Archive for: March, 2010

Brief Hiatus

Mar 28 2010 Published by under Navel gazing

In a perfect storm of events, it’s Passover (first Seder tomorrow night), the plan to make cuts at my university has been released (women’s studies, music, theatre, dance, and modern languages axed, among others), and the PCA/ACA conference begins Wednesday, which means finishing my paper and getting everything set prior to departure.

We’re so rushed for time this year that I might have to follow Slate’s suggestions for How To Get Through the Haggadah in Two Minutes Flat.

I won’t have a new post until my first conference report Thursday.

Happy Pesach!!

10 responses so far

Review: Possessing Morgan, by Bonnie Edwards

Mar 25 2010 Published by under Reviews

Possessing Morgan is the first Blaze I listened to with my new Audible 12 month Blaze subscription. Blazes are about 6 hours on audio, not mentally demanding, and are perfect for taking the boredom out of repetitive tasks like exercising, cleaning, or commuting.

The narrator, Sandra Caldwell, was pretty bad. Maybe the worst audio narrator I have ever heard, actually. You know when children read aloud to their classrooms … and they don’t know how to read ahead mentally to determine where the emphasis should be in a sentence and how the flow should go? This narrator was that bad. Sometimes she would even pause in the middle of a word, as in “Are you walk. … Ing away, Morgan?”

Yesterday, I reviewed a book that I didn’t personally enjoy, but would recommend. This book is the opposite: I liked it, but I am not sure I can really recommend it, and not just because of the bum narrator.

Morgan is a repo woman, who enjoys the thrill of repossessing cars. As a teen, Morgan actually stole cars and ended up in juvie. She chalks that up to being under the thrall of an older boyfriend, and vows never to depend on a man again.

She’s had a fan girl crush on playboy Kingston “Mac” McRae for years, fed by consumption of tabloid magazines that print salacious stories about him, as well as her own nonexistent love life. When she gets the chance to repo one of his fancy cars at his estate, she hopes for just a glimpse of him. Morgan gets a lot more than that when he spies her from his window and runs out to stop her. One look at her Daisy Duke shorts and flaming red hair (a kind of distracting uniform, not her personal choice of attire), and Mac is interested. Heat flares instantly between them.

It so happens that Mac has been troubled by a stalker of late, and he suspects the stalker has been messing with his payments to creditors like the car dealer. Mac convinces Morgan to come inside while his security team works things out. They get to know each other in the Biblical sense, Morgan telling herself it’s a meaningless one afternoon stand. But Mac is instantly smitten and convinces her to stick around for the weekend.

The stalker angle is significant, and consumes the plot. (I found myself secretly hoping Morgan was the stalker, with a split personality disorder. That would have been super cool, but perhaps a bit off target for a Harlequin Blaze.) There isn’t much internal conflict, except for Morgan occasionally reminding herself she will never fit in to Mac’s life and that she can’t rely on a man. It should be totally ridiculous that Mac gets so involved with Morgan so fast, on the day before his sister’s wedding, and while a stalker is invading his life in terrifying ways. Talk about distractions! Not to mention the tryst he has with Morgan in the coat room during his sister’s wedding reception. All class, that guy. (Actually, in some ways, the conflict WAS the fact that there was no conflict, that they fell for each other so fast.)

And yet … I was truly entertained by Possessing Morgan. There was no sexual tension, and Mac and Morgan fell into love as easily as they fell into bed. But I enjoyed the writing, and Morgan and Mac were both likable, interesting characters. The stalker plot made sense, the secondary characters were well drawn, and neither Mac nor Morgan ever did anything unforgivably stupid. I enjoyed it, and I will look for more titles by this author.

4 responses so far

Review: Written on Your Skin, by Meredith Duran

Mar 24 2010 Published by under Reviews

I was looking forward to Written on Your Skin, Meredith Duran’s third novel, after having read and enjoyed her first two. This one didn’t work as well for me, unfortunately. I hasten to add that my view is an outlier: most reviews of WOYS have been very very positive. This will be a brief post.

Blurb:

Beauty, charm, wealthy admirers: Mina Masters enjoys every luxury but freedom. To save herself from an unwanted marriage, she turns her wiles on a darkly handsome stranger. But Mina’s wouldbe hero is playing his own deceptive game. A British spy, Phin Granville has no interest in emotional entanglements…until the night Mina saves his life by gambling her own.

Four years later, Phin inherits a title that frees him from the bloody game of espionage. But memories of the woman who saved him won’t let Phin go. When he learns that Mina needs his aid, honor forces him back into the world of his nightmares.

Deception has ruled Mina’s life just as it has Phin’s. But as the beauty and the spy match wits in a dangerous dance, their practiced masks begin to slip, revealing a perilous attraction. And the greatest threat they face may not be traitors or murderous conspiracies, but their own dark desires….

