• Halfway to the Grave with Bonus Material: A Night Huntress Novel for $1.99
• Cassie Palmer Series: Touch the Dark, Claimed by Shadow, Embrace the Night and Curse the Dawn in one bundle for $7.51

*******

Kindle lending is being tested by readers in the Seattle, Washington area. The Kindle Support page has been updated. You will only be able to use WiFi to access the library from your Kindle device:

Note: Public library books require an active Wi-Fi connection for wireless delivery to a Kindle device. Library books will not be delivered via your Kindle’s 3G connection. If trying to send to a Kindle device and do not have an active Wi-Fi connection, you may instead choose to load your library book via USB. Both Mac and Windows users can manage Kindle content through a USB connection.

Even when a book’s lending period expires, you will still keep all your notes and highlights:

What happens to my notes and highlights after a loan expires?
You can always access their notes and highlights through kindle.amazon.com, even after a book expires. And if you check a book out again, or purchase it from Amazon.com all of you notes and highlights will appear in the book as before the loan expired.

The library feature will be available for all apps:

What Kindle devices can I read public library books on?

You can read borrowed Kindle books on any generation Kindle device or all free Kindle apps, as well as in your web browser with Kindle Cloud Reader. Public library books require an active Wi-Fi connection for wireless delivery to a Kindle device.

Library books will not be delivered via your Kindle’s 3G connection. If trying to send to a Kindle device and do not have an active Wi-Fi connection, you may instead choose to load your library book via USB.

Via MobileRead by way of Nate the Great.

******

Berkley Executive Editor, Cindy Hwang, and author Meljean Brook, are engaging in an author/editor chat at Goodreads. They are answering questions about Brook’s Guardian and Steampunk series. There are ARCs of Heart of Steel to be had. They are answering questions about publishing in general. I thought the questions and answers about how much the editor contributed to the overall story were very interesting.

One of the things I always try to remember is that these characters are not MY characters–they’re the author’s characters, so I usually try to give my authors enough room and support so they can be the characters the authors envisioned. Sometimes, I do have issues or concerns about the direction a character is going in–if I see the issues in the proposal stage, I’ll point them out there. If I see a problem in the manuscript, I’ll talk it with the author. Ultimately, though, I won’t force an author to make changes if it’s something she feels strongly about, since it’s her name on the cover

Hwang, among other things, commented that novellas can birth entire series such as the Eileen Wilks’ Lupi series:

This is the case with Eileen Wilks’ Lupi series–it was originally a novella in the anthology LOVER BEWARE. I loved the world and characters in her story so much, I encouraged her to develop a series from it. I’ve also used novellas to introduce new authors to readers–this is what I did with Meljean. Her first published work was a novella that was a prequel and introduction to the Guardian universe in the anthology HOTSPELL.

******

Someone brought TheDroidLibrary.com to my attention and I just want to give you all a warning about this. The Droid Library sells itself as a subscription service where, for $60, you can download millions of books. They proclaim to have partnerships with major publishers and show books on the site like The Help, Twilight, and even Harry Potter. The major publishers are engaged in Agency pricing which means it has to offer the same price on books everywhere. Further, Harry Potter isn’t even released, legally, in digital form. You can read more about this company here at Gear Diary. All I can say is buyer beware.

******

Amazon doesn’t sound like a very good employer. High unemployment rates are being taken advantage of by using only contract/temporary workers and running through them like a playboy and his playmates:

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

*******

And while redhead women are the holy grail for some men in romance books, in the real world, the demand for redheads is low according to the world’s biggest sperm bank.

The world’s largest sperm bank is telling redheads to keep their semen.

Demand for ginger-haired donors is so low that Cryos International says they needn’t bother donating.

********

Seanan McGuire argues that print equals accessibility of knowledge for the poor and that the move toward digital books will increase the digital divide.

********

In a situation where truth is stranger than fiction, German news reported a teen boy having emerged from the woods suffering from amnesia.

A mysterious young fellow named Ray, around 17-years-old, walked out of a German forest last week and told authorities he and his dad, who had just died, had been living in the wild for about five years. But that’s all Ray remembers about his life.

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Midday Review Links: Kindle is everywhere but Canada (WTF?)
2. Tuesday Midday Links: Harlequin Horizon’s, A self publishing venture
3. Tuesday Midday Links: Win $1,000 from Avon

NOTE: there will probably be spoilers for the events of the film. Read at your own discretion.

“You’re the girl of my dreams…and apparently I’m the man of yours.” – Henry Roth

Even as I sit here writing this review, I can’t believe it. I’ve actually watched, and enjoyed, a second Adam Sandler film. Will miracles never cease? Thank you DA community, for urging me to give this one a chance because if you hadn’t, I never would have. But let me also be clear that it’s Sandler and Barrymore’s performances that work for me while some of the secondary arcs fell totally flat.

Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) is a marine veterinarian who works in a sea aquarium type job in beautiful Hawaii. He’s also a player afraid of commitment who has worked out various schemes that enable him to quickly hook up with, enjoy, and then dump lovely tourists when their vacations end. One day, he spies a beautiful young woman eating breakfast in a local diner and chats her up. But to his surprise, the next day when he approaches her, she seems to have no memory of him. That’s when Sue (Amy Hill) who owns the diner, pulls him aside and tells him about Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore).

Over a year ago, Lucy was in a car accident with her father (Blake Clark). She sustained terrible brain damage that prevents her brain from processing short term memories into long term ones. Since the accident, each morning, she wakes up thinking it’s the same day and has no recollection of anything she did the days before. Her father and brother (Sean Astin) work to keep her from realizing the extent of her trauma since they’ve seen what it does to her to be told.

Now Henry has a dilemma. He can forget this woman or try to make her love him over again each day. Is there hope of a future for a man who can’t forget the woman of his dreams and a woman who can only remember him one day at a time?

In the movie, Lucy is presented as having something called Goldfield Syndrome which in reality doesn’t exist using that term. Her condition is actually closest to anterograde amnesia and though a rare condition, it can happen though maybe not quite like in the movie. So I would just advise people to go with it and enjoy the film. One thing that I do like about the film is that there is no magic cure. Henry uses some clever devices to help Lucy so she can progress in her life beyond the “Groundhog Day” existence she was leading but she doesn’t have another accident or anything else that suddenly restores her. As her doctor (Dan Aykroyd) tells her, her condition is permanent.

There are several things I truly enjoyed about “50 First Dates.” Barrymore and Sandler do have great onscreen chemistry. I loved Henry’s daily schemes to get Lucy to fall for him as well as the way he stands up to her father and brother when they try and get him to stop. I can really see him becoming a changed man. The scene where he watches as her family tells Lucy of her condition (again) and then all drive out the Callahan Institute along with Henry is both funny and heartbreaking and explained to me why Lucy’s family worked so hard each day to keep her from rediscovering her condition. I also liked the relationship between Lucy and her family. It’s that primal parental/fraternal thing that keeps these men enduring the same mind numbing day, over and over, in order to shield Lucy from any pain that they can avoid.

Director Peter Segal manages a nice balance between sweet, serious and funny in Henry and Lucy’s relationship. There’s the homage to the diner scene in “Groundhog Day” as Henry “meets” Lucy again and again as well as other “meeting” scenes including a hilarious one which shows that Lucy has a bat and doesn’t hesitate to use it to mete out justice. She also does some interesting “construction” projects with her daily waffles. These are counterbalanced by the emotional scene when Lucy – after hearing of how Henry has put his life’s dream plans on hold for her – goes to break up with him. And then doesn’t remember him when they meet later at his job. The ending was also a surprise to me and I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it.

But as much as I like Henry and Lucy’s part of the film, there are two characters I don’t care for. One is Henry’s friend Ula and the other is Henry’s coworker Alexa. The humor involving both these two is crude. In the case of Alexa, it’s at least a bit funny but with Ula it’s just crude and to me not funny at all. Since the film starts out with this, it’s something that has to be endured before getting to the good stuff with Lucy. Again, if not for people urging me to watch this, I might have turned it off early on.

This is definitely a movie that gets better as it goes along and one that I found I liked more the second time I watched it. The commentary with Barrymore and Segal is also worth listening to as they talk about some of the challenges and rewards of making the film. Watch for several “natural light” scenes, including one in the “golden hour” near sunset, which are lovely. While the medical stuff might not stand up to scrutiny, it defies Hollywood convention and presents a condition and then leaves the characters to cope with the created reality instead of contriving a magic fix. I’m glad I gave it a chance and really glad that I watched Tony Bourdain’s Hawaii segment so that I understand the abundance of Spam meals at the diner. B

~Jayne

Related posts:

1. Friday Film Review: While You Were Sleeping
2. Friday Film Review: Ever After
3. Friday Film Review: A Room with a View

When I was offered the chance to review The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton I had no idea what to expect. I’ve had mixed reading experienced with Avon historicals, and while I have enjoyed our few brief exchanges on Twitter, I really had no sense of where your books fit in within the Historical Romance subgenre. The title and cover art are formulaic Avon (i.e. not remarkable to me at all), and the marketing seems to put your writing style somewhere between Lisa Kleypas and Julia Quinn, which wasn’t a big help, either. And I’ll confess that for perhaps the first few chapters of the book I was skeptical: a young woman kidnapped, stripped of her clothes, and abandoned (temporarily) in a deserted Yorkshire cottage; a dandy and member of the ton conked on the head, partially stripped and robbed, who wakes with amnesia. Said dandy is precisely the man who cut the heroine dead with one of his “witticisms” (in this case that she had a head like a cauliflower) and ruined her chances with a prospective suitor. How these coincidences persist given all the English Regency characters running around Historical Romance, I’m not sure, but one lesson I did learn (again) from reading this book: it is unwise to judge a book solely by its cover and title. Because The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton proved to be a witty, interesting, trope-busting read.

Celia Seaton has had a run of very bad luck. First her mother dies, then her father — who is raising her in a remote area of India, supposedly under the aegis of the East India Company – is killed on his way to meet Celia on a ship bound for England, leaving Celia to sail alone and without any prospect of family or employment upon arrival. Celia, who has never set foot on English soil, is briefly taken in by her uncle, who dies before he can provide for her economic security. From there she gains a position as a governess to four boys, whose widowed father proposes marriage, only to throw Celia out when the man’s sister convinces him (erroneously) that Celia has a lover. She is currently on her way to visit a Mrs. Stewart, a stranger who has written Celia to say that she knew her parents and her recent “misfortunes,” when she is kidnapped at gunpoint and left nearly naked in the abandoned Yorkshire cottage. Celia’s kidnapper has, however, suggested he will return to have a little “fun” with her later on.

