Dean Lynch is a preacher’s wife. Her husband is an ambitious pastor in the Methodist church, and Dean has always chafed under the restrictions his duties place upon her. When she and Ben move to Crystal Springs, Florida, though, her life changes when she meets and is befriended by Augusta Holderfield. From a distance, these two women have nothing in common. Augusta was raised with wealth and privilege. Dean, in the meantime, was raised by backwoods drunk rednecks. Augusta is wild and vivacious, while Dean is thoughtful and careful. But the two develop a bond. But when a tragedy strikes, Dean will have to reevaluate all her priorities and beliefs in order to figure out her place in life.

The thing that pleasantly surprised me about this book was how flawed the characters were. Dean is by no means a poor put upon woman whose life sucks due to her martyrdom. She does martyr herself a lot, but she’s also kind of judgmental and passive aggressive. In this way, she and her husband, Ben, are perfect for each other, because Ben is also great at being passive aggressive as well as a complete douchebag. At the beginning of the book, I was afraid that I couldn’t stomach 500 pages of Dean and Ben being horrible people to each other. But Dean grew on me. I found mmyself empathizing with the struggles she went through, and as the book went on, I kept encouraging her to leave the life she was leading, which clearly didn’t suit her, and get a new start.

This isn’t going to be an easy book for some readers of this blog to get through, and that’s another of the book’s surprises. We have adultery, some of which Dean disapproves of, some of which she justifies. The paragons of loving relationships that are most obvious are a gay couple. And King doesn’t seem to be saying verry positive things about organized religion, especially things involving church politics. If those things bother you, then you ought to skip this book. But for the most part, all those things worked for me. The gay couple is adorable, the adultery gave the book a dash of realism that I appreciated even if I didn’t always approve, and I can well imagine there being some truth to what Dean thinks about church politics.

If I have any quibbles with this book, it’s that I thought Dean took a long time to finally manage a new start for herself. She didn’t take the steps necessary to get to a happier place on her own initiative. She was reacting to the circumstances around her, and she basically had to wait until she had no other choice. I also hated the final treatment of Ben. Dean’s last encounter with her husband is ludicrous and anticlimactic. I wanted a bit more oomph there, and I’m still a bit angry that I never got it.

Overall though, I really did enjoy this book, and I would read more Cassandra King if given the opportunity. I’d recommend it to fans of women’s fiction who like a bit of darkness in their books, and who are open-minded to flawed characters. This one gets a B+ from me.
Note: I read this book via Bookshare. Also, I could not find other reviews. If you’ve read this book, let me know what you think of it in the comments!

I know, I know. I haven’t been blogging for a while, and now I’m going to post a book review like I expect you to just be OK with my flakiness and forgive me. What can I say? Flakiness is part of my charm.

Anyway, lately I have been absorbed in what I lovingly refer to as werewolf pr0n. (And won’t that make for some fun search results?) I plan to talk about two of my werewolf pr0n reads in this post, and if you come back later, you could win a fabulous prize, which should, in itself, be insentive for you to put up with my blather.

Anyway, the Red Rock Pass series by Moira Rogers is far more than just werewolf pr0n. And I’m not just saying that because I think Bree and Donna are the bee’s knees. There is plenty of smut to be found in the books, but there’s also political intrigue, werewolf politics, and witty banter, and if you don’t like any of those things, then I really don’t know why you’re here.

I had read the first book in the series a couple of years ago, and so when I went to catch up on the series I’d found that I’d forgotten a lot. And this isn’t good, since the second book picks the action right up.

Sanctuary Lost is the second book in the series. Brynn Adler and her sister Abby have been living in Red Rock Pass for a few weeks now. Red Rock Pass is basically a safe place for newly turned werewolves, because their pack alphas aren’t overbearing, power-hungry jerks. But that’s not quite enough for Brynn. She hates that the events of the first book have made her afraid, and she hates that her humanity leaves her vulnerable. She is also inexorably drawn to Joe, one of the stronger members of the pack, and the feelings are mutual. Brynn wants Joe to help her through the transition into becoming a werewolf, but Joe’s been down that road, and it wasn’t very pretty. Plus, if that weren’t enough, the werewolves who were after Brynn and Abby in the first book are back. And soon the pack is dealing with another complication in the form of Sasha, an apprentice witch whose mentor was savagely attacked and killed and who now seeks sanctuary in Red Rock.

A lot is going on in this book, and if you wait a year and a half like I did in between reading the first and second book, it will take some getting used to. I eventually pieced together who everyone was, and found myself devouring the book in a matter of hours. The werewolf politics were absolutely gripping stuff, and I liked the addition of witches into the mix.

That being said, the romance was kind of weak. It’s not that Brynn and Joe were bad characters, because they’re not. And they did have chemistry, and I wasn’t unsatisfied by the way they got together. But there wasn’t really anything unique or fresh about them as a couple. Having read the book a few weeks ago, I’m hard pressed to remember any particular scenes between the two of them that stood out.

