My favourite M&B line

Mills & Boon Medical has fast become my favourite M&B line. I tried a couple at first that had a bit of a Presents-ish feel to them, which isn't something I particularly enjoy, but since I've got some author recommendations, I've had much better luck. Marion Lennox, for instance, has become a fave. What I most like here is that the heroines are usually in the medical profession as well, so they tend to be highly competent and in a position of relative equality to the hero. Oh, and the Australian settings! I seem to be liking mostly the Australian ones, for some reason.

TITLE: The Surgeon's Family Miracle
AUTHOR: Marion Lennox

This is a reunion/secret baby story. Lily Cyprano and Ben Blayden met in medical school and fell in love. They always knew their relationship wouldn't last beyond school, though, because Lily was committed to return to practice medicine at her homeland, the island of Kapua, while Ben wanted a life of adventure and travelling. So when Lily discovered she was pregnant right before she was due to return home, she said nothing to Ben, knowing that he'd do the right thing but resent her forever.

Eight years later, Ben is working as a frontline doctor for a Special Forces team and they're called to Kapua, where there's a bloody coup attempt. He and his team arrive to find the rebels holed up with hostages and Lily, the island doctor, frantic about one of them, her son Benjy.

This was quite good. The opening scenes, especially, with the coup attempt and the arrival of the Special Forces team, were fast-paced and exciting, and very good at giving us an idea of who these characters are now. The story did lose a bit of steam afterwards, as Ben and Lily were nice, but not particularly exciting together, but it was nice enough on the whole. I actually liked how the secret baby angle was handled, because as much as Ben now thinks Lily should have told him about her pregnancy, he does admit that his reaction would have been what she expected.

MY GRADE: A B-.

NOTE: I must be softening, but I really like the cover. The kid really seems to be having fun, and so does the guy!


TITLE: The Doctor's Rescue Mission
AUTHOR: Marion Lennox

The setup of this one is very similar to that of The Surgeon's Family Miracle. The protagonists have a history together, but she had to leave him and Australia to become responsible for the health care needs of a small, isolated island. When disaster hits her island some years later, the hero shows up as part of the emergency rescue team, and the relationship recommences.

In this case, the disaster in question is a tsunami, which kills a bunch of people and sweeps away much of the island's infrastructure. This is an April 2005 book, and there's a clearly hastily affixed sticker at the back telling readers that the book was written before the Asian tsunami and that there was a donation made by M&B to the relief fund. Wow, Lennox was amazingly prescient! I suppose it must have been chilling to read it right after it came out.

Again, the opening scenes were excellently done, very exciting and interesting. However, in this case the book continued just as strong. In part, I liked it better because of the heroine, Morag. At the same time that she feels responsible for the island, she does resent having to be there and not having been able to have the life in Australia that she was planning on having.

Also, the conflict between Morag and Grady, what prevented them from just getting back together, was very interesting. As I said, the tsunami has completely destroyed the community's infrastructure. It was already costing the government a ton of many to maintain services to such an isolated area, so there had been some overtures to try and settle people somewhere else. Now, considering the immense expense and difficulty of repairing what's been flattened, the government is even more serious about resettlement, and Grady has been charged with doing a kind of preliminary evaluation of how viable what's left is. Morag, on the other hand, is determined that they WILL rebuild, and not lose the community spirit by resettling elsewhere (not to mention that the Aboriginal settlement on the island won't be abandoned).

Interesting, no? I enjoyed seeing Morag and Grady work around the issue, even while thinking Lennox's implicit arguments were much too simplistic. I got the feeling that we readers were supposed to automatically sympathise more with Morag and her efforts to keep Petrel Island going, but I wasn't so convinced. I kind of felt the argument was mainly: how can you be so heartless to think about the money when there's the life of a community and its spirit to be considered? Well, I think I must have spent too much time working as a government economist, but I found this reasoning really flawed. It's not heartless to think about the money, it's necessary. That money is coming out from somewhere. Financing a huge project such as this one means resources taken away from or not devoted to other uses. The government has limited resources, however rich it might seem to people, and it has to decide how to use them best. What is best for society? Rebuilding Petrel Island or more funds for, I don't know, cancer research? Rebuilding Petrel Island or funds for free childcare? Of course, it can be: rebuilding Petrel Island or more tax cuts to the rich?, but the thing is, that's not obvious. It could be anything, and it has to be considered. And it's not heartless to think that other things might be more valuable than rebuilding one particular community.

Anyway, off from my soapbox, sorry for the rant! All in all, a good book, with a nice romance and issues which made me think.

MY GRADE: B


TITLE: Bride by Accident
AUTHOR: Marion Lennox

Yet another Marion Lennox that starts with a bang. Or rather, a crash, in this case. A school bus crashes right outside an isolated Australian community, and Dr. Devlin O'Halloran rushes to help, only to find that the pregnant woman in another of the cars involved in the accident (and who ends up helping out quite heroically) is also Dr. O'Halloran. Emma O'Halloran is Devlin's brother's widow, on her way to meet her late husband's family, who know nothing about her.

Emma's pregnancy is very advanced, and the accident ensures that she can't get on a plane until the baby is born. So she stays at Devlin's place and in the process, helps both him and his mother come to terms with her husband's death, and the whole community get over the tragic school bus accident.

I really liked BBA. It's got a pretty melancholic tone, which is fitting, as the story is as much about people allowing themselves to grieve and heal as about Devlin and Emma finding love with each other. Lennox does this well, and the story is touching and heartbreaking, without ever becoming maudlin.

MY GRADE: A B.


TITLE: Coming Home to Katoomba
AUTHOR: Lucy Clark

This is the sequel to Crisis At Katoomba Hospital, which I read and enjoyed a few months ago. I'd found the heroine, who's the sister of the hero of the previous book, an interesting character. Stephanie is a very competent doctor with a quirky sense of humour, happy enough to shave her head to support her cancer patients and dye her stubble green.

In CHTK, she falls in love with newcomer Oliver, the new hospital chief (or administrator, I forget the exact title. He's in charge, at any rate). Her house had burned down shortly before he arrived and she was living at a friend's, but there was some mix-up with the property agent, and the house ends up having been rented to Oliver as well. They decide to share, sparks fly, even when Oliver's young daughter comes visit, etc., etc.

This was a nice book until the halfway point, when Steph goes a bit psycho. So there's chemistry between her and Oliver, they like each other, they feel a connection. They've done nothing more than share a few kisses and feel something real might develop, when Stephanie suddenly decides she loves Oliver. Ok, a bit sudden, but ok. But then, when he says he thinks they should date, get to know each other better, etc, she just goes batshit crazy and starts accusing him of using her and telling him he needs to make a commitment and blah, blah, blah. Mind you, it's been only a couple of weeks since they've even met! I thought Oliver was just proceeding the normal way, and that it was Steph who was completely out of line. But no, everyone else seems to find her behaviour perfectly justified, while I was going WTF?? At one point Oliver wonders "had he really behaved so badly?" He answers "yes" to himself, but I'd say "Definitely not".

I also disliked the demonisation of Oliver's ex wife. She's a completely cartoonish figure here, and it irritated me.

MY GRADE: A C-.


TITLE: Pregnant on Arrival
AUTHOR: Fiona Lowe

The title of this one is more accurate than most: Dr. Bronte Hawkins discovers her pregnancy on her arrival to a small outback town, where she's joining the area's Flying Doctors team. Huon Morrison was looking forward to getting a new partner who could share his backbreaking workload, and is now quite angry that the new partner has turned out to be pregnant and obviously will be going back as soon as she can. But Bronte is determined to stay, and soon he's helping her settle in Muttawindi and feeling more and more of an attraction to her.

I loved the portrayal of Bronte and Huon's day-to-day work, providing medical care for the people living in a wide area of the Australian Outback, whether over the phone or radio or flying all over the place on emergency calls. There's a variety of interesting cases, and Lowe gives us a fascinating glimpse of what an outback doctor's life might be like.

The romance? Nice. Nothing to phone home about, but on the other hand, nothing that bothered me, and the setting and the other stuff that was going on around them was strong enough to earn this a recommend.

MY GRADE: A B-.