With that promise lingering, Celia manages to get herself out of the attic where she’s been imprisoned, only to find an unconscious and half-dressed man lying across the cottage’s doorway. Recognizing him as Tarquin Compton – ton dandy and all around jerk – Celia manages to rouse him, seemingly intact except for his memory. At which point Celia tells Tarquin of the danger to them both, but fibs a bit about Tarquin’s identity; she tells him that they are a betrothed couple and that he – Terence Fish – is studying to be a vicar. Terence/ Tarquin is not convinced of the story’s truth (for one thing, he despises the name Fish and has vague, periodic memories of a rather high-flying lifestyle), but he is certainly aware of the predicament he and Celia are in, and together they set off across the moors, hopefully to find refuge with the mysterious Mrs. Stewart. Neither has any money (Tarquin has his boots, his breeches, and an erotic novel he recently purchased on his way to his Yorkshire property, while Celia has an old, tarnished silver baby rattle that belonged to her mother and that apparently escaped the thief’s eye), both are only half-dressed (Celia’s shift is far too short and her only other garment is a pinned-up blanket that serves as a makeshift skirt), and neither has any conscious idea of where they are or in what direction salvation may lie.

As Terence/Tarquin and Celia trudge across the moors (part of which, not surprisingly, turns out to be Tarquin’s Yorkshire property), they encounter everything from sheepherders who think they’re thieving gypsies to a farmer who agrees to give them a ride and a meal but who later wants to purchase Celia for a bride, and always they are aware that Celia’s kidnappers are in close pursuit. What neither can figure out is why a young woman of so little social consequence would be the object of such a dedicated kidnapping plot and search, and while Terence/Tarquin struggles with his memory loss, he can only rely on Celia to fill in the blanks of his now-forgotten life. She is terrified he will remember who he is before she can tell him about her lie, but even more she is afraid that once he knows who he – and therefore she – is, he will abandon her to her less-than-illustrious fate. For Celia’s experiences of Tarquin Compton have not been pleasant. Several times introduced to her, he never remembered her name, and once he publicly designated her a cauliflower (due to an unfortunate attempt to make her red hair appear lighter and blonder), the little chance she had to make a good match was destroyed. Consensus indicates that Celia is not possessed of great beauty, and she had only the most tenuous of connections to the ton. Once those were spent she really was an outsider to respectable society, both in position and perspective, and she has no faith in Tarquin Compton to help her.

Terence Fish, on the other hand, is an entirely different sort of man. He is protective and solicitous, suspicious of the story Celia told him of his life but trusting that she told him what she genuinely knew. In fact, Terence had a growing fear that he might be a “nobleman” but not a “gentleman,” recognizing the quality of his boots, for example, not to mention the erotic volume he has to keep snatching back from Celia. More importantly, Terence Fish finds Celia Seaton extremely appealing, and he wastes little time in seeking the physical commitment from her that a betrothed man might convince his fiancée – especially a fiancée who seemed to enjoy reading erotic fiction – to indulge.

That so much happens before Tarquin regains his memory might suggest a quick resolution to the plot once he comes back to himself. However, one of the surprising delights of this book is that Tarquin’s recollected life is actually a catalyst to the real heart of the novel, as well as most of its trope-rich action. For by the time Tarquin realizes who he is, the connection he shares with Celia is far more than casual, and even though his social position would allow him to abandon her with impunity, his conscience – not to mention a lower part of him – won’t allow him that option. With the mystery of Celia’s kidnapping still opaque, Tarquin takes her to Shropshire, where his best friend, Sebastian Iverly, is staying with his new wife’s family. Of course, Tarquin forgets that Diana is very close to delivering her first child, and the scene at the Montrose’s home is, to put it mildly, chaotic. What happens from this point on is really too complicated to explain (and would entail some spoilers and delicious details best discovered by the reader), but I can say that while I had guessed the great mystery quite a bit before its revelation, the way it is incorporated into the larger plot strains of the book is very logical and clever.

While the set-up for Celia and Tarquin’s amnesiac road trip seemed somewhat tedious to me, the momentum continues to build throughout the novel, making each chapter more engaging and suspenseful than the last. The outrageousness of the set-up is subtly admitted to within the book itself, especially by the clever framing device of Tarquin’s erotic volume, The Genuine and Remarkable Amours of The Celebrated Author, Peter Aretin, a genuine 18^th C novel that Celia finds outside the cottage. The little book provides almost constant subtext, making many amusing contributions to Celia and Tarquin’s growing sexual attraction, not to mention quite an education for Celia, and, later in the novel, one of the younger Montrose sisters. The book becomes a clever way to negotiate around a heroine who is both virginal and sexually aware (her life in India and her father’s Indian companion also provided her with a rather unconventional sexual education). It also allows for some pretty funny bits involving the hero’s, well, bits, which riff off the standard Romance expectation that the hero is always well-endowed and often overwhelming to the heroine’s inexperienced eyes. In fact, one of my favorite things about the novel is that numerous genre conventions — amnesia, the road trip, the house party, the rusticating hero, just to name a few — are renovated and renewed in interesting ways.

The writing is witty, too. When Tarquin looks down upon Celia sleeping in the midst of much birdsong, and the reader expects some sentiment about her hair or face, Tarquin “wondered if she could be deaf in one ear.” There are clever turns of phrase, as when women would “flutter like deranged doves” around Tarquin. And there are some laugh-out-loud scenes, like the one in which Sebastian drunkenly worries about the physics of a baby’s head and the usual size of the birth canal as his wife labors without complication elsewhere in the house.

On a deeper, level, though, The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton is itself a novel about learning lessons and lessons learned, around which the novel’s more poignant elements are revealed. Celia has felt like an outsider all her life, and as an unbeautiful woman she sees herself as “a shabby wraith in the shadow of [Tarquin’s] magnificence.” How can she believe that a man like Tarquin could ultimately love her, especially when so much of his ego seems to depend on the good opinion of others? And Tarquin, who has spent so much of his adult life so privileged he no longer consciously sees himself as privileged, attraction to Celia is both challenging and vexing. After all, the woman lied to him, humiliated him, and then has the gall to question his intentions and his feelings for her — whatever they may be. There is a point in the novel where Celia is done-over by Diana’s maid, and while she cannot wait to surprise Tarquin with her new look, his attraction is already past her surface appearance. It’s really a lovely moment, because it highlights the disparities in their perceptions of each other at that point in the novel. And while the consummate insider and the absolute outsider do share an early personal history of sadness, the crucial difference between Tarquin and Celia – that he has had influential people to count on at crucial points in his life – stands as a very real obstacle between them. Not as much because of the social implications, but even more because of the emotional consequences of their very different life conditioning.

Despite the length of this review, I feel as if I have barely broken the surface of my feelings about this book. There is so much I admire and appreciate about the craftsmanship and a great deal that entertained me in a fresh, unexpected way. The way the different tropes play on surface v. substance and appearance v. reality, for example, and illuminate the different prisms through which people view themselves and each other. In some ways it is light, but not in the way of wallpaper historicals or straight romps; the light is emitted from the effervescent voice and prose. So what kept it from being an A read for me? This is the hardest part to articulate, because in the end it distills down to a matter of chemistry. Sure there were some anachronistic-sounding phrases, and Celia delivered a number of impassioned comments on the relatively disempowered status of women that fit her outsider status but still sounded a bit modern to me (or at least as vehicles for sharing historical details that might not otherwise be easily worked in), but mostly my issue with The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton is that I never felt deeply emotionally invested in Tarquin, Celia, or their relationship. In fact, I was more emotionally drawn to Sebastian and Diana, whose book I’m now going to go back and read. Had I fallen in love with this book to the degree that I admire and appreciate it, it would have been an easy A. Without that emotional clincher, though, it’s a B+.

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. All About Amnesia, a Guest Post by Miranda Neville
2. REVIEW: The Wild Marquis by Miranda Neville
3. REVIEW: The Dangerous Viscount by Miranda Neville

I thought I’d read a lot of amnesia romances, but found I needed a refresher course, (assisted by AAR’s Special Title Listing). For me amnesia works best when the couple are somehow connected, whether or not the non-amnesiac partner is aware of the fact. When they are total strangers, most problems will be solved once the memory returns. I love it when the writer lets me in on the disaster that lies in wait. In Teresa Medeiros’ A Kiss to Remember, the heroine, desperate to find a husband, invents a whole life for the amnesiac man she finds in the woods. The reader has the delicious knowledge that the man she quickly falls in love with is, in fact, her worst enemy.

In romantic suspense the amnesiac is usually menaced by some unknown peril. Anne Stuart’s Winter’s Edge is a classic of this kind of plot: the heroine doesn’t know if her estranged husband is the one who wishes her dead; meanwhile the real villain must finish her off before she regains her memory. Just to add to the fun, the heroine feels like a different person from the character described to her. She–and we– have to learn why she was putting on an act and how it ruined her marriage.

One of the great appeals of the amnesia plot is seeing a character learn the hidden truth of his or her character or emotions while divorced from the preconceptions and prejudices of real life. Medeiros’ cruel duke becomes a good and kind man when freed from the bitterness of his unhappy upbringing. In Mary Balogh’s wonderfully melodramatic Deceived, a bride is kidnapped at the church door by her divorced husband and loses her memory from a blow to the head. He tells her they’ve been happily married for seven years and it seems right to her: without the knowledge of his supposed infidelity and long estrangement, she readily accepts that she loves the hero because, Big Misunderstanding aside, she does. And if you want complicated, try Lynne Graham’s The Sicilian’s Mistress. The amnesiac heroine lives quietly with her very straight-laced parents and her small son (secret baby!), whom she believes to be the result of a youthful indiscretion. Enter the Sicilian: turns out she was his mistress, whom, of course, he dumped when he “discovered” she was a slut. A mistress! Horrors! Plus he reveals she’s been adopted by the wrong parents.

