Tag: books

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s taken me a while to figure out exactly how to review this book. The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker has a lot in it I like quite a bit, but on the other hand, it’s also got some elements that drive me absolutely crazy. The core concept is certainly Relevant to My Interests: an urban fantasy scenario, only set in a period time frame, and written in a style heavily influenced by old-school Gothic romances. We’ve got a secret society of men and women whose function is to protect London from ghosts and other supernatural creatures, and who discover that the strange young albino woman who shows up at their academy may be their prophesied seventh member, vital to their defense against an ultimate forthcoming evil.

All well and good. And certainly I must say that Ms. Hieber at many points in this book turns a lovely phrase indeed, very nicely evoking the Gothic style.

The problem for me is, there are also many points where she goes a bit far for my tastes in evoking that style. Our young heroine, Miss Percy Parker, spends just about all of her on-camera time dewily mooning over her handsome professor, the leader of the aforementioned secret society, Alexi Rychman. This frustrates me for several reasons. One, Percy is apparently brilliant in all of her classes except his, yet we never see her actually being particularly brilliant. Two, despite the fact that she’s handed an opportunity to have private tutoring sessions with her professor, she spends way, WAY more time swooning over him than she does actually trying to apply herself to learning anything from him, which would have made me respect her as a character quite a bit more. And three, there was just way too much emphasis, seemingly every third or fourth paragraph in these scenes, about Alexi’s “rich voice” and “noble brow”. All of this is rather appropriate for a traditional Gothic heroine, don’t get me wrong–but in a modern work, I find myself hoping for more, a better balance between the Gothic story tropes and a modern reader’s sensibilities.

My other main point of frustration has to do with the big climax of the story, about which I can say little, since I don’t want to spoil it. I will however freely disclaim that this book ties into certain aspects of Greek mythology about which I have very, very strong opinions–and in fact about which I’ve written a story of my own, so I can’t really address the ending of the story and what’s revealed there in a suitably unbiased manner.

I will say though that if Gothic romance is your thing, you’ll probably eat this book right up. And again, Ms. Hieber’s command of her prose is often very lovely, if you don’t mind your prose in shades of purple. Three stars.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn’t get into Book 2 of the Samantha Jellicoe series as much as I did the first–but that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. This book’s set three months after the first, and changes have come into our cat burglar heroine’s life; she’s not only got a real, blossoming relationship with billionaire Rick Addison now, she’s even trying to go straight. Instead of robbing people blind, she’s now trying to advise them on their security.

It’s a great plan on paper, but it just goes to figure that one of Sam’s very first clients is murdered shortly after hiring her. Nor does it help matters much that Rick’s ex-wife arrives on the scene, ostensibly to integrate herself into Florida society–but as far as Sam’s concerned, clearly trying to integrate herself right back into Rick’s life, and Sam just can’t have that, now can she? Toss in complications with Sam’s former fence being a suspect in the murder of her client, and all in all, it’s a tasty little mystery.

The main reason it didn’t work quite as well for me as the first one, I think, lies with how there’s a bit more emphasis on the whole OHNOEZ EX-WIFE plot than I would have liked, vs. the OHNOEZ Sam is Trying to Go Straight But Her Past is Complicating Things plot, which was quite a bit more interesting. However, I’ve got to give Enoch credit for avoiding getting too cliched with the ex-wife, and for keeping Sam and Rick’s developing relationship lively. I’ll be proceeding on to book 3! Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is a distinct level of irony in reading a book about a girl whose profession is “restorer of old books” in ebook form. And in some ways, the dichotomy of this–of reading a book about an old profession via very modern means–carried over into my reaction to the plot. Not entirely positively, either.

Our heroine, Brooklyn Wainwright, inadvertantly stumbles across the murder of her mentor, and as a result is drafted in his stead to restore a rare and supposedly cursed copy of Faust as the showpiece of a family collection. But she’s also suspected of both murder and theft, and repeatedly runs afoul of a dour security agent hired to investigate the goings-on.

Toss in the obligatory Colorful Family, and you’ve got decent makings for a fluffy but entertaining cozy mystery. Problem for me was, Brooklyn for me as a heroine oftentimes fell kind of flat. My main beef with her was the repeated scenes of snark between her and her nemesis, Minka LaBoeuf; most of the snark was unfortunately merely petty rather than actively witty, and the situation wasn’t helped much by Minka not serving a plot function above and beyond “being there for Brooklyn to be snarky at”. She’s regularly described in spitefully unflattering terms, up to and including digs at her weight. This wasn’t cool, and rather than accomplishing the goal of having me feel snarky to her because Brooklyn was, it instead made me feel sorry at Minka and annoyed that narrative space was being wasted having Brooklyn pettily snark at her.

