Read React Review

I listened to the audio version, narrated ably by Wanda Fontaine. To my ears, Fontaine has a very natural amateur sounding style, with performance almost an afterthought. As is typical with female narrated romances, she voices masculinity with low affect rather than deepening her voice.  She also narrated Dahl’s Talk Me Down, and Broken by Megan Hart, the latter of which I listened to and highly recommend.

My take in brief: Very funny, very sexy, with one of the most romantic endings I can recall reading in this subgenre. I really enjoyed it.

Word on the Web:

Dear Author, Janet/Robin, B-

I agree most with this part:

“I didn’t get enough of Quinn to understand why Lori, of all women, was the one who managed to hold his sexual and romantic attention.  NOT because Lori’s physical charms were perhaps a bit more petite than Quinn’s other women, but because slack jawed surprise merely opens the door to sex, and what makes Quinn want more is not justified merely because the reader may understand Lori’s appeal.  In other words, even though I may be able to construe any number of reasons they work as a couple doesn’t mean the book has, in my opinion, done its job in effectively building the relationship beyond the bedroom.”

Monkey Bear Reviews, B+

I agree most with this part:

“Victoria Dahl’s sense of humour is quirky and irreverent. I’d imagine it wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, but it definitely appeals to me.”

The Romance Reader, 4 stars

I agree most with this part:

“Start Me Up has a lot of chemistry, loads of charm and plenty of laughs. Quinn and Lori’s love affair works from the beginning because their old friendship morphs into something much hotter very naturally.”

KupK8’s Kitchen, positive

I agree most with this part:

“While I loved both novels, I liked Lori more as a character. Her journey to rediscover herself after sacrificing her dreams for her responsibilities is one I can strongly relate to. I know her. Molly was a bit silly, but not silly in an “I’m going to throw you into the wall” kind of way. More like the friend you have who always gets too tipsy at the bar (or acts like it anyway) and makes you snort Coke out your nose with outrageous comments. But her growth as a character didn’t interest me as much, though she was dreadfully amusing in both novels.”

AAR, Abi,  B+

I agree most with this part:

“Start Me Up isn’t an A for me only because I would rather the story held more scenes between Lori and Quinn, particularly towards the end. I suppose what I’m saying is, I’d have liked the book to be longer, and if the big, bad publisher made this impossible, I’d have liked their relationship to be meatier, meaning Dahl could have made the novel into a fully character-centric book with no mysteries to solve (apart from the mystery of their lurve).”

Series?: Yes, second in the Tumble Creek, CO trilogy, after Talk Me Down. Up next in Jan 2010 is Lead Me On, Jane’s story.

Racy Romance Review:

Instead of doing my own review, I just pasted together the parts of other reviews that I liked. It is not cheating. Rather, it’s my attempt to bring postmodernity into the romance reviewing world.

Just kidding.

Anyway, Lori is a bit stuck. She had to return from college to care for her father who had been permanently and severely disabled in a a bar fight. After his death, Lori took over his garage and stayed put, literally and emotionally. She doesn’t conform to gender expectations in employment, dress, demeanor or dating habits (her infrequent and not totally satisfying affairs were brief and private), so she is, of course, suspected of being a lesbian. As the story opens, Lori, a frequent reader of erotic romance, is wishing she could have a hot no strings attached affair with a man who outperforms her own hand in the bedroom.

Quinn is a hot nerdy successful architect from Lori’s hometown of Tumble Creek, now living and working “across the pass” in Aspen. All I know about Aspen I learned from multiple viewings of Dumb and Dumber…

Which is to say, not very much.

Anyway, the romance gets going when they notice each other sexually for the first time:

Lori couldn’t help but laugh. When he scowled, she laughed harder. “Give it up, Quinn. I’m not going to feel sorry for you. Even if you could convince me you’re a nerd, you’re still hot and rich and successful. Poor baby.”

Shaking her head, she set to work on removing the old starter. Maybe he was nerdy in the strictest sense of the word, but she knew plenty of girls in her junior high class who’d thought him tantalizingly mysterious before he’d gone off to college. Bookish and distracted took on a whole different meaning when the boy in question was also gorgeous and kind.

“Hot?” she heard him ask, and looked up to see him leaning against the porch rail watching her.

“Huh?”

“Hot. You said I was hot.” He kept his mouth serious, but his hazel eyes danced with laughter.

This time Lori’s face heated. She waved her wrench in his general direction. “I was just stroking your ego.”

“Well, nice work. It felt good, your stroking.”