The recovery of memory often stops a developing relationship in its tracks. The couple who fell in love when one member had no idea of his identity, has to fall in love all over again when he or she becomes a “different” person. Medeiros’ duke must forgive the heroine her deception. Balogh’s heroine must discover that her love for her husband was real. (And incidentally, SPOILER ALERT, reveal the existence of the secret baby.)

Amnesia creates a power imbalance. The character who loses his or her identity is automatically at a disadvantage. I don’t pretend to have read every amnesia romance out there, but it seems in contemporary romance it’s more often the woman who loses her memory, hence the popularity of the trope in the Harlequin Presents type of story which depends on male power and apparent female helplessness. In historicals it’s the opposite: with the inherent advantage of men in the past, amnesia turns the power differential on its head.

When I decided to write an amnesia plot I got onto the trusty Google to find out the medical truth about the condition. I’m no doctor, but it didn’t take much to convince me that a realistic treatment of the illness wasn’t going to serve my purposes. One of the likely concomitants of memory loss is permanent brain damage: not a desirable condition for the hero or heroine of a romance. Clearly I had to get away from reality and use amnesia as a literary device, as writers more distinguished and successful than I have done. This decision gives the writer the advantage of defining the form temporary memory loss takes to fit the requirements of character and plot. So don’t read most amnesia books, including my own, with any expectation of medical accuracy.

The hero of The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton, Tarquin Compton, is a dandy and the kind of social leader who destroys a debutante with one quip. I’d already decided that a dandy needed to lose his clothes. Then it occurred to me that the persona of a society darling is such an artificial one that he needed to be stripped of his very identity to learn what’s underneath. And just for fun he finds himself stranded (almost naked) far away from his urban comfort zone in company with a woman who resents him for his careless destruction of her prospects.

An unforeseen challenge of writing the amnesia plot is the revelation of back story. A writer reveals the past through dialogue and internal monologue. But when a character has no knowledge of his past, there’s nothing to reveal. Initially I wrote a long section for my hero before he’s hit on the head, but my critique partner firmly informed me it was data dump. She was right, damn it. (I am not a writer who enjoys deleting 5000 words in a single blow.) I kept a brief pre-amnesia passage for Tarquin and left the reader to learn about him from the skewed perspective of the heroine and conclusions (mostly laughably wrong) drawn from his own fragmented memory.

By the way, this book is lamentably lacking in secret babies, but I make no promises for the future.

You can find out more about Miranda Neville’s new release, The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton, at her website.

Related posts:

1. My First Sale by Miranda Neville
2. REVIEW: The Dangerous Viscount by Miranda Neville
3. REVIEW: The Wild Marquis by Miranda Neville

Your first novel, a psychological thriller titled Before I Go to Sleep, has garnered considerable attention. The cover of my advanced reader’s edition proclaims that rights have been sold in over thirty countries, and movie rights sold to acclaimed director Ridley Scott. There are blurbs from Tess Gerritsen and Dennis Lehane calling it “Quite simply the best debut I’ve ever read,” and “Exceptional,” respectively.

For these reasons, I approached Before I Go to Sleep with high expectations, and while I can’t say that it was badly written, I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it, either.

Before I Go to Sleep opens in present day England when its narrator, Christine Lucas, wakes up. Christine finds herself lying next to a middle-aged man whom she doesn’t recognize. The man is wearing a wedding ring and Christine is revolted by the realization she must have slept with a married man, and not even in a hotel room, but in his and his wife’s home.

But when she goes to the bathroom and sees herself in the mirror, Christine is further shocked to realize that she herself is middle-aged, and she too wears a wedding band. Christine isn’t the twenty-something she thought she was, but a woman in her late forties: a woman with amnesia.

After seeing herself in photographs on the wall, pictured with the man beside whom she’d woken, Christine confronts the sleeping man – her husband, Ben. “You seem to be able to retain information while you’re awake,” Ben tells her. “But then, when you sleep, most of it goes.”

After Ben leaves to go to work, Christine receives a telephone call from a man named Dr. Nash. Dr. Nash tells Christine that they have been meeting to work together on trying to restore her memories. Although initially suspicious, Christine allows Dr. Nash to make a house call. They go to a nearby park and it is there that Dr. Nash explains to Christine that she has been keeping a journal as part of her treatment.

Dr. Nash says that when they began working together, Christine decided not to confide in Ben about their work. She did not want to raise her husband’s hopes until she and Dr. Nash saw measurable improvement in her condition. Dr. Nash gives Christine the journal, which she had given to him to read.

When she returns home she is stunned to see that on the journal’s front page she has written “DON’T TRUST BEN.”

Before I Go to Sleep is divided into three parts. The brief Part I which I have just summarized, is narrated in first person present tense. Part II, the longest section, comprised of Christine’s journal, is written in first person past tense. The book’s last quarter takes place after Christine has read the journal, and since it includes the ending, I probably should say no more about it.

Christine’s journal shows how Christine begins each day with little memory of the past twenty or so years of her life. Some days she remembers a bit, others she is lost in a mist. But her journal is Christine’s tether to reality, to the past, to the future, to the passage of time. Each day Dr. Nash calls her and reminds her where it is hidden, and most days Christine reads it and records the events of that day.

Eventually a picture emerges: Ben, Christine’s husband and caretaker, isn’t being entirely honest with Christine. He omits certain details when he tells her of their past, and as her therapy starts working and Christine begins to recall bits and pieces of that past, she grows more and more troubled by Ben’s omissions.

Is the feeling that tells Christine not to trust Ben paranoia, or is Christine’s gut sending her a message worth heeding? Is Ben a loving husband leaving out the most painful details of Christine’s past so as not to cause her to relive past traumas day after day, or does he have a more sinister motive?

There are only a handful of characters in Before I Go to Sleep. For most of the novel, Christine’s only recurrent contacts are Ben and Dr. Nash, and she rarely leaves the house she shares with Ben. That aspect of the book created a claustrophobic feeling in me, one that served to show how confined Christine’s world has become since her memory loss. In contrast, Christine’s rare flashbacks showed that she once led a much fuller and larger life.

Christine’s narration gives the reader an unusual depth of insight into how awful it must be to wake up each day with no memories of the previous day. The context of the novel gives many reasons to sympathize with Christine, but although I felt sorry for her, I did not fully warm to her.

I’m not sure I can fully articulate the reasons for this. It may have been because her narration was so matter of fact. It may have been because there was almost nothing glamorous or romantic in her life. Or it may have been because her story was so discomfiting and disturbing.

Because of all of the above, I didn’t feel a deep connection with Christine, and yet, the book evoked dread in me. Dread not just for what might happen to her, but dread for what had already happened to her. The book was not just a thriller, but also a meditation on the nature of memory – how it defines us, and how much we depend on it.

Despite the psychological acuity in the writing, or perhaps because of it, I did not enjoy reading the book. In fact, whereas some other readers couldn’t put it down, I found it difficult to pick it back up. There have been psychological thrillers I’ve loved, but the older I get, the harder it becomes for me to read about vulnerable characters in jeopardy. Christine was acutely vulnerable, and reading about her made me feel uneasy to an uncomfortable degree.

Grading this book is tough, because again, I don’t feel that the writing was bad. The prose was better than average and the characterization well done. The characters felt real to me, and although you are a male author, Christine felt authentically female. There was a twist that I didn’t anticipate, and yet, when the truth was revealed, I saw that clues had been there all along.

Still, reading this book was not an enjoyable experience, and I know I will not read it again. C.

Sincerely,

Janine

Book Link | Kindle | Amazon | nook | BN | Borders
| Sony| KoboBooks

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Can’t Stand the Heat? by Margaret Watson
2. REVIEW: Where Serpents Sleep by C.S. Harris
3. REVIEW: Sleep No More by Susan Crandall

The Heir from Nowhere by Trish Morey.  There are two problems with the story for me, the first being believability. Oh, I know that seems like a crazy accusation to level against an HP, a series that pretty much thrives on the fantastical more than even paranormals but in bringing together two disparate individuals, the circumstances of their connection needs to be authentic.  Angie Cameron was mistakenly impregnated with the fertilized egg belonging to the wife of Dominic Pirelli.  The results of the mistake are found 12 weeks later and Angie contacts Dominic to tell him the news.

Angie becoming pregnant with Pirelli’s child in the first place seemed impossible.  The clinic that Dominic used was so expensive and so exclusive that Angie shouldn’t have even got through the door let alone be allowed fertility treatments.  This was even more baffling because Angie’s husband didn’t want her to go through with the treatments so why would he “scrape together the money for the procedures” and then “cancel a holiday” and get “a subsidised place in the Carmichael Clinic.”  Angie’s supposedly despised husband’s actions didn’t match up with what we needed to believe about him – that he was an emotionally cruel man who left Angie with nothing.  To make Angie seem even more desperate, Angie’s husband left her for a teenage girl and took the car and all of the furniture except a couple of chairs.  Angie is living in her house with mounting bills, no food, no furniture, and “thin” ragged clothes.  It’s like a Dickens book, only not.  How could they have afforded any fertility payments if they were one step away from true poverty?

Angie was left so destitute that it was a miracle she wasn’t homeless in the streets. At least, that is the picture that is portrayed.   She was described as thin, waiflike; a “ragged urchin” with an “unkempt ponytail.”  The imbalanced power dynamic was troubling. I kept wondering why Angie had to be made so down in the mouth, so virtually incapable of taking care of herself in order to make the romance work.  Ultimately, it was Angie’s weakness that really led to my dislike of the book. I know I was supposed to see Angie as this internally strong woman, refusing to have an abortion, carrying on like a martyr, but I kept thinking that maybe if she got a job and a little public assistance she wouldn’t be the lonely street urchin just waiting for the rich man to sweep her up into his arms.  Good thing that she is a presents heroine, though, because Dominic takes her away and solves all her problems. Yay!

I know I’ve enjoyed Morey stories in the past, but the extreme self pity Angie presents was too much for me to take.  D

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*****

The Secret She Can’t Hide by India Grey. Kate Edwards was sent to interview Grand Prix race car driver, Cristiano Maresca, and instead ended up in bed with him, in love with him, and impregnated by him. Only Cristiano was involved in a terrible racing accident after they met and lost his memory.  His handlers, a jealous woman in particular, kept everyone at bay, even Kate.  Kate’s pregnancy and Cristiano’s  fatherhood was kept a secret from him.  Cristiano decides to return to racing four years later and Kate screws up the courage to tell Cristiano once more about the son that they made together.