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Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

TITLE: Life As We Knew It
AUTHOR: Susan Beth Pfeffer

COPYRIGHT: 2006
PAGES: 339
PUBLISHER: Scholastic

SETTING: Contemporary Pennsylvania
TYPE: Young Adult / Apocalyptic Fiction
SERIES: There's a related book, taking place at the same time as the action of this one, but in another location: The Dead and the Gone.

REASON FOR READING: I was intrigued by a review of The Dead and the Gone at Dear Author.

No shops. No TV.

No electricity. No daylight.

No idea if your family is alive or dead...

Could you survive?

An asteroid will hit the moon at 9.30 this evening. The astronomers say there's nothing to worry about.

What if they're wrong?

THE PLOT: An asteroid is about to hit the moon. It's supposed to be nothing more than a fun, educational event to watch through a telescope... see how a new crater is created, enjoy some natural fireworks, that kind of thing. But it turns out that the asteroid was much denser than astronomers supposed, so it kicks the moon off its normal orbit. And soon the effects of the changes in the gravitational pull of the moon are being felt: massive tsunamis kill millions on the coast, earthquakes shake up unlikely places.... and that's just the beginning.

Narrated by 16-year-old Miranda through her diary entries, Life As We Knew It shows us the aftermath of the asteroid hit from the point of view of one family living in north-eastern Pennsylvania.

MY THOUGHTS: Wow! Just... wow! I think this book is going to be one of the highlights of the year. I love end-of-the-world catastrophe movies (as much as I love romance in my reading, I'd much rather go watch a disaster movie than a chick flick), but I always end up wanting to see more detail about the everyday things that are going on around our heroes as they're involved in whatever outlandish and dangerous adventure the moviemakers have come up with.

This is exactly what we get here. The book has a narrowish focus, which is something that I might have considered a weakness before I read it, but which I ended up considering one of its main strengths. We know a bit of the horrors that are happening in other places, but we are not seeing them. We spend all the book isolated in an area which didn't bear the brunt of the natural catastrophes, but which is still suffering. So what we experience are the everyday kind of horrors: the lack of food, the petrol shortage, the cold, the disease, and most of all, the isolation and hoplessness of not knowing. Communications have been cut, so Miranda (and so, us) can't have a very accurate idea of what's going on in the whole world or whether there is any hope, whether somehow things are improving somewhere. Basically, whether there is going to be a future at all.

This narrow focus, which actually gets narrower and narrower as the book advances, adds up to a claustrophobic feel at times, which intensifies the very well done family relationships. Miranda's family is a good one, not at all dysfunctional. They all clearly care about each other, but four people spending months in close proximity are going to clash, however much love there is there. The trick is to still show that love through the discussions and tension, and Pfeffer does so well.

I especially liked how Laura, Miranda's mother comes across. We're seeing her only through the eyes of Miranda, but Pfeffer succeeds in showing her beyond her mother role. You can glimpse the real woman there, worried about her children, yes, but also a person in her own right, with a wicked sense of humour (I loved the scene where they finally get radio reception after months of silence and there's an inane speech made by the president "from his ranch in Texas", full of platitudes about how they've turned the corner and how everything's going to be better. Laura's reaction: "The idiot is still alive, and he's still an idiot!") and her own romantic interests. She's not perfectly strong all the time... there are fights in which she's just as irrational as Miranda, and you can certainly see she almost reaches the end of her rope sometimes.

As for Miranda, she's an excellent narrator. She's sixteen, and feels sixteen. A mature enough sixteen, yes, but she's not a grown-up, and this is reflected in her concerns. Obviously, as the situation worsens, she becomes more and more worried about serious, life-threatening issues, but she never stops caring about things as her education (what happens if there's no school, will she be able to get to a good college? Will there be any good colleges left?) and boys.

I really liked that these are common people, not highly competent MacGyver types who are able to jury-rig a generator out of an old battery, some wire and a piece of chewing gum. They do the best they can with their limited resources, and they do go beyond the limits of what they would have thought they could do, but it's believable, and they behave as you or I (assuming you're not a MacGyver type, either) would.

Something else I thought was excellently done was how there's an ominous feel about certain things that are going on in town, how people are not being Pollyanna-ish nice and sweet and solidary, but that this is hardly explicit. There's the say Sammi finds to leave, there's the fear that women are not safe being alone in town, there's the hospital guard who creeps Miranda out... we don't actually see much happening, but the suggestion is enough to create a mood. Very effective stuff, especially because what one imagines can be worse than reality.

As you can imagine, the whole book has a dark feel to it, partly because characters you care about do die, but actually, mostly because the difficulty in staying hopeful about the situation. Fortunately, there is no waving of magic wands at the end. The moon doesn't spontaneously go back to where it was, it doesn't turn out that things were nowhere near as disastrous as people had thought. And yet, you close the book feeling optimistic. As the book finishes, you trust that at least there is going to be a tomorrow and that people will tirelessly work until they find ways to deal with the changed circumstances. And that was good enough for me.

Do give this a try, even if you're not generally a YA reader. I'm not (other than the Harry Potter series), and I'm very glad I made an exception for this one.

MY GRADE: An A.

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Catching up with the Otherworld

Having reserved Personal Demon at my library as soon as it came out, I'm now all caught up with Kelley Armstrong's Otherworld series. So now to post about them. I'm only up to the third book here, so here's a little something about the rest.

BTW, if you don't know anything about this series, this review is probably not the best place to start reading about it (which makes sense, because these books are not the best place to start with the series itself).

TITLE: Industrial Magic (# 4)
EXCERPTS: prologue, chapter 1, chapter 2

Industrial Magic again has Paige Winterbourne as a narrator, and continues to develop her relationship with Lucas Cortez and their tense interactions with his powerful Cabal family. Lucas is used to his father, Benicio, trying all kinds of ploys to involve him in Cabal business. He usually has little trouble resisting his offers, but the latest case he's asked him to investigate touches a chord both with him and Paige. Cabal kids are being murdered, and only someone with Cabal links, and yet operating outside them (i.e. only Lucas and Paige) have a shot at stopping the murderer before more children die.

I liked this a lot. The case and the investigation are cool; we finally meet Jaime here, and she's a great character from the very beginning, but there's also some very eccentric vampires and a glimpse of what's on the other side. But the best thing about the book is the relationship between Lucas and his father. It's as complicated and impossible as Benicio himself, and you really feel for Lucas, torn as he is between his ethics and his love for his father.

There's some very nice romance as well. In the previous book, we saw Lucas and Paige getting together, but here their relationship strengthens and grows, and reaches a commitment, and it was just as satisfying as the courtship.

MY GRADE:A B+.


TITLE: Haunted (# 5)
EXCERPTS: prologue, chapter 1, chapter 2.

Haunted is one weird book. Good, but weird. For starters, it takes place almost wholly in this strange kind of afterlife for paranormal beings, where black witch Eve Levine went after she died. Eve is Savannah's mother, and she's been obsessed with watching over her daughter and trying to contact her ever since she passed on to the other side. She owes a favour to the Three Fates, the beings who control the afterlife she's living in, and as the book starts, they call it in. Eve must capture the Nix, a half-demon who's escaped and has been wreaking havoc in the human world for years and years. Basically, the Nix craves chaos, and what it does is go into humans and give them the courage to kill. The Fates have already sent three hunters after the Nix, but all have failed. Maybe Eve won't?

It's hard to conceive of a book like this succeeding when the main character is, after all, dead, but Armstrong manages it. Eve is a fantastic character. We'd heard a lot about her in the previous books, and even seen her briefly in the last one, and she fulfills all that promise. She's resourceful and tough, and unapologetic about all she's done in life, and yet does have a core of goodness. She loves her daughter, and as much as she would like to deny it, cares deeply about Kristof, Savannah's father, who's joined her in the afterlife and would very much like to have a real relationship with Eve (and if it's hard to conceive of a plain story where the main character is dead, how about a romance where both are? And yet it works as well).

Eve's hunt for the Nix takes her to some fascinating places. This afterlife Armstrong's created is certainly unique, with some very scary and original places. Very definitely not fluffy clouds and harps! But the most interesting element is seeing her deal with a very big and surprising decision regarding the Fates plans for her. Cool stuff.

MY GRADE: A B.


