Lately I’ve been trying to read more new-to-me authors and when your latest book, “Heartstrings and Diamond Rings” landed in my arc pile, it was fate. I had heard you have a good reputation for humor and this story certainly backs that up. That plus good hero/heroine snappy dialogue are what makes the book for me.

After her latest long term relationship disaster, Alison Carter ends venting and crying to her best friend Heather. Where have all the good men gone and why can’t she find one? Alison isn’t really asking for much – just a decent guy who wants to settle down, raise a family or at least a date who won’t ask her if she’s interested in a threesome. Heather urges Alison to try a matchmaker – not just Match.com but a real, live, old fashioned matchmaker and then offers the clincher that the woman had matched one of Heather’s coworkers who will now be headed down the aisle in a month or so.

With nothing to lose except – hopefully – bad dates Alison makes the call then arrives for her appointment to discover that Rochelle died two weeks ago and her grandson Brandon Scott is taking over the business. A little shocked at first – because what guy knows anything about romance or what a woman wants – Alison lets herself get talked into taking the $1500 plunge for five matches. But despite all he tells her, little does she know that Brandon has no interest in love, romance or matchmaking. Instead he sees this as his chance to earn the quick cash that he needs to enter a real estate partnership after which it’s adios to Dallas.

Yet as Brandon attempts to do what he’s being paid for in order to keep being paid, he starts to fall for Alison and her trusting nature. Is there any way he can keep from breaking her heart since he’s never pictured himself as the “9-5 with a family” kind of guy? Or when he’s earned what he needs, will he head on down the road?

To me this is a very funny book. I especially love Alison’s blow by blow recounts of her dates to Brandon. Yeah, they might be exaggerations – at least I hope no woman has gone through these for book research purposes – but the ways in which these men are so awful as dates is wickedly inventive fun. My favorite is the Pharmaceutical rep with bonus points to you for getting the police involved on the date.

I also love the kittehs in the story. I grew up with Siamese and can testify to their rwonks! Lucy, Ethel and Ricky are lucky to have found such a good home and loving cat slave who’ll accept their early morning drag races down the hall.

Alison is lost at times in the glory that is Brandon without his shirt on as he tries to fix his broken AC but she isn’t tongue tied around him for long nor does she fall over things or engage in other twatish nonsense to show how hotly she lusts for his bod. It’s also nice that though she physically doesn’t change at all, and Brandon doesn’t initially think she’s more than just a nice girl who’s okay to look at, by the end of the book he’s totally fallen for her – he’s smitten and wanting the best for her. He wonders – as he’s still trying to set her up – if there’s any man out there who’s good enough for her. Then after he decides he’s too in love with her to ever leave, he makes the supreme sacrifice and does something just because he knows she’ll love it. This is what I like to see from a hero – that he’s a man who’s either noticed what his heroine likes or he’s willing to do something that he thinks he’ll hate just for her.

You did surprise me by not bringing a certain character from Brandon’s past back into the story for which I thank you. Brandon also doesn’t use this person or his childhood to have “sworn off romance for all times!!” No, he just doesn’t think he’s cut out for staying in one place for long, that’s all. This is such a nice change from what I’ve come to expect from not just historical but also some contemporary heroes.

The secondary characters are great in the story from Heather and her husband Tony to Alison’s dad – whom I loved for his plain spoken bluntness and the pistol packing Bea. This is Texas after all. And it’s not just Alison and Brandon who are funny together but all these people. This works as an ensemble piece.

Another thing I like is that Alison ends up helping Brandon almost as much if not more than he helps her by using her marketing skills. When I had mentioned at DA that I was reading this book, a reader questioned whether or not Alison comes off as pathetic because she wants to be married so badly. Her competency here is part of the reason that, to me, she didn’t. Beyond her job skills though, you give Alison a background from which it makes sense that she wants marriage and a family: her best friend is happily married and Alison’s suffered some family losses that would lead her to want to establish her own.

The changes in Brandon are gradual, begin at the halfway point and the HEA doesn’t depend on some last minute change of heart that I’ll find too quick. But he’s not all RomanceLand hero – he does his share of smoothly checking out the neckline of Alison’s little black dress, her slutty pink shoes and he takes a lot of pleasure in watching her position herself for a pool shot.