Kate, unlike Angie, was not a martyr.  She had friends and was able to have her baby and take care of her son without the help of some Presents hero.  She even has a house and furniture!  But she does acknowledge that she should make one more attempt to bring Cristiano the news he has refused to hear previously. There was a good enough explanation for me on both sides as to why Cristiano was still unaware of his son’s existence.

What I liked was that Cristiano, upon seeing Kate again and still suffering from memory loss, is attracted to her again.  Whatever connection Kate and Cristiano had four years ago wasn’t fleeting.  The amnesia of Cristiano’s is used to affect the right amount of agnst. Oh, the pain that Kate feels when Cristiano treats her like he has never seen her before is delicious. I ate it up with a spoon (I know this sounds macabre but this agnst is exactly the reason I read HPs).  What was surprising was the direction the story took. It many ways it was unpredictable even though it incorporated many of the HP mainstays – the secret baby, the amnesia, the marriage of convenience, misunderstandings.   I was always a little off balance in the story and I wasn’t sure whether I liked that. In some sense, I felt like I wasn’t given the time to absorb the characters’ feelings about one issue and then the next. I wasn’t allowed to savor the moments. But I liked Kate and Cristiano who seemed like equals, maybe not in the pocketbook, but certainly in all other areas. B-

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Emily and the Notorious Prince by India Grey
2. Interview with Jennifer Morey, The Secret Soldier
3. REVIEW: Then You Hide by Roxanne St. Claire

Dear Ms. Banks:

I have to confess, although I think you know this already, that I am all over the place with your books. Some I have enjoyed tremendously, others have bored me, and still others make me shake my head in dismay. When I had heard you were writing books in the romantic suspense genre, I was interested because most everything I had read from you had been purely erotic in nature, meaning that the conflict was centered mostly around the relationship of the two (or more) protagonists, usually based on sexual exploration. The blurb for The Darkest Hour didn’t sound like an erotic romance and it is not.

The story opens with Ethan Kelly trying to drink himself into oblivion, again. Ethan had married his childhood love, Rachel, a young girl that became part of his family long before they were married. But Ethan loved his job as a Navy SEAL maybe more than he loved Rachel and their marriage began to disintegrate when he was gone for weeks on end, with no word when he would return. Lonely and alone, Rachel went on a relief mission and only her remains were returned to Ethan. Devastated by how he had failed Rachel, how he never gave enough of himself to her, Ethan can’t live with himself.

On the one year anniversary of her death, Ethan receives a package which suggests that his precious wife is not dead, but has instead been held in captivity in some hellhole in Cambodia. Ethan is struck by two extreme emotions: hope and hate. Hope that his beloved is still alive and hate at himself for allowing her to be a prisoner for over a year. Ethan seeks out the help of his brothers, all former military who run a security firm that rescued people, freed hostages, “blew shit up.” I loved the scene in which Ethan took his case to his brothers.

"Ethan," Donovan began in his quiet voice. "You have to know, this is probably just a hoax. Some sick joke. It might even be someone with a grudge against KGI. What better way to get us in the line of fire with our balls hanging out than to dangle Rachel in front of us like that?"

Sam nodded grimly. "We certainly have to treat it as a possible threat."

Ethan exploded in rage. He slammed into Sam, grabbed handfuls of his shirt and got into his face. "That's my wife down there in some shit hole. We aren't talking about some name-less hostage or some political pawn who doesn't matter. This is Rachel. With or without your help, I'm going in to get her."

I don’t think it is any spoiler to say that Rachel is recovered but she has amnesia. She’s addicted to drugs which were used to keep her compliant while imprisoned and her memory is like a sieve. She remembers a few people from her past, like Ethan, but not much else. She doesn’t even recall much about Ethan, just a lot of intense feeling and a foreboding.

There is a lot of emotion in this story and while the suspense is present, I thought the real story was the relationship between Ethan and Rachel. Ethan is desperate for a second chance. Rachel is haunted by fleeting memories and struggling to cope with being with Ethan again. There is tension between them that belies his whispers of love and devotion. They both have to deal with the problems of what caused their marriage to fail the first go around. Ethan, in particular, is in a pickle because no one in his family knew how bad his marriage to Rachel had become.

This book isn’t perfect. One thing that bothered me quite a bit was Ethan’s mother’s adoption of another teenage stray, Rusty. While she played a part in the conflict, Rusty was also a forgotten character for many stretches of narrative. I felt she was sequel bait and little else. At some point, I presume she will hook up with one of the many Kelly brothers.

I liked how the amnesia part was dealt with. Rachel felt confused and guilty and needy, all at the same time:

"Will you take a bath with me?" she blurted.

He blinked in surprise, and for a long moment he didn't say anything. He seemed to struggle with exactly what to say, how to respond.

"You used to wash my hair. I remember you touching me."

Fire built in his eyes, sparking the blue until it resembled a storm front.

"Are you sure, baby? I don't want to do anything to make you uncomfortable."

She shrugged, hating the awkwardness of asking her husband, her husband, to be intimate with her again.

But I would have liked to have seen more of Rachel’s recovery from her addiction to drugs and whether it had any long lasting effects (it didn’t seem like it did) particularly when I thought that the drug addiction was in place of Rachel being sexually assaulted (which it appears that she was not).   The suspense doesn’t pick up until the second half of the book and while present, my focus was on the rebuilding of the marriage between the amnesiac Rachel and the guilt ridden Ethan.

Also, while I didn’t mind this, I can see some people being frustrated with Rachel because she is weak and often being taken care of by the Kelly men, and the local law enforcement, Sean (who might also be future hero for Rusty) but given that she was a recovering drug addict who had been imprisoned for a year in Cambodia who was also struggling with regaining her memory, I cut her some slack.   Who wouldn’t be a basket case, right?

I was very satisfied, emotionally, by the romance.   Bring on the rest of the Kelly brothers!   B

Best regards,

Jane

I have 10 books to giveaway and if you leave a comment and tell us the title of the last good book you’ve read (because I’m nosy like that), I’ll enter you to win one of the 10 copies. Thanks to Berkley and Maya Banks for the giveaway. You can read an excerpt of the book here.

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This is a mass market to be released on September 7, 2010 by Berkley, a division of Penguin Books. Penguin engages in Agency pricing.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Into the Lair by Maya Banks
2. REVIEW: Into the Mist by Maya Banks
3. REVIEW: Seducing Simon by Maya Banks

I was first introduced to your books a few years ago with your debut, Tithe, the first in a series about faeries in modern times. In some ways, I consider those books to have kickstarted the popularity of faeries in recent young adult fiction. That said, I’ve made no secret of the fact that faeries are among my least favorite denizens of the supernatural menagerie so I just didn’t love Tithe as much as many other readers did. I admit I felt a little left and that maybe I was missing out on something. So when I heard you were starting a new, non-faerie series, I leapt at the chance to review it.

Cassel Sharpe comes from a family of criminals. Unlike his brothers and his mother, however, he’s trying to go straight. You see, in Cassel’s world magic is real and is outlawed in the U.S. This doesn’t stop it from proliferating, of course. What magicians, or curse workers as they’re called, don’t get drafted into “service” by the government end up on the other side of the law. It turns out that ever since curse work was made illegal during the Prohibition era, curse workers have formed gangs. That’s right. In the world of White Cat, the mafia is made up of magicians.

As you can guess, Cassel’s family consists of nothing but curse workers. His mother manipulates emotions. His brother, Philip, can shatter bones with his pinky. And his grandfather? His grandfather can kill you with the mere touch of a single finger. But despite all that, Cassel has no ability whatsoever. So despite his infamous family ties, he’s trying to live a straight, completely legal life at the private school he attends. Of course, I personally can’t help but laugh that his concept of straight living involves running an illegal betting ring at school so he can pay his tuition. Details, details.

Unfortunately, despite his best attempts, Cassel’s plan is doomed to failure. Not only has he been sleepwalking, waking up to find himself in the most inconvenient of places, he’s positive his brothers are keeping something from him. Add in a mysterious white cat that’s been invading his dreams at night and stalking him at all other times, Cassel has a mystery on his hands that needs solving.

What a fun book! I really liked Cassel a lot. You can’t help but sympathize with him as he struggles with people judging him for coming from one of the most infamous curse worker families in the U.S. while not actually having any ability whatsoever himself. What I enjoyed best about his character was that even though he didn’t have access to curse work for the majority of the book, he was able to use his smarts to counter his brothers’ plot. I’d say Cassel learned his mother’s lessons in how to be a con artist best out of all the sons.

I also enjoyed the worldbuilding, which I thought was very well done. Magical mafias and curse work families? I’m there. I liked the fact that the curse work was diverse but still logical since it can only be done via touch, hence the importance of gloves in society. As a longtime fantasy reader, I appreciated the fact that curse work has a cost. Cassel’s mom can manipulate emotions — such as causing men to fall madly in love with her — in others, but it’ll rebound and make her a mess. His grandfather can kill people, but he’s lost all the fingers on one hand as a result of that work. You can alter someone’s memories, but you’ll lose some of your own in exchange. It’s a logical world with a clear system of checks and balances.

It was also very realistic to see that even though curse work was made illegal in the U.S., it wasn’t that way all over the world and that even in the U.S., people were lobbying to make it legal under certain circumstances. The paranoia that Cassel’s mother and other curse workers depict at being watched and monitored certainly made sense and echoes our reality today.

I’m a sucker for family books — that is, books that show family relationships in all their ugly, messy glory. White Cat definitely delivers on that score. Cassel loves his brothers but as with all family relationships, that love is intertwined with envy, jealousy and resentment. The exasperation he has for his mother, who’s in jail, will no doubt remind many people of parental relationships. But I admit, my favorite family member was Cassel’s grandfather, who was famous for what he did and yet lived in Jersey and made his grandsons do mundane work like mow the lawn when they stayed at his house during the summer. He was more like the cranky old man next door than a feared mafia hitman.

As for the mystery surrounding Cassel and his midnight walks, I figured out pretty early in the book what was going on. I’m interested in hearing from other people who’ve read the book to see when they figured out the deal between Cassel and his brothers. Did you figure it out early on or did you only realize it during Cassel’s revelation? I don’t want to spoil what the mystery is but I think readers should go into the book knowing as little as possible because I believe puzzling out the clues is fun. (But if readers want a more specific clue, look at the tags for this post.)

