and make me rethink my perceptions of the world. This is why I never read books everyone raves about. The disappointment always seems greater when everyone else loves something you don’t.

And it wasn’t that I didn’t like the book. I did, actually. But I put it down a lot, got distracted by other, shinier books, and when I did pick it up, I felt like I was slogging through it so I could move on to something better. And, of course, I can’t pin down what didn’t work for me. It wasn’t the writing, which was beautiful and evocative and lyrical. It wasn’t the characters, who were interesting and relatable, particularly our protagonist, Katie. But there was something there that didn’t click with me at all.

The story centers around Katie, whose mother, a woman who was very vibrant and full of charisma, has died. She and her father are trying to move on from that. Her dad has thrown himself into baking, and Katie has taken a job working for the reclusive Miss Martine, who has decided she wants a new gazebo. As Katie and the other workers dig out the area for the gazebo, she becomes fascinated with Miss Martine, and spends her time at the library trying to figure out her story.

This is ultimately a quiet, reflective sort of book. The mystery isn’t nearly as important as Katie coming to accept the loss of her mother and move on from that. The parts about Katie’s mother were poignant and moving, and I especially loved the way Katie and her dad’s relationship worked, with both of them struggling in their own ways to fill the void Katie’s mother has left. Katie often finds her dad exasperating, but she loves him anyway. There’s also a nice romance, which is subtle but sweet in its own way, even though I’m not really sure that it was altogether necessary. And, of course, there is the story of Miss Martine, which was resolved in a way I hadn’t seen coming.

My only real complaint that has any substance to it is that the dialogue didn’t quite ring true. The characters talked like book characters, and not real people. I think this is one of the major reasons I didn’t connect with them emotionally. And, as I said, not much happens, so I felt the book dragged. I suspect that if I’d been in a more introspective mood, the book’s style wouldn’t have bothered me, so I don’t feel like the pacing is a valid criticism.

There is a lot to like about this book. I just wish I had liked it more. You can read other people’s takes on the book below to find reviewers who were less ambivalent and more positive than I was. For me, it only rates a C.

Other Opinions

• My Friend Amy, of course.

• Rhapsody in Books
• Devourer of Books
• Book Nut
• Presenting Lenore

Dear Internet,

I know I haven’t really been around much, and I feel that my poor blog, with all five of its regular readers, is missing out on the joy that is me waxing poetic–or not so poetic, as the case may be–on what I’ve been reading. There are a number of reasons for this. School has been… an interesting challenge, to say the least. And I haven’t been reading very much.

I have finished a few books, though, and am woefully behind on reviewing them, so I’m hoping that if I take a less structured approach, the reviews will get written and might even be a little better than some of the very blah stuff I’ve been cranking out lately.

Anyway, the recent read that I wanted to talk to you about is When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. This book won the Newberry medal this year, which is not why I picked it up. I picked it up because in other reviews I’d read, mention was made of the fact that Miranda, our main character, loves A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. As it happens, I do, too. So the fact that this book won the Newberry was just a bonus.

Our story is about a twelve-year-old girl named Miranda, who lives in New York in the 1970’s. It’s told in a very stream-of-conscious style. It starts out with Miranda’s mother finding out that she will be a contestant on the $10000 pyramid. This news compells Miranda to contemplate whether she should write a note to the person who has been leaving her mysterious messages, because she thinks these messages may come from the future. In the meantime, Miranda is dealing with normal kid issues–changing friendships, trying to figure out who she is, and experimenting with boys.

I’m a character-driven reader, as long-time followers of this blog are no doubt tired of hearing. I need relatable characters or a story won’t work. And I loved Miranda. She’s smart, she’s spunky, and she felt real. I liked that her viewpoint was very childish in places, but that she was perceptive. (There’s a touching bit that sticks out in which, after she’s complained to her mom about the shabbiness of their apartment, she is suddenly made aware that her mom knows this and is embarrassed, too.)

That was another thing I really appreciated. Miranda’s family isn’t traditional, and she’s, gasp, close to her mom. She also doesn’t view her mom’s boyfriend as an interloper, and thinks that her mom should just give him a key and let him move in. After so many melodramatic stories about dealing with a parent’s new boyfriend, it was nice to read a protagonist that didn’t care.

But, you may be asking yourself, what does A Wrinkle In Time have to do with this story? Quite a lot, actually. For one thing, it is the only book that Miranda reads, and so she makes lots of references to it. I particularly liked the fact that she acknowledges what a universally relatable character Meg is. Miranda thinks of Meg as twelve, and I had to double check my copy of A Wrinkle in Time before concluding that Miranda’s right. L’Engle never outright states Meg’s age.

I wouldn’t really classify this book as a science fiction novel, though, so if you go into the book thinking there is more than just an abundance of references to < A Wrinkle in Time you’ll be disappointed. It is a mystery, first and foremost, and the science fiction elements are like a nice powdered sugar glazing on top of everything else.

Obvbviously, I liked this book a lot, and am glad it won the Newberry. The writing style was absorbing, and I read it in pretty much one sitting. My only real quibble was that I thought Miranda was a little too young to be making out with boys, but this might not bother an actual reader in the target age range, so you can take that as a sign that I am turning into a fuddy-duddy.

I’d rate this one a very strong B.

Other Opinions

• Booking Mama

• A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy
• S. Krishna’s Books

P.S. If you’re from the FTC, hi! I got this from Bookshare, which I have access to because I am considered print-disabled. So there.