This really though was my only real problem with the book. Brooklyn does have an entertaining family, and once Dour British Security Guy actually unwinds enough to start being a real character, he’s fun too. The latter third of the book is the best, even given a brief and unnecessary diversion into “cozy paranormal” territory rather than just “cozy”. Two and a half stars, though for Goodreads review purposes I’ll go ahead and round up to three.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The fourth book of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovans series, Midnight in Ruby Bayou, is for my money the best of the lot. It’s got the most complex of any of the plots in the series up to this point, and since it’s a bit longer than the previous ones as well, Lowell has more time to develop the various characters. This time around, the Donovan Sibling Du Jour is Faith, Hope’s sister, and we finally get some payoff on the plot point set up in previous books, involving an asshole ex-boyfriend. We’ve also got a stolen priceless Russian ruby, and the torrid secrets of a South Carolina family who’ve commissioned Faith to design a necklace for a forthcoming wedding–that of her own best friend.

Lowell does a decent job tying all of these elements together, although there’s a clear demarcation between the half of the story involving “Faith and Owen travel to South Carolina”, and “Faith and Owen arrive at the Monteageaus’ mansion, and deal with all the drama there”, and the transition between the two parts isn’t entirely smooth. But that said, out of all of the lead characters in the Donovans series, I like Faith and Owen the most. Their relationship and chemistry come across to me as the most equal out of any in the series, and not just because Owen is an employee of Faith’s family. He’s the most understated of the male leads in the series, and a lot of this is on purpose as he deliberately plays to the “Southern good ol’ boy” stereotype as well as to the fact that he’s carrying a cane as he recovers from an injury sustained in Afghanistan. Most importantly, while he and Faith do their share of arguing, they get over it quickly, and there’s no Big Misunderstanding sorts of annoyances that so often annoy me in romance and romantic suspense novels.

Once the action shifts to the Montegeaus’ mansion, everything takes on a decidedly darker tone–because at this point the plot delves into the sordid history of the family, and in particular, the crazy old woman Tiga. Questions of alcoholism and incest and murder are all explored, all of which give a bit more weight to this novel than its predecessors. As this is a romantic suspense novel, nothing is ever really graphically called out, though the presence of these plot elements at all may make it a questionable read for some. So be on the lookout for that.

All in all though a decent read. Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The third of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovan books, Pearl Cove, is perhaps one of the earliest Lowells that levels up a bit for me in general quality of plot and character development. It’s still formulaic–I haven’t met a Lowell suspense novel that isn’t, even if it’s a formula I happen to enjoy. But this one at least does a better job than others.

This time around we have the focus on Archer Donovan, the oldest of the Donovan brothers and the one who’s generally in charge of everything the younger generation of the family does. He’s a former international operative, with the obligatory unspecific hints about Awful Things He Did When He Was Younger, and he’s got the suitably jaded outlook on life to go with it. And, unsurprisingly, a portion of his Awful Background(TM) is plot-relevant, for it turns out he’s got sordid backstory with his illegitimate half-brother–a bitter, crippled man named Len McGarry. Who, it turns out, has just died under mysterious circumstances. And Archer learns this from Len’s widow Hannah–who, it turns out, is the obligatory Only Woman Archer Has Ever Loved(TM).

Naturally, Archer must hightail it down to Australia to help Hannah find out who murdered her husband, and what happened to the priceless necklace of black pearls he’d been assembling.

I quite enjoyed the “solve the murder mystery” aspect of this story, and the chemistry between Archer and Hannah was suitably edgy and compelling, even given the gyrations Hannah’s backstory goes through to get her into a position of being a widow yet still more or less sexually innocent. The only part of their interaction I didn’t enjoy was the Big Misunderstanding trope rearing its head, since a good chunk of Hannah’s early interactions with Archer are her assuming that he’s just as much of an asshole as her dead husband was, without any particular justification at all. Once they get past the Big Misunderstanding, though, it’s fun to see the Donovans reacting to their brother finally being in love, and all of them coming together to help him and Hannah ultimately solve the crime. Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stranger, Book 4 of Zoe Archer’s “Blades of the Rose” series, is hands down my favorite of the lot–in no small part due to the awesomeness of its hero, Catullus Graves. I was afraid he wouldn’t live up to the buildup he got in previous books, but I was happy to discover I was wrong. Sure, he’s a romance novel hero and therefore in many ways is a very typical one: i.e., he’s hot, he’s a competent fighter, and such. But what really sells him for me is his intellect; scientifically inclined heroes for the major, major win! And like many a nerd in real life, Cat’s got his issues talking to women, so I found him quite endearing as he established his relationship with our heroine, reporter Gemma Murphy.