I’m pleased to discover I like this new series of yours far more than I did Tithe and its sequels. I don’t know where we’re going from here, and I’d like to say that the ending was completely heartbreaking, but I’m definitely along for the ride. B

My regards,

Jia

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This is a hardcover published by Simon & Schuster and thus subject to the Agency Five pricing.

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3. REVIEW: White Flag by Thom Lane

Dear Ms. Benedict:

This is my first book of yours and while I liked that the characters were from the non landed class, I felt like you didn’t take advantage of the potential for an original setting. Instead the characters looked and sounded as if they were part of the ton, perhaps to evoke a sensibility in the reader unnecessarily.

Edmund Hawkins is the middle brother of the infamous Hawkins brothers. Their sister married the “Duke of Rogues” and so the Hawkins brothers are tangentially part of society. As Edmund describes it, “The haunte monde wasn’t interested in befriending the Hawkins brothers. The haute monde was interested in drawing the brothers out of their gilded cage, gawking at them, gossiping about them behind their backs.”

One bored night, Edmund goes to what is described to him as “the most wicked” whorehouse in London where he is entranced by a veiled dancer. The veiled dancer is Amy Peel. Amy, the heroine, provides one of the most contradictory form in the book.

Let’s examine Amy. Amy is an erotic dancer but she is a virgin and her employer ,”Her Highness, Queen Rafaramanjaka” wants to keep Amy a virgin. Yes, the purported former monarch from Madagascar runs the most wicked whorehouse in London but Amy is just hired to stir up the fires in the groin, not put them out.

How Amy kept her virginity, having lived in the slums for ten years (age six to sixteen) prior to being found by Queen Rafaramanjaka, is unknown and unexplained. Amy has a mysterious past. She was not slum born. The origins of her birth unexplained. Yet, Amy who grew up in the streets, flash houses, and rookeries speaks with the diction of the well educated. In an early exchange with Edmund who she believes to, Amy says “An educated thief. I’m impressed.” Her monologues match those of a learned individual (this is particularly noticeable given that Amy can’t read).

She looked back at Quincy. A good thing he was a gossip, for she'd learn little about their unique family dynamic from the surly Edmund. For instance, she'd discovered there was a significant age difference between the brothers, stemming from the fact that their father had been away at sea for more than a decade, pressed into naval service. Upon his return, the family had expanded, and so had their maritime ventures with the acquisition of the Bonny Meg , their ancestral ship.

Amy also is supposedly saving every penny she can to get away from her wretched life under Queen Rafaramanjaka. She plans to save enough money to live out the rest of her life in comfort. Yet she buys gilt hand mirrors, perfumes, damask window treatments, a croquet set, brass candlestick holders, and boxes and boxes of gloves.

I understand that you were trying to show us that Amy was a misfit and allude to some mystery of Amy’s past life, but not only was it heavy handed but it wasn’t consistent with the way in which she purportedly lived her life. It sounded like she was a spendthrift.

Edmund saves Amy from a kidnapping attempt, suffers amnesia and Amy houses him for his safety. Edmund chafes at Amy’s chosen profession. Rails at her choice and urges her to quit (and do what, Edmund?). Conveniently Edmund recovers from amnesia and whisks Amy off to his home, hoping to train her to become a lady’s maid or companion. Edmund is convinced that no one will discover her because no one pays attention to his home (but see infra the reference regarding how the haute monde likes to gossip about the Hawkins brothers? Who cares about internal consistency when forwarding the plot, right?)

Edmund has to fight for the right to house Amy when his older brother tries to suggest that it isn’t appropriate. Edmund doesn’t want to let Amy out of his sight and his brother, Quincy, addicted to opium, needs help as well. Edmund feels like he is always being treated as a child by his older brother and wants to prove that he isn’t the derelict bounder that he has been labeled.

When the true origins of Amy’s past are discovered, Edmund is beset with new insecurities while Amy tries to be happy with the life she thought she always wanted.

I felt like we had one trite storyline after another. First, the rags to riches portrayal of Amy. Then, the amnesia plotline followed by the Henry Higgins/Eliza Doolittle storyline. It is capped off by the lost heir, the unwanted forced marriage and the convenient virgin. The ending was a surprise though.

I did appreciate that Edmund and his brothers didn’t totally have a lovefest but that Edmund strained against his place as the middle and irrresponsible child. Amy was a fairly weak character and the romance between the two was flat. C-

Best regards,

Jane

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This is a mass market published by Avon, a member of the Agency 5. Pricing is set by Avon for the digital books.

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I first heard about your YA novel, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, last December during the Smugglivus event on The Book Smugglers blog. Author Nalini Singh did a guest post recapping her favorite books read in 2009. Her description of the book was brief but, combined with the hardcover's eyecatching cover and with the fact that I've enjoyed several Singh books, it intrigued me enough to look up your novel, and after reading a longer description, I purchased the ebook.

I used to be someone.

Someone named Jenna Fox.

That's what they tell me. But I am more than a name. More than they tell me. More than the facts and statistics they fill me with. More than the video clips they make me watch.

More. But I am not sure what.

"Jenna, come sit over here. You don't want to miss this." The woman I am supposed to call Mother pats the cushion next to her. "Come," she says again.

I do.

"This is an historic moment," she says. She puts her arm around me and squeezes. I lift the corner of my mouth. Then the other: a smile. Because I know I am supposed to. It is what she wants.

"It's a first," she says. "We never had a woman president of Nigerian descent before."

"A first," I say. I watch the monitor. I watch Mother's face. I've only just learned how to smile. I don't know how to match her other expressions. I should.

"Mom, come sit with us," she calls out toward the kitchen. "It's about to start."

I know she won't come. She doesn't like me. I don't know how I know. Her face is as plain and expressionless to me as everyone else's. It is not her face. It is something else.

"I'm doing a few dishes. I'll watch from the monitor in here," she calls back.

I stand. "I can leave, Lily," I offer.

She comes and stands in the arched doorway. She looks at Mother. They exchange an expression I try to understand. Mother's face drops into her hands. "She's your nana, Jenna. You've always called her Nana."

"That's all right. She can call me Lily," she says and sits down on the other side of Mother.

So begins The Adoration of Jenna Fox, an eerie, unsettling novel told from the viewpoint of a seventeen year old girl who has just awakened from a year and a half long coma.

The setting is California in the not-too-far future. Jenna doesn't yet have all her faculties back, but she has enough to sense that something is wrong. Or perhaps everything is wrong. Or maybe it is she who is the something wrong.

There is a mystery surrounding her which Jenna feels the need to solve. But how can she do so when she lacks almost all memories of her former life, and of things as basic as words? She begins by looking up word definitions.

Curious adj. 1. Eager to learn or to know, inquisitive.
2. Prying or meddlesome.
3. Inexplicable, highly unusual, odd, strange.

At her mother's request, Jenna begins to watch recordings of her previous life. She discovers that Jenna Fox was adored by her parents, a beloved only child. The Jenna Fox on the discs physically resembles the Jenna who watches them, but on the inside Jenna feels like a different — curiously so — person.

She can remember and recite historical facts, and yet she feels disconnected from her own history. And then there is the way her grandmother, Lily, keeps her at arms' length and the way her parents conceal things from her. Jenna doesn't love her mother, but when her mother tells her to go to her room she is helpless to do anything else.

The adults in Jenna's life try to restrict her activities. They don't want her to leave the house without them, even to explore the yard. They don't want her to eat anything other than the nutritional liquids they give her. They don't want her to ask questions which they have difficulty answering.

Things come to a head when Jenna begins to remember. She remembers that before her accident, when she and her parents lived in Boston, she used to go to school and have friends. Two friends in particular stand out in her mind, Kara and Locke. Where are they now? What's happened to them in the time Jenna was comatose?

Jenna insists that her parents allow her to attend school, and eventually her parents cave. Jenna can go to a special school, which has only four other students.

Once there, Jenna discovers that her fellow students all have reasons for attend such a small school. Dane, who calls the others freaks, is lacking in empathy and humanity, but Jenna is nonetheless drawn to his blunt honesty. Allys, who uses artificial limbs because she suffered a bacterial infection and was not able to obtain the restricted antibiotics, has a special interest in bioethics. And then there is Ethan, who seems to feel too much, who is rumored to have done something terrible, and who shows Jenna the understanding that she craves.

Who can Jenna trust in her search for the truth? Dane, who will not soften his words but who may do her harm? Lily, once her adoring grandmother and now a skeptic where anything Jenna does or says is concerned? Ethan, who cares for Jenna but whom she may inadvertently hurt? Her parents, who claim to love Jenna unconditionally but who sometimes make Jenna feel imprisoned?

The Adoration of Jenna Fox is a disquieting, genre-bending novel. It is equal parts science fiction thriller and family drama, with a little bit of YA romance and coming-of-age story added into the mix.

This novel is character-driven and almost all the suspense comes from the characters. How will they react? What will they reveal? And how will Jenna react to the knowledge she uncovers? There aren't any car chases or guns drawn in this book and yet the suspense never dissipates.

One of the reasons why is that Jenna is fascinating protagonist. She is both similar to and at the same time, utterly different from a typical teenage girl. At first she is a mystery, not just to the reader, but also to herself. Who is she? What is she? These questions consume Jenna and they also kept me turning the pages.

But even though Jenna was clearly unusual and odd, she also had a core of longings that I could relate to – the needs to be known and understood, loved and accepted – and it was this core that made me care about her and fear for her.

As for the other characters in the story, they felt very real to me. They too were compelling and sometimes mysterious, but most of the time, I could understand what motivated them, even when I also understood why Jenna was at odds with some of them. My one complaint about the side characters is that every single one highlighted something about the novel's themes, to such a degree that when the characters are taken together, this sometimes felt artificial, though as people they themselves did not.

One of the highlights of this book was the language. The writing was simple and spare, but at the same time, amazingly effective at conjuring an ominous sense of danger and a disturbing, eerie feeling. Each time I picked up the book I was sucked in, while every break I took from reading made me think about Jenna and dread what she might discover and what might happen to her.

The book ends with an epilogue that I'm of two minds about, because it raises almost as many questions as it answers. But I love the final image with which The Adoration of Jenna Fox closes, and I will definitely be reading more of your work in the future. B+.