TITLE: Broken (# 6)
EXCERPTS: chapter 1, chapter 2.

Probably the weakest book in the whole series. We're back to Elena and Clay (probably by popular demand, and my theory is that this is probably why the book was so weak), who in this book get sucked into in a situation involving stolen letters from Jack the Ripper. By accident, a portal between Toronto and Victorian London seems to have opened, through which some very scary characters may be crossing. And making things even more complicated, Elena is pregnant. First female werewolf, first pregnancy in the pack? Protective insticts triggered!

I was very excited when I started reading because I thought the Jack the Ripper connection sounded promising, but it ended up being a bit boring. No the plot itself, but the actual investigation. Elena and Clay just seem to be doing the same things again and again, coming across as a bit ineffectual, I'm afraid.

I did like the relationship stuff better, though. There's a level of trust between Elena and Clay that just wasn't there in earlier books, and it made me have a bit more confidence in them. Clay seems to be getting better at controlling his controlling tendencies (if not because he thinks it's the right thing to do, because Elena wants him to, and that counts), and I also liked the whole Pack dynamics, as well as Jeremy and Jaime's developing relationship.

MY GRADE: A B-.

No Humans Involved is # 7, but I read it out of order and so I've already reviewed it here.


TITLE: Personal Demon (# 8)
EXCERPTS: chapter 1, chapter 2.

This time we've got two narrators. The one I'd consider the main one is Hope, whom we met in the previous book. Hope is an Expisco half-demon, which means she senses chaos, making her an excellent trouble detector. Problem is, she also craves chaos, and though she's a good person and not someone who'd do evil things just to create chaos she can consume, she's still afraid of what's inside her.

In this book, Hope is asked by Benicio Cortez to infiltrate a supernatural gang who's apparently giving the Cabals some trouble in Miami. Since it's a way to repay him for a favour (and it's NOT a good idea to owe the Cabals a favour) Hope agrees, telling herself that the fact that she'll be coming in contact with some chaos while doing a good deed is not one of the reasons for her agreement. Soon Hope is realising that she relates to some of the gang members quite a bit, so when someone starts targeting and killing them one by one, she's determined to find out what's going on. In this, she'll have the help of werewolf Karl Marsden, with whom she shares a very complicated relationship.

I quite liked this one. It's not the best in the series, but it's good. I enjoyed Hope and her voice, and I appreciated her mixed feelings about the gang, as well as the development of her relationship with Karl. I wish we'd seen a bit more of Karl, actually, maybe from his point of view.

I also liked having Lucas as the secondary narrator. Hmmm, maybe calling him the "secondary" narrator is a bit misleading, because there are some huge things happening on his end, especially relating to his complicated family relationships. In this book, Lucas and Paige have to make some complicated decisions, decisions where none of the options are ideal. I liked this area even more than the Hope parts.

As for the negatives, there is a developement there near the end which worried me, in terms of what it's going to mean for the series and the direction it's going to go in. There are characters introduced which have some powers I thought were excessive. I'm not sure why this makes me so uncomfortable, maybe because if used right, there's no way they can be defeated. I'm at the same time intrigued by how Armstrong's going to deal with this and worried, because it's just too much. And I'm probably not explaining this well, but there it is. *Sigh*, just ignore me.

MY GRADE: A B.

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Two (well, three) Shakesperean experiences

Two books today. Completely different genres, but with strong links. Plus, another link (a literal one, this time), to a related visit.

TITLE: The Book of Air and Shadows
AUTHOR: Michael Gruber

COPYRIGHT: 2007
PAGES: 561
PUBLISHER: Harper

SETTING: Contemporary US and England.
TYPE: Literary thriller
SERIES: No

REASON FOR READING: Malvina recommended it.

Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?

These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer-or killers-unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one-not family, not friends, not lovers-is to be trusted.

Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and shadow is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery . . . or self-destruction.

MY THOUGHTS:The summary quoted above is pretty good... the plot is convoluted enough that if I tried to summarise it myself it'd probably take a while. I'll only add that while Jake is the main character, Albert Crosetti, a wannabe filmmaker who works for an antiquarian bookseller and makes the original discovery, plays almost a big a role as Jake... and is much more appealing (more on this later).

The book has an interesting structure. We start almost at the end, and then go back and forth, finding out just what happened and how each of the players got involved, with visits to the 17th century every now and then. There's letters from Richard Bracegirdle, the 17th century soldier who inadvertently set all this to-do in motion, there's diary entries written by Jake as he awaits danger, there's third person narration following Crossetti. It sounds like it could get confusing, but Gruber keeps all the balls in the air and pulls it off. He even makes the double- and triple-crosses understandable, all the while making the story move fast. Secret codes, forgeries, 400-year-old spy plots... it was fun.

I didn't love the thriller bits all that much, though. Gangsters and mafia and "exciting" kidnappings and murder attempts... that just doesn't entertain me much. Now, the literary detection bits, those were truly exciting. The very thought of.... ah, you'll have to read the book yourself to discover just what this is all about, but it really captures the imagination.

What made it even more fun to read this book was that while I was in the middle of it, I spent a day in Stratford-upon-Avon, and that town's pretty much Shakespeare, Shakespeare and in case you didn't have enough, even more Shakespeare. So I went there and recognised a lot of what I saw, and then came back and got back to the book, and could visualise what I was reading much better. I saw some documents in Stratford and went: "ah, so this is Jacobean secretary hand? (a kind of handwriting) No wonder Crosetti couldn't make head or tails of it at first!" And then I went back to the book and read a mention of Shakespeare's will and though: "yeah, yeah, the one where he left his second-best bed to his wife". The two experiences really complemented each other.

Now for the negatives. Gruber creates some interesting and complex characters, but I just wish he hadn't made the main narrator quite so despicable. Jake was... well, a total and complete sleaze; there's no other word for it. I usually like self-deprecating humour in a character, but while this guy saw his failings quite accurately and saw the humour in them, he did so in a "yes, I'm a disgusting cheating bastard, that's who I am, what can I do?" kind of way, with no desire to change whatsoever. Am I supposed to like him better just because it's as clear to him as it is to me that he's despicable? Even if at the end he does change his ways (apparently), I didn't feel he deserved the break. He should have paid a LOT more. Hmmph!

MY GRADE: A B+.

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TITLE: Shakespeare: The World as Stage
AUTHOR: Bill Bryson

COPYRIGHT: 2007
PAGES: 195
PUBLISHER: Harper Collins

SETTING: N/A
TYPE: Non Fiction - Biography
SERIES: Part of a series called Eminent Lives: "brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures".

REASON FOR READING: I love the distinguished author and I'm very interested in the canonical figure.

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.

Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's—the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.

MY THOUGHTS: This is a short book, basically because the central idea is just how little we know, 100% actually know about Shakespeare. There's a lot of supposition and theorising (usually on very doubtful and scant basis), and what Bryson does is cut through all this to the few bare, undeniable facts. He does present some of the suppositions, but always clearly marking them as such, and actually, a lot of the book is about what we don't know rather than about what we do.

I don't know if it sounds very promising, but it was fascinating, mainly because the mystery of who exactly Shakespeare was is so intriguing. And BTW, I mean who he was as a person, not his actual identity. The last chapter shows just how little convincing all those "so-and-so actually wrote the Shakespeare plays" theories are, and provides a good example of how Shakespearean scholars have tended to be an entertainingly eccentric bunch. Mean as it is, I'm still chortling at how three of the proponents of those theories were called Looney, Batty and Silliman.

It's an enormously enjoyable book, very much a Bryson, with his humour enhancing the material, rather than overwhelming it.

As an aside, as I was reading, I couldn't help but think back on the (I know, wholly fictional) plot of The Book of Air and Shadows. Seeing what little real information we have about the man made me appreciate exactly how huge a discovery the Bracegirdle letters would have been, even if the Big Find had remained lost.

MY GRADE: A B+.

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A few short reviews

TITLE: Birds of a Feather
AUTHOR: Jacqueline Winspear

In this second book in the Maisie Dobbs series, Maisie investigates the disappearance of the daughter of a rich grocery-story tycoon. Maisie suspects Charlotte Waite left of her own accord, but when her friends and former friends start turning up murdered, it becomes urgent to find her and discover just what is hiding in her past.

