Ordinary Day

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sweet Enemy was a recommendation I picked up from my regular visits to SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com, a book that falls into the general category of historical romances with bluestocking heroines. This book’s heroine, Liliana Claremont, is a brilliant chemist who chafes at the restrictions that society places upon her, keeping her from pursuing achievements in that science. But when she discovers that her father may well have been murdered, she’s determined to look for evidence at the house of Geoffrey Wentworth, the Earl of Stratford.

Geoffrey’s our obligatory broody hero, whose family is throwing the obligatory mess of young misses at him in an attempt to get him to marry. Liliana’s own family pressures her to go to his estate in the hopes of catching the Earl’s eye–but all Liliana’s interested in is finding out whether this man was responsible for her father’s murder.

Now, this is a setup guaranteed to catch my attention, and it did a decent job of it. Ms. Snow’s writing was solid, and I did very much like the shooting contest scene, in which Liliana actually gets to use her chemistry knowledge. Set off against this, though, were tropes that usually weary me in a romance novel and this time was no exception: i.e., the failure of characters to just talk to each other, insta-lust, and how the Big Misunderstanding that almost always causes the characters to fight almost always comes after they’ve finally had sex.

But that said? I did actually enjoy this book for the most part and I’d like to see how Ms. Snow’s writing in this series progresses. Three stars.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second to last Weather Warden novel was one that it took me a bit to get to, on a couple of grounds. One, that one of the plot threads in it sounded like something we’d already seen happen earlier in the series. And two, that I’d started reaching a point of apocalypse fatigue with these books–we’d already had so many instances of the Wardens and the Djinn facing the Imminent! Destruction! Of! The! World! that reading another round of it just seemed like, well, work.

This is not to say that Caine’s writing has suffered, since as always, her pacing is crisp and tight. And once I got into this story, I did actually find it quite readable. But that said, the issue of this story covering several themes that have already appeared earlier in the series did remain–the antagonism between the Wardens and the Djinn, the rage of Mother Earth against humanity, the angst surrounding Jo marrying David, the angst surrounding the unresolved feelings Lewis has for Jo. And to top it off, we also have angst about Oh No! Jo has a Demon Mark and it might turn her EVIL!

All of these things were certainly engagingly and compellingly handled, but the sheer fact that we’ve seen them before takes a bit of the urgency away. Which is a shame, because if you’ve stuck with the series this far, it is still definitely worth continuing so you make it to the final book and get that resolution. But it would have been cooler to not retread ground we’ve been over before. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Follow My Lead didn’t grab me quite as much as previous Kate Noble outings–but that isn’t to say I disliked this book. Because I didn’t! I still found this one an enjoyable read even though it didn’t click with me quite as much as the previous installments of the Blue Raven series.

This time around our principals are Jason Cummings, the Duke of Rayne, and the scholar Winnifred Crane. I’m always a sucker for stories in which the heroine’s a scholar of any kind, and given that this whole plot revolves around her wanting to go to Europe to do actual on-camera research, that’s bonus. But the circumstances that push Jason into being Winn’s escort made it a bit hard for me to suspend my disbelief; there were quite a few convolutions that had to happen before he could be thrown into her company.

On the other hand, though, I’m sure that’s rather par for the course for this kind of a plot, so I was willing to hand-wave that and get on with the main story. Which is to say, Jason and Winnifred having to scamper across Europe without access to much in the way of money–especially vexing for Jason, accustomed as he is to wealth–and with a rival determined to marry Winn hot on their trail. It is amusing to see the two brainstorm their way through getting money, and since Winnifred does actually get to exhibit some scholarly train of thought on camera, it’s fun to see Jason trying to keep up with her.

And of course there’s the obligatory Pretending to Have to Be Married scenario, otherwise they’d scandalize everybody they meet. And of course, since they’re having to pretend to be married, they naturally have to figure out how to react to one another in private as well. Seeing them work their way up through that is charming, and it’s in those stretches of the story that Ms. Noble’s fun touch with character chemistry comes through. All in all, three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The third of Courtney Milan’s Turner series, her Regencies following the Turner brothers, turned out to be just as entertaining as the first two. And in some ways, I found it the most satisfying of the three!

Of the three Turner brothers, Smite’s the one who engaged my sympathies the most when it came to the name he’d been saddled with by his Bible-obsessed mother: “‘The Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done.’” Between this, the nightmares he suffers as a result of his childhood, his near-perfect memory, and his absolutely perfect committment to justice in his work as a magistrate, Smite’s a deeply compelling character. And with Miranda Darling, a seamstress raised by actors, who’s pulled into the shadowy dealings of the mysterious figure known as the Patron, Smite’s got an excellent heroine to stand with him in the plot.

Miranda is desperate to keep her young charge Robbie away from the temptations of working for the Patron–even if it means putting herself at risk by working for the Patron herself. And when the opportunity arises, she leaps on the chance to become Smite’s mistress and gain his protection for both herself and Robbie. Their relationship is a stormy one indeed. And one of my very favorite things about this book is how Ms. Milan handled Miranda’s reaction to Smite’s childhood trauma, i.e., with a refreshing lack of angst. I grinned outright at Smite’s line to Miranda about how there’s a limit to how much sentimentality he’ll tolerate in a day, a line that exemplified the delightful lack of mawkish angst between them.