Sincerely,

Janine Ballard

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I’ve never been a huge fan of the Intrigue line because I felt that even full length romantic suspense books struggled to fit both romance and suspense in one story, how could a compressed format do both topics justice? Under the Gun had a good balance of both the suspense (which was more of a whodunit) and the romance, in part because both were in full swing at the start of the book.

Luke Hathaway was jilted by Claire Samson, his one love, who then proceeded to marry another man a month later. Claire loved Luke, but he was always keeping something from her. At the last minute, she caved to her fears and gave Luke his ring back and decided to marry stable, wealthy Phil Samson. Only Phil decides to fake his death and pin it on Claire and now she looks for Luke to help her.

It wasn’t explained why Claire was so good at evading the law or why she thought Luke could help her other than he has a savior’s complex. I wasn’t super convinced at Luke’s easy forgiveness of Claire’s overthrowing him but it was a quick read with a decent suspense thread. B-

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Fictionwise | Books on Board

Marchese’s Forgotten Bride by Michelle Reid

This is an amnesia story but this time it’s the hero who has amnesia. Allessandro Marchese is on hand to oversee the smooth assumption of his latest takeover. Cassie Janus is the single mother of five year old twins who nearly faints upon seeing Sandro again. She had had a romance with him and after she got pregnant, Sandro disappeared leaving Cassie alone and penniless. With her MBA, she’s managed to provide a good life for her children and she’s furious to see Sandro again. Further, she’s not sure if she really believes his crazy claims of amnesia. Sandro is manipulative and Cassie is helplessly attracted to him. For fans of the amnesia trope, this is fun to read about the hero with amnesia. All the good of an HP line is here without too much of the bad. It’s full of agnst and passion but not too much of the asshole hero and no doormat heroine (despite Cassie’s attempts to resist her own desire). B-

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Fictionwise | Books on Board

The Doctor’s Pregnant Bride by Susan Crosby.

Ordinarily I stay out of this line. The doctor/nurse dynamic has never been one that interested me. Probably too many years of hospital related television dramas. Doctors never seem to have fidelity as part of their makeup.

Sara Beth O’Connell works in a fertility clinic whose research and results are under suspicion. She is asked by her best friend and boss to keep an eye on the clinic’s two main research doctors, one of whom is Ted Bonner. Ted plays the part of the absent minded professor, someone who is so focused on his job that he can barely remember to eat, let alone date. Most of the story involves Sara Beth becoming the focus of Ted’s attention, particularly while she decorates his bachelor bad at his invitation. There’s some clinic work, but the medicine is really a sideshow. I swear I read more about the two of them debating furniture pieces than about fertility science. It was rather a dull story and it didn’t inspire me to pick up others in this line. C

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Fictionwise | Books on Board

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3. SB&J Saturday Night Live Blog

I haven’t always had the best of luck with the Harlequin Historical line, but always being in the lookout for new historical authors, I decided to give The Accidental Countess a try. I wish I could say that my experience was a resounding success, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. While I found the writing smooth, the characterization was flat and inconsistent (at times the hero and heroine behaved in wildly contradictory ways in order to further the plot) and the story uninvolving. Great prose can make up for a messy plot, for me, but simply decent prose can’t make up for lackluster characterization and plotting.

The story begins with Stephen Chesterfield, the Earl of Whitmore awakening in his country home, bruised and beaten and with no memory of how he came to be so. In fact, he cannot remember the previous several months of his life, months in which he apparently married his childhood friend and neighbor Emily, disappeared about a week after the wedding, acquired a mysterious tattoo on his neck and a nasty knife scar on his torso and got the crap beat out of him.

Emily is disappointed, to say the least, that Stephen remembers nothing of their marriage. She was already extremely disappointed in him, given that he disappeared shortly after their wedding, failed in his promise to protect her brother (who has been murdered) and apparently visited his mistress in London shortly before his disappearance.

Emily’s life has been a difficult one – her mother died early, and her father was something of a wastrel. Her childhood friendship with Stephen was one of the bright spots in her life, a life that has become even harder recently. Her whirlwind courtship with Stephen and brief marriage made her happy; not only did she fancy herself in love, but her marriage has taken her away from the decrepit ruin of a family home that she lived in. Since her brother’s death, she has inherited the care of his two young children, and if Stephen renounces their marriage, she doesn’t know how she and the children will survive.

I had a lot of problems with the plotting of The Accidental Countess – it felt haphazard to me. Plot points are built up only to have the resolution fizzle. For instance, Emily reflects portentously several times on an unspecified scandal related to the death of her father, which she feels is at least one of the roadblocks to her appearing in polite society. But the revelation that her father committed suicide because he was financially ruined feels anticlimatic, and seems mostly to serve as an excuse to have Stephen feel sorry for Emily and have the reader admire how plucky and long-suffering Emily is. I was unclear on when the suicide had even occurred; Stephen didn’t know about it but I couldn’t figure out if that was because of the amnesia or because it had happened after he disappeared. I’m guessing it’s the latter because there’s no mention of Emily being responsible for her niece and nephew when they married (though really, I was unclear that plot point as well).

Really, the whole resolution of the amnesia plotline felt similarly vague – there was no “aha!” moment where Stephen remembered everything. I suppose one could argue that’s more realistic, but amnesia is inherently unrealistic as presented in movies, television and books, and if I’m going to read an unrealistic and somewhat cheesy plot element, I at least want it to pay off in a dramatically satisfying way. A lot of the backstory simply has to be inferred. For instance, Stephen’s original reasons for the marriage are implied but never spelled out. I think some flashbacks from Stephen’s perspective (once he did remember) would’ve have really helped tighten and clarify the story.

One of my main issues with The Accidental Countess was that Stephen and Emily are constantly at odds, and their positions on various issues flip-flop willy-nilly. He wants her to come to London with him, but she doesn’t want to go. Later, he doesn’t want her there, arguing that she’s safer on his isolated estate (where she’s already been attacked once; his position made no sense to me) while she’s determined to follow him to London. He wants her to appear in society with him (even though he’s not sure he wants to stay married to her), but she’s terrified of being snubbed and refuses. Later, she insists on attending balls; now, he doesn’t want her to (again, supposed safety concerns; these felt particularly manufactured). I ended up with the sense that all of these conflicts were simply set up to keep Stephen and Emily at odds until the end.

Also, the “will they or won’t they?” tension regarding the consummation of Stephen and Emily’s attraction got very tiresome, very quickly. I can’t count the number of aborted seductions that occurred before they finally got onto it. Their marriage had already been consummated, actually, but Stephen doesn’t remember it of course, and it takes place pretty much off-stage except for a few recollections from Emily’s perspective, which I thought was an odd storytelling choice.

The mystery – who killed Emily’s brother and attacked Stephen, and the meaning behind Stephen’s mysterious tattoo – both confused and bored me. The resolution – involving damning evidence against the villains left in an unlikely hiding place – had me rolling my eyes.

Ultimately, I found The Accidental Countess to be very average; the flaws I have enumerated were not enough to tip the book over into “truly bad” territory for me, but neither were its scant virtues enough for me to grade it higher. For that reason I am giving it an average grade: C.

Best regards,

Jennie
This book can be purchased at Amazon (affiliate link), Kindle (non affiliate) or other etailers.

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3. REVIEW: The Accidental Werewolf by Dakota Cassidy

I had heard about your book, The Husband She Couldn’t Forget, back in September and made a mental note to myself to purchase it, partly because I want to encourage more diversity in the genre, and buying a Silhouette Special Edition that features African American protagonists is a good way to do that, and partly because I have a soft spot for amnesia stories.

Unfortunately, like many mental notes I make to myself, this one went astray, and it wasn’t until your book was mentioned again during our recent discussion of cultural appropriation in romance that I bought the book and began to read it.

In the book’s prologue, we are introduced to Melanie Bishop. Melanie is holding a pregnancy test stick bearing negative results when her doorbell rings. She opens the door to be served with divorce papers. Melanie’s husband, Deion, has left her.

Melanie and Deion have been trying for years to have children, without much luck. Deion has done very well in an investment firm, and he and Melanie have all the trappings of success, but the emptiness of their home has made Melanie miserable. Melanie has sacrificed a lot for the marriage, having even cut off her siblings, so she is devastated by Deion’s decision to end their relationship. She tries desperately to get a hold of him so as to plead with him to give her another chance, but when she can’t locate him, she finally signs the divorce papers and leaves their big house in the care of their housekeeper.

When we next meet up with Melanie, some time has passed. She has gone back to using her maiden name, Wysh, and is working as a therapist at the Ryder Rehabilitation and Spinal Center where she is assigned a patient named Rolland Jones.

Rolland suffers from TBI (traumatic brain injury) as a result of a car accident. After twenty days in comatose state, Rolland awakened with a powerful determination to get better. He underwent surgeries and was given a beautiful face, and he worked very hard at his therapy. His condition when Melanie meets him, three months after the accident, is described this way:

His physical recovery had been nothing short of miraculous, except for the resulting symptoms from TBI. He knew how to write alphabetical letters and words, but he couldn’t write numbers anymore. He reversed things, his shoes occasionally, words, which hand to shake with. He had image memories of his past, but not of the past six years. Sometimes things had to be defined for him. He didn’t know his name, his age, but he thought he’d been married. He confused right and left and didn’t have a mental edit button. Whatever he thought came right out of his mouth. He still suffered with balance problems and he sometimes got lost.

It’s not stated exactly what kind of therapist Melanie is, but from what I gathered it seems she is neither a physical therapist nor a psychotherapist. Rather, her job is to prepare Rolland for life in the real world. She is to teach him things like how to use a compass, how to write numbers, and how to cook.

When they meet for the first time, Rolland is quickly smitten. Melanie is the first woman he remembers being attracted to, and he knows that he wants her to be more than his therapist almost from the very beginning. But Melanie, who doesn’t want to lose her job, refuses his advances because he is her patient and because she is afraid to risk her heart a second time.

Gradually it becomes harder and harder for Melanie to resist Rolland’s sweetness and sincerity, and it gets even more difficult when a fire makes the Ryder Center uninhabitable. Most of the patients are transferred to other facilities, but because Rolland is so close to recovering, the Center’s director decides that Rolland and Melanie can stay in his empty summer home while they finish the last three weeks of Rolland’s therapy.