I'm finding the Maisie Dobbs mysteries fascinating, both because of the settings and because of Maisie's unique investigative techniques. It's not just that the 1920s make a rich, vivid backdrop to the stories, it's that Winspear chooses to tell stories that couldn't have been set in any other period. So far both of her plots that I've read have had some essential ties to the First World War, and this makes them even more interesting to me.

I also like Maisie's approach to solving her cases, with such huge emphasis on the responsibility of the investigator to consider the impact of what she turns up on everyone involved, and Maisie's reliance on the new field of psychology to make her deductions.

What I'm not liking all that much is the tinge of the paranormal in the series. I think in a way it devalues the investigative method, which is really interesting enough that it deserves to shine alone. As it is, it's a bit devalued by the cheap psychic tricks of Maisie sensing auras and having physical reactions that show her when she's near a clue.

Also, I dislike it when the author is coy and plain hides things from her reader, and that's what Winspear does here. Maisie finds something in the houses of the murdered women, and we're told only that she found something she believes is significant, but doesn't tell us what. And then someone tells her something about Charlotte and her friends, and same thing. Well, I cry foul! I hate to be kept in the dark, told she found something that made her think hard and not be told what it was. Why do it? Maybe because the reason for the murders would have been obvious to us -as it REALLY should have been to Maise, much sooner than it actually was.

Still, other than this (which really, really irritated me, clearly), I enjoyed the book and thought the mystery a good one.

MY GRADE: A B.



TITLE: I'll Be Seeing You
AUTHOR: Beverly Bird

I picked this one up from the 10p bin at the library. I can't seem to pass it up without buying something *sigh*. It's about Kate, a caterer who finds one of her clients murdered in his soup (well, it wasn't soup, but you know what I mean). Turns out the client was part of the Irish mob, and it soon becomes clear that whoever ordered the hit thinks Kate might have witnessed something. This lands her with around-the-clock protection, in the person of Det. Rafe Montiel.

I developed an antipathy for Rafe from the beginning. Basically, I thought he was a total asshole and a disgusting slob (hot-button for me, living with 6 flatmates, some of whom don't seem to understand that it might be the right thing to do to wipe the table after you use it and not leave it all sticky and disgusting for the next person). For all that she was annoying, Kate was just trying to keep things going to save her livelihood. I do understand that it was more important to preserve her life and that this might not permit her to keep going as normal with her engagements, but the way Rafe did it, constantly mocking her and sabotaging her at every turn made me want to hit him. And so what if she's a control freak? It's her house and her kitchen, she can do what she likes. It gives you no right to leave everything a mess. Damn, I'm like Kate!

On the whole, this was a very run-of-the-mill category romantic suspense, with a slightly preposterous plot and characters with cookie-cutter issues... Kate's former fiancée left her for a beautiful bimbo so she's all woe-is-me, no man will ever want me, Rafe fears getting close to any woman because she might be in danger. Oh, he *does* have a reason for feeling this way, because a killer he was after murdered a woman he was seeing, just because he was seeing her, but it's a bit irrational to think it will definitely happen again and, er, not very interesting.

Oh, and there's this huge WTF thing, with a dog who is actually an angel and protects Kate. Clearly just a left-over from an earlier, related book, which might have been relevant and fun in that book, but which was just silly and useless in this one.

MY GRADE: A C-.



TITLE: The World Cup's Strangest Moments
AUTHOR: Peter Seddon

I happened upon this one at random, just caught sight of it in my library. It's from a local-ish author (from Derby), apparently. Being a big football fan, I couldn't pass it up. And I had a blast reading it. I meant to make it last, read a couple here, a couple there, but I couldn't stop. I'd think "just one more", and keep reading. I was done in 2 days.

I'm going to have to quote the back cover blurb, because it gives an excellent idea of what this collection of World Cup anecdotes feels like:

Among the dodgy refs, eccentric mascots and manic managers that appear in this end-to-end collection of amusing, bizarre and shocking true stories is a dog who saved the Football Association's blushes, shameful fixes, outrageous cheats, bespectacled strikers, gangland disputes, tragic hairstyles and the most unpronounceable team of all time. Not to mention the odd assassination attempt, an excitable witch doctor and the minnows who didn't quite make the finals after losing 31-0.

Why was an England captain arrested by Colombian police? Which team stole a bus? Where did the Mexican wave really start? Was a defender really shot for scoring an own goal? Do robots have good vision? Why do the Germans taunt the Dutch with cheesy insults? How did a firework cause a Brazilian woman to bare all? And who was the fan who cycled over 4,000 miles to see his beloved team?

Football expert and author Peter Seddon introduces the man who played in two countries on the same day, the deceased official appointed by FIFA, the fan who committed suicide to help his team, and the England mascot who tried to prevent World War II by running round the deck of an ocean liner. If 90 minutes plus extra time and penalties is just the sort of entertainment you like, The World Cup's Strangest Moments is guaranteed to score -unlike singer Diana Ross, whose supreme penalty-miss at USA '94 has never been bettered.

Clearly, there's a bit of everything here. I'd say it's a great balance of on- and off-the-pitch antics and weirdness, all written in bite-size pieces. It never feels repetitive. You might say English football is over-represented given its World Cup performance (hah! take that!), but hey, it makes sense. English writer, book written for the Brit market, what can you expect? I didn't particularly mind, those stories were good. There were lots of stories I didn't know (and I've no idea why they're not better known, they're so jaw-dropping), but as they became more recent, I loved that many concerned episodes I actually remember (the ones from Mexico '86 onwards, that is).

Strangely enough, I even loved the writing. I say "strangely" because Seddon is fond of tortured metaphors and painful puns, but the thing is, that made it feel just like listening to a football radio commentator, at least the ones in Uruguay. The tone felt perfectly appropriate to the subject matter, and only added to the charming feel of the book. And even if he did make me wince a couple of times, Seddon IS funny.

MY GRADE: A B+. It just hit the spot.


TITLE: Untouched
AUTHOR: Anna Campbell

Anna Cambpell's debut, Claiming the Courtesan wasn't to my taste, at least not as a romance. But I was very impressed by her writing, and when I saw what her latest was about, and realised that the hero sounded like the complete opposite of the spoiled-little-boy rapist "hero" of CTC, I decided to read it.

The hero of Untouched is Matthew Lansdowne, Marquess Sheene. Matthew had the misfortune of inheriting his title while very young and under the tutelage of his eeeeevil uncle. When Matthew contracted brain fever at 14, evil uncle took his chance and had him declared insane (while he was recovering from the fever, Matthew had some fits, which actually made him doubt his own sanity), in order to take control of his estates. So Matthew's been imprisoned and under the control of violent, sadistic guards ever since.

But Matthew has been getting a bit restless, and to minimise chances of an escape attempt, his uncle decides he should have a woman to keep him happy and pliant. He orders the guards to get him a prostitute, but the guards are not only violent and sadistic but dumb as rocks. Instead of a prostitute, they snatch Grace Paget, an impoverished widow who happened to be lost and wandering around a dangerous area of town. Still, a woman is a woman, and evil uncle decides Grace will do. She must seduce Matthew (who is much more aware than his uncle thinks, and refuses to be manipulated in such a way), or die.

Matthew is a sweetie, a true hero, doing the impossible to protect his lady even from a position of practically no power. As the book starts, he's at a stage where he's pretty much lost all hope of ever being free. He doesn't dare try to escape any more, not after the reprisals his uncle took when he last tried it. What's more, he's not even 100% sure that he's not insane. It's got to the point where he's seriously contemplating dying, as a way to wrest control away from his uncle. That all changes when Grace arrives and gives him a reason to keep fighting. So basically, great, great hero.

Unfortunately, Grace wasn't such an appealing character. She's of the brown cow variety Mrs. Giggles used to love to hate: in short, tedious, self-martyring and a total ninny. Yeah, yeah, poor woman, she lands in a horrible situation and she handles it as well as could be expected, I suppose, but her constant bleating irritated me. I would have liked a better heroine for someone like Matthew.