And of course, because this is a historical romance and this is how things must go, Miranda’s troubles with the Patron are not at all easily resolved. Yet again, though, Ms. Milan excels. In many other books I’ve read, much of the plot conflict would have been handled by Miranda having to hide her troubles from Smite. Instead, here, she reveals them up front and they work together to get them dealt with.

Throw in some fun side resolution with the Turner family nemeses the Dalrymples, and some fun scenes involving Smite’s lively dog, and all in all this was an excellent conclusion to the Turner trilogy. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

As any good fan of the TV show Castle knows, Nikki Heat is by no means Richard Castle’s first famous character. The show starts off with his concluding his long-running Derrick Storm series, and the particular explosive ending he gives those books is a nice little character development point for Castle since it leads right into why he tags along with the NYPD. And given the success of the Nikki Heat tie-in novels, it was pretty much inevitable that additional material involving Derrick Storm would be eventually made available to us fans. This time around, though, they’ve elected to give us a graphic novelization of the “first Derrick Storm novel”.

It’s a clever choice, and certainly provides some nice variety for the Castle tie-in material as well as general versimilitude–since quite a few well-known authors in SF have graphic novelizations of their work going, such as Jim Butcher and Richelle Mead. But the important question is, as a graphic novel, does Richard Castle’s Deadly Storm work?

Art-wise, it will probably surprise no one who glances through this work that Derrick Storm comes out looking suspiciously Nathan-Fillion-esque. Other than that, I vacillated between quite liking several panels and being indifferent to several others, so I ultimately came out uncertain if I liked the art style. Story-wise, I was definitely ambivalent. It read like a truncated version of a meatier story–certainly, given the overall style of the Nikki Heat novels, this seemed much jerkier of pacing by comparison. And while this might only add to the versimilitude of a “graphic novel adaptation”, it nonetheless left me wishing I’d actually gotten a novel version of this story instead.

All in all if you’re enough of a Castle fan to be a completist, you might want to pick this up. Otherwise, for now, the Nikki Heat novels are actually more amusing. Two stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Urban fantasy has to work very, very hard to seize and hold my attention these days, and I say this fully cognizant of how there are a great number of authors out there writing awesome books. For me, it’s just been a matter of wanting to read so many things–and having read so much urban fantasy the last several years–that more of it is generally pretty far down my reading queue.

For Cherie Priest, though, I’ll totally make exceptions. I’ve unilaterally liked every single thing of hers I’ve read, and Bloodshot, the first of her Cheshire Red Reports series, is no exception. It doesn’t engage me quite as hard as the Clockwork Century books do, I’ll cheerfully admit. But on the other hand, “slightly less awesome than Boneshaker” is still pretty goddamned awesome.

Here’s the thing for me about Bloodshot: it made me actively like a vampire protagonist, and it did it by making her an engaging character entirely aside from her being a badassed vampire thief. Yeah yeah yeah, badassed vampire thief, seen too much of that; see previous commentary re: reading a whole LOT of urban fantasy. What I haven’t seen, though, is a vampire who was a flapper before she was turned. Who sets off being a badassed thief with being thoroughly neurotic, to the degree of preparing for her heists to obsessive levels of detail. And who, even while she swears up and down to the reader that she’s not interested in forming lasting attachments, nonetheless has adopted two homeless children in her Seattle base of operations–and who proceeds to take a very personal interest in the case her latest client brings her, when he turns out to be a blinded vampire seeking to steal information about what happened to him while he was the captive of a secret government experiment.

Nor was it enough that Raylene rocked. Backing her up in this story is one of the most awesome male lead characters it has been my pleasure to read in some time: Adrian deJesus, a.k.a. Sister Rose, an ex-Navy SEAL turned drag queen. I adore Adrian. I adore that he is the reason why Raylene has to struggle with the question of how to address his gender identity, in a reasonable and non-angstful way, and that it’s a struggle that doesn’t take Raylene much time to figure out. I adore that he is both thoroughly badassed AND very, very comfortable with makeup. I adore that he is, in fact, the second most badassed character in the book, only slightly less badassed than the vampire protagonist. And godDAMN, that boy can dance.

With these two highly engaging main characters to blaze the way, it was no effort at all to enjoy the hell out of this book. I very much liked the exploration of the aforementioned secret government experiment, and how it dovetails with Adrian’s own backstory, as he’s on the hunt for his missing sister, who has herself become a vampire. And I quite like the exploration of the idea that a vampire, Raylene’s client Ian, has to live with the strong likelihood that he’ll be permanently disabled.

In short, there’s a great deal I liked here and not very much at all I didn’t care for. I found the kids a bit too plot-moppety for my liking, as they’re mostly there to provide character development for Raylene, and a couple of the details revealed about what happened to Ian a bit too predictable. But that’s about the extent of my problems with it, and all in all, we’re talking four strong stars here.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s a romance staple to do a series of interconnected books all featuring siblings in the same family, or employees of the same agency, or what have you. Courtney Milan’s Turner series is no exception. And happily, Unclaimed, the second book in the series, turned out to be just as much fun for me as the first.