I found reading this book to be a very strange experience. It’s hard to explain, but it felt very “jerky” to me. I kept thinking the Kindle formatting was wrong, that paragraphs or pages were missing. It did not flow smoothly for me at all. I would read lines like “he had routed her”, and I would think, “huh, what?”, and have to go back and see how exactly this had happened.

Much of the book takes places in Phin and Mina’s heads. They both have haunting pasts — him as an unwilling spy for the British government and her as complicit in her some way in her mother’s abusive marriage. He starts off the book as a classic self-loathing tortured hero (“every inch of his skin prickled with self-contempt” etc.), with an opium habit (although this dour identity, including the opium and panic attacks, pretty much evaporates without explanation), and she … well, she was never easy for me to pin down. A brash American business woman? A scared mamma’s girl? Or, as Phin sees her for much of the book, a doll or a child? (Frequent references to Mina as a wriggling child, a doll, a brat, whose cheeks he wanted to pinch, etc. made me uncomfortable)

Phin and Mina don’t trust each other. Their relationship is gamesmanship, with sexual overtones, at first. And when they figure out they are on the same side, they have to deal with those ghosts of their pasts before they can develop a relationship. I didn’t feel I had a good handle on either of them, or when I did, the characters sort of changed in unexpected ways, preventing my investment.

Everything — I mean, the slightest movement of a head or finger — was written as deeply significant. But when you don’t feel that invested as a reader, this doesn’t have the intended effect. There’s just this constant thick cloud of figuration and emoting that I found very distancing for me as a reader.

There were two things I liked about it.

One, there’s a scene when Phin and Mina are in the country and they dance. It was a really beautifully written few pages, and the only place in the book where I felt drawn, as a reader, to this as a love story. It’s inspired me to write a post on dancing in romance novels, whenever I get around to it.

Second, when Phin is talking about someone (a bad guy) he accidentally killed, he recognizes, “but someone had wept for him, no doubt. Someone always did.” Mina has a similar recognition late in the book. I like the ambiguity of viewpoint. From some point of view, everyone is good and everyone is tainted.

I picked this one up and put it down so many times over the past months. I am sure that contributed negatively to my perception of the flow of the narrative. I’m sorry I don’t have more to offer for this review. Definitely follow the links above for more enlightened discourse about this novel.

16 responses so far

Monday Morning Stepback: Male pubes, the point of book reviews, feminist sci fi, and Kotex

Mar 22 2010 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion and inanity post

Links of Interest (where if it’s new to me, it’s “news”):

First, I am having a contest, which closes Tuesday at midnight EST, for a copy of Carolyn Crane’s Mind Games. Open to all. Just comment to enter.

Congratulations to blogger and quilter extraordinaire Phyl for winning the Avon/Harper Collins “It Happened One Season” contest.

What is the Purpose of a Book Review, and are Book Reviewers Writing Anything Useful? from Michelle Kerns at examiner.com. It’s amazing to see literary fiction reviewers only now grasping basic things about book reviewing that genre readers have long understood (for another example of the same, scroll down this page to the Media Bistro interview). (Of course, we genre reviewers have our own set of reviewing traps.)

From the NY Times Well Blog, a report on a study that will warm any philosopher’s heart, Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

Aarti of Booklust asked “Do You Fall for the Hype?” (hat tip Janet Webb). An older post (3/14) but worth catching up on for the 58 comments, Aarti is not thrilled with the growth of the “blog tour” phenomenon:

Yes, I like getting free books, but I don’t like to feel as though I have unwittingly contributed to pushing a certain book on someone else. I don’t like to feel that I have to review a certain book by a certain time so that everyone hears about it all at once. I prefer hearing about a book because a blogger wanted to pick that book up at that time, and wanted to read it. Not because she had to read it at that time to meet a deadline. I don’t want books forced upon me in that way.

The Sexist is wondering, What Do Men Do With Their Pubic Hair?

My Friend Amy is asking about Literary Identity, The Weight of Recommendations, and More.

There are times as a book blogger or recommender of books that I wish I had a more defined sense of taste. The truth is that I enjoy a great variety of books and feel antsy whenever I think of fitting into one niche or genre. At the same time, I often feel without roots or a strong sense of like minded community in the book blogosphere.

Sandy at AAR is Calling in the Angry Villagers: 10 Cliches We Can Live Without (with dozens of additions from helpful readers.)

The F Word on Justine Larbalestier’s Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century

Daughters of Earth opens the door to a selection of feminist and women’s science fiction writing, then puts these examples in historical and literary context through critical essays written in a broad and accessible tone. These essays sprout hundreds of branches, tantalising the reader with glimpses of the history of US women’s speculative fiction, the development of science fiction as a genre, the development of feminist ideas, feminist critique and the relationship between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ writing.