All in all, this wasn't as good as I was hoping for, or as good as it could have been. Most of the book was all right, but for such a dramatic, larger-than-life plot, there sure were some boring parts, especially around the middle. Also, just as in CTC, the villains were seriously over-the-top. No subtlety at all there, which just made them feel a bit cartoonish.

MY GRADE: I'm giving this extra points for a lovely hero, so a B-.

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Not Quite a Lady, by Loretta Chase

TITLE: Not Quite a Lady (excerpt)
AUTHOR: Loretta Chase

COPYRIGHT: 2007
PAGES: 384
PUBLISHER: Avon

SETTING: 1820s England
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: It's at the same time part of the Carsington series and the first in a series of novels about Fallen Women: see this great interview with the author at The Book Smugglers. As I said in the comments there, I love the idea of giving these women happy endings, rather than the horrid ones that they often received in the novels of the period.

REASON FOR READING: Autobuy author

IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

Darius Carsington is a spectacularly handsome rake with a rare intelligence and no heart, a man who divides his time between bedding loose-moraled women and writing scholarly papers. He finds society's “perfect darlings”....exceedingly boring. But there’s something intriguing, and not quite perfect, about faultless Lady Charlotte Hayward. He senses a crack under her polished surface, and finding it is a temptation he can’t resist.

IMMOVABLE OBJECT

Lady Charlotte is so beautiful, charming, and gracious that no one has noticed what an expert she is at Not Getting Married. Early on, she learned a painful lesson about trust....and temptation. In the years since, she’s devoted her life to all she ought to be--and she’s not about to let a man like Carsington entice her to do everything she shouldn’t.

A SPLENDID COLLISION

But the laws of attraction can easily overpower the rules of manners and morals, and sometimes even the best -behaved girl has to follow her instincts, even if it means risking it all.

MY THOUGHTS: I remember reading quite a few lukewarm comments about Not Quite a Lady when it came out, which was probably the reason why I didn't pick it up before this. Stupid me, I ended up loving it.

The fallen woman in this first entry in the series is Lady Charlotte Hayward, and though she's not fallen publicly, she very much feels the effects of being so, inside. Ten years earlier, when she was only 16, Charlotte was seduced and made pregnant and with her stepmother's help, gave birth in secret and gave away her son. Since then, she's been successfully manouvering out of getting married, despite her father's best efforts. Partly it's because her early betrayal has left her leery of men and love, but it's also because not being a virgin, she sees no good way of getting into a marriage that would work, other than lying through her teeth.

But her avoidance comes to an end when Darius Carsington arrives to take over the estate next door to her family's. Darius is there as a challenge by his father, who's bothered by his son's coldblooded behaviour with women. Scientific genius Darius behaves just as scientifically in his liaisons, going through experienced women without caring in the slightest about any of them, and refusing to ever come in contact with anyone elegible. So his father dares him to either take over the almost-ruined estate next door to the Haywards' and make it profitable in a year, or be cut off and have to marry a heiress.

At the beginning of the book, Darius' attitude outraged me just as much as it did the Earl of Hargate. He doesn't dislike women (he's not like those disgusting mysoginistic "heroes" who think all women are whores), but when it comes to sex, he's a mix of the worst parts of animal (in the way sex is purely about physical reactions and impulses, with no feelings involved) and control (in the coolness and calculation with which he chooses his partners). I experienced a twinge of doubt about this guy as a potential hero, but that disappeared the minute he met Charlotte.

It was incredibly satisfying to see him fall, and fall hard. He immediately starts experiencing these uncomfortable, unfamiliar feelings... tenderness, protectiveness, pleasure in just being with this strange woman, and he's got no idea whatsoever what to do with them. He's confused and out of his depth, and doing things he would have condemned as irrational not a day earlier. Charlotte is out of bounds, according to all his rules, and yet he can't seem to stay away.

As for Charlotte, Darius inspires behaviour that is just as uncharacteristic. She's spent the past 10 years repressing every urge, avoiding any kind of involvement, but this irritating man just makes her forget her determination to be all quiet and circumspect. It's a fabulously romantic and spicy and funny relationship, and I loved every minute.

Chase's writing deserves a mention. She's got a certain witty, wry tone, a way of describing things and often poking gentle fun at her own characters that is very much her own. She's one of the few romance authors with voices distinct enough that I'd be able to recognise one of her books immediately. And it's not just voice, her writing is just plain good, with lots of showing instead of telling, and a knack for creating subtle, well rounded secondary characters. In other hands, Charlotte's stepmother or the neighbour who's determined to marry Charlotte would end up being stock characters, but here they are be fresh and original and believable.

Now for what generated most doubts among readers: the resolution of Charlotte's old, scandalous secret. Yes, there are some instances of quite amazingly unlikely coincidence and yes, the solution they arrived at strained credibility a bit. But see, I wanted to believe it very badly, so it worked for me anyway. And there was some very powerful stuff there. When Charlotte confesses the truth to her father, his reaction brought tears to my eyes. An amazing, amazing scene, and so was the one soon thereafter (don't want to spoil things, but I mean what happens when Charlotte's father goes out of the house and meets a certain someone). Just wonderful.

MY GRADE: I was going with a B+, but thinking about the many things I loved about the book and just how much I loved them has made me change my mind. This deserves an A-.

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Reader and Raelynx, by Sharon Shinn

TITLE: Reader and Raelynx
AUTHOR: Sharon Shinn

COPYRIGHT: 2007
PAGES: 432
PUBLISHER: Ace

SETTING: Gillengaria
TYPE: Fantasy Romance
SERIES: 4th in the Twelve Houses series.

REASON FOR READING: I love Shinn's writing and this series has been fantastic.

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In this novel of secret sorceries and forbidden desires, the mystic Cammon must put aside his personal feelings for Princess Amalie while he reads the souls of her suitors for any potential threats. But Cammon is unable to read Amalie, and he begins to suspect that she herself possesses magic powers-a revelation which would put her life in danger, and throw the kingdom into chaos.

MY THOUGHTS: Even though there's going to be a 5th book in the Twelve Houses series, Reader and Raelynx is in every respect the book where all the overarching plot lines which had been developed in the first three books reach a climax.

The threat to the kingdom and mystics represented by Halchon Giseltess and his sister Coralinda has grown to the point where they're finally ready to openly challenge the crown. Meanwhile, King Baryn has decided it's time to contract a marriage for Princess Amalie, and Reader Cammon is entrusted with the task of helping vet the candidates (having someone who can know their innermost thoughts proves to be very useful!). But of course, two attractive young people spending a lot of time in close proximity can lead to feelings that could be potentially disastrous for the kingdom.

As in the rest of the series, although the outside plot is gripping and fascinating, what makes this book a joy to read are the characters. I've always had a soft spot for Cammon, liking the contrast between his sweet, trusting nature and the dark, scarily powerful potential of his mystic abilities. It was nice to see the unwanted, previously unloved child find romance in this book, but I was more interested in his relationship with the other five members of his makeshift family, the protagonists of the previous books, who play a huge role in this story as well (especially Senneth, who keeps stealing all the scenes she's in).

In fact, I did like the romance, but I'm afraid I didn't love it. For all that Cammon and Amalie's relationship isn't at all chaste, it still had a bit of a YA vibe to it. I can't really pin-point why, but it didn't feel completely grown up. Plus, I was a bit annoyed by Amalie, maybe because in this book she seems very inconsiderate and insensitive about the consequences of her actions, of her getting what she wants, on Cammon. She's getting him in trouble with everyone -with the courtiers, with Queen Valri, even with his own friends- by singling him out so obviously and insisting on a closeness she knows will make him face a lot of disapproval, but she doesn't seem to particularly care.

And then there was also the issue that the conflict created by the forbidden nature of their relationship kind of fizzled out. This is the forbidden romance to end all forbidden romances, but this element ends up being totally overpowered by the momentous nature of the events going on. It makes sense, really. If everything's in danger and no one knows if they'll be able to survive, having the Princess be a bit too close to a low-born nobody is not the biggest worry in anyone's mind!

The outside plot about the final, all-out confrontation between the royal forces and the hateful rebels was fantastic. Shinn succeeded in making me feel the high stakes they were fighting for, and therefore care very much about the outcome. I especially liked the final battle scenes. They reminded me a bit of those in Valley of Silence, in that they were very, very well done, with a sense of enormity that reflected the huge consequences they would have, and yet with enough human detail to make sure we readers didn't feel distant.