Book 1 was the story of Ash, the oldest of the three brothers; Book 2 picks up with his younger brother Mark. Mark’s an example of Milan cheerfully subverting another romance trope–because here, it’s Mark, not the heroine of the novel, who’s the one without sexual experience. This is by no means not Mark’s only defining trait, but it’s an important one that sets the course for the entire plot.

Mr. Turner–or rather, I should say, Sir Mark Turner, because the Queen has knighted him for his service to the nation’s morality–has written a treatise, the Gentlemen’s Practical Guide to Chastity. In her intro to the novel, Milan talks about how she wanted to write about a character with a rock star’s level of fame, but since she’s a writer of historicals, she had to figure out how to work it into the book in a period-appropriate fashion. Hence, Sir Mark’s Guide!

Exactly how berserk England goes over his work is one of the somewhat sillier things about the novel, but in the context of the story I was willing to go along with it. Why Mark wrote it and how he reacts to the scores of young men (and older women towing their young daughters) who fawn over him are hugely important aspects of his character. And I’ve got to say, I found his resolve to remain chaste until he finds the exact right woman for him refreshing and charming, especially after all the reading of urban fantasy and paranormal romance I’ve done for the last several years.

Set off in strong contrast to Mark is our heroine, Jessica, a courtesan who’s been paid to seduce him and ruin him in the eyes of the public. And as with Book 1, Jessica finds out fast that she genuinely likes Mark, and it doesn’t take her long at all to back away hard from the idea of causing his public downfall.

There’s all sorts of stuff that could be said here about the roles of gender and sexuality in this situation. And the book does, in fact, say them. Happily, it does so in a way that came across to me as natural for the characters and their interactions, without ever getting preachy. Mark calls out the hypocrisy of society’s encouraging men to express their lusts, or at any rate not punishing them for it, while holding women to far stricter standards. An oh-so-modern and enlightened attitude for a man in the 1830′s? Sure. But as put forth by Mark, it’s sincere and believable. It helps a lot as well that Jessica has a great deal of agency as the plot progresses, especially in the final third of the story. And it helps, too, that there’s a reasonably small amount of angst and drama as Jessica’s initial goal is inevitably revealed.

As with Book 1, I had some minor quibbles with plausibility–but only minor ones. And I’m eagerly heading on to read Book 3! Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you like werewolves, and you like the Old West, then Cherie Priest’s short story collection Dreadful Skin is a decent way to spend your time. We’ve got three interconnected stories here, featuring the werewolf Jack Gabert and the woman who hunts him, Eileen Callaghan, an Irish ex-nun who’s tracked him all the way to America.

The characters are sketched in with Priest’s usual deft touch, though due to the length of each story and to the propensity to change points of view with each scene change, ‘sketched in’ was about all each tale had time for. I found this frustrating, for Priest’s skill with her prose did indeed mean that each story gave me pieces of a much bigger story, one that I quite wanted to experience in greater depth.

Still, this was a fun read, if quick. Fans of werewolf-based urban fantasy may find this a trifle disappointing in that the werewolves in these tales are, in fact, monsters. As such, they are not intended to be sympathetic. I myself found this a refreshing change of pace, and a nice palette cleanser after the heavy diet of urban fantasy I’ve had these last several years. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first book of 2012 is a good strong start: Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

Much has been made over this novel being the “fantasy novel Jane Austen would have written”, and to an extent, I do agree with that. I could certainly see Austen, had she thought to use magic in the stories she wrote, using it the way Kowal does–as a womanly art, employed to enhance the illusion of beauty on a painting, in a room, in an entire house, or even upon a person. Yet at the same time, a comparison to Austen is inevitably going to be a burden against which many books, worthy in their own right, are going to struggle. For my money, Kowal’s prose didn’t quite resonate the same way Austen’s did. Yet this is not to say it’s bad, for it is most assuredly not. I very much enjoyed the read.

I’ve seen Shades of Milk and Honey called out for not having enough of substance going on, that it focuses upon the relationships between the characters and lacks Austen’s social commentary. For me, this charge is unfair; I certainly noted multiple points throughout the book that read as social commentary, such as our heroine’s disdain for the notion of using her talents at glamour to make her nose smaller. Moreover, while most of these characters did not come across to me with the same force as oh, say, the cast of Pride and Prejudice–though yet again, many otherwise worthy novels would suffer in comparison to that particular book–I am honorbound to point out that that very novel focuses quite a bit on the relationships between the characters. And the ultimate main plot does, indeed, come out of that. So too is the case with Shades of Milk and Honey. The eventual unmasking of a callous rogue in the cast livens up the end of the book considerably.

All in all my only lament about this novel is that the relationship between our heroine Jane and her eventual love lacks a certain force, at least at first. So to some readers, it may come across as completely out of the blue. Still, I did quite like this and am looking forward to the next one in the series. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.