Archive for August, 2009

The Monday Morning Stepback

I had so much fun writing my “this n that” post last week, that I’ve decided to make it a regular feature. I’m going to post random observations and opinions, links to posts of interest, and whatever the hell else I want, just like you guys do.

(If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that announcing I will do something on this blog is a sure bet I never will. Adjust your expectations accordingly.)

Here goes:

0. Tumperkin has an amazing post up about Outsider Heroines, and why she likes em.

1. I appreciate the effforts that go into them, but I don’t enjoy the AuthorTalk videos at all. I can see getting a huge kick out of them if you are friends with the people in them. But I find them painful to watch. Are they supposed to be promotions of some kind? I don’t get it. And no, I’m not going to watch any more. Do you enjoy these videos?

2. Fighting ebook piracy. Karen Scott posted about this recently, and she has the right idea with reporting the pirates to Paypal, etc. My experience teaching college students a unit on ethics and digital piracy is that most of them do not consider it wrong. So you have to find other ways of fighting it besides moral education and public shaming. Only force and threat will work.

3. I get a little sad when I find that different people in Romanceland whom I like don’t like each other. First of all, it makes it hard to be a minion, my life’s goal. Second, I don’t know why or how these feuds were generated, but they are the source of so many threads going off track due to ad hominem arguments. Do you have to be a philosopher to realize that even an evil person can make a logical argument? You know how we say reviewers should focus on the book and not the authors? I wish folks would take a little more of their own advice when it came to Romancelandia.

4. How do you choose the blogs you visit? There are so many excellent blogs that I don’t regularly visit. I was forcefully reminded of this by my recent visit to Heidenkind’s Hideaway. There’s also Rip My Bodice, which is great, but I don’t visit it much. Same for TBTBTU. Why? I now realize there is no rational basis, or if there is, it’s tempered by laziness, and routine. What blogs have you really been enjoying lately?

5. My semester starts today. I teach bioethics and ethics this morning. I absolutely love this time of year. It’s fall in New England, all the hopes of a new year sprung anew. I always feel a little nervous my first day back in the classroom, but I am so grateful that I get to do this for a living. I can’t wait to meet my new students!

6. Some of you might remember an English Shepherd pup we adopted last December. Well,  he was so good at destroying our home and making us crazy, that we just adopted another one. It’s his brother (different litters, same parents). Here’s a pic, and Happy Week everyone!

Wellington and Kitchener (ok, Wellie and Kitchy)

Wellington and Kitchener (ok, Wellie and Kitchy)

I Finally Read a Stephanie Meyer. Thoughts on New Moon.

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Stay away from this post if you like this series, if you dislike snark, or if you don’t want to be spoiled about this book. You’ve been warned.

Somehow, despite my love of both vampires and romance, I was immune to the pull of the Twilight saga. But when I gave a paper on the Sookie Stackhouse series at my university in April, I noticed many of the attendees were women whose teenaged daughters had read the Twilight books. I got into a long conversation with an English professor whose 13 year old daughter devoured them, and she told me I just had to give them a try, not because she liked them, but because she wanted to know what I thought. Then I gave the Sookie paper at the Pop Culture Association conference in New Orleans, and I was shocked at the number of Twilight papers. Like my English professor colleague, many of the presenters distanced their own aesthetic taste from the text, some to the point of mocking it — they wanted to make it really clear that they had a merely academic interest; they were not fans. In my neighborhood, the books have been making the rounds of moms. They are usually in their 30s or 40s, white, heterosexual, middle class, and can’t blame it on their kids, who are too young for these books. They say, sheepishly, mystified, laughing at themselves, “I don’t know what it is. I just could not put them down.” This group’s taste generally runs to “book club fiction”, certainly not YA , romance, or paranormal. That was it. I decided I had to experience some of this phenomenon for myself.

I watched the movie Twilight this summer with my 15 year old niece and her 44 year old mother, when I got to see the mom/teen girl bonding over Twilight in action. They had read all the books, as well as some internet-leaked version of events from Edward’s POV, and their delight was catching. I enjoyed the movie, which harked back to the earnestness of movies of my teenage years, like The Lost Boys, Reckless (Aidan Quinn’s first movie), Footloose, Sixteen Candles. What Twilight has in common with those movies is that it takes the drama and pathos of the teen experience seriously. It’s not distanced or ironic. I also liked the Forks setting.