MY GRADE: A B+.

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A Presumption of Death, by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers

TITLE: A Presumption of Death
AUTHOR: Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers

COPYRIGHT: 2002
PAGES: 378
PUBLISHER: Hodder & Stoughton in the UK

SETTING: England, early days of 2nd World War
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: A Presumption of Death is Jill Paton Walsh's continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series. Unlike Thrones, Dominations, which had already been partly written by Sayers and which Paton Walsh completed, APOD was wholly written by the latter, basing herself on The Wimsey Papers (a collection of letters between members of the Wimsey family published in newspapers during the war).

REASON FOR READING: I can't get enough of Lord Peter and Harriet.

While Lord Peter is abroad on a secret mission, Harriet Vane, now Lady Peter Wimsey, takes their children to safety in the country. But there's no escape from war: rumors of spies abound, glamorous RAF pilots and flirtatious land-girls scandalize the villagers, and the blackout makes rural lanes as sinister as London's alleys. And when a practice air-raid ends with a young woman's death, it's almost a shock to hear that the cause is not enemy action, but murder. Or is it? With Peter away, Harriet sets out to find out whodunit...and the chilling reason why.

MY THOUGHTS: When reading this book and evaluating my enjoyment of it, the first thing I considered was how well it succeeded at being about my old friends Peter and Harriet. Unfortunately the answer was "not very". I didn't really recognise the P & H here as the P & H from Sayers novels. Paton Walsh tried, including by having Harriet reminisce often about events in the previous novels, but it felt a bit awkward... a kind of "hey, hey, I'm that Harriet!" kind of thing that shouldn't have been necessary.

So I decided early on that I'd be better off just reading it as a wartime murder mystery starring characters who were quite nice and interesting and whom I'd never met before. As such, it was all right. The basic plot is that during an air raid drill a young woman is murdered on the streets of the village. The police are busy with other stuff, so the detective in charge needs help. Since her famous detective husband is away, he asks Harriet. Strains credibility, but all right. And thus starts an investigation which will take off in some unexpected directions.

The mystery itself wasn't particularly good. The basic plot about the young woman's death was quite obvious, and Paton Walsh laid the clues rather thickly and unsubtly. I challenged myself by writing down what I thought had happened pretty early in the book, and it turned out to be the exact solution. But then there is another death, and that one has the opposite problem. The solution is one that would be impossible to guess by a reader.

What's best about the book is the setting, in a small English village during the early years of World War II. It's a setting that's written with a great deal of ex-post clarity about the significance of the events going on (all the world events that the characters find their attention caught by are events that turn out to be significant if the grand scheme of things, which is often not the case in real life), but it was very enjoyable to read. It added a lot of poignancy to the story, as well as some humorous moments.

MY GRADE: I'll go with a B-. Not great, but worth reading.

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Krugman on e-books

I <3 Paul Krugman and have been reading his columns in the NY Times for years. Today's is on e-books:

Now, e-books have been the coming, but somehow not yet arrived, thing for a very long time. (There’s an old Brazilian joke: “Brazil is the country of the future — and always will be.” E-books have been like that.) But we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink.

That’s certainly my impression after a couple of months’ experience with the device feeding the buzz, the Amazon Kindle.

Read the whole thing here (registration required, I think).

He doesn't really say anything we haven't talked about extensively, but I'm finding it interesting that he considered the issue relevant enough for a column.

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2007's been over for five months

Shocking, but it has, and I still have some books I read in that year that I have posted nothing about. The problem with these has been that they're great books, so I wanted to do better by them than a quick summary post. Yeah, yeah, I had the best intentions, but I really should be realistic here. I'll forget all about them before long, and until October / November if I'm lucky, I'm not going to get much more free time. So here we go, I wish I could have written long, in-depth posts about each of these, but c'est la vie!

TITLE: The Serpent Prince (excerpt)
AUTHOR: Elizabeth Hoyt

Oh, my, how I adored this book. By far the best Hoyt has written yet, and keep in mind that I loved the first two.

Lucy Craddock-Hayes is a young woman living in a sleepy village where nothing much happens. But that all changes when she finds a naked man half-dead in a ditch as she's walking home. With much doubt, Lucy drags him home with her.

The naked man is actually a viscount, Simon Iddesleigh, and his near-death experience was the result of his determination to avenge the death of his brother. This is something that has been all-consuming for him lately, but as he gets to know Lucy and they fall in love, he will need to decide what's most important to him.

Simon and Lucy were just amazing together. This was one of those rare books where you can actually feel the love between the main characters and understand why they're willing to go to whatever lengths for each other. I liked that though it was acknowledged quite early that they were in love, this didn't mean that there was no conflict any more. On the contrary, the conflict stemming from Simon need for revenge and his need for Lucy's love was an excellent, wrenching one.

Another outstanding thing about TSP was its tone. This is a book filled with humour, humour of the witty, intelligent and often bawdy kind, but this doesn't make it light. It doesn't diminish the angst factor in the least, and even makes us feel it all the more.

MY GRADE: An A-, beautiful.

NOTE: Follows The Raven Prince and The Leopard Prince, but can be read on its own without any trouble.


TITLE: Fairyville
AUTHOR: Emma Holly

As always, Holly takes the kind of story that would ordinarily have this reader who usually prefers vanilla running hard in the opposite direction, and makes it immensely enjoyable. Medium Zoe Clare has been lusting after her landlord, Magnus, for years, but Magnus seems ready to have sex with every woman in town but her. What she doesn't know is that Magnus is an escapee from the world of the fae. Magnus actually is crazy about Zoe, but all the catting around is just what is required for him to be allowed to stay in the human world.

Not knowing this, though, Zoe has all but given up on Magnus, and when her first lover, Alex, comes back to town with his new boyfriend, Bryan, she's ready to enjoy herself with them. But Alex's return will brings some surprising revelations about all of them and their relationships.

Fairyville perfectly showcases what makes Holly's erotic romance so amazing. I love the way sex is always a wonderful, joyful thing in her books, not something ugly, or something that should bring guilt. There's all kinds of explorations and combinations here, and all feel healthy and beautiful and the right thing for these particular people to be doing. The romances are perfectly believable and I loved the paranormal element, which felt fresh and new.

MY GRADE: A B+.


TITLE: A Chance Encounter
AUTHOR: Mary Balogh

This is one of Balogh's very old, very hard to find Trad Regencies. It features Elizabeth Rossiter, a young governess living a quiet life in the countryside, whose tranquillity is shattered when the new owner of the nearby big house decides to settle there. Oh, the new owner himself is a nice guy, who's very kind and attentive to Elizabeth, but his guest, Robert, the Marquess of Hetherington, is someone out of Elizabeth's past. We don't know what the story is there, but it's clear he bitterly resents her and is determined to make her pay for whatever it was she did.

I'm very glad I read it, because it's vintage Balogh: an intense, emotional story, with both protagonists clearly drawn to each other in spite of their wishes. As I said, the reader doesn't know for a long while what exactly happened between those two, and this works wonderfully. Balogh reveals the details slowly, and when the big revelation came, while it was not exactly a shock, it was definitely not what I was expecting.

MY GRADE: A B+.


TITLE: Count to Ten
AUTHOR: Karen Rose

Count to Ten has Det. Mia Mitchell (who Rose fans will recognise from previous books) teaming up with Reed Solliday, a Lieutenant from the Chicago Fire Department to investigate a series of arson/murders. Mia and Reed's partnership is difficult from day one, as she's still conflicted about the case which landed her partner, Abe Reagan (also well known to old-time readers of this author) in hospital. As the case becomes more complicated and the body count rockets up, they're going to have to work together to solve it before Mia becomes endangered herself.

Karen Rose has quickly become one of my favourite romantic suspense writers. She can do what very few rom. susp. authors can, and make both the romance and the suspense strong, interesting and convincing. Mia and Reed were fully realised characters, with their distinct issues and personalities, and the development of their romance was believable in spite of having to happen in the middle of an intense investigation.