I’ve got this book on its way to me. Can’t wait to read it!

American Book Review published an article (PDF download) with 40 responses to their question about what makes a bad book bad. A variety of colorful responses from academics, many of which will have you gnashing your teeth. I loved it. But for this blog, I thought pulling out quotes about romance would be interesting. I think someone could write a paper on the necessity of a certain conception of “Romance” for the construction of the definition of the bad book.

Genre books aren’t bad. They are the paradigm of good books. If any writing can be justified, romances and Westerns and mysteries and pornography can, being like the stain on a napkin, exactly the size of themselves. Hasn’t everybody on occasion wished for badder books? Roland Barthes famously remarked that he wrote books because he didn’t like the books he read. When younger I thought he must be talking about the books reviewers called bad, but later I realized books like that rarely inspire anybody. Is badness, at bottom, more like incompetence or like evil? Ronald Sukenick once confided to me his ambition to write books no one would know how to judge either bad or good. I feel that. … I dream of the book so horrendous it denies me peace, tracks me down in my haven, and compels me to vomit rejoinders. (from R. M. Berry, FSU)

Another comment, on Women in Love (a book I have always despised. One of the best things about an article like this is finding other who people think the same books are overrated that you do) :

“It’s like someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance.”

From Christine Granados, Texas A & M:

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992) comes immediately to mind. I think of it as a romance novel for men, his trilogy included. Like all good romance novel writers, McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies. He gives men a romanticized view of manliness. McCarthy wraps his characters in half-truths and idealized anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star State, the border, and its cowboy myths.

From Carol Guess, Western Washington U.

Heather Lewis’s second novel, Notice (2004), is a work of genius. Underrated, rarely discussed, the book belongs with contemporary classics. It is perhaps the most disturbing book I’ve ever read, and among the most compelling. It illuminates the state of female, specifically lesbian, subjectivity under contemporary American regimes by deconstructing genres that have failed to capture women’s experiences: pulp, noir, mystery, romance. It subverts these genres, yet never falls prey to the directives of political correctness.

Finally, a comment that hits a little too close to home, from Christian Moraru, U North Carolina Greensboro:

Let us face it: yesterday’s “bad” books are on today’s syllabi. Think, for example, about the whole sentimental tradition, about romance, or about the “paraliterary” genres.

The Guardian Books Blog follows up with, What Makes a Bad Book Bad?

I really enjoyed this Media Bistro audio interview with Laura Miller, Salon.com critic and author, about reading and reviewing. She talks about the difference between reading with enthusiasm (typical of children) and reading with understanding (typical of reviewers). This is such an interesting interview, because you have a reader, Miller, advising authors of literary fiction to write protagonists who care about something, desire something, and do something and that “the bedrock of readerly engagement is storytelling”.

Wow. So, you need plot and character to engage readers. Who would have thunk it?

Inspiration: Mark Athitakis has a quote about American writers from Nadine Gordimer that is going on my office door.

We all know about DABWAHA, but did you know that there is a literary Tournament of Books modeled on March Madness? There is! But instead of books winning by popular vote, they advance by the vote of one judge per matchup. It is in its 6th year, sponsored by The Morning News.

I loved the Kotex ad making fun of tampon ads, and like everyone else, found it predictable but dismaying that it was banned for using the word “vagina” by three networks, and that two networks wouldn’t even allow the use of the euphemism “down there”. My favorite lines: “How do I feel about my period? … I like to twirl, maybe in slow motion … and I do it in my white spandex. And usually, by the third day, I really just want to dance.”

Me too, sister, me too.

Personal

Shit is hitting the fan at my uni. Our president announced his resignation last week (effective in 16 months) and while it still looks like philosophy is in the clear, other departments’ fates are tragic. I don’t want to say more about it now, in case students are reading this (it’s not official at this point, and I don’t want to panic anyone unnecessarily). But I will have something to say next week.

One bright spot is that I had my annual review at my other job — where they have had to eliminate 100 positions — it went well, and my job seems secure for now.

About health care: I am thrilled with the passage of the health care bill. Yes, it has a LOT of problems, but take a step back and look at it philosophically. When I started out in bioethics in 1999, I organized a summit of state and regional health care leaders in Florida. At that time, none of those experts predicted this would happen — in fact, they insisted it never would. As a country, we have moved from thinking about health care the way we think about automobiles (really important to have, but not society’s problem if you can’t afford it) to thinking about it more like education (something necessary to partake in the equality of opportunity the US promises, like public education). I think the passage of this bill signals a recognition in the US that health care is more than a privilege for those who are lucky enough to have jobs with coverage, or who meet criteria for Medicare, Medicaid, or VA benefits: it’s closer to a right, something that should not be denied to any US citizen. I hate the many concessions Obama and the Democrats made, to big pharma and to the anti choice agenda in particular, but this is what reform looks like. The passage of a bill isn’t reform — we can’t literally overhaul health care in the House chamber — it’s the working out of the details, which will happen gradually over the long term. I don’t think we can overstate the importance of the shift this bill represents.