When I had a long car ride the other day, I decided to get the audio book of New Moon, to really experience Meyer’s writing for myself. After about three hours of Bella, I wanted to … well, have you ever seen that bit in Annie Hall, when Christopher Walken tells Woody Allen about his urges while driving? Specifically, the urge to turn the wheel into the oncoming headlights of another car? Then you have some idea of how I felt listening to Bella think about Edward ad nauseum. At first I thought, well, she’s young, her boyfriend is her whole world, weren’t we all like this once? Eventually, I had to pull over and breathe into a paper bag. That was enough of New Moon on audio for me.

Still, the story had sucked me in. I wanted to know what would happen. So I Kindled the book when I got home and finished it this weekend. Here are some random thoughts:

There is an appeal, I get it, kind of. The story is interesting, although the pace careened wildly, and the return of the Cullens felt tacked on rather than resolutionary (I made up that word). The writing I found adequate to piss poor. Here’s an example, the last line in the book, of the latter: “I squared my shoulders and walked forward to meet my fate, with my destiny solidly at my side.” Anyone with even a working knowledge of the English language should know that line makes no sense. I felt about 1/3 of this incredibly repetitive book could have been excised, with much better results. Rarely have I had the urge to throw my Kindle across the room, but at the 1000th mention of “the huge hole that had been punched through Bella’s chest” at losing Edward, suddenly $350 didn’t seem like too high a price to pay to make it stop. Wasn’t there any other non torso-related way Meyer could think of to communicate Bella’s distress?

Bella. Sigh. I totally understand why so many women have been a tad concerned at the way their daughters have embraced this character, although maybe they don’t. There are no “Team Bella” t-shirts, perhaps because it would be like embracing carbon monoxide, colorless, odorless, tasteless and highly toxic. To call her a “heroine” is an insult to the word. There is nothing to Bella besides her love for her boyfriend. I was prepared for teenage obsession — it exists, I get it (John Cusack with the boom box, anyone?). But Bella never thinks about anyone or anything else, ever. She’s either thinking about Edward or thinking about trying not to think about Edward. We don’t even get relief when she falls asleep, because she dreams about Edward every night (too bad she didn’t have access to propofol like Michael Jackson did. General anesthesia would have helped provide relief to both her and her poor readers.). It’s a kind of obsession I couldn’t believe until I read it. But unlike other literary protagonists with similar obsessions, Bella’s love for Edward is superficial and one note, and thus a very hard thing to hang such a long book on. It’s the hearts and puppies kind of love. “Love you forever. Ditto.” is all the complexity and nuance you get here.

She’s melodramatic, narcissistic, not very bright, and wholly dull. After chapter after chapter of Bella as a nearly catatonic empty shell, I kept fervently wishing her quasi-suicidal outings would actually succeed. But no, Bella is too witless to even get herself killed.

And what makes Edward such a catch? It’s never clear, because we see him through Bella’s unimaginative eyes (New Moon is written in the first person). We know he is “beautiful” and “perfect”, with a hard cold body, and that he’s in love with Bella. What does he do in his spare time, or does he even have any, considering what a time suck serving as the glue of Bella’s fragile identity must be? It’s like a perfect circle of narcissism.

I also thought this teen world was unbelievably, jarringly, clean. Bella actually chastises Jake for using profanity, and Edward actually chastises Bella for ordering a Coke. There’s no sex, no alcohol, no drugs — not even the occasional joint. Forks is definitely not like any American town I know of. Does this have something to do with Meyer’s religious beliefs? I am out of the loop, but recall hearing that at PCA.

I probably enjoyed Jacob the most — this character actually has an arc, unlike Bella and Edward who are mindnumbingly unchanged from page one to page last  –  but I wouldn’t root for Bella and Jacob, because I liked him too much. I was interested in the whole wolf storyline in general. I would love to read a romance based around Sam and Emily’s relationship, actually. In paranormal, we so often have the fear of the supernatural hero accidentally hurting the human heroine, but he never actually does. How would it go if he disfigured her face (or reverse the roles, and she did it to him?). Now that’s a story I’d love to read.

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Review: The Sharing Knife, Volume 1, Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold

imageDBIn which I get to use the word “vitalist” and call another reviewer an ass!

This was my first book by renowned sci fi/fantasy author Bujold. Beguilement, published in 2006, is the first of the four volumes of the Sharing Knife series. I listened to this one on audio, and I highly recommend that format for anyone so inclined. I think romantic fantasy works really well on audio, and the female narrator was very good.