That being said, one of the things I did enjoy was Brynn’s relationship with her sister. It is complicated. Brynn is kind of a rebel, and Abby has always been there to mother her. Brynn chafes at this, but her love for her sister is very obvious. In short, it was a very realistic sister dynamic. As someone who is close to my own sister, I love reading about other close sister bonds.

One last thing. I also appreciated that long-lasting romance doesn’t make couples invulnerable. There was a heartbreaking scene featuring Abby and Keith from the first book that surprised me, because I hadn’t been expecting any further complications in their relationship.

While I enjoyed Sanctuary :Lost , I loved Sanctuary’s Price. And I can express my love in two words: beta hero.

You see, Internets, I am that rare breed of romance reader that would rather read about vulnerable men than men who always kick ass with no difficulty. And Dylan Gennaro is that man. He came from the evil pack that’s been bothering Brynn and Abby, and now in Red Rock he’s something of a local hero, having had a shining moment of badassery at the end of Sanctuary Lost. This is a first for him. In his old pack, he was pretty much beaten into submission, having to always hide his wolfish instincts, so he’s got a lot of scars.

Sasha, the witch we met in the previous book, also has scars. She’s been thrust into this world without her mentor, and the wolves need her magic. When the pack alphas ask Sasha and Dylan to work together to study some pack lore, they find themselves fighting their attraction. Then, a wolf pack in Maine finds itself in trouble, and there are vampires causing havoc, so it’s road trip time, during which time Sasha and Dylan must evaluate their feelings and make some difficult choices.

Right. So I’ve talked about Dylan, and he really made this book for me. And while I did not love Sasha, I did like her a lot. I liked that they were both two very wounded people who needed each other to recover from their various emotional scars. That kept the power balance in the romance on an even keel, which made me believe in the romance arc.

There’s a lot going on, plot-wise. Again, I don’t think this is a standalone book, and yet again, Rogers doesn’t insult the reader’s intelligence. We’re expected to keep up with the twists and turns and the nonstop action. And some of that action makes certain events feel a bit rushed. But I didn’t mind. These books are quick reads, and the fourth book, Sanctuary Unbound, comes out tomorrow, so I won’t have to wait a year to catch up with the Red Rock crew.

A note to my blind readers: Samhain Publishing offers romance ebooks of all genres that are DRM-free and reasonably priced. If werewolf politics are not your thing, explore the site. You will find something there you like, if you’re into romance at all!

In the meantime, for everyone, stay tuned. You could win a copy of Sanctuary Unbound if you come back in a few hours. And you know you want some free books.

This novel resembles the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale in several crucial aspects, but I wouldn’t call it a straightforward retelling. Marillier takes the story and makes it her own, and it works well. I loved it, and except for one quibble which is spoilerific and which I’ll talk about below, I’d recommend this wholeheartedly.

Caitrin is running away from home. Her father has recently died, and her scheming, opportunistic distant relations have moved in and taken charge. Cillian and his mother Ita are downright abusive, and eventually Caitrin just snaps and runs away. She travels west, eventually reaching the settlement of Whistling Tor. It turns out that Whistling Tor is cursed, but its chieftain has need of a scribe, and since that’s actually what Caitrin is trained for, she offers her services, since the alternative is continuing to run from Cillian and Ita. Whistling Tor is cursed, and even though she doesn’t really believe in the curse, she figures Cillian wouldn’t be foolish enough to risk it. Of course, Whistling Tor is cursed, and Caitrin is soon embroiled in trying to figure out how to break the curse and deal with the magic of the keep. She’s also drawn to Whistling Tor’s chieftain, Anluan, a complex man who has always felt that he was a prisoner at the Tor.

As with the other Marillier books I’ve read, I loved the characters. Caitrin is timid, and good at underestimating herself. But she’s stronger than she realizes, and it’s that strength that stands her in good stead. I liked how she takes her own advice to Anluan to heart about being brave in small steps.

Anluan is also wonderful. He’s basically a good man, trapped by the curse that afflicts his home. He’s given up hope that things will ever be any different, and he’s never really had to grow up and accept adult responsibilities. At least, not until Caitrin shows up and makes him think about what his duties are and makes him feel hope. The romance between Caitrin and Anluan is sweet. It develops gradually, and at a satisfying pace, and I definitely felt the chemistry between them. There’s no explicit sex, although there are sexual references throughout.

The rest of the cast was varied. I loved the various inhabitants of Whistling Tor, with one exception, and they certainly added color to the story. Some of them could very well have had their own books, and I liked that Caitrin came to care for all of them as much as she did Anluan.

The atmosphere is very Gothic. There are some downright spooky moments, and Whistling Tor certainly is exemplary of a Gothic castle. There are also lots of elements that the heroine must fight against, from Anluan’s initial hostility to the very real supernatural forces surrounding the castle.