In romance news, I finally broke down and got a category subscription, my first ever, to Harlequin Blaze on audio. Bracing myself for more references to “wet panties” than any human being not employed in a nursing home should have to hear in her lifetime. Have I just entered a new circle of romance fandom?

This week on the blog

I’ll review the Meredith Duran, Written on Your Skin, that I promised to review last week, and also a Harlequin Blaze.

Also, a post on “Vampire Romance: Dead or Undead” which collects bits of analysis and trendspotting I have been gleaning via interviews with experts in the genre.

HAPPY WEEK!

11 responses so far

Win a Free Copy of Carolyn Crane’s Mind Games

Mar 21 2010 Published by under Uncategorized

How much do I love this fresh urban fantasy debut? So much that I am going to personally buy a copy on the day it is released — Tuesday 3/23 — and send it priority mail to the winning entrant.

Simply comment on this post by Tuesday March 23 at midnight EST. Winner announced Wednesday 3/24.

Click on the cover image for synopsis and other reviews.

From my review:

Mind Games is not romance, but it has strong romantic elements. I found it fresh, exciting, thought-provoking, mordantly funny, scary, and sexy. I absolutely loved this book.

From All Things Urban Fantasy:

Mind Games is actually a dark, gritty, and sexy urban fantasy that hooked me from page one. I’ve never read anything like Mind Games before,

Fantasy Dreamer’s Ramblings (5 stars)

Mind Games needs to be on everyone’s must-read-now list. Seriously – not kidding.

Good luck!

52 responses so far

Goals, Objectives and Blogging

Mar 20 2010 Published by under Blogs and blogging

Have you looked at a college course syllabus lately? They have “goals” and “objectives”. The goals are the general intentions of the course, while the objectives are the concrete things that students will learn. The objectives are specific ways to meet the goal.

So in an Intro to Philosophy course, a goal might be something abstract, like “students will gain a greater appreciation of the history of Western philosophical thought”, and an objective would be something narrower, and measurable, like “students will be able to describe the difference between rationalism and empiricism”.

There is a lot of advice online about blogging, sometimes an overwhelming amount. It tends to focus on objectives (usually referred to as “strategies”). I find that much of the advice and strategizing is irrelevant to my goals. It helps me to have my goals in mind when I consider whether to spend time reading what someone has written about a strategy.

I know some of you are reading this and thinking “I don’t have ANY goals with regard to blogging. I just do what’s fun and what I feel like.”

I think that as human beings we act for reasons, which are a kind of intention or goal. When most people say “I don’t have a blogging goal”, I interpret that as “I don’t think about goals.” But there is a difference between not thinking about goals and not having a goal.

Blogging is a human activity, and as such, it is purposeful. The only things we “do” that aren’t purposeful are things like breathing and blinking. So when someone says “I have no blogging goals”, I interpret that as “My goal is not to get bogged down by blogging and to keep it spontaneous and fun.” People who say they don’t have any goals usually do have them, and if you look closely, they also have strategies they use to meet them. For example, the person who says “I have no blogging goals” usually won’t read a post like this when it shows up in her reader. Not reading posts about blogging goals is an objective which serves to meet your goal of not thinking about your blogging and keeping it spontaneous and fun.

I think part of the issue is the word “goal” and what it connotes in our culture. We think it means conscious, striving, effortful, competitive, “work-related”, maybe monetized. But when I go on vacation, my goal is to relax and not think about anything. That’s a goal, but it’s quite the opposite of effortful and tiring and competitive.

Anyway, it occurred to me as I was reading the agenda for the Book Blogger Convention in New York in May (which looks great and which I would love to attend), that several of the panels did not interest me, because they meet objectives for goals I don’t have as a blogger. For example, the panel on marketing or the panel on the relationship between authors and blogger.

I recall having an email exchange with a fellow blogger and talking about stats. It quickly became apparent that all I cared about was subscribers and comments (number and quality) and all she cared about were number of hits and her placement in search engine rankings. It hit me that we had different goals. Mine was more focused on building community, which means repeat visitors and comments, and hers was more on visibility and reach. To meet my goal, I have to do certain things, and to meet her goal, she has to do different things. Or we might do the same things, but to meet different goals. So she might have a contest to generate interest in her blog and increase her numbers, and I might do a contest for a friend who has written a book, or to thank my readers helping me answer a particular question.