I liked Gemma just about as much as I did Cat, since she was adept at finding the right things to say to draw him out of his reclusive shell. They actually talk quite a bit during the course of the plot, and because of this, they come across to me beautifully as genuinely liking each other as people, above and beyond the obligatory percolation of each other’s hormones. In other words: my favorite kind of chemistry!

Plus, partial I am to tales involving Celtic mythos, I have to give this book props for having Cat and Gemma have to venture into Faerie. There’s some nicely creepy stuff there, and that whole sequence would have fit well in any fantasy novel. Not quite as awesome for me was this book’s choice of “monster”, but on the other hand, you can hand-wave that if you remember that the “monster” is supposed to be more the “villains’ perception of what he should be” rather than a straightforward lifting of his mythos. (Which is all I’ll say about that, lest I delve into spoilers.)

While I’m sure this is not the last of the Blades books, this does neatly tie off the story arc begun in the earlier ones. Thus this is not a good place to start if you want to check out the series. There’s followup here with the lead characters from Book 3, as they’re still critical to resolve the ongoing crisis with the Heirs of Albion, and we do see a bit more of the leads from Books 1 and 2 as well, making this much more of an ensemble cast affair than the previous installments. I found that apt, given that this was the Big Final Crisis of the arc. The villains overall were still kind of flat for me, but perhaps due to this being the end of the arc, the main villain at least felt like he had a bit more to bring to the table. All in all, fun stuff. Four stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovans series, Jade Island, continues the adventures of the jewel-loving Donovan family. This time around the camera’s on brother Kyle, the brother who’d gone missing in Amber Beach and who now gets his own time in the spotlight. He’s being eyed by the powerful Tang family as their way in to doing business with the Donovans–and the Tangs intend to have their unacknowledged relation Lianne Blakely try to seduce Kyle to get their in to the Donovans assured. Meanwhile, Kyle’s older brother Archer is sure Lianne must be involved with stolen jade, so he wants Kyle to put the moves on Lianne.

That our female lead Lianne is half-Chinese and driven by the desire to be accepted by the Tang family is simultaneously one of the best and one of the most disappointing things about the story: best since Lianne’s a nice change of pace from the standard whitebread heroine, disappointing because Lowell played up the “look how awesome the (American) Donovan family is compared to the (Chinese) Tang family and Lianne would be much better off marrying into the Donovans, wouldn’t she?” angle way too hard. There is some decent mileage with Lianne’s conflicted relationship with her parents as well as her grandfather, and that gives her some obvious reasons to want to be accepted by the Tangs. But it would have been nice to see some other positive aspects of the family, just to let us see that they weren’t all assholes.

But hey. As it stands, for what it is, Jade Island‘s a decent enough read, even if it’s on the fluffy side of romantic suspense. Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amber Beach is going back a while in my re-read queue, back to earlier days of Elizabeth Lowell’s romantic suspense novels. It’s the first of her Donovans series, which to this day remain among my favorites of hers. Not because they’re particularly better written or less formulaic than her later work, but more because I’m partial to the family of characters she depicts. Plus, while the cast travels all over the globe, they’re headquartered in Seattle. And I’m a sucker for books that reference Pike Place Market, what can I say?

Anyway, her Donovan clan is fairly fun. You’ve got a large group of brothers and sisters, all headed up by a forceful tycoon of a father and a hugely talented painter of a mother, and the various stories of the series all focus upon a particular sibling. Since the siblings also run an international jewelry business, each book focuses upon the starring sibling’s particular favorite gem. Amber Beach‘s jewel du jour is of course amber, and its heroine is Honor, one of the two Donovan sisters. Honor’s desperate to find her missing brother Kyle, desperate enough to overcome her own phobia about going out on the water and hiring a man to help her search the San Juan Islands by boat. This being a romantic suspense novel, Jake Mallory, the man she hires, does of course have an agenda of his own. And his reasons for finding Kyle are much less benign. And, of course, there are Bad Guys out to find Kyle too, along with agents of the US government. Every last one of ’em is out to find out what Kyle knows about the fabled Russian Amber Room, and the fortune in amber from it that’s gone missing.

Like I said, formulaic, but it’s a decent enough light read. Three stars.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Say you’re a big fan of steampunk. Say also that you think the world needs more queer short fiction–and in particular, F/F. If both of these apply to you, you absolutely need to check out Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, a forthcoming anthology from Torquere Books. Editor (JoSelle Vanderhooft) kindly sent me an ARC of this antho, and I can happily say it was one of the more unusual anthologies I’ve read, not only because of the lesbian aspect but also because of the sheer diversity of stories and the emphasis on non-European and non-American cultures when possible.

