Category: Book Log

A Feral Darkness is hands down my favorite of Doranna Durgin’s books. There are a lot of elements to it that might file it into the paranormal romance or urban fantasy genres, though for my money, I would still call it a straightforward fantasy. Romance it’s got, to be sure, but quieter and sweeter than most current paranormal romances do. Neither is it urban; if anything, it’s more like suburban/rural fantasy.

When she was nine years old, Brenna Fallon sacrificed her hair in desperation to the god Mars Noden, hoping to save her dying dog. The dog mysteriously lived for many years after, and Brenna acquired both an uncanny knock with all dogs as well as a head of miraculously long hair. Now, she’s a dog groomer stuck in a shopping center pets store, frustrated to no end with her job, puzzled by the stray Welsh Cardigan Corgi she discovers at the site of her childhood sacrifice, and troubled by the recurring rumors of a feral wolf pack in the area–and recurring impressions she has of voices warning of a strange new mutated rabies virus. Soon enough, she learns that what’s going on has its roots in an assault carried out on the spring where she’d made her prayer, and now she must try to raise Mars Noden’s power again to counteract the darkness that assault has raised.

I like every single thing about this book, pretty much: Brenna’s talent with dogs, the suburban/rural setting, the male lead Gil Masera and his Basque background, and the romance that blooms between him and Brenna. Their chemistry is a lovely, subtle thing, exemplified by a scene where he takes the time to comb out her incredible hair for her, and it never needs to rely on blatant statements of sexuality or graphic love scenes. In other words, exactly how I like it. And, the Celtic influence on the magic at hand is nicely understated, as is the challenge it puts to Brenna, who must figure out how to reconcile it with her Christian upbringing.

The biggest win in the story though is the dog Druid, who walks a balanced line between being insanely cute, believably canine, and an effective participant in the plot. Durgin’s own experience with dogs and horses shines through beautifully in Druid’s characterization, all throughout the book. Make no mistake, Druid is every bit as much a character as Brenna, Gil, and the rest of the humans in the cast.

This is Durgin at her best, a book I have re-read multiple times now. It came out in 2001, though, so it might be hard to find; if you can grab a copy from a used bookstore, though, I highly recommend it. Especially if you’re a dog lover. Five stars.

I’ve always loved Doranna Durgin’s work, although I miss her earlier fantasy novels. Her latest paranormal romance, The Reckoners, hearkens back a bit to those even as it’s squarely targeted at the paranormal romance crowd.

The book starts off a bit shakily, introducing us to Lisa “Garrie” McGarrity and her team of ghost hunters, who call themselves “reckoners”. We learn that Garrie was befriended in her childhood by an actual ghost, Rhonda Rose, whose wisdom is frequently quoted by the team, and we get a general idea of the abilities and personalities of the various team members. What we don’t get, though, is a scenario like unto the blurb that appears on the back of the novel, which would lead you to believe that Garrie and her team are trying to handle a huge upsurge of ghost activity when our hero Trevarr shows up. The scenario that actually happens is that the Reckoners have been quite hard pressed for serious cases as of late–and mysterious Trevarr, with a minimum of explanation and a jaw-dropping amount of cash, shows up and offers to pay their way if they’ll come with him to Winchester House to deal with strange goings-on with the ghosts trapped there.

I found the order of scenes explaining how Quinn (Garrie’s former boyfriend) opts to stay behind a little jerky, and I kept wanting to smack Trevarr for his stubborn insistence on not telling Garrie and the others any serious detail about what they were walking into. Likewise, I periodically wanted to smack Garrie too for only putting forth token insistence on these details until later on in the plot. Some of the worldbuilding I found a bit sparse, too–such as why Garrie and her team call themselves “reckoners” to begin with. Another review I saw said that this felt kind of like it should have been a third or fourth book in a series establishing this characters, and I have to say I concur; I almost feel like I was introduced to these characters too swiftly, without enough to really orient me with them.

But. All that aside, I did find the book fun. Once you get past the roadblock of Trevarr flat refusing to give up details until they’re pried forcibly out of him, the pace picks up considerably. Winchester House, the site Garrie’s team goes to investigate, does actually exist; scenes set there make good use of random tourists as well as the site staff. Glimmers of what I miss about Durgin’s fantasy days come to the fore with the big reveals about what’s going on in Winchester House as well as with Trevarr himself. The last stretch of the novel felt much more like a fantasy novel to me than a paranormal romance, and the few details given about Trevarr’s background are the best worldbuilding in the book, piqueing my interest about what might be written about him and Garrie later.