For someone more interested in community, it is more important that those people who are valuable contributors keep coming back. Not losing (good) contributors is the focus. For someone interested in, say, monetizing their blog, it is going to be important to see those numbers grow. This might mean paying more attention to what posts generate a lot of interest and hits. It won’t matter quite as much whether the same people keep coming back, but whether more and more people do. For someone who wants to be acknowledged as an expert in her blogging field, being on top of news is going to be very important. To meet that goal she’ll have the objective of doing timely links posts, and to meet that objective she’ll have to be on line a lot, to gather the news via Twitter, feeds, etc.

And these goals aren’t mutually exclusive. Building a good community is a way of growing in numbers, for example, which is a way to better monetize.

I don’t think about my blogging goals every day or every post. But I find it helpful to take a step back and ask myself about them every so often. Recently, when I changed the blog’s name, I realized that I had goals that the blog could help me meet, goals which are outside of the blog itself. Specifically, I could use this blog as a place to think out loud about issues in philosophy of fiction, a subject none of my real world colleagues work on. This will help with both teaching and research. So one issue I became more conscious of is the difference between goals for the blog, versus goals that the blog can help me achieve. (And they are not always compatible: my posts on philosophy of fiction tend not to generate a lot of discussion!) Now my thinking about “blog goals” encompasses both.

Reflecting on blog goals helps me to shuck interest in things that waste time, it helps with focus, it helps with crafting a clear blog identity, it helps minimize the stressful feeling that I should be doing “more”, and it helps with identifying the difference between blogs I merely enjoy versus blogs I want to learn from and emulate. As blogging goals change — and they do — raising my head out of a particular post and looking at the big picture helps clarify and solidify that change (at least for the moment, since goals will likely change again, and again). I recommend it!

6 responses so far

The Secret History of the Marketing of Lauren Willig’s Debut Novel

Mar 18 2010 Published by under Reviews

A discussion and review of Lauren Willig’s The Secret History of the Pink Carnation.

I listened to SH, narrated by Kate Reading, who did a wonderful job. I downloaded this last year, and it has languished in my audio TBR pile ever since. I was motivated to finally listen to it by Keishon’s TBR Challenge, one day late. Click on the cover below for excerpts, outtakes, and purchase information.

First a brief description and review (and, having only listened to the audio, I apologize in advance if I get any details wrong. I considered purchasing the ebook for my Kindle but at $9.99 — the paperback is $5.60 — I couldn’t justify the cost):

SH is a regency romance with a contemporary framing device. The contemporary story is a first person narration by Eloise, Harvard history dissertator in London researching the identity of the heroic Napoleon-foiler the Purple Gentian, and being prevented from getting the access she would like to the Selwick family papers by Colin, the distrusting, arrogant, but young and handsome, family descendant. When Eloise gets her hands on the diaries of Amy Balcourt, the narrative switches to third person omniscient, which was quite jarring for me, personally, as no diaries or letters would be written that way. The bulk of the novel follows the story of Amy, whose French father was killed by Napoleon’s men, and whose English mother died shortly thereafter of grief, as she travels from Shropshire England to France to join the league of the Purple Gentian and fight Napoleon herself. She meets and falls in love with the Purple Gentian, as well as meeting and being attracted Lord Richard Selwick, an Englishman abroad who appears to be happy working as a historian and collector of artifacts for Napeolon.

Here’s the thing about this book: you can’t take it even slightly seriously if you want to enjoy it. It is a comedy. You have a young English miss who decides to go to France and bring down Napoleon, who meets up with men in gardens at night, and who almost loses her virginity to a masked stranger in a rowboat on the Seine. You have a master spy whose major skill seems to be detecting the heroine’s identity by the sway of her hips, and you have a French inspector who says things like “so we meet again” and has a “super secret dungeon”, and a Napoleon whose office is left open for the seemingly constantly unchaperoned heroine to search in broad daylight.

The chick-lit framing story (complete with several references to shoe brands. I don’t have to name them for you, do I?) is minimal to the point of being nearly nonexistent, as is the plot of the historical bulk of the novel. Both Amy, the plucky, unexpectedly highly educated, impetuous, foot stamping, curl bouncing, tiny, beautiful heroine, and Richard, the sardonic, cool, handsome, intelligent super spy (we’ll have to take the author’s word on this, as our intrepid Amy scoops him nearly every turn, and her presence has the unfortunate effect of turning him into a giant raging hormone) who knows better than to deflower Amy, but can hardly help it.

I enjoyed this book for what it was: a historical romance with all of the usual tropes, played for comedy, and written in a style that mimics “better” fiction. You might be wondering, actually, what the author did with 464 pages and almost no plot? Well, she wrote. There are loads of comic asides and detailed descriptions, and careful scenes of dialogue, like this:

“I thought I’d find you here.”

“What?” Amy was jolted out of her blissful contemplation of Edouard’s letter, as a blue flounce brushed against her arm.