The story is set in Ireland, during the time of the Norman conquest. It’s clear Marillier has done her homework, and she made the setting come alive for me. Now I’m even more anxious to read her much more famous Sevenwaters books, also set in the British isles.

So, with all that going for it, why doesn’t this rate an A? I’ll tell you why, but it involves a major spoiler, so please stop reading if you don’t want to know.

I hated Muirne, the eventual villain of the piece. She was the only character who doesn’t get even a bit of a sympathetic portrayal. She was basically an ambitious, power-hungry bitch who enjoyed making people miserable but remaining completely unnoticed. And of course, she doesn’t like Caitrin, and makes no bones about it. Given that both Caitrin and I distrusted her from the beginning, I found it irritating that no one else anywhere had ever suspected her of being so eeevil, especially since she doesn’t bother to hide her true motivations from Caitrin.

I guess I’m just tired of reading about shrill ambitious bitches who turn out to be the villain. Why can’t a woman be both ambitious and a decent person? It’s a cliche that bothers me, but might not disturb other readers.

The villain aside, I very much enjoyed this book. I love Marillier’s writing style, and I love the atmosphere and the sense of wonder she evinces in her books. This one rates a B+, and I can’t wait to read her Sevenwaters books!

Other Opinions

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Unlike Crazy Beautiful I find that I have a lot more positive things to say about Beastly now that I’ve given it time to settle. Flyn manages to successfully present the fairy tale in a modern setting, and Kyle/Adrian, the main character, is drawn very well.

Kyle Kingsbury is basically a little snot at the beginning of the book. He’s hot, he knows it, and he takes the opportunity to treat everyone like crap. Eventually, though, he picks the wrong person to humiliate when he snubs Kendra, a new girl who turns out to be a witch. She transforms him into a hideous beast, and, well, we all know where this is going. He’s got two years to make a girl fall in love with him. He convinces his father, a prominent newscaster, to move him into a brownstone in Brooklyn. His dad basically gives him an Amex card to do with as he will, hires a blind tutor, and he lives a pretty idyllic life, comparatively speaking, except for the beast thing. He eventually ends up changing his name to Adrian as well. And, of course, there is a girl for him. She’s nerdy, bookish Lindy, a scholarship student at his posh private high school. Unlike the traditional tale, Lindy isn’t pretty. And Lindy’s relationship with her father is much more complicated than it’s generally presented.

It’s hard not to like Kyle/Adrian, despite the fact that he’s such a brat at the beginning. His brattiness is explained–his father is too self-involved to pay much attention to his son, and anyway his dad is pretty much a grown-up version of his son. But Kyle/Adrian grows up over the course of the novel and realizes just how shallow and awful he has been. He learns to care about people–not just Lindy but Will, his tutor and Magda, his maid–seeing them for who they are and loving them for themselves and not what they can give him. And the message is delivered in a matter-of-fact manner that didn’t feel overly forced or preachy.

The other characters are also interesting. None of them are quite as well-drawn, in my opinion, as Kyle/Adrian, but I did have to mention Will, the tutor. He’s blind, and for the most part, Flyn got the blindness right. I didn’t even mind the end of Will’s story arc, which was hokey, because at the very least he was allowed to be a competent character who wasn’t a walking stereotype. I also loved Kendra, the witch, who takes an active part in the story beyond her initial curse. And Lindy was, of course, excellent. I could understand her motivations, and though I would have liked to glimpse the inside of her head, it wasn’t necessary and Flyn did a good job of portraying her evolving feelings for Kyle/Adrian.

There were also random intervals in which Kyle/Adrian talks with other transformed characters from other fairy tales in an online chat room. This was my favorite aspect of the book, as Flyn used these chats to subtly poke fun at fairy tale tropes. They were also quite funny, and, in at least one instance, surprisingly poignant. And I liked how Kyle tried to use the modern age to foil his curse. He creates a fake myspace profile and tries to meet girls online, only for them to turn out to be either too young, cops, or hideous old hags. Well, at least he tried, and I liked that Flyn went there.

I did have a few quibbles. The pacing starts out strong, but the middle dragged. For the most part I thought Flyn handled the fairy tales well, but I thought a few things were handled better than others. I didn’t really buy Kyle/Adrian’s obsession with his roses, for instance. And I also didn’t quite buy that Kyle’s dad would just hand over his Amex and say, “Sure, kid, go live by yourself with only a maid and a tutor for company as long as you’re out of my hair.” Maybe I could buy one of those, but not the other.

Overall, I was quite charmed by this book, and I felt that Flyn did the fairy tale justice. Apparently, Sleeping Beauty is the next fairy tale Flyn will tackle, and I look forward to reading it. As for this book, it rates a B-.

Other Opinions

Persnickity Snark
• Steph Su Reads
• The Ya Ya Yas
• YA Fabulous

P.S. I got this one from Bookshare.

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!

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

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!

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

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)

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

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