As for the investigation itself, that was just fascinating. The crimes were a teeny bit too graphic for my taste (I actually found them more difficult to read than those in Die For Me, and that book had Inquisition-style torture in it!), but the investigation of them and the way the police had to piece together the whys and hows behind it all were amazing.

MY GRADE: A B+.


TITLE: The Curse of Chalion
AUTHOR: Lois McMaster Bujold

After spending years as a war prisoner, Cazaril manages to escape and go back home to Chalion, where he's hired as tutor to Iselle, sister of the heir to the throne. But it soon becomes clear that his duties won't be easy, as the throne is in danger and it ends up falling to him to save it. Lifting a powerful old curse on the royal family, making sure Iselle isn't forced into a disastrous marriage to the heir of the power-hungry family that has an unhealthy influence on the current ruler... the unprepossessing Cazaril manages the impossible.

I suppose Bujold is best known for her SF, but I love how she does fantasy as well. The Sharing Knife series is fantastic, and so is this one. Chalion is a rich, complex world, one with a well-developed history and traditions (did anyone else get a Medieval Spanish vibe from it?), and the best thought-out religion I've ever seen in fiction. It's a religion that plays an important role in the story, shaping the plot and the characters.

And the characters and story told against this backdrop are just as amazing. Cazaril is a classic LMB hero, with that kind of non-showy heroism I find so attractive. I wasn't completely won over by the romance (I didn't really feel the chemistry with the woman he ends up with, and she seemed much too young for him), but I was completely in love with him.

MY GRADE: An A-.


TITLE: Paladin of Souls
AUTHOR: Lois McMaster Bujold

Paladin of Souls is the second book in the Chalion series, and is about Ista, the Dowager Royina, Iselle's mother. Long tormented by the gods and the curse on the royal family and thought to be mad, the lifting of the curse has given her some respite. However, she still finds her life in the fortress of Valenda oppressive, so she decides to go on a pilgrimage, not so much for religious reasons as to take a break from court life. While on it, a surprise attack on her party by a retreating party of raiders brings her to Porifors, the castle belonging to the dy Lutez family, one with which she shares a great deal of history. It turns out that it might not have been chance that brought her there, but further meddling from those troublesome gods. Because the dy Lutez family seems to have its own problems, involving the current governor, his wife and his brother, whose comatose state is not as straightforward as it seems.

While as rich and real as TCOC, and narrating events which are just as significant, POS has a quieter feel to it. It's not slow or at all boring, just... more leisurely, I'd say. As always, LMB's characters come alive and carry the plot. I wasn't really expecting much from Ista, but she turned out to be an amazing character. I loved the way she comes into her own during the story, becoming a very effective heroine and saving the day with her common sense and intelligence and willingness to see beyond the obvious and discover exactly what is going on with these people. There's a very lovely romance here as well, one that is as surprising as the situation in Porifors, and I liked it a bit better than the one in the first book.

MY GRADE: A B+.


TITLE: The Betrothal Ball (in Love's Legacy anthology)
AUTHOR: Mary Balogh

The next few are Christmas stories from Regency anthologies, all of which I read at Ana's, in Portugal, on the days coming up to Christmas.

With the first one, you can see why I decided to write this post now and get it over with. All I can remember about this book is what I noted down at the time. I wrote down the names of the characters: Laura Melford and Bram, Earl of Dearborne, that I'd rate this a B, and that I'd thought it was a bit too short at a mere 43 pages, but that Balogh did make it work. Period. I have absolutely no recollection of what it's about. *sigh* Anyone care to remind me of some details?

MY GRADE: A B, then.

NOTE: The reason why it's so short is that there are so many stories, 11 of them. This was a charity project of Leisure's, with the proceeds going to a literacy foundation.


TITLE: The Porcelain Madonna (in A Regency Christmas anthology)
AUTHOR: Mary Balogh

Now, this one I remember perfectly. I suppose it made much more of an impression, and no wonder, because it was a wonderful, heartwarming story. It's narrated solely from the point of view of Darcy Austin, Earl of Kevern, for whom Christmas isn't a joyful season but a reminder of his bereavement. He meets Julie Bevan when saving her from getting her pocket picked as she yearns for a porcelain madonna in a shop window, and after that, his cynism can't resist the onslaught of true Christmas feeling.

What made this story work was the hero's inner reactions to the perfect, sweet Christmas story happening around him. You see, he doesn't believe all that stuff for a second. On seeing Julie, he thinks that of course, she'll be the sweet and deserving impoverished gentlewoman, who wants the porcelain madonna for completely unselfish reason. And of course, he tells himself, the pickpocket will tell a hard-luck story about many brothers and sisters going hungry because he's either an orphan or his father has lost his job. And of course, she is and he does, so he's not surprised. But he's not as cynical as he thinks he is, and he clearly wants to believe it all. And sometimes, people are as good as a cynical person refuses to believe they can be.

Funny, sweet and lovely without being schmaltzy, this was the perfect Christmas story.

MY GRADE: An A-.


TITLE: The Best Christmas Ever (in A Regency Christmas III anthology)
AUTHOR: Mary Balogh

This one was a bit schmaltzy, but it still worked. Edwin Gwent's daughter, Anna, has been mute since the traumatic death of her mother. Visiting her grandparents at Christmas, she makes a secret wish for a new mother, and focuses her attention on Emma Milford. Emma and Edwin share a past, as he proposed to her years before and she rejected him, having decided to spend her life taking care of her parents. He still resents her for it, but at the same time, the attraction is still there.

Balogh is great at showing characters who tell themselves they should despise the other person and fail at it completely. Edwin is one such character, and I loved seeing him and Emma get a second chance at love. Emma's determination to martyr herself was a bit more problematic, but she's a very different person than she was all those years before, so I was able to enjoy the story anyway.

MY GRADE: A B.


TITLE: A Handful of Gold (in Christmas Keepsakes anthology)
AUTHOR: Mary Balogh

Vicar's daughter Verity Ewing has become the sole support of her family after her father's death, and has had to resort to being a dancer to get funds. While performing as Blanche Heyward, she meets nobleman Julian Dare, who decides to make her his mistress. He invites her to spend Christmas with him and friends at a hunting lodge, in exchange for the "handful of gold" of the title, and she decides to take what she has decided is the unavoidable plunge and accept. But of course, once at the lodge, Julian realises that "Blanche" is not what he expected.

I liked most of this story, but I wasn't crazy about the device Balogh used to show Julian and his friends the error of their ways: the arrival of a clergyman and his family, stranded in the storm. I thought Julian and Verity's relationship was proceeding in a perfectly satisfactory manner even before that, and the other people were quite happy as they were. But eh, well, it was nice anyway. And I loved the ending!

MY GRADE: A B.


TITLE: The Three Kings (in A Regency Christmas II anthology)
AUTHOR: Carla Kelly

Lady Sarah Comstock finds herself stranded in Spain during the Peninsular war, and needs to get to safety in Portugal, with some important papers. Spanish Colonel Luis Sotomayor agrees to escort her there. But the French troops are right behind them, and their journey is even more dangerous than they'd thought it would be.

This is probably not your typical Christmas story, as the tone is quite grim and somber, but I still liked it. I liked how it shows that even in the middle of the horrors of war, there can still be love and good feeling and people caring for one another. I wish we'd seen a bit more of Luis' point of view, as her male characters' inner monologues are one of my favourite things about CK's stories, but it was all good anyway. I especially liked the glimpse of a ceremony that's very similar to the "posada" I went to with my Mexican friends this Christmas. We've lost that tradition in Uruguay.

MY GRADE: A B+.


TITLE: The Undomestic Goddess
AUTHOR: Sophie Kinsella

Samantha Sweeting has the ultimate high-powered, high-stress career. She's been working herself to death at a London law firm since she got out of university, and her effort seems to be paying off. She's set to become the youngest partner ever, and if this is turning her into a dried-out husk who has no life outside of work, she tells herself she doesn't care. Until she makes a horrific, career-destroying mistake, and sees no choice but to run. Taking the first train out of London, she ends up in the middle of nowhere, knocking at the door of a big house to ask for a phone. And in a very Kinsella-esque turn of events, a case of mistaken identity ends up with her hired as the new housekeeper. Sam is completely clueless about anything to do with housework or cooking, but with the help of the hunky gardener, she gets her act together and realises she's enjoying herself much more than she was in her old life.