Fawn Bluefield is a young farm girl in the magical world Bujold has created, fantasy North American lake country, whose technology and economy are preindustrial. Fawn is unwed, and pregnant, heading to the city of Glassforge to escape the condemnation of her family and create a new life with her child. Fawn is so tiny she is mistaken for a child, and she’s very young — barely 18, with a naivete appropriate to her youth and rural farm existence. Fawn is captured on the road by mud-men, truly horrifying amalgams of men and beasts, and rescued by Dag, a middle aged Lakewalker with one hand. Lakewalkers are magical people (in this vitalist tale, Lakewalkers influence and sense the “ground” of living things — kind of like the Force for Star Wars fan) who patrol the area for Malices, creatures who hatch and feed on the grounds of living things, getting stronger with each kill. Malices create Mud Men out of animals, which they control as through one mind. Lakewalkers are able to kill Malices using Sharing Knives, knives made of the bones of Lakewalkers and primed with a mortal blow by a Lakewalker death (containing a Lakewalker death, they force Malices to remember how to die). There are hints that this world is post-apocalyptic, but it was never clear to me what life was like before magic got out of control.

SPOILER FOLLOWS

SPOILER AHEAD

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Fawn and Dag manage to kill the Malice, but Fawn’s unborn child is sacrificed in the process. When its ground goes into one of Dag’s knives, something Dag has never seen before, he decides they need to travel to Glassforge together to see his clan leader and get advice. Later, he takes her back to her farm.

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END SPOILER

IT;s SAFE NOW, REALLY!!

All of the fantasy adventure is replaced about 1/3 of the way in with worldbuilding around a love story. Dag and Fawn are years apart in age and experience, not to mention height (shades of Lisa Kleypas, for sure), and, what’s more, as a farmer and a Lakewalker, their relationship has a built in barrier. Farmers tend to be suspicious of Lakewalker magic, unaware of the extent to which it protects them (they refer to malices as “blight bogles”, but think of them more as imaginary creatures than the real threats they are) while Lakewalkers, who are a tent-dwelling cross between hunter-gatherers and pastoral people, tend to be dismissive of the craft and skill farmers possess.

I would call this a domestic fantasy, as the elements of the world Bujold has created are revealed more in conversation and in doing every day tasks than in heroic battles. Although Fawn and Dag do a lot of explaining to each other, it never feels like an info dump, perhaps because the rituals, beliefs, histories and practices of farmers and Lakewalkers are so interesting, or because the characters are so likable. (If I have a quibble, it’s how hard it was to understand how ignorant these two groups could be of one another while basically living on top of each other.)

Dag is world weary, referring frequently to himself as an “old patroller”, who has lost not only his hand, but his family, in the ongoing battles with the Malices. For readers looking for a middle aged hero who is complex and deeply romantic, Dag is your man. He’s often physically underestimated by his foes (thanks in part to his disability), and very intelligent in a Columbo kind of way.  He’s even tempered to a fault — and Fawn, being his perfect match, realizes quickly that there are a lot of strong emotions roiling beneath that calm exterior.

For her part, Fawn is spirited, emotional, and has a strong sense of right without being righteous. As a farmer, it’s very important to her to be productive, and she has to find unique ways to do that on the road with Dag. She’s more idealistic and hopeful than Dag, but she grows in the course of the book, too, becoming more thoughtful and more aware of the large forces that have shaped her life. She has been put down for most of her life by the people around her, and she needs Dag’s admiration and respect to see her own strengths and potential.

The romance between Dag and Fawn is absolutely beautiful, and if I were redoing my list of Top 9 Most Romantic Love scenes in Romance, I might just have to add the first sexual encounter between them.  I was frankly stunned when the true extent of their age difference was revealed in the second half of the book, but it totally worked for me.

It’s very interesting to me, in reading reviews of Beguilement on fantasy and sci fi websites, how dismissive they are of the fantasy elements in this book. You know how in philosophy, when women write about emotions and mothering and love, it’s not considered “hard core philosophy”? And in history, if you’re not talking about political, economic or military history, it’s not (or wasn’t until 25 years ago) considered “real history”? Well, I now know that in fantasy, if the magic and worldbuilding is not built around weapons and warfare and political intrigue, some fantasy readers do not call it “real fantasy”.

It is true that this is not a stand alone book for anyone interested in the mystery of Fawn’s use of the sharing knife, or certainly not for anyone interested in the ultimate battle between the Lakewalkers and Malices. But the romance itself, while ending in a definite HEA, still has a lot of ground to cover, and leaves many obstacles in their path, similar in that sense to the end of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, and dissimilar to Sharon Shinn’s Mystic and Rider, in which the central romance arc ends.