All in all, not my favorite Durgin, but pleasant nonetheless. Three stars.

I’m primarily familiar with Mira Grant, a.k.a. , through her filk music and through the folks in the Pacific Northwest who know her. That was enough of a connection, though, to make me quite pleased to hear she was pursuing a writing career, and certainly I was pleased to see that as urban fantasies go, Rosemary and Rue stood out for me as better than normal in an overcrowded genre.

That was before I read Feed.

Now, granted, I’m a sucker for a good zombie novel. But what makes a truly kickass zombie novel is a plot that’s much less about the zombies and much more about the world that a zombie outbreak creates, and Grant does this in spades in this book. I’m not sure what impressed me more, and there’s a lot to impress here: the backstory of the Kellis-Amberlee virus; the various complex social and political changes that happen in America as a result of the Rising; the fact that in this world, George Romero is considered a national hero; or the upsurge of bloggers as a source of organized journalism. Either way, it makes me very much want to up the ante on my own writing efforts. Take note, my fellow writers. This is how worldbuilding is done.

And when you take impressive worldbuilding and throw in highly engaging characters on top of it, the result is riveting. I loved the two protagonists, Georgia and Shaun Mason, as well as the supporting crew surrounding them. I loved Buffy the support tech chick, who quips that she’s blonde and cute and hunts zombies, what else should she name herself? I loved Rick, who signs on with Georgia and Shaun after working for actual newspapers. I even loved Senator Ryman, a halfway decent politician.

Quotes from the various major characters’ individual blogs add a lot of lovely atmosphere to the book. Be sure to read them in depth, too. There’s lots of detail you don’t want to miss, and the blog excerpts are of critical importance in the climactic end of the book.

Watch out for that climax, too, because it’ll totally make you tear up. Or, aheh, so I’ve heard. *^_^*;; Five stars. Because I mean, DAMN.

With so much urban fantasy saturating the market these days, it’s really nice to see that a good ol’ fashioned fantasy novel can still show up on the shelves. Like, say, Benjamin Tate’s Well of Sorrows.

Well of Sorrows tells the story of Colin, a boy who’s come with his parents across the sea to a new country, fleeing war in their homeland–only to discover that the city where they’ve settled has no use whatsoever for the influx of refugees. Violence eventually ensues, and Colin’s father must lead a group of their people out to try to found a new settlement. But there are strange and dangerous things out in the plains, things which have caused previous settlers to never be seen again.

Colin’s family’s group of course finds these dangerous things. And Colin’s life is irretrievably changed.

I could go on from there, but that would be significant spoilerage. I will however say that this is only really the first stretch of the book; the main storyline is what happens long after these events. And I can add that the worldbuilding is the primary thing that appealed to me about Tate’s work. The idea of an overseas colony, complete with strife between it and the motherland, is not new to fantasy to be sure. But it’s handled well here and with a nice balance between a realistic feel and just enough magic to remind you that oh yeah, this is in fact a fantasy novel–not to mention that there are two non-human races that initially will probably strike most readers as thinly disguised elves and dwarves. Tate’s names for them, the Alvritshai and the dwarren, do not exactly dispel that impression. (That said, the dwarren are not miners, which helps a lot.)

Much of the book hinges upon the volatile relations between the humans, the Alvritshai, and the dwarren, and this is really where it shone for me. I was less invested in Colin’s acquisition of magical powers that enabled him to be the prime person to stop the blossoming warfare, mostly because his acquisition of them is primarily off-camera and so I had to adjust hard to jump from “Colin as youth” to “Colin as man with magical ability”. Aeren, one of the lords of the Alvritshai, becomes a more accessible character in the latter stretches of the book.

Lastly, I’ll note that Tate had a bit too much “as you know Bob” type dialogue in various conversations, such as an Alvritshai character using a given term and then immediately following it with the term’s definition–in conversation to another Alvritshai. But that was pretty much the only issue I had with any of the writing at all, and I’ll definitely be coming back for the next book in the series. ‘Cause this ain’t done, not by a long shot. And I do need to know what happens next! Four stars.