I enjoyed reading this, but in a way, it was a bit of a guilty pleasure. My feminist sensibilities had a lot of trouble with some things. Should this be read as saying that a woman can't stand the pressure of a high-powered job, that she's just better off keeping house? Or is this just about one particular woman for whom one choice is better than the other? I just closed my eyes tight and decided it was the latter. And having decided there wasn't a "message" in the book, I had no objection to Sam's decision that she was better off not pursuing that particular career. It was something I very much sympathised with, as someone who chose to give up a stressful, awful, demanding job that paid very well for one that was more satisfying, even though the money wasn't that good. It makes perfect sense to me to consider the effects on your whole life when deciding whether a a job is the right one for you.

However... here's the thing: what left a bad taste in my mouth was that Sam's choices were presented as so limited. It was all right throughout most of the book: she just happened to end up at this place and her job as a housekeeper was a bit of a refuge and an opportunity to heal. But the ending was the problem. While having Samantha have to choose between being a Carter Spinks partner and cleaning loos made a big effect, it was a completely false dichotomy. She could choose between being a Carter Spinks parner, cleaning loos, OR whatever else she wanted to do. With her reputation back and as high as ever, she could probably even get a job as a lawyer with whatever firm she wanted, maybe one with a much more relaxed attitude, or hey, maybe work as a lawyer in the countryside, advising people like Mr. Geiger. So the book ended in a bit of a low note, unfortunately.

MY GRADE: A B.

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This past month...

... I've been spending all my days here:




doing this:




But now exams are all done, and the computer can come on, so I hope to resume posting soon. I just hope there's still people coming here to visit... this past year's blogging has been a bit erratic, to say the least!

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Another quick round-up

A few books I don't have all that much to say about (though when I start writing, it will probably turn out to be looooong. I'm inconsistent and wordy like that):

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TITLE: The Fourth Bear
AUTHOR: Jasper Fforde

I'm probably the one person on this world that prefered The Big Over Easy over the Thursday Next books, even over my favourite, The Well of Lost Plots. The Fourth Bear is the sequel to TBOE, and it's just the same mix of intrincately intertwining storylines, each as insane (and clever and funny) as the others, but all peopled with characters with hearts.

The plot? Too much going on to list, but the basics are that even after the heroics of TBOE, Jack is still in bad standing at the Nursery Crime division. The Gingerbreadman ("—sadist, psychopath, cookie—", as described in my book flap) has escaped and is on the rampage. But Jack, the man who originally caught him, isn't allowed to go after him. Instead, he's to investigate the disappearance of Henrietta "Goldilocks" Hatchett, who vanished after visiting the isolated residence of three bears. Add (among many, many others) some competitive cucumber growing, porridge quotas, Punch and Judy as marriage counselors and Jack's not-so-surprising identity struggles, and you've got a fantastically funny, smart and entertaining book.

Like with the first book, which makes this all work so well is that our characters (main characters, at least), react to all this absurdity as real people would, and Fforde makes you care for them.

Wonderful series, I never would have imagined police procedurals and nursery rhymes could mix so well!

MY GRADE: A B+.

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TITLE: Superstition
AUTHOR: Karen Robards

Superstition had a very interesting set-up. The heroine, Nicole, is a reporter working for a news magazine. Her latest hoping-for-a-breakout project is to conduct a live séance at a house in her hometown which was the site of a bloody murder 15 years earlier. The séance is to be done by her mother, who Nicole knows is a genuine psychic. The séance is not quite a flop but inconclusive. But then, right afterwards and only metres from the house, Nicole stumbles upon another victim, killed with the same MO as that of the earlier murders. The hero, former big-town-cop with big issues Joe Franconi investigates.

And that was about as far as I got. I would have loved to know what was going on, but Oh. My. God. This was SLOOOOOOOOW. I'm not exactly surprised, because I had the very same problem with the last Robards I read (Whispers At Midnight), but it seems to have got worse, because while with some effort I could get through WAM, I couldn't manage to get past the halfway point of this one. Robards takes pages and pages and pages to narrate things that are not that complicated, and I kept getting the urge to put the book down.

It also didn't help that I was seriously unimpressed with Joe's investigative abilities, as well as with his inexplicable willingness to divulge confidential details of the case to Nicole... a journalist, for heaven's sake! Eh, in fact, pretty much everyone seemed to be purposely dumb and to behave in unreasonable ways.

I liked the basics of the plot and enjoyed the Southern Gothic atmosphere, but my time is short and my supply of good books is long.

MY GRADE: DNF.

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TITLE: A Christmas Journey
AUTHOR: Anne Perry

This Christmas short story tackles the themes of redemption and expiation, but I didn't find it as powerful and insightful as I hoped I would.

At the beginning of the story, Isobel Alvie makes a needlessly cruel comment about Gwendoline Kilmuir, a fellow guest at the house party they're attending. Gwendoline kills herself later that night, and every other guest blames Isobel for it. The host, a kindly man, proposes an alternative to the almost certain ostracism that Isobel will suffer if (or rather, when) the story about what she said comes out. He proposes that Isobel undertake a kind of pilgrimage to expiate her sins. She's to travel to Scotland to break the news to the mother of the dead woman, deliver her daughter's last letter and explain her (Isobel's) role in the tragedy. If she does that, the rest of the guests promise to keep quiet.

The story is narrated by Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, a friend of Isobel who ends up accompanying her in the harrowing journey. Perry veterans will recognise her as the formidable old lady in the Thomas Pitt series. Well, this story takes place years before that, when Vespasia is a young wife and a recognised beauty. I've always found this character very interesting and looked forward to getting some insight into her. Unfortunately, while we do get some interesting reflections on her life and her general sense of dissatisfaction and ennui, it was more of a teaser than anything else, and ended up being too little.

So that was a bit of a wash. How about Isobel's pilgrimage to expiate her sins? I thought that was a fascinating concept, but then it becomes a bit diluted when the whole thing turns into a mystery (well, Perry is a mystery author, after all) and it becomes clear that there might be a lot more behind Gwendoline's decision after all. So in the end, it's not so much about expiation and redemption, because does the woman actually need to expiate anything? The thing just lost much of its power with this.

MY GRADE: Disappointing, but not awful. A C+.

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TITLE: Taken By The Viking
AUTHOR: Michelle Styles

Another one I couldn't finish (and no, I really do finish most of what I read, it's just that these round-ups are the perfect place for DNFs).

I was very intrigued by the setup and the opening scenes, especially because I'd just been to Dublinia, an exhibition in (duh!) Dublin about the history of the city, and there was a whole fascinating section about the vikings. Among other things, there were explanations about how and why raids like the famous one on the monastery of Lindisfarne in the 8th century might have happened, so it was interesting to see Ms. Styles take on that. The hero, Haakon, and his party don't come there to raid, just to make use of the historically accurate "banking" services offered by the monks, and a tragic instance of miscommunication results in the bloody raid. However, I was a bit ambivalent about how heroine Annis ends up as a captive, in a way that makes her come off as a twit but at least keeps Haakon from being a honourless, ungrateful bastard. But ok, I was enjoying myself.

But once the action reached Norway, my enjoyment went way down and then disappeared. I loved the setting and the vivid sense of place Styles was able to create, with many details about what everyday life at a settlement might be like, but the characters and the plot... blergh. I'm might not be being totally fair to Ms. Styles, because my main problem was probably not so much to do with the book itself, but with how the action brought me back to the kind of old-school bodice-ripperish captive narratives I used to detest so much when I first started reading romance.

The well-born heroine being forced to be a servant at the hero's household and to do backbreaking/unpleasant tasks that put her in physical discomfort, the mistress of the house who makes her life hell, with the help of another of the servants, a total slut who envies our heroine for being so beautiful and so obviously NOT a servant and for having caught the master's eye, etc., etc. And when we got to the scene where she's being molested by some of the men of the household and the hero, on having to rescue her, accuses her of provoking them and being a tease, I gave up. It might have got much better soon thereafter, but I was out of patience.

Like I say, I'm possibly being unfair to the book, so if you don't have my extreme allergy this kind of plot points, you might like it much better.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

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