I love a book that amuses me as it entertains me and if this is the typical style you write, I think I’m going to enjoy seeing what else out there you’ve got. B

~Jayne

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: To Keep a Husband, An Ex-Wives Novel by Lindsay Graves
2. REVIEW: Slightly Foxed by Jane Lovering
3. REVIEW: Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Pattillo

By February I had heard enough people mention how eagerly they were awaiting the sequel to your first novel, 2007's The Name of the Wind, that I was intrigued and decided to pick up the first book in the series.

The Name of the Wind begins this way: "It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts." The following paragraphs go on to describe all three parts of the silence. The first is "a hollow, echoing quiet," the second the silence of two customers at the bar who "drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news." But it's the third silence that is most unsettling, the silence of a red-haired man polishing the bar. It was, the third person omniscient narrator tells us, "the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die. "

The red-haired man is an innkeeper who goes by the name of Kote, but he is also more than an innkeeper, and more than Kote. When a terrifying, spider-like being nearly kills one of the inn's few customers, Kote is the only one who knows what to watch out for and what to do.

Later, a man referred to as Chronicler comes to the inn, and Kote admits to Chronicler that he is Kvothe (pronounced like the word "quothe"), a famous, heroic figure now in hiding. But Kvothe doesn't see himself as others see him, and only agrees to tell Chronicler his story if Chronicler will stay at the Waystone for three days and record Kvothe's tale word for word, without altering anything.

Kvothe's story, told to Chronicler in first person, begins when Kvothe is eleven. Kvothe is one of the Edema Ruh, a highly-regarded troupe of actors and other performers. From his father Kvothe begins to soak up acting and music. From his mother, a noblewoman who left her family to be with his father, Kvothe learns etiquette.

One day the troupe takes in Abenthy, an arcanist (magic user) who helps them with lighting and special effects. Abenthy, or Ben as Kvothe calls him, was educated at the University and teaches Kvothe much of what he knows, including Sympathy, a system of magic that helps Kvothe redirect energy from one object to another. But what Kvothe most wants to learn is how Ben did something Kvothe once saw him do — call the wind so that the wind came and did Ben's bidding.

Ben refuses to teach Kvothe the name of the wind, but he does tell Kvothe's parents that Kvothe is a child prodigy, able to absorb nearly any skill with almost no mistakes. He will be the best at whatever he chooses to be, Ben informs them, so they should think carefully about what opportunities to give their son. Kvothe overhears this conversation and dreams of attending the University, but at age eleven, he does not know what lies ahead of him.

The troupe parts from Ben around the time Kvothe turns twelve, and on that occasion, Kvothe's father performs the first verse of a song he is working on. It is a song about the Chandrian, a group of legendary demons. Kvothe's father is collecting legends about them because he wants to write the definitive song, the one that hearkens back to the root of these legends.

The Chandrian are believed to be nothing more than a superstition, but one night Kvothe returns from gathering firewood to find his entire troupe dead, and the surrounding fires burning blue, a sign of the mythical Chandrian's presence. And indeed, the Chandrian are in front of him for a few moments, before they disappear.

Kvothe is left grieving and utterly alone in the world at age twelve. He forages in the forest and teaches himself to play his father's lute even better. A fateful trip to the nearby city of Tarbean in order to replace a lute string turns Kvothe into an urchin. He lives on Tarbean's streets for three years, until something reopens the memories he has shut away. Memories of his parents and of the Chandrian, of his dreams of attending the University and acquiring knowledge.

Eventually fifteen year old Kvothe arrives at the University and it is here that he makes dear friends and dangerous enemies, here that he learns greater magic, and here that he falls in love. He also cannot let go of his need to get to the bottom of the truth about the beings who killed his parents, even though it places him at great risk.

I enjoyed The Name of the Wind a great deal. One of the things I really appreciated was the device of having Kvothe's tale told by his older self, and the occasional interludes which allow us to see Kvothe in a different place in his life, and to sense danger lurking around the Waystone Inn.

This story-within-a-story structure, known in literary terms as a frame device, gave the book extra richness due to the age gap between the teenage Kvothe and the more mature and weary Kvothe who was telling the story. We got both the younger Kvothe's viewpoint and the perspective of his older, wiser self, who knows things the teenage Kvothe does not.

Alternated with these viewpoints is the third person narration of the frame story, so even though the book is mostly written in first person, there is more variety of voice, perspective and texture than in many first person books.