Much has been made of Malinda Lo’s being a “lesbian Cinderella”, and while that’s certainly true, it’s only true up to a point. If you’re familiar with the fairy tale in question, you’ll certainly see most of its familiar elements in play here: the young girl whose mother’s death leads to her father’s disastrous second marriage, the cruel stepmother and stepsisters, the ball attended in secret, the Prince. There’s even a fairy protector.

But even with these familiar elements in place, Lo nonetheless builds a lovely tale that is at once similar to and quite a bit different from that of Cinderella. The fact that this version of Cinderella is much more interested in the King’s Huntress–and that the Prince isn’t really ever in the picture–is only part of this. The rest of it is simply charming worldbuilding, where Lo takes the pieces of the tale we all know and assembles them into a setting uniquely her own. Ash’s fairy protector in this version of the story is in fact a fairy godfather of sorts, with much more of a backstory and much more characterization than you’ve probably seen in most traditional Cinderella retellings. The interaction Sidhean has with Ash is the heart of the magic of this story, and as a fan of stories involving fairies and the Sidhe, I can say that it pleased me greatly. It was unearthly and compelling.

On the other hand, there is definitely a queer element to this tale, and the best thing about it is how refreshingly underplayed it is. The fact that Ash loves another female is not the conflict of the story in the slightest; it’s just there, without angst, without either Ash or Kaisa being considered out of the ordinary for where their romantic interests lie. And if Ash’s interaction with Sidhean is the unearthly driving force of the story, her affection for Kaisa is its sweet, earthly counterpoint, pulling it ultimately towards a very human resolution.

If there’s any complaint I have about this book, it’s that it’s honestly too short. The length’s probably fine for YA, but I came out of it wondering “that’s it?!” and quite anxious for more. Since it was so unexpectedly short, what conflict there is in the story felt a little too easily resolved–but that’s really something I didn’t mind at all, given the overall win of the rest of it. Four stars.

Kate Noble’s The Summer of You is an immediate sequel to Revealed, quite literally picking up pretty much right where the previous book left off. And, as is often the way with consecutive romance novels from the same author, they involve a connected cast of characters. In this case, the heroine is Lady Jane, the rival of Philippa Benning from Revealed; her love interest is Byrne, the brother of Marcus Worth.

Jane’s been called to the country to contribute to the care of her ailing father, who’s started showing alarming signs of what modern readers will of course recognize as Alzheimer’s. Her brother Jason is no help, as he’d just as soon lose himself in his youthful pursuits of drinking and carousing with his friends. This leaves only one retreat for Jane: the company of the irascible Byrne, who unbeknowst to her has already settled in the area to convalesce from a bullet wound to his leg and the laudanum addiction he’d developed as a result. And Byrne, too, has another problem: everybody in the town thinks he’s the highwaywman who’s been waylaying victims in the area for the last year.

The Summer of You isn’t as action-driven a plot as Revealed, and since we’re not in the heart of the ton in this story, we don’t get the barbed repartee that made up a lot of the fun of the previous book. What we do get here though is some nice character development, especially as Jason has to catch up in maturity to his sister, and both of them have to wrestle with the fact that the man they’d known as their father the Duke is pretty much gone. Meanwhile, Byrne’s overcoming his own issues as he and Jane fall for one another and team up to unmask the highwayman is well done too.

Overall, a nice read and a bit more substantial than many examples of the genre. I’ll cheerfully return for more of Noble’s work. Four stars.

When the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books recently gave high marks to Kate Noble’s The Summer of You, I went out to research this lady–and leapt with great abandon upon Revealed, her second book, which you should definitely read if you wish to read The Summer of You, since the two are linked by common characters and events.

I wasn’t all that moved by her first book, Compromised. But this one? Now we’re TALKING. Our heroine du jour is Philippa Benning, who’s cutting through the ton of London with singleminded determination, and who is delightfully snarky in all the ways that any longstanding fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will remember from the character Cordelia. And, like Cordelia, Philippa at first seems to be focused upon fashion and social gatherings and men, yet eventually comes to prove that she’s got quite a bit more depth than that.

