Book Log #17: Practice Makes Perfect, by Julie James

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Julie James’ first book, Just the Sexiest Man Alive, didn’t do much for me. Fortunately, Practice Makes Perfect worked better for me, otherwise I’d have seriously regretted buying three ebooks of hers at once!

The driving character conflict here has a bit more substance than the first book, which helps. We’ve got our heroine, Payton, who works for the same law firm as our hero, J.D., and it’s established right out of the gate that they vociferously dislike each other. (Which is of course, in Romancelandia, code for “they will be snogging each other’s faces off before we’re halfway through the book”.) The situation is decidedly Not Improved when they discover that someone in the firm is going to get a promotion–but there’s only one promotion slot available. And guess which two members of the firm are up for consideration? They are, of course, forced to work together on a Supremely Important Case, all the while trying very hard to pretend they aren’t noticing one another. With interest.

Though I did like this one better than the first, still, though, this one plays as awfully heteronormative to me. Payton’s supposed to be a strident feminist, while J.D. stays just far enough on the good line of the line between “conversative” and “outright sexist jerk” that I did make it to the end of the book without wanting to punch him. So a lot of the conflict between them is driven by their perceptions of each other’s gender politics, but it’s presented in such a simplistic way that I wound up having a strange reaction to it–I was all “wait, there are still novels that have such watered-down gender politics as their character conflict?” And then I remembered that, yeah, well, these things still happen in real life, so. And some readers may get their first exposure to these sorts of questions through even such light fare as a romance novel.

But to get back to the overall point, even given the very standard conversative-boy-vs.-liberal-girl conflict, I did enjoy reading this. The main plot of how well Payton and J.D. handle the case they have to handle together is enjoyable enough, and I did like how they eventually ferret out the original cause of their animosity towards each other. Not a terribly substantial book overall, but a perfectly acceptable light read. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Book Log #18: Something About You, by Julie James

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Okay, now we’re finally talking. Something About You was the Julie James book so eagerly supported by the Smart Bitches, and when I finally made it to this one after reading the first two by James, I could see what they were going on about. Of the three, which I read back to back, this one was easily most enjoyable to me. It helped a great deal that this one was more romantic suspense rather than a pure romance plotline, so there was more to line up with my personal reading tastes.

Our heroine Cameron Lynde is an assistant US attorney who overhears a murder while she’s staying in a luxury hotel–and to her shock and horror (and to the glee of her percolating hormones), the FBI agent assigned to the case is Jack Pallas, the very same agent whose career she ruined three years before. Cue the obligatory Having to Put Their Past Behind Them to Solve the Case, and all of the attendant sexual tension therein.

Two big things I liked about this: Cameron was reasonably smart about dealing with police protection and Jack having to improve the security in her house. And by ‘dealing with’, I mean, ‘she actually accepted it and did her best to work with it’, as opposed to ‘pitching a tantrum and sneaking around the guys trying to do their jobs to keep her from getting killed’. So points for that. Also high marks for having the B romance in this story actually being a gay one, which I was not expecting. Cameron has the typical Romance Heroine Accessory of a gay male best friend, only he and his boy get a nice amount of screen time and some actual character development.

It still wasn’t the most substantial thing I’ve ever read, to be sure. While there were many aspects of it I enjoyed, I still found quite a few of the chain of events driving the overall plot disappointingly predictable. Still, this was definitely my favorite of the James ebooks I read earlier this year, and I liked it well enough that I’d consider reading further romantic suspense from this author. Three and a half stars (rounded up to four, since Goodreads doesn’t do half star ratings).

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.