I wanted to highlight a review that shows just how hard it is to review across genres (or perhaps how easy it is to be an ass):

“The next sentence will probably cause about half of you to groan in dismay and click to another review fast enough to cause a quantum fluctuation in your computer’s processor. Beguilement is a straight-up romance novel. … Though Bujold gives this new world a history with excellent dramatic potential for a suspenseful story at least as rewarding as her Hugo-Nebula coup Paladin of Souls, the only conflict in Beguilement is “Will they or won’t they?” Since it’s obvious they will, what’s the hook here? … is there any other genre on earth whose formula can be best described as a dull postponement of the inevitable? Are they gonna end up together at the end? Do bears…? You know….” (SFReviews.net)

As you well know, dear reader, it’s not “will they or won’t they?” but “how will they?” that provides very satisfying dramatic conflict for romance readers. It’s one thing for an SF reviewer to say he prefers other kinds of conflicts, but to pronounce romantic conflict dull tout court just because he finds it so? Please.

Maybe Dag using his mind to repair a beloved shattered bowl in a farm house, or controlling the ground of fireflies to create a magical nighttime ambience for his lover, doesn’t count for some people as fantasy.

It sure does for me. I’m already halfway through book 2!

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Blogging At Borders True Romance: The Results

I’m up early for my flight home and thought I would let folks know what the Borders blogging experience was like, in case some of you are sitting on the fence about submitting for the Friday open blog slot.

Qualitatively: I enjoy writing for other blogs, because my voice always sounds a little different, and that was true in this case as well. I got a healthy number of comments, many from published authors, which was fun, and some from regular visitors to RRR, which I appreciated very much. It remains to be seen whether a reader/author/blogger community will develop at BTR, or whether it will have the feel of more of a promotional website, but it’s too soon to judge.

Ms. Grimshaw’s video intro was amusingly vague and inaccurate (JR Ward is NOT one of my fave romance authors), but I still got a kick out of it.

Quantitatively: Linkage from the Smart Bitches website and pimpage from SBSarah and Sue Grimshaw on Twitter gave me my best stats day ever, at about 10% higher than my last best day. Throughout the week, the linkage from Borders gave me a small bump in hits all week. I think if you are a smaller/newer blog looking to reach more people or an established blog looking to reach a different audience, it’s a great idea to do it.

Next up is Keishon of Avid book Reader, and soon after that, Katiebabs from Babbling About Books. Can’t wait!!

I leave you with one of my patented, totally boring Kindle on vacation shots:

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Romance Reading As Escape: From What? To Where?

My shortish post on this topic at Borders True Romance will be up Friday morning.

I will be so grateful if you click over and let me know what you think about the topic.

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(For anyone following along, I am on vacation with my family. Looking at Friday morning’s schedule, and my children’s unusually strong desires when it comes to extreme theme park rides — MOM!!! WE WILL DIE IF WE DO NOT RIDE RIP RIDE ROCKIT THE MINUTE THE PARK OPENS. DIE!! DIE!!! MOM!!! DID YOU HEAR US???!!! MOM!!!! IN FACT, WE ARE GOING TO SIT UP IN BED WILD EYED ALL NIGHT WAITING!!! LOOK, WE ARE ALREADY DRESSED!!! AND SUNSCREENED!!! EVEN THOUGH IT IS 10:30 PM!!! MOM!!– I am worried I won’t have time to post this then.)

I’ll check in Friday afternoon. Have a lovely day!

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This and That, News and Misc.

I have a confession: I cannot resist any post title that reads “misc” or “random thoughts” or “stuff”. I have no idea why, but I absolutely must click through to find out what is up. And even though it may be just a few odds and ends, I always enjoy reading about what my fellow bloggers are up to. Here’s hoping you feel the same way.

1. Borders True Romance

By now you all know about the Borders True Romance blog, which Sue Grimshaw, romance buyer for Borders, Jane of Dear Author, and Sarah of Smart Bitches, are hosting. There will be author interviews every day, and readers’ blogs on Fridays.  I was asked to contribute to the Friday “open mic” slot, and to my surprise, I see I am first out of the gate this Friday. I wrote a short (under 800 words — really) piece on what we mean by “escape” in romance. I touch on high versus low art and the benefits of reading novels. I hope you will check it out. I actually get a video intro from Ms. Grimshaw herself!

They are looking for reader and blogger contributions, so if you are so inclined you should submit. There are a lot of Fridays in a year.

I’m really not sure what the site will offer, besides videos with big name authors and fairly high production values, at least compared to Author Talk and the like. I guess the idea is to create a new space for discussion. I have put it on my sidebar and will be checking it out. We’ll see.