This is an example of one thing I really liked about SMU. In another book, Lori would have answered Quinn’s comment, “You said I was hot”, by getting embarrassed, turning away, etc. but not only does Lori have a great comeback, it keeps going with Quinn’s come on.

So many times, I found myself in a preparatory wince, sure that I knew what kind of typical contemporary romance conversational non-response was coming from Quinn or Lori. I find that conversations, especially in contemps, which is probably my favorite subgenre, are even more freakishly unnatural than the sex. In this they are often like soap operas, where people answer each other the way the author needs them to to get the story where she wants it. This often ushers in non sequiturs, nonsense, and big misunderstandings.

I am happy to report that Dahl allowed her characters to “go there”, whether it was bawdy talk, as in this case, or just direct talk about something uncomfortable. If a character was wondering something, s/he asked it. Amazing, isn’t it? Dahl didn’t rely on artificial conversation curbers to keep suspense or drama going. That’s a long winded way of saying the dialogue was great, and so funny at times — especially in the first third of the book — that I laughed out loud.

Lori and Quinn engage in a steamy affair, and while he begins to fall for her, Lori resists. You might think the resistance was the “rich boy/poor girl” aspect of their relationship, and, while the presence of “Dream Whore Barbies” in Quinn’s past romantic life did cause Lori her moments of insecurity, that wasn’t really it. (As an aside, I wish Quinn’s attraction to those women had been explored more fully. It rarely is.) I completely understood Lori’s resistance, although she couldn’t articulate it herself until the very end. In love, there is a difference between completing each other and using another person to shore up big gaps in your identity. Lori had some work to do on that score, before she could give herself to Quinn. It was a believable conflict and it worked for me.

I did agree with Robin and others who reviewed SMU that Quinn’s attraction to Lori was not as clearly developed as I would have liked. I believed, especially in the wonderful ending (eating hotdogs at a kitchen table was never so romantic), that he WAS in love with her, but since it was mainly her rosy nipples that he talked about in the book, it wasn’t clear how it happened. The fact that they had known each other for years helped with this.

There is a suspense subplot — involving a piece of land Lori inherited fomr her father –  which worked for me. That’s all I’ll say about it.

I’ll now get into probably my favorite thing about this book, besides the dialogue that almost got me banned from my gym for laughing so hard I apparently distracted others from their workouts, which was the depiction of Lori’s sexuality.

I absolutely loved it that Lori read sexy romance novels, and I found it remarkable that Dahl could provide snippets of Lori’s reading material that were at the same time very funny and lovingly presented. Lori has a complex journey to undertake, which includes grieving for her father and restarting her stalled life, but her sexual needs are presented not as a superficial distraction, but as a key part of that journey. This is a hot read, but the last thing that is happening in this book is a cheapening of sexuality.

The sex scenes provided the heart of the development of Lori and Quinn’s relationship, and while I wish there had been more nonsex scenes, these did move the relationship along in important ways. After all, having known each other since childhood, sex was the area in which their relationship had the furthest to go.

I was reminded, reading SMU, of an essay by philosopher and feminist theorist Sara Ruddick called “Better Sex”, which was originally published in 1975 in an edited collection called Philosophy & Sex. In it, Ruddick talks about “completeness” in sex acts. Sex is not just about orgasm (which one can have by oneself, while sleeping, or against one’s will), but about desire, and specifically, mutually recognized and encouraged desire. Completeness depends on the relation of the people to each other’s sexual desire. In complete sex, a person allows herself to be taken over by active desire, which includes an awareness of the active desire of the partner.

As she puts it:

A desiring consciousness is flooded with specifically sexual feelings that eroticize all perception and movement. Consciousness ‘becomes flesh.’”

This embodiment is key: think about sexual assault victims who “go somewhere else” while they are being violated. The partner has to actively desire the other partner’s desire. This takes more than embodiment (which after all, masturbation can help someone achieve all alone), and more than just being aroused by another. In complete sex, “two persons embodied by sexual desire actively desire and respond to each other’s active desire.” This was portrayed beautifully in the text, in my opinion.

From this point of view, passivity with respect to one’s sexual desire — the passivity Lori started out with — poses a real threat to not only sexual pleasure, but to the possibility of incorporating sexual pleasure into a coherent identity. Complete sex (which can occur between strangers, between more than two people, and between same sex partners) provides moments of recognition as a “real” person to be respected and valued, puts a brake on our tendency to disassociate from our bodies, and can — but does not have to — usher in an emotional connection that conduces to the virtue of loving (which is a virtue in my book).

Well, that’s my personal interpretation of Quinn’s afterglow declaration: “I was a fucking sex ninja!”.

Your mileage may vary.

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