Still, and although we meet his family, his friends and the woman he loved, there is no question that the focus of the novel is Kvothe himself, and one of the things that kept me reading was the desire to see how he had evolved from the boy he had been to the man telling the story of his youth. Another was Kvothe's voice – witty, opinionated, and as a boy, often unwise.

I think that Kvothe could fairly be described as a Marty Stu (male equivalent of a Mary Sue) character because he is not only a child prodigy, but by age fifteen he is endowed with so many gifts – near perfect recall, a quick and strategic mind, lively curiosity, a talent for verbal sparring, a gorgeous voice and a breathtaking musicianship with the lute, to say nothing of his command of magic.

Normally so many talents in one character would be a sure way to turn me off, so Kvothe's saving grace is his propensity to making big mistakes. He takes chances that most people would not, and while some of them pay off, others land him in trouble. It is this quality, along with his witty opinions, and his vulnerability, that make the younger Kvothe so engaging and make it possible to believe in his genius.

There when many times during the reading of this book that I found myself thinking, "No Kvothe, no! Don't do it!" And he went ahead and did whatever impulsive, courageous yet unwise thing it was I wished he wouldn't do. I see my desire to spare Kvothe from pain and punishments as a sign of my huge investment in this character and his fate. His failings made him real and endearing to me.

One of other endearing things about Kvothe is that he judges people based on their behavior rather than their social status, and doesn't see himself as particularly better than anyone else. He is willing to do some shady things on occasion, but there are other moral lines which he would never in a million years cross. There is a great exchange between Kvothe and Ambrose, the university student who later becomes his nemesis.

Kvothe walks into the University's Archives to see Ambrose and a female student, Fela, at the front desk. Ambrose is sexually harassing Fela, but his family is so powerful that she can't protest, and Kvothe cannot bear to stand by and do nothing. He sees Ambrose's attempt at a poem on the desk, and sets about rescuing Fela by eviscerating Ambrose's writing.

Ambrose looked over his shoulder, scowling. "You have damnable timing, E'lir. Come back later." He turned away again, dismissing me.

I snorted and leaned over the desk, craning my neck to look at the sheet of paper he'd left lying there. "I have damnable timing? Please, you have thirteen syllables in a line here." I tapped a finger onto the page. "It's not iambic either. I don't know if it's anything metrical at all."

He turned to look at me again, his expression irritated. "Mind your tongue, E'lir. The day I come to you for help with poetry is the day–"

"- is the day you have two hours to spare," I said. "Two long hours, and that's just for getting started. "So same can the humble thrush well know its north?' I mean, I don't even know how to begin to criticize that. It practically mocks itself."

"What do you know of poetry?" Ambrose said without bothering to turn around.

"I know a limping verse when I hear it," I said. "But this isn't even limping. A limp has rhythm. This is more like someone falling down a set of stairs. Uneven stairs. With a midden at the bottom."

"It is a sprung rhythm," he said, his voice stiff and offended. "I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"Sprung?" I burst out with an incredulous laugh. "I understand that if I saw a horse with a leg this badly "sprung,' I'd kill it out of mercy, then burn its poor corpse for fear the local dogs might gnaw on it and die."

How can you not love a character like Kvothe? I couldn't help loving him. A lot of the charm of this book is Kvothe's charm, his indelible appeal, as well as the human scale of his personal story. If he isn't the hero others think he is, he is still more heroic than he gives himself credit for.

The Name of the Wind clocks in at 726 Kindle pages, or 13,459 locations. That is one long book, a huge investment of time, especially when you consider that it is only the first of the three parts of Kvothe's story. The early parts of the book, especially the beginning at the Waystone Inn and then the time Kvothe spends on the streets of Tarbean, dragged a little for me. But the vast majority of the book was greatly involving and entertaining, and there was an artistry to the narration and the dialogue that makes this book stand out among many others.

Even though I'm not usually one to embark on such long tomes, much less series that follow the same protagonists, I find myself anticipating book two. As for The Name of the Wind, it is a terrific novel and one I can easily see myself rereading. A-/A.

Sincerely,

Janine

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

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Mid Day Links RoundUp: The Medieval Chronicle
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3. Gone With the Wind Lives On (perhaps in ignomy?)