For the little guys, I think it promises good exposure to a potentially new audience, which was the appeal for me. I’ll let you all know if it has any great impact on my stats.

2. My new eyeglasses

I got new glasses yesterday. This is a big deal. It happens about once every 10-12 years. This is what they look like:

get_thumbnailI wear contacts usually, but the reaction from Mr. Racy to these glasses has been so ego boosting that I have been wearing them 24/7 just so I can waggle my eyebrows at him and wait for the wave of lust to hit. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that for the last ten years I have been wearing glasses that look like this guy’s:

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If you thought I was totally trying to copy a certain other blogger’s look, well, you’re way off base.

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(Except that I started to write a novel. It’s a little subgenre I invented that I’m going to call “urban fantasy”, and I’m calling it The Disillusionists. I heard the title was available.)

3. Vacation

You know I love philosophy and romance novels. What’s the obvious third great love? If you guessed amusement parks, you’d be right! Tomorrow we make our 7th annual trek to Orlando. We typically split the trip between WDW and Universal, but this time we are doing Universal the whole week, because if you stay onsite you get linebreaking privileges.

Usually, when we go to Florida, we are leaving the frigid northeast in the dead of winter. This year, we decided to do something incredibly stupid and go in August.

I would say I won’t have time to blog, but I am fairly certain I will be holed up in my air conditioned hotel room with my laptop to get out of the sun, so expect posts.

Somehow, I have 83 books on my Kindle. I swear I am ordering them in my sleep at this point. I started Judith Ivory’s Black Silk today, which is awesome so far. I also have two old Charlotte Lambs that Tumperkin sent me which I will bring along. A Kate Noble. And I’m going to buy Summer of Two Wishes since Nicola’s review piqued my interest, and do a dueling books review with Hint of Wicked.

4. The Book Bloggers Award

I was nominated, so a nice woman who commented on my last post told me. Thank you to whomever did it. Then she emailed to say I would receive “instructions”, which I now await. Can anyone tell me what is up with this? I assume you have all been nominated as well.

Short Reviews of 3 Kathleen O’Reilly Blazes

hotunderpressure250th_0373793014th_0373793138

I read O’Reilly’s trilogy, Those Sexy O’Sullivans, last year, and enjoyed them, especially Sex, Straight Up, the best category with the worst title ever written. Recently, KMont at Lurv a la Mode blogged about her failed attempts to fall in lurv with categories, and her commenters gave her a heck of a great list to try.

My favorite comment was Wendy’s, who said she loves categories because they give you “all of the romance, with none of the bullshit”.

I totally agree with her on that. It’s cheeky to call secondary characters, subplots, worldbuilding, suspense, and fur, “bullshit” but I totally know what she means. I’ve already gone on record as saying that to me, the contemporary feels like the purest form of romance. Well, the contemporary category is like the boiled down essence of that purity. The couple meets right away, and they can’t stay away from each other for more than a page or two. It’s all about the romance.

I have a lot of respect for category romance writers, because they have so much to do in so little time, with so many rules. It’s like the Iron Chef of romance writing.

Of course, a lot of them are dreck. But when you find an author you can trust, it’s heaven. I feel that way about Kathleen O’Reilly.

I started this glom with Hot Under Pressure, just out this month, and reviewed all over the place already. Ashley (boutique owner from Chicago) and David (financier from New York) meet on a plane. They are both divorced and a bit gunshy about dating, but there’s instant attraction. When their flight in canceled, they end up in the airport hotel. They are both in some emotional recovery, especially David, whose wife left him for his own brother, and Ashley has her own problems at home, where she lives with her neurotic mother, her troubled sister, and her young niece. This is a darker story, with a lot of intensity around the sex (there’s a lot of plunging, as Jayne in the Dear Author review mentions. Maybe he was a plumber in a past life?), which for David is how he shows emotion. David is intense, and Ashley is hyper-responsible and tentative about going after what she wants. David needs to learn to let go, and Ashley needs to learn to focus on her own needs. Theirs is a story of learning to trust again, making compromises, and putting one’s neck out for love. I think the heavier themes are not easy to tackle in the shorter space of a category, and while some of the loose ends were tied up a bit too tidily, others were left to dangle, which is a lot like life. This gave the book a melancholy feel to me throughout. I did really like it, but I enjoyed the other two a bit more.