A basket of wildflowers on Jane’s arm testified to a walk along the grounds, but she bore no sign of outdoors exertion. No creases dared to settle in the folds of her muslin dress; her pale brown hair remained obediently coiled at the base of her neck; and even the loops of the bow holding her bonnet were remarkably even. Aside from a bit of windburn on her pale cheeks, she might have been sitting in the parlor all afternoon.

“Mama has been looking all over for you. She wants to know what you did with her skein of rose-pink embroidery silk.”

“What makes her think I have it? Besides,” Amy cut off what looked to be a highly logical response from Jane with a wave of Edouard’s letter, “who can think of embroidery silks when this just arrived?”

“A letter? Not another love poem from Derek?”

“Ugh!” Amy shuddered dramatically. “Really, Jane! What a vile thought! No,” she leaned forward, lowering her voice dramatically, “it’s a letter from Edouard.”

“Edward?” Jane, being Jane, automatically gave the name its English pronunciation. “So he has finally deigned to remember your existence after all these years?”

“Oh, Jane, don’t be harsh! He wants me to go live with him!”

Jane dropped her basket of flowers.

“You can’t be serious, Amy!”

“But I am! Isn’t it glorious!” Amy joined her cousin in gathering up scattered blooms, piling them willy-nilly back in the basket with more enthusiasm than grace.

I think you have to be in the mood for this kind of writing, because as a reader you are constantly being asked to pause in the action and smile or nod or appreciate the wittiness or nice turn of phrase, rather than just being invited to pass through them to get into the story. I did enjoy it overall — it was very very funny at points — especially on audio. But I have to confess that the style is not my thing, and so it’s a matter of subjective preference, and no reflection on the book, that I likely won’t continue with this series.

In preparation for writing this review, I looked at the Amazon reviews, and was shocked to see the vitriol with which the many people who gave SH a one or two star rating expressed their views of this book. How could so many of them be shocked to discover SH is a romance novel?

It turns out that the fact that this was a romance was not at the forefront of the marketing of the book, or it was, but there were other cues from other genres mixed in. First, the title and cover are not typical (no naming of a title, such as duke, no clinch, no bare skin). And it was released in hard back and trade paperback, not mass market.

How about the blurbs? Not that much to signal a romance. Eloisa James calls it a “delicious caper… a fascinating story”.

“This genre-bending read a dash of chick-lit with a historical twist has it all: romance, mystery, and adventure.” Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries

“A historical novel with a modern twist” — Mina Ford

“A merry romp with never a dull moment” — Mary Balogh

The blurb doesn’t have the usual cues either (a focus on the hero and heroine and their conflict), although it is clear there is a “passionate romance” somewhere within the pages:

The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, a wildly imaginative and highly adventurous debut, opens with the story of a modern-day heroine but soon becomes a book within a book. Eloise Kelly settles in to read the secret history hoping to unmask the Pink Carnation’s identity, but before she can make this discovery, she uncovers a passionate romance within the pages of the secret history that almost threw off the course of world events. How did the Pink Carnation save England? What became of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian? And will Eloise Kelly find a hero of her own?

Willig herself said in an article at MSNBC.com which pictures her at Harvard, where she was in law school when she wrote the book, “[SH] is sort of on that uneasy cusp between what you call a traditional romance novel and more mainstream historical fiction.”

And in the same article: “Laurie Chittenden, Willig’s editor at Dutton, said the novel is a unique marriage of ‘chick lit’ and serious fiction.”

In that article, and in many others at the time of the debut, and in the marketing of this book, Willig’s own educational background (graduate work in history at Harvard as well as a law degree) was a part of the package in selling the book as historical fiction.

I may be totally off base in this, but in my opinion, while the writing style was not typical of historical romance, the character, plot, situations, setting, sensuality level, and focus on romance situate this book 100% smack dab in the middle of the genre. To me, the difference was in the writing style.

If you took a passage like this:

A basket of wildflowers on Jane’s arm testified to a walk along the grounds, but she bore no sign of outdoors exertion. No creases dared to settle in the folds of her muslin dress; her pale brown hair remained obediently coiled at the base of her neck; and even the loops of the bow holding her bonnet were remarkably even. Aside from a bit of windburn on her pale cheeks, she might have been sitting in the parlor all afternoon.

And de-Williged it, it would read more like this:

Jane approached carrying a basket of wildflowers, looking her usual utterly composed self.

Because I happen to really like historical romance, I liked SH, but I think marketing this book as historical fiction backfired for at least some readers who have very negative opinions of romance and felt tricked into reading one.

Here’s a typical Amazon 1 or 2 star review:

I went in to reading the book expecting a tongue-in-cheek take on espionage during the French Revolution. Instead, I got a bodice-ripper.

And another:

The author sounds smart and interesting, to bad she’s using her skills to produce formulaic drivel. The historical background of this book is geared for the type of reader who only reads the first paragraph of any story in the newspaper.