And what brings it about? Spies! In particular, Marcus Worth, who’s certain he’s uncovered a plot by a French nobleman to carry out strikes on London society functions–and who’s inadvertantly discovered by Philippa, who becomes convinced that she’s found the infamous Blue Raven. She boldly offers Marcus a deal: she’ll get him the cred he needs to attend the threatened gatherings, if he’ll let her finish off her own season by unveiling the Blue Raven and sealing her position as notorious queen of the ton.

Folks, I cheerily ate this one up. Marcus was a fantastic hero, the perfect sort of fellow for a spy: physically forgettable at first glance, lean and brown-haired and even wearing spectacles to read. Yet give him the right fashionable haircut, and SURPRISE! He’s actually handsome! Plus, we have bonus action scenes where Marcus gets shot, and OHNOEZ! Philippa has to be the one to take the bullet out! Okay, yeah, sure, it’s cheesy, but this book hit all the flavors of cheese I happen to particularly adore. ;)

There’s great mileage with Philippa snarking at her chief rival (who of course winds up being the protagonist of the next book) Jane, and some fine mileage as well with the masculine version of same going on with Marcus and his brother Byrne (who of course winds up being Jane’s love interest in the next book). One star off for resorting to the standard romance trope of Big Revelation to Make the Heroine Back Off Must Come Immediately After Smexxing–but other than that, this was a delightful read all around. Four stars.

Kate Noble came highly, highly recommended on Smart Bitches Trashy Books, and so I went and grabbed the sample of Compromised off Barnes and Noble’s ebook site. I can say right out that Ms. Noble’s overall writing style in that sample hooked me into buying all three of her available books; it’s a bit cliched, perhaps, to say that she has Austen-esque charm, but you know what? It’s what I thought when I read that sample.

That said, Compromised is the least interesting of her books. The scenario here is one that’s very likely familiar to readers not only of historical romance, but of any genre that spends any time in period settings: that of the older, plainer daughter being outshone by her beautiful sister. This time around, it’s a case of the man Older Plainer Sister is interested in being forced to propose to Beautiful Younger Sister… because OHNOEZ! He actually dared to sit alone with her and kiss her in the moonlit garden at her family’s ball! Yet he’s really way more interested in Older Plainer Sister because she’s the one with the brain and who likes all the same things he does! OHNOEZ!

Given this as a scenario, the rest of the story does pretty much proceed as expected. I do however give Ms. Noble props for carrying out with a deft light style that minimized the angst of it all and made all of the cast of characters generally likeable, even the sisters’ brusque stepmother. Much ado is made over what to modern readers probably will seem awfully tame: i.e., the hero was alone with the beautiful sister and kissed her, and there wasn’t even any removal of clothing going on, much less smexxing! Nor is there any particularly strident character conflict. The plot here is pretty much all about families trying to navigate their way through societal expectations, and the main characters trying to find a way to follow their hearts. Enjoyable overall, but definitely fluffy. Three stars.

Phil Rossi’s Crescent was a bit of an odd read for me. I started off with actually listening to the podcast version, but partway through decided to go ahead and switch over to reading the Kindle edition. So this is a bit of a hybrid review.

Salvage pilot Gerard Evans accepts a job working for the mayor of Crescent, a run-down station on the fringes of colonized space. Things start to go south very quickly, though, as he finds out that not only is the mayor up to his eyes in the shadiest of shady dealings–but that something is loose on Crescent, something that’s out for blood and lives.

The podcast version, or at least the initial stretch of it I listened to, was intriguing listening. Rossi reads well, and is good at varying accents to give you a sense of the voices of the different characters, something you don’t get as well when you’re just reading the ebook. There are also neat tricks done with certain sound effects that maximize the creepiness of a few key scenes, something else you don’t get in the ebook version.

Either way, I found myself poised between wanting more SF to this story and more horror at the same time, possibly because it had a foot in both genres and didn’t quite commit to either one, and possibly also because the horror tropes that the story invokes aren’t really the ones that work best for me. In particular, I found it had way too much reliance on acts of senseless violence–especially rape of random side characters, which happens twice–as a means of creating the horror.

When it avoids those tactics, which is thankfully the majority of the time, Crescent does achieve some genuine moments of creepiness and suspense. So, three stars.