On a gossipy note (wait, can one gossip about oneself? Must ponder.), I commented about the use of a potentially questionable word on the Smart Bitches review on this book, and Kathleen (she totally said I could call her that) responded in a very detailed and helpful way, which I really appreciated. I honestly don’t care if authors are monsters in real life, but it’s nice to know when they aren’t.

My second read was Beyond Breathless, the first installment of The Red Choo Diaries, three books published in 2007 about the Brooks family of NYC. Beyond Breathless starts with a bang, just like Hot Under Pressure, when uptight, driven, up and coming Wall Street broker Jamie has to share a Hummer limo with similarly uptight and driven Wall Street super broker Andrew Brooks. I know some people may think the sex in a limo thing is a stretch (har har) but it was worth it just for the many times Jamie thinks later, “and in a Hummer!” and you can just see her wincing and shaking her head. It was totally out of character for both of these serious workaholics, but thanks to Andrew’s little sister Mercedes, a wannabe erotic romance author who narrated their encounter (anonymously) on her blog, The Red Choo Diaries, all of Wall Street becomes obsessed with their story. Neither of them have big issues, so this was a pretty low conflict romance.

Andrew wants Jamie, but Jamie wants to make it on her own. I liked Andrew, but Jamie was not easy to like. While I understood her fear that a relationship with the biggest dude in the stock market might forever make her seem like the beneficiary of nepotism no matter what she does, at times she seemed to blame Andrew for being a white male, something he can hardly help. I did love the Nietzschean overtones of Andrew’s “everyone is not equal speech”, and the Randian tones of his comment that she should take his insider help to get a client because “life isn’t fair. If you play by the rules, you’re always competing against someone who won’t”.  Andrew was possibly one of the most amoral heroes I have read in a Blaze.

This was a story of two very similar people who love in each other what is most like themselves. Andrew’s reluctance stems from always needing to be in control (he has been the de facto male head of his family since he was a child). He’s the one who gives in to love first, and his attempts to break out of his shell to court Jamie made for a very enjoyable read.

My third read was Beyond Daring. This one is about Andrew’s younger brother, Jeff, the charming, gorgeous PR man. Jeff’s latest assignment is to keep Sheldon Summerville (think Paris Hilton) from embarrassing her wealthy family with her drunken antics. Sheldon is gorgeous and constantly tries to seduce Jeff, just to see if she can. Jeff, a ladies man who normally wouldn’t think twice, has to resist for the sake of his career. In the meantime, they fall in love. Jeff, never very ambitious, worries that he can’t keep Sheldon in furs, while Sheldon, for her part, has agreed to a marriage-merger to some other guy. Normally, I hate those arranged marriages in contemporaries, but Sheldon, a life long party girl with no talent other than making trouble, feels it’s the one thing she can do to make herself useful.

I don’t know what to say about this book, except that my brain stopped and everything else took over when I read it. I loved every second of it. It pushed every one of my buttons. There was an incredibly romantic kiss at a baseball game, crying in the shower, a fight at a dance club, hot sex on the beach, drunkenly yelling up at closed windows, sleeping outside doorways, and secret violin lessons, all capped off with a big splashy finale a la An Officer and A Gentleman. It was like Total Drama Island all the time with these two, but somehow it worked for me. It was a very pure romance — all they wanted was each other and they couldn’t manage it. It was just so romantic and sexy and sad and terrific.

The one quibble I have is the sequel baiting for Mercedes’ book (this is turning into a full blown peeve of mine), which threw me right out of the story at the worst time (not the interview, but what came after, for those who have read it). “The Red Choo Diaries” conceit worked great in Beyond Breathless, but the blog didn’t add much to Beyond Daring and I would have been happy without it.

If you like Blazes, I would recommend any of these. If you are not sure about categories, I dare you to read Beyond Daring.

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Joint Review: Bound By Your Touch, by Meredith Duran

Bound By Your Touch

Tumperkin’s Take

I read Meredith Duran’s debut, Duke of Shadows last year and could tell that Duran was going to be an author I’d enjoy.  I meant to review it but it was one of those books that I miss the boat on (about 70% of what I read I never review despite the best of intentions.  I tend to find that if I don’t review something within about a month of reading it, it doesn’t get reviewed.  How the likes of Jane from Dear Author can review practically every book they read, I just don’t know).

Anyway, when Jessica suggested we jointly review BBYT, I was happy to agree.  And it did not disappoint.  It’s a better book than Duke of Shadows, a more accomplished and confident book altogether, with a stronger structure and a defter touch.