Will Melanie be able to withstand Rolland’s honest and heartfelt declarations of his feelings? What will happen to her if she can’t? And what about Rolland? How will he feel when he discovers his true identity?

Rolland was a wonderful character — caring, trusting, devoted to Melanie, and completely guileless. I loved the way his unedited frankness sometimes made him say embarrassing things, but also revealed how much he cared. Here’s an example, from a scene in which Rolland and Melanie are discussing Melanie’s ex-husband:

“What I should have said is that he didn’t really know you. There’s fire in you. I felt it in your hands the first time you touched me. My arm tingled. I felt it again when we kissed. So if he divorced you, that’s his loss.”

She still looked doubtful and he knew what the other therapists had told him to be true. Only time would make him speak faster and not exhaust him. And only time would make Melanie understand her husband hadn’t been worthy of her love.

I loved Rolland, but I was less keen on Melanie. In most ways she was a nice person, but I feel that the instant she recognized her feelings for Rolland or his for her, she should have asked for Rolland to be assigned to a different therapist. It helped that Melanie at least worried about the ethics of the situation and understood that she was doing something unethical, but I was really uncomfortable when Melanie and Rolland finally had sex, because of the patient/therapist relationship.

In many ways I feel that this is a problem with the book’s premise, but it comes off in a way that makes me less than happy with Melanie’s character, and not entirely sure about Melanie’s happy ending with Rolland. There was also a point in which a neighbor helps Rolland woo Melanie, knowing that the two were patient and therapist, and I wondered what this neighbor was thinking.

Late in the books, there is a discussion of an insider trading investigation and a resulting court case. I’m neither a lawyer nor an SEC investigator so I don’t know if the legal details are accurate, but I was somewhat doubtful when I read the scene.

Some of the dialogue was a bit stilted, but a lot of it was affecting. I really felt for Rolland and sympathized with Melanie’s dilemma, even though I think she should have handled things differently, and I would have liked to see even more fallout from her actions. Had Rolland been any less wonderful, I think I would have been very annoyed with this book, but I liked him enough that I was able to enjoy it despite my problems with Melanie’s ethics.

In the end, my feelings about The Husband She Couldn’t Forget are mixed. C+ for this one.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased at Amazon or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

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3. REVIEW: Mistress to the Merciless Millionaire by Abby Green

When I first picked up A Hint of Wicked, I did not have much in the way of expectations. I assumed that this was your first book, since I hadn’t heard your name before. I hadn’t really heard any buzz about the book, and I had to remind myself of the plot before I started by rereading the blurb. I rarely go into reading a romance with less of an idea of what to expect. It was a refreshing change, and one of the strengths of the novel turned out to be how difficult it was to guess what direction the story was going to go in.

The book opens with our heroine, Sophie, the Duchess of Calton, discovering that her beloved husband Garrett has fallen at Waterloo. With Sophie when she gets the news is Tristan, Garrett’s cousin and a dear friend to both Garrett and Sophie.

The story then shifts to eight years later; Tristan has succeeded his cousin as the Duke of Calton, and has now been married to Sophie for a year. Together they are raising her daughter Miranda (Sophie was pregnant with Garrett’s child when he left to fight Napoleon) and his son Gary (named after Garrett), born of Tristan’s late wife.

Tristan and Sophie clearly have a loving and strong relationship, though Sophie still loves and misses Garrett (Tristan does as well, for that matter). They are in the midst of making love one night when Garrett returns quite unexpectedly from the dead and catches them in flagrante delicto. He mistakes the scene due to the fact that Sophie is tied to the bed naked – Tristan and Sophie apparently like to play domination games at times – and sporting a large bruise from a horse-riding accident. Garrett proceeds to beat Tristan to a pulp before order can be restored.

It turns out that Garrett has only recently (and partially) recovered from amnesia; he has been living and working as a laborer in France. He has returned to England with the help of a former member of his regiment, a Mr. Fisk. Garrett is furious and devastated to learn that his wife has moved on, and with his closest friend, no less. He orders Tristan out of the house and declares his intention to see Tristan and Sophie’s marriage voided.

What followed was, for me, an uneven tale, with some faults and virtues. The prose never really rose above workmanlike level for me. It wasn’t bad, for the most part, and you managed to avoid many of the cliches that run rampant in regency-set romances, which I appreciated. But the writing lacked the spark that would raise it above “competent”, and this caused the characterization to suffer. The three protagonists are pretty broadly and hazily drawn. Garrett is supposed to be intimidating but essentially gentle at heart, but we are told that rather than shown it (it doesn’t help that we mostly see Garrett after his return, when confusion and anger make the gentleness less apparent; he skirts the edge of unlikability for the majority of the book). Tristan is less autocratic than Garrett, not having been raised to the dukedom. I’d say he’s in general a little more cultured and “soft” than Garrett, but this is a vague impression I have, and I’m not sure I could even say what it’s based on.

Sophie feels slightly more fully drawn than Garrett or Tristan, perhaps partly because her feelings upon Garrett’s return are so complicated. She felt anachronistic to me in some of her emotions and actions. But I appreciated very much that you created a heroine who really was torn. I also appreciated that you allowed her to have sexual feelings for both men; I always live in hope that romance will someday permanently overcome the heroine arousal=true love equation.

There were a couple of other anachronistic elements that jarred me slightly – one comes when it’s suggested that Sophie could obtain a divorce on the basis of her husband’s adultery, which as far as I know was not a possibility at that time. Another comes when Sophie’s and Garrett’s young daughter joins the family for dinner – I had always been under the impression that this did not occur in aristocratic families of the era. These were minor issues, but contributed a bit to the “wallpaper historical” sense that I got from the book at times.

In addition to the tangled mess that exists between Garrett, Tristan and Sophie, there is an external villain working to undermine Garrett and his belief in his own sanity. I could have done without this plotline entirely, especially as the identity of the villain was quite obvious and the lead characters seemed pretty dense at times in making the necessary connections.

The love scenes in A Hint of Wicked were well done; the rather risque bondage scene near the beginning of the book led me expect that the story that followed would be spicier than it was, but ultimately it becomes clear that this scene was not gratuitious; it was included to illustrate something about the couple’s relationship.

Without giving too much away, I will say that I found the resolution of the love triangle disappointing; the story up to that point led me to expect something different. I would’ve been open to a different ending, though I suspect many other readers wouldn’t.

My grade for A Hint of Wicked is a high B-. I will definitely be on the lookout for future works from you; with slightly stronger prose and characterization I can imagine enjoying future books from you very much.

Best regards,

Jennie

This book can be purchased at Amazon or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: A Little Bit Wicked by Victoria Alexander
2. REVIEW: Wild, Wicked & Wanton by Jaci Burton
3. REVIEW: Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night by Kresley Cole

I laughed a little when I finished this book because it had virtually all the common HP/SD tropes smushed into one small category. We have the secret baby, amnesia, asshole boyfriend with trust issues, evil other woman, and an abduction for added spice (plus the requisite travel to an exotic locale).

There is something kind of fun about a secret baby mistress abduction amnesia story but the melodrama level was a bit too high for me. Essentially the heroine is the mistress of a wealthy developer and she is unjustly accused of selling secrets to his competitor. She’s virtually tossed out of his home and then kidnapped. But once the kidnappers realize that there is no use for her, she is released unharmed. This stretched my credibility even for an HP. As a result of her trauma, she gets amnesia and her lover comes to take care of her and as a result learns that she could not have possibly sold secrets to his competitor. Of course, why he couldn’t have figured out that before, I’m not sure. C

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

Antonides’ Forbidden Wife by Anne McAllister

Two words: Asian Heroine. I’m giving this book a B just for that. This might be my new grading scale. Every book with an Asian heroine starts at a B grade from the beginning. Actually, I think I would have given this book a B even without my personal race bias.

PJ Antonides marries Ally (half Japanese) as a favor over 10 years ago and neither bothered to get a divorce. PJ kind of liked the excuse of being married. It was an easy way to fob off his family and other women even though no one was really sure whether to believe him. Ally decides she is going to marry this nice doctor and trots off to see the PJ to get her divorce, only PJ isn’t so sure that he wants this divorce. He tells Ally that he isn’t going to sign the papers unless she pretends to be his wife for an upcoming family reunion. This is a story of mini misunderstandings, unrequited feelings, misaligned stars, and PJ’s charming Greek family.

Note to Harlequin: just because the model has straight hair doesn’t make her Asian.

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

Her Ruthless Italian Boss by Christine Hollis

I read this book with a look of wtfery on my face. I could feel it. My face was contorted for at least the first 20 pages, as I tried to figure out what the hell was going on with the characters. Beth met Luca  Francesco a few years ago when Luca was in the army. They were in love but Beth didn’t want to marry a soldier. Or maybe she didn’t want to marry someone poor. Or maybe she wanted to marry Luca but he turned her down. Luca is now one of the richest men in Europe, Beth has no money, and his heart was broken so much that he wants revenge or he doesn’t want revenge, he wants to court her, or something. Seriously, I had no idea what was going on in this story. The motivations of the character were more slippery than a wet fish. Beth was a doormat throughout much of what I read, first lamenting her monetary loss but then deriding any efforts to see to her comfort. Luca hates Beth for leaving him and vows something but also treats her like spun glass.

Ultimately I gave up because, well, it just didn’t make sense. DNF

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

Related posts:

1. Harlequin Lightning Reviews: May Edition
2. Harlequin Lightning Reviews, The Sarah Mayberry Edition
3. Harlequin Lightning Reviews, Sarah Mayberry Edition Part II

One thing that continually frustrates me in romance is the idea that readers will only find one type of male heroic. To wit, that only the alpha male, stern and unyielding, can make the loins aquiver and her heart to pitter pat. This is why the Duke is such a popular role as is the spy or the soldier because these men are not known for their smiling countenances, nor does he require great wit, a friendly mien or modulated voice.

From the romance novel stock shelves, the alpha male is tall, broad shouldered, generally dark haired, of grim coutenance. Surly demeanor optional for an extra $9.99. It is actually a bright spot to open a book and find a hero of a different caliber and that is what I thought I was getting after the introduction to Seduction of a Proper Gentleman. Oliver, you tell us, is a romantic. In the tontine created by his friends to see who would be the last of man standing, Oliver was sure it would not be him. He was ready to marry and to start a family. He was willing to embrace love, should it present itself on his doorstep.