I was casually perusing the Book Smugglers' blog when I came across this midyear list of their favorite books of 2010 and saw that Ana had given your debut, Bleeding Violet a grade of perfect 10.

Since the book's genre (YA with a paranormal flavor) is one I enjoy, I looked up Ana's review of Bleeding Violet. The book sounded unusual and well-written, and perfect 10's are a rare event on the Book Smugglers' blog, so I thought I'd give it a try. I downloaded Bleeding Violet from the Sony store to my ebook reader, began to read, and found myself engaged almost immediately.

The truck driver let me off on Lamartine, on the odd side of the street. I felt odd too, standing in the town where my mother lived. For the first seven years of my life, we hadn't even lived on the same continent, and now she waited only a few houses away.

Sixteen year old Hanna Jarvinen arrives in Portero, Texas to reunite with her mother, who isn't expecting her. The town of Portero isn't in any way normal, but then Hanna doesn't feel normal, either. She's not only biracial and bicultural (half African American and half Finn), but also bipolar.

As she approaches her mother's house, Hanna hallucinates her deceased father's voice coaching her on how to deal with her mother. Hanna's mother, Rosalee Price, left Hanna with her father in Finland shortly after Hanna's birth, and Hanna has no memories of Rosalee. But the voice of Hanna's father, Joosef, warns Hanna not to wake her sleeping mother by knocking on her door in the middle of the night.

So, after finding the spare key and letting herself into Rosalee's house, Hanna follows her father's advice to lure Rosalee out of her bedroom with the scent of a grilled cheese sandwich.

My grandma Annikki once told me that anyone who looked on the face of God would instantly fall over dead. Looking at my mother-’for the first time ever-’I wondered if it was because God was beautiful.

To Hanna, who did not resemble her Finnish relatives, Rosalee, who looks much like her, is beyond beautiful. Hanna wants nothing more than her mother's approval and love.

But Rosalee is not pleased to find her daughter in her kitchen instead of in Finland. As she learns that Hanna and her father came to the United States nine years earlier, and that in the last year, Hanna's father passed away, Rosalee notices the bloodstains on Hanna's clothes.

It turns out that Hanna struck her aunt Ulla, with whom she had been living, on her head with a rolling pin during an argument over whether Hanna should be committed to a mental health facility. And that discovery is how Rosalee learns that her teenaged daughter hears voices and is prone to violence.

While Rosalee tries to ascertain just how badly Ulla was injured, Hanna settles into the attic and unpacks her wardrobe of violet dresses. Hanna sews her own clothes, and she is going through a purple phase.

Rosalee does not want Hanna to move in, but Hanna digs in her heels and refuses to leave. And so, Hanna and Rosalee strike a bargain: if Hanna can fit in at Portero's high school and in the town within two weeks, she can remain in Rosalee's house. If not, she will leave.

Hanna is elated and determined to make friends and stay, but there's only one problem: she has never fit in anywhere.

Still, Portero is not anywhere. When Hanna goes to the school, she discovers that it is a very strange place, one where glass statues shaped like students get more attention than newcomers, where nearly everyone wears black clothes and uses earplugs for some mysterious reason, and where Hanna's geometry textbook turns into "A Teen's Guide to Living with Bipolar Disorder" with multiple choice questions like this one:

12. All work and no play makes Hanna ____________.
a. eat Cheerios c. go crazy
b. limp awkwardly d. very sad

At first Hanna thinks she's hallucinating, but then she begins to suspect that that's not exactly the case. The other students refer to Hanna as a "transy," and after school, Hanna asks her mother what the word means.

"A transient." She grabbed an apple for herself and leaned against the picture window, since she couldn't sit with me at the table. "Anything transient. Like a mayfly."

I knew about mayflies, had seen them in action during the slow summers at our lake house in Finland. Huge swarms of them rising like dark mist from the lakes, mating in the air in winged orgiastic abandon, only to flutter back down into the water, drained. Dead. An entire lifetime played out in the space of a few hours.

But what the hell was mayflylike about me?

Since the students treat Hanna with indifference, she decides the quickest way to gain acceptance is to attach herself to a popular boy. The best candidate appears to be Wyatt Ortiga. Unlike everyone else, Wyatt dresses in green. Students seem to hang on his every word. And Hanna finds him attractive, if annoying at times.