The hero is James Durham, Viscount Sanburne, heir to the Earl of Moreland.  The heroine is Lydia Boyce, the oldest daughter of an Egyptian scholar and a scholar herself, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge.  This circumstance, along with a plethora of other details, place the book in a richly-observed late Victorian period.

This is a setting I like.  My favourite historical settings are Regency and Georgian but this later Victorian period is also one that resonates with me.  It’s a society on the brink of true modernity with fast, efficient railways and mechanised industry.  The modern world with its looming changes: universal suffrage, the women’s movement etc. is within glimpsing distance.  Within a few decades, the privileged world of the aristocracy supported by its vast pool of underpaid servants, will begin to wither.

The main part of the book opens with James interrupting a lecture Lydia is giving in her father’s stead.  He is oblivious to Lydia and set upon creating a scene with his father.  We come to learn that James nurses a deep anger with his father and that he has made it his mission in life to goad and embarrass him.  As the book wears on, we learn the reason for the anger but at this early stage, we are allowed to judge James as Lydia does, as a spoiled, excessive wastrel.  James has purchased what he believes to be a piece of genuine Egyptian antiquity, a stela, that his father will covet.  But Lydia – irate at James’ interruption – publicly (and correctly) pronounces it to be a fake, thus setting off a chain of events that will bring her own beloved father’s reputation into question and indeed her very life into danger.

James’ raison d’etre is the animosity he feels towards his father.  By contrast Lydia treasures her role as her father’s right hand, idealising both him and his achievements.  Despite her own academic interests lying elsewhere, she devotes herself to being her father’s assistant.  Duran neatly contrasts how James and Lydia’s views of their respective fathers develops, and explores the idea of faith – Lydia’s unerring faith in her father, James’ complete lack of faith in his and then, ultimately, the faith they place in one another – to great effect.

Despite a few reservations which I mention later, I very much liked the character of James.  But then he is that archetypal romance rogue that I am a sucker for: he is beautiful and damaged; he is a self-loathing wastrel bent on destruction.  How many times have I written such a description of a hero?  Why is it so endlessly appealing?  Maybe it’s the healer complex that so many female romance readers have.

Lydia, by contrast, I struggled with a little.  She too is a ‘type’ that romance readers will be familiar with.  She is the brave/ forthright/ capable type yet vulnerable inside.  She is the academic heroine with a prickly skin and a passionate soul.  Do I find her harder to like because she is a heroine and I just give heroes an easier ride?  (I do find myself falling in love with heroes regularly but heroines only rarely).  Or is it because we demand our heroines to be less archetypal and more real than heroes?  I’m not sure.  But heroines will always find it harder to win me over.

Duran uses these very familiar types but she breathes life into them too.  Lydia, for example, shows herself in a quite unflattering light on a few occasions in her ongoing bickering with her middle sister.  I enjoyed that untypical facet of her character.  Duran managed to make it both unattractive and understandable.  The other thing that was good about Lydia was how she ‘read’ her encounters with Sanburne.  She will think he likes her, then worry that her instinct is wrong and that he is merely playing her.  These vacillating worries of Lydia’s felt authentic and won my sympathy.

I did have a few reservations about BBYT.  Neither the underlying reason for James’ anger nor how he expressed it against his father completely convinced me.  Similarly, the ease with which that issue was resolved disappointed me.  It made the whole thing feel manufactured and convenient.  I also rather wished that Lydia’s own scholarly endeavours had been made more of.  At one point, she objects to being referred to as a bluestocking – the implication being that she is self-educated – when she is a graduate of Girton.  I would liked to have seen this ‘professionalism’ demonstrated.  We got a little taste of it at the outset of the book when she denounces the stela as a fake and I would have loved a little more of that.

But really, these are quibbles.  BBYT is a quality read and I enjoyed it greatly.  I have great hopes for the next book featuring Phin and Mina.  We met Mina briefly in this book and she is very much more to my taste as a heroine.

In fact, I think I might just be able to fall in love with her.

Jessica’s Rejoinder

Isn’t Tumperkin smart? Love that review, and agree with pretty much all of it. So I’ll try to add a few different observations.

Like T, I had read Duke of Shadows last year and really enjoyed it. And I also think this is a better book. It’s very well written — beautifully, soaringly written in many places — and James and Lydia are intelligent, sympathetically flawed, and very interesting characters.

I admit I was reluctant to start this book. Yet another rake/spinster story?  But as soon as I read the first page, I was hooked. We begin with an incredibly gripping and heartbreaking scene in which Lydia comes to realize that the man she thought she’d marry wants another woman.