The setup, it seemed, was to present a kind of role reversal so that Oliver was the romantic, longing for love, and Kate was the clear eyed pragmatist.

Although there was that bothersome character flaw of his that had kept him from marriage thus far. The twelfth Earl of Norcroft was an unabashed romantic. He didn’t just want to marry, he wanted love. His father had loved his mother. His grandfather had loved his grandmother and so on and so forth. Why, marrying for love was every bit a part of his heritage as his blue eyes and brown hair. And every bit as impractical.
Regardless, he was who he was.

Kate believed that she and Oliver needed to be married to fulfill a destiny. Her family had been cursed with misfortune for over 500 years due to an aborted marriage which was an attempt of the two feuding families to end the bloodshed between them. The curse would result in the end of both lines should they not reconcile within the 500 year deadline. Kate is left with the dilemma of how to meet Oliver, the Earl of Norcroft, and convince him to marry her.
The next thing the reader knows is that Kate is left on the doorstep of Oliver’s country home claiming amnesia. In a clever twist, the reader isn’t quite sure that Kate isn’t playing a trick or whether she actually does have amnesia. At least that is the twist I hope was intended.

The problem is that Oliver was not provided a consistent characterization. If he was indeed a romantic, one ready for love, wouldn’t he have embraced this beautiful stranger who seemed perfect for him in every way? Wouldn’t he have loved the idea that she was an amnesiac, something an irrepressible romantic would find titillating? Wouldn’t he have been thrilled that his mother, too, thought that this lovely young woman with the bad memory and the good gloves and clothing (meaning she was from a decent family) was the perfect match for him?

Instead, Oliver is full of ominous threats to find out who Kate really was and to expose her for the . . . what, fraud? of making him fall in love with her. Oliver was presented as intractable and overbearing. He was studying clouds and promising to kiss her one minute and the next threatening her. It seemed incongruous. Was he the brooding agnry man or the charming flirt? Was he the romantic or the stern, unyeilding alpha male.

Best parts of the book were Oliver’s mother. She poked fun at Oliver’s stuffiness. She intimated that the life she currently led wasn’t entirely satisfying and much to her son’s chagrin, was ready to try out her widow’s wings and live a little.

I didn’t love how the amnesia was played out. Kate would be able to play a word association game and come up with an answer. Husband – none. Children – none, but she wants them. Parents – mother at least is dead. Conveniently Kate was able to remember all the details of her life that might provide impediments for Oliver and her falling in bed together. I also felt that because so much of the book was spent with Kate “remembering” her past, that I didn’t get to see her grow as a person at all. I also thought that she was superficially dressed. I.e., she was made to be a scholar but wasn’t given to any scholarly thinking.   She was an archer but that was only so that she and Oliver could have physical contacct and get into awkward social situations.   

Overall, there is a good sense of humor that permeates this book and for a light, fluffy escape, there are certainly worst ways to spend an afternoon or evening, but I have to say I was disappointed in not being delivered what I thought was promised in the setup. C

Best regards

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

Related posts:

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2. REVIEW: A Little Bit Wicked by Victoria Alexander
3. REVIEW: A Wicked Gentleman by Jane Feather

I loved the original Kushiel trilogy. I found the heroine Phèdre nó Delaunay, her story as a premier courtesan and the only anguisette in generations, and the Terre D’Ange setting fascinating and compelling. All those things were enough to keep me reading the second trilogy about her adopted son, Imriel, despite the fact I never found him quite as interesting.

Imriel de la Courcel nó Montrève has spent his entire life burdened by the past. He’s the son of the traitorous, Melisande Shahrizai, whose manipulative plots sent Terre D’Ange into a war that nearly destroyed it. As a child, he was sold into slavery to a man who elevated perversion and abuse to an artform. And finally, he was saved from that bondage and raised to adulthood by Phèdre and her consort, Joscelin, who are considered heroes of the realm. In short, he has a lot of baggage and his narrative makes sure you know this again and again.

That’s more than enough issues for him to work through but in the previous two books of the trilogy, Kushiel’s Scion and Kushiel’s Justice, Imriel found himself with another burden — one that was as delightful as it was troublesome. He fell in love with Sidonie, his cousin and heir to the throne of Terre D’Ange. If there was anyone he shouldn’t have fallen in love with, it was her. Given his mother’s actions, very few people would see his affections as genuine and anything other than a power play for the crown.

In Terre D’Ange, there is one sacred precept and one alone: Love as thou wilt. But Imriel and Sidonie both violated it, choosing instead duty over love. When that choice brought nothing but disaster, Imriel and Sidonie then embarked on the difficult journey to follow their hearts. Not only do they have to contend with those who haven’t forgotten Melisande’s deeds, they have to face the wrath of Sidonie’s mother, Queen Ysandre, who hands down a decree. She will not acknowledge the relationship between Imriel and Sidonie and if Sidonie marries Imriel, then she will be disinherited. But if Imriel can track down his missing mother and bring her back to Terre D’Ange to be executed, then he can marry Sidonie. Tough love coming from a woman who married someone the realm found inappropriate, if you ask me, but as Imriel’s story shows time and time again, the past has a way of affecting the present.

Imriel reluctantly accepts Ysandre’s task but the quest to find his mother is interrupted when the foreign country of Carthage makes friendly overtures towards Terre D’Ange. But everything is not as it seems and Carthage’s actions soon send the world into chaos as they cause Terre D’Ange to become divided against itself. And through a rare sign of affection from his wayward mother, Imriel is the only person able to fix it.

As I mentioned earlier, I just don’t find Imriel as compelling a narrator as Phèdre. He’s more likeable and grounded, which makes him a less polarizing character. At the same time, I think that results in an inability to induce the same love or hate in readers that Phèdre’s character did. To be honest, I find Imriel’s long bouts of brooding trying and often want to say to him, "Cheer up, emo kid." And that sentiment characterizes my feelings towards the first 200 pages of the book. They were tedious and dull. Not enough to make me stop reading — the books have earned my trust enough that they get more leeway in this regard — but enough to make me wish something interesting would happen. After all, no reader wants an overall good trilogy to end on a bad note.

Thankfully, when Carthage makes its power play, the story’s scope changes in a spectacular fashion. After that point, I all but sped through the book. Without revealing too many details to those who have yet to read the novel, I thought the method used to disguise Imriel from Carthage’s head magic user was very clever and allowed readers to see the romance between Imriel and Sidonie from an outsider’s point of view while also letting readers watch them fall in love all over again. For the first time, I felt like we’d revisited the intense drama and peril that characterized Phèdre’s trilogy. I just wish it didn’t take quite so long to get there — both in the book itself and the entire Imriel trilogy.

One of the things I loved about the original trilogy was the fact that the final book, Kushiel’s Avatar, reflected many things that had occurred in the previous two. So I am very pleased to find that same reflection here. Not only did Kushiel’s Mercy mirror events from the previous two Imriel books but it touched upon Phèdre’s trilogy as well. Imriel and Sidonie’s quest to find the word to free a demon reflects Phèdre and Joscelin’s quest to learn the One-God’s name to seal an angel. Ysandre sought to free the capital city of Elua from an external siege; Imriel and Sidonie from an internal one. Ysandre’s marriage to Drustan united two countries, and Imriel’s love for Sidonie bridges past and present and allows old wounds to heal.

Despite my initial misgivings, Kushiel’s Mercy lived up to the promise of its predecessors and provided a fitting ending to a great series. While cynics might find the romance a little too sentimental for their tastes, the relationship between Imriel and Sidonie shows that love knows no bounds, distance, or boundaries, and that it can conquer any obstacle. Certainly not the worst message to impart, and most definitely an uplifting one. B

My regards,
Jia

This book can be purchased in hard cover rom Amazon or Powells or ebook format (Mobipocket and MSLit).

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Kushiel’s Scion by Jacqueline Carey
2. REVIEW: Mercy Street by Mariah Stewart
3. REVIEW: Undressing Mercy by Deanna Lee

Geek girl, Meg Sweeney, has been making herself over since high school to turn from jock into girly girl, but she hasn’t been successful enough to make it onto the hot bachelorette list, “Tilly Townsend’s infamous Hot Chicks.” This bothers Sweeney so much that she attends humiliating classes with other members of her small town to discuss her orgasms and lack thereof. This book is over the top in nearly every aspect from the Hot Chicks list to the old ladies that attend “carnal classes.” C-

This book can be purchased in mass market or ebook format.

Tycoon’s One-Night Revenge by Bronwyn Jameson. Donovan Keane lost his memory and along with it a very profitable resort deal. He believes that Susannah Horton parlayed information he shared with her during this forgotten period in order to give the resort deal to her new fiance. Truth is that Susannah totally fell for Donovan but because he never contacted her after their short time together, she thought he moved on. Donovan has to stop the marriage so he can stop the consummation of the resort deal so he seduces Susannah. This story had very little conflict in it. Susannah wasn’t in love with her fiance. She was in love with Donovan and she wasn’t able to disguise that for a second. She appeared weak and out of control. Donovan was an ass throughout the story because he didn’t mind breaking up a marriage to be for profit reasons. Essentially this story contains two of my least favorite characters: the doormat heroine and the ass of a hero. C-

This book can be purchased in mass market or ebook format.

Primal Instincts by Jill Monroe. This book featured a dual romance with a brother and sister. Miriam Cole is always in control except when she is in the arms of her much younger lover, Jeremy Kelso. She had a one night stand with him (and what a night it was) in Oklahoma. Because he is so much younger than she is (15 years), she thinks he is just a fling and he would like to rock her world forever. Ian Cole is Miriam’s less responsible, rootless younger brother who is dispatched to make a sex anthropologist’s manuscript less academic and more sexy. Ava, the anthropologist, greets him at the door with no clothes and body paint.

The book is highly sexual because Miriam and Ian believe that the only thing that they are capable of are physical relationships. Ava and Jeremy show them how wrong they are with Ava’s research interspered to show how other cultures use sex to articulate more than physical desire. Both stories are shortened because of the word count requirements and I think that hampers the full development of the emotional arcs. However, it is still a quick and satisfying read. B-

This book can be purchased in mass market or ebook format.

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