A Goodreads review from 2006 is typical:

Perhaps my disappointment is my own fault. The jacket blurb is fabulous, the cover captivating, the premise intriguing. I waited weeks to have enough to time to curl up on the sofa and read this book. I made it to page 55 (at page 22 I decided to force myself to get to page 100-not going to happen though, I just can’t do it.).

I thought I was getting a fabulous historical novel, but it reads like every other Regency era romance out there

And people are still getting mad about it 5 years later. Here’s a GoodReads review from last month:

This book was crap. It was just complete and total crap. The thing that made me the most angry is that at the back of the book the author has a “historical note” where she talks about this garbage in light of its place in the “historical fiction” genre. Oh. My. Gosh. THERE WAS NOTHING HISTORICAL ABOUT IT! The Scarlet Letter is historical fiction. Cold Mountain is historical fiction. This, as I have already said, is crap. Mentioning Napoleon and the year 1803 does not make a book historical fiction. It makes it a crappy romance novel that mentions Napoleon and the year 1803.

If you look at blog reviews, many of them came from non-romance blogs, and many were quite critical on the same grounds. For example, seeFyrefly’s Book Blog for her (not vitriolic at all, but decidedly mixed) review and a list of other reviews.

I’m not shocked at how derogatory the reviewers were about the romance genre — that is old news. But it surprised me to take this little trip into the history of the series and see how SH was marketed.

I guess the publisher (Dutton, a division of Penguin, I think) knew what it was doing, because the sixth book in the series was just published this year and made the NYT extended bestseller list, and while there are far fewer reviews for later installments on Amazon.com, the average rating is higher (4 stars). I would be interested to know who the series’ core readers are, and whether it has attracted a lot of readers of historical fiction.

(PS. The title of this blog post is a joke, a play on the title of the book. I am under no illusion that I have “discovered” any kind of “secret” whatsoever!)

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Review: Mind Games, by Carolyn Crane

Mar 17 2010 Published by under Reviews

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Mind Games is the debut urban fantasy novel — the first of a trilogy — by Carolyn Crane, someone well known to the online romance community for her irreverent blog, The Thrillionth Page.  I received an advance copy from Carolyn (Mind Games will be released this Tuesday, March 23). Click on the image of the cover for excerpts, other reviews, and purchase info.

Mind Games is not romance, but it has strong romantic elements. I found it fresh, exciting, thought-provoking, mordantly funny, scary, and sexy. I absolutely loved this book.

There are so many genuine surprises in this book, from very early on, that it is hard to even know what counts as a spoiler. I have done my very best not to give anything away that in my opinion could diminish readers’ enjoyment of it.

Mind Games is set in Midcity, a congested, decaying city terrorized by a crime wave that began eight years prior to the action of the novel. Midcity at first seems very much like any contemporary US city, but Crane disperses cues throughout the book that add up to a complete and believable alternate urban fantasy world. The most significant difference is the presence of “highcaps”, humans with unusual cognitive powers, including standard fare fantasy abilities like telepathy, telekinesis, and memory erasing (“revisioning”), but also unusual choices like  “medical intuitionists”. As the book opens, our heroine, Justine Jones, is talking over lunch at the Mongolian Delites restaurant, with her boyfriend Cubby, who doesn’t believe highcaps exist, which is the official position of the authorities as well. But Midcity has been terrorized lately by an individual known as “the Brickslinger”, whom Justine believes is a telekinetic.

“Brickslinger” sounds goofy, doesn’t it?  And it is — one example of the quirky dark humor that permeates the book. But as we  see adults rushing in to their apartments to avoid getting hit, deserted ball fields and playgrounds, and children wearing helmets to school, it’s clear that “Brickslinger” is a perfect symbol for the social instability, urban decay, and random horror that grips Midcity.

Justine suffers from an extreme form of hypochondria. And since Mind Games is not only written in the first person, but in the first person present, you as the reader are sucked right in to her mental illness. Midcity has its own set of dread diseases, such as Vein Star Syndrome, the one that killed Justine’ mother, and which she fears most. I totally enjoyed Justine, but she is not a heroine for everyone. She is morbidly funny, smart, courageous, and resourceful, but she is breathtakingly narcissistic and selfish. Justine’s hypochondria negatively affects her life in every conceivable way, including interfering with her relationship with Cubby, an average Joe whom she refers to as her “aspirational boyfriend”.  Justine’s hypochondria was narrated in an entirely believable and gripping way. It makes her subject to constant self-doubt and second guessing (is this just a headache? Or something worse?). Especially chilling was Justine’s concomitant awareness that she is a hypochondriac, an awareness that could not prevent her from engaging in self-destructive behaviors like marathon web searches for symptoms or quick trips to the ER.