Hands down, my favorite story in the whole thing was N.K. Jemisin’s “The Effluent Engine”. Fantasy fans may recognize that name from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which got a whole lot of favorable buzz; now that I’ve finally read something by this author, I can see why. I very much enjoyed her story, thanks to my ideal level of romance (i.e., it’s an aspect of the story but not the dominant point of the plot), the intrigue (a female spy in New Orleans is looking for hotly sought secrets of clean methane production, because whoever gets hold of that gets airship superiority), and the emphasis on Haiti. The heroine of this story is Haitian, and it’s just after the revolution in that country–so not only do you get a lesbian romance, it’s multi-racial and multi-cultural as well.

“Brilliant”, by Georgina Bruce, mostly worked for me as a character study–although again, we have an emphasis on non-European culture, as there are references to the “Egyptian Empire”, and the title character of the story is the daughter of the Nigerian ambassador to Cairo. Nice.

D.L. MacInnes’ “Owl Song” was a bittersweet one, which I didn’t entirely enjoy. And yet, the ending of it was haunting and powerful.

“Where the Ocean Meets the Sky” by Sara M. Harvey somewhat contrasted for me with Jemisin’s story, since there’s more emphasis here on the sexual attraction between the two main characters and not quite as much on the actual plot. But that said, I quite enjoyed that the plot featured a colorful character from San Francisco history, Emperor Joshua Norton I.

Beth Wodzinski’s “Suffer Water” gets points for a nice little blend of Old West, nanotech done steampunk style, a relationship gone wrong, and a bit of mad scientist to boot.

In “Steel Rider”, Rachel Manija Brown brings us a tale with a bit of anime-style mecha to spice up her steampunk. There’s a hint of Jewish culture here as well as Aztec and Mexican, not to mention all sorts of interesting questions about the world only barely seen in this story.

Shira Lipkin’s vignette “Truth and Life” is a glimpse of the sadness of a brilliant engineer.

Matthew Kressel, in “The Hands that Feed”, brings us a solid little tale of a shopkeeper with hidden talents, and the seemingly innocent young woman she comes to love. Our two heroines are Jewish and Hindu, as well as separated by thirty years of age, which makes for quite the unusual pairing indeed.

My fellow Drollerie author Meredith Holmes brings us “Love in the Time of Airships”, a tale of romance across social classes–and a woman who discovers not only that she has romantic inclinations she never dreamed of, but that her so-called husband is far more dangerous than she ever imagined.

Teresa Wymore, another fellow Drollerie author, has some intriguing glimpses of genetic manipulation shaping the society that exists “Under the Dome”.

“Clockwork and Music”, by Tara Sommers, is a poignant tale of a young woman who must wrestle madness, possibly nefarious intentions of the doctor who looks after her in a sanitarium, and the clockwork servants that carry out his will. All she has to sustain her is the love of a fellow inmate, who may or may not be mad herself.

Mikki Kendall’s “Copper for a Trickster” is brutal, and believably so, if you take a steampunk culture and think about how it would have impacted the development of African slavery. Protagonist Dalila and her beloved Ashaki are willing to do anything to free themselves and the children enslaved with them–but Dalila learns the price of the bargain they make with the Hare.

“Sleepless, Burning Life”, by Mike Allen, is perhaps the oddest piece in the collection. The prose is almost more metaphor than narrative, and even after having read through it, I’m still not entirely sure what it’s about. There are goddesses and priestesses and gears involved, and that’s pretty much what I came away with; more than that will have to wait until I get a formal copy of the anthology. (This was the first of two stories where I found the watermarking on the ARC to interfere enough with my ability to read the story that I will need to re-read it later.) Still, there’s imagery to be admired here, as well as the sheer lyricism of the writing.

And lastly, we have Shweta Narayan’s “The Padishah Begum’s Reflections”, another piece complex enough that I had a hard time reading it given the watermarking on the ARC and reading it on my iPhone. There’s a lot of jumping around between time frames in this story, which made it hard to follow on a small screen–but I glimpsed enough complexity of plot in this final piece that it’s another reason I absolutely want to acquire a full formal copy of the book.

In conclusion: highly recommended for steampunk fans as well as readers in search of lesbian fiction as well as fiction that embraces non-Western cultures. Not every piece was to my particular tastes, but they were all solid, and I look forward to buying my formal copy. Four stars.