Duran does something in this book that very few authors of rake romances manage to do: she conveyed what the partying life was like among the rakish nobility. I have a secret fondness for the film Marie Antoinette. It fails on many levels, but it succeeds in three ways: the soundtrack, the cinematography, and finally, the way Sophia Coppola manages to convey the totally alluring, drifting quality of the privileged party set on the verge of dislocating downfall, giving you the feel that you are there, and, despite the dangers, want to be.

In BBYT, I thought the early scene when James emerges from drug induced fog at his own party captured it beautifully, and a later scene at the races also completely conveyed the odd mix of boredom and excitement, easy privilege and self-conscious unease, breaking and relying on social conventions at once, and friendships forged in a shared ironic attitude to nobility that are somehow both totally casual and very deeply felt.

Tumperkin mentions the feel of the threat of oncoming societal changes. I think this was a very important theme in the book. Here’s James thinking about his long friendship with Phin:

“Eggheaded dolts spoiled into uselessness: thus, at the tender age of ten, had [Phin] dismissed the majority of Britain’s future leaders. Eyeing James, he’d added Really, I have no idea how you turned out so interesting. I do hope you manage to keep it up.

James had tried. For years afterward, whenever he found himself in a situation where his position gave him advantages, he tested himself with Phin’s rule: Is this interesting? — which soon came to mean, Is this original? It turned out, far too often, that the answer was No.

Lydia, too, has an emerging class consciousness — “He behaved very stupidly, and people adored him for it. Ah the wonders of a title!” she thinks of James — but, like James, her attitude towards privilege is informed not only by social consciousness but by her personal history, her experience of being an educated, strong, competent woman in a world where that makes her even more dependent and vulnerable than an ignorant, weak, but married one.

I wanted to point this out because I think, like their attitudes towards their fathers, this is another example of a kind of mirroring in the book, that worked very well to both say something interesting about the times and provide internal and external conflict between James and Lydia.

Like T says, there were a lot of hallmarks of the era, not just in the technology or clothing, but the emerging mass media, new awareness of sexuality — James’ every move is reported on by the press, Lydia thinks to herself that the male powers that be want her body to remain a stranger to her, for example.

I found the sensual scenes especially well done (and we all know how easy it is to go wrong here). Like this one:

The fit of their bodies startled her. It felt like an answer to some question she yet hadn’t thought to ask.

Or this one:

He praised her for doing exactly what she should not do, and the fit of his body against hers was causing something within her to unfold, to grow stronger and clearer as it developed. Like an anagram unriddling itself, or a maze slowly straightening.

You know how the heroes are always so much taller than heroines? And the only way you know this is the constant references to something hard prodding the heroine’s belly? I am happy to report that Duran actually uses the height difference beautifully in a scene where Lydia finds herself level with James’ throat and cannot stop herself from opening her mouth on his skin.  (although it must be said, given my last post, that Duran is a smell offender, when she has Lydia think James once smelled “civilized and predictable”).

I absolutely loved it that Lydia’s sexual awakening was a coming into personal power. I think every romance writer claims to do this, but far fewer manage it.

Did he like it? Oh, she did not care. This restless, breathless feeling knocking through her might have been desire, but it could as easily be anger. The only thing clear to her was that she’d had it wrong, worrying about what she revealed of herself of what he or anyone else might think about her. It was not their opinions that mattered. ‘I do not do this for you,’ she said. I do it for myself.

This sets James back in a way that romance readers expect and enjoy:

She had warned him, once. I possess a talent for a memorable exit. But he hadn’t listened. His opinion of her was much like a sand castle: it stood in constant need of repair.

As in all the best romances, James and Lydia need each other to become capable of loving each other. Duran reminds us that love requires a mature, resilient, open-eyed kind of faith, something neither has managed alone. As Lydia thinks in yet another wonderful passage:

Faith. She knew better than anyone what it was. More durable than any substance science had discovered — and when it shattered, more violent and cutting than glass. She would walk across its shards for the rest of her life. At every step the pain would be with her.

Like Tumperkin, I can’t wait to read Phin’s book, which I already own. The sequel baiting was pretty blatant in a late scene where we meet Mina, one of my few criticisms of the book, but it was also quite effective, so what do I know? I can say I ended up with seven pages of Kindle notes, every one of them a reminder of a turn of phrase or bit of characterization or setting that moved or awed me. It’s so nice to have another autobuy author for my very short list.

And for anyone who made it to the end of this post and would like a copy of Bound By Your Touch, I happen to have an extra copy. Make a comment by Monday at midnight EST to be entered in a drawing.




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