It’s Justine’s mental illness that attracts Sterling Packard, ruggedly handsome proprietor of Mongolian Delites (there’s a fascinating story there), who recruits her for his team of “disillusionists”. Packard has the ability to see psychic structures and detect psychological weaknesses. He can also absorb others’ weaknesses, leaving them temporarily free from them. He teaches Justine how to “push her awareness out through her energy dimension”, otherwise known as “zinging”, to rid herself of her hypochondria by giving it to someone else. All of the disillusionists’ power comes from their own illnesses in this way, whether it is anger issues, gambling addiction, or intense pessimism. We get a phenomenology of this stuff, not a detailed, exact science, and there’s a lumping together of mental illnesses and personality quirks, which worked for me.

The disillusionists (a small collection of well drawn, unique secondary characters) are hired by victims of crimes, who want a kind of revenge which the police cannot offer. Packard uses his skills to determine a target’s weaknesses. He then sends in those disillusionists who can best work together to break him down and “reboot” him. Packard convinces Justine that she can live a life free of fear, as well as help change people for the better. Since all Justine longs for is a “normal life”, the offer is irresistible. There’s an interesting kind of Platonism at work here: the underlying assumption is that evil doers are suffering under an illusion, mistaking the bad for the good. Packard contends that disillusioning, while a vigilante effort, is much more effective at rehabilitation than prison.

Here’s an excerpt from when Justine first meets Packard:

Some men are handsome in a sculptural, symmetrical way, but the restaurateur’s good looks come from imperfection: bumpy, maybe  once-broken nose, crudely shaped lips, a sort of  rough-and-tumble allure you can feel sure as gravity.

“Forget him.” He draws closer, and I become acutely aware of my pulse pounding. “I want to talk about what I can do for you, and what you can do for me.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I say. “My boyfriend and I are just finishing up.”

“You’re fine?” He looks at me hard— looks into me, it seems. “What about the vein star problem?”

How does he know? “What about it?” I ask.

He smiles, all radiant  self- possession. “I’m the one who can cure you.”

“Cure me of what? Anxiety or vein star syndrome?”

“Both. I can give you your life back.”

I regard him carefully. He has to be a highcap. My guess is he read my thoughts back there and wants to con me. Still, I have to ask. “What’s the something I do for you?”

“You’d work for me.”

“Doing what?”

“Does it matter? Is there anything you wouldn’t do to be free?”

I know a Faustian proposition when I hear one. “A lot of things. I’m not that desperate.”

“You were desperate ten minutes ago. You’ll be desperate again.” He fixes on my eyes. Slow smile. He’s like this handsome maniac.

“I’m used to desperate, buddy. Desperate’s my factory default. But thanks anyway.”

I felt that the high level of psychological insight and inventiveness and terror in this book was its greatest strength, and that extends to its moral psychology. Justine often wonders what the right thing is to do, what qualities a “good guy” has, and what mix of motivations is morally ok. When a disillusionist “zings” a target, she experiences a period of not just freedom from her own mental illness, but intense joy, known as ‘”the glory hour”. How strongly can a disillusionist look forward to the glory hour before what she is doing is less about making the world a better place and more about experiencing personal nirvana? This is a book that makes good on the urban fantasy promise of postmodern moral ambiguity. It presents very clearly the ongoing, neverending struggle of figuring out what to do and motivating yourself to do it, and seriously questions whether the struggle is winnable at all.

This would be enough for a whole book in some less skilled writer’s hands. But Mind Games not only brings us along on Justine’s first few hair raising disillusioning efforts, but offers a very compelling overarching story arc having to do with Packard’s history, his ulterior motives, and his mysterious powerful nemesis. Justine and Packard are drawn to each other, and their relationship generates all the sexual tension and excitement a romance reader would want, but he betrays her again and again … or are they really betrayals? Crane’s use of first person narration keeps us in suspense as to who is good and who isn’t for much of the book. Things get especially complicated, and a triangle ensues, when Justine goes after her final target, The Engineer, a man to whom both she and Packard have some kind of personal interest, an interest which may be tainting their view of him … or not. There are a few sexual scenes in the book which I would say are  of “medium level explicitness” from a romance reader’s point of view.

I think this is an amazingly polished debut, but it is not a perfect book. At a few points in the middle, there was some repetitiveness. Also, there are a couple of things that I would love to see more fully developed in the next book. For example, the moral status of high caps. Are we to assume they are dangerous merely because they have greater powers than normal humans?  Is theirs, then, a kind of evil that is not about illusion? Finally, and this is something that may be less of a complaint than an observation: there is no mention in the book, IIRC, of the mental health profession. Aren’t there therapies or drugs for people with anger issues, hypochondria, or depression in Midcity, and if not, why not? The absence was slightly jarring since the world in which we live today is so thoroughly saturated with mental health discourse.

But those are minor niggles. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I can’t wait for the next one.

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