As Hanna gets to know him better, she discovers that Wyatt is as far from normal as she is, and that he is still hung up on his ex-girlfriend, Petra. But that doesn't stop Hanna from pursuing him. And Petra, who doesn't seem to be entirely over Wyatt herself, does not discourage this.

Petra grabbed my shoulders, leaning on me again, but this time so she could whisper in my ear. "Do yourself a favor and find someone tough, someone like Wyatt, who'll look after you. You'll thank me." She let me go and rushed off to join Lecy.

Someone tough to look after me?

Petra seemed like a nice girl, not quite the bitch I'd been expecting, but even if I'd wanted to be her friend, her attitude would drive me insane. Did she think this was the fifies? I didn't need some guy to look after me. I could look after myself.

The more Hanna discovers about how dangerous Portero can be, the more determined she is to face its threats head-on. And that means becoming more and more involved with Wyatt, who knows more about those dangers than any other kid in Portero.

Hanna's goal is to win the right to stay with her mother, and more than that, to win Rosalee's love. But with threats abounding from sources both supernatural and natural, what will she discover about Portero, about Wyatt, about Rosalee, and about herself in the process?

Bleeding Violet is one of the freshest and most original books I have read this year. I don't want to reveal too much of what is going on in the story, but the world-building is startling and surreal, and some scenes have a dreamlike, hallucinatory quality.

But as great as the world-building was, what I liked even more was the writing and the characterization. The dialogue was exceptional – snappy, surprising and real, while the narration was full of the contradictions that make Hanna such an interesting character.

Yes, the girl may be prickly, even pugnacious, and she's not above using her boyfriend, but her need for love and her determination to attain respect and acceptance made her indelibly appealing to me.

Hanna's relationship with Wyatt stands out from many of the teen romances I've come across because the two jump into bed pretty quickly. One of the things that impressed me was how much I liked Wyatt despite his difficulty in getting over Petra even after he was sleeping with Hanna. There was decency and goodness in Wyatt that Hanna sensed from the first but which he could not see in himself.

Rosalee was also a memorable character – seemingly cold in her constant rejection of her daughter, but more complex than she appears at first. And many of the side characters stand out too, from Wyatt's fierce mother to the insecure Petra to the objects that should have been inanimate but came to life and acquired a personality.

I have very few criticisms of this book. Although the portrayal of Hanna's illness did not seem realistic to me at first, I quickly realized that that was because of the book's surreal quality. I do feel that at one point, during the ramp up to the book's climax, the supernatural goings on overwhelmed the human conflicts a bit, but that problem quickly righted itself.

Besides that, I have just one gripe, and that is that not about the book itself, but about the typesetting for the electronic edition I read. As mentioned before, I purchased the book from the Sony store, and my copy was peppered with question marks in places where I think there should have been dashes.

But those minor caveats aside, I enjoyed Bleeding Violet enormously. Original, quirky, suspenseful, occasionally funny, romantic, and dramatic – it was all these things and more. A for this one.

Sincerely,

Janine Ballard

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

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Violet by Design by Melissa Walker
2. REVIEW: Violet in Private by Melissa Walker
3. REVIEW: The Bleeding Dusk by Colleen Gleason

When Submit Wharton married Henry Channing-Downes on her sixteenth birthday, she had no idea what to expect from this scholarly man 43 years older than she. Her father had named her to her purpose in life, but as Submit insightfully notes, he "was not very astute in his choices, merely lucky." And that luck had much more to do with the success of marrying his middle class daughter into society than in molding her personality. For while Submit was, in many ways, Henry’s "creature," she was not shaped into some milquetoast acolyte; rather, Henry pushed and challenged her into intellectual and emotional independence. That she tempered these with deep affection and love for her husband was more her choice than Henry’s, since he never mastered his discomfort with winning a pretty, bright, drastically younger wife.

And Henry is not alone in that; from his first peek at the young widow (he never saw or communicated with her until Henry’s death) Graham cannot make sense of Henry and Submit’s marriage, either, assuming the petite woman bound in yards of black silk must either be little more than an abused child grown sympathetic to her abuser or happily liberated from marriage to an impotent, arrogant, cruel old man. That she refuses both explanations baffles Graham, a man who, at 38, is at his own crossroads. He cannot decide whether he loves his mistress, a married American woman, Rosalyn Schild, who carts her cuckolded husband around like another piece of luggage, and whose audacious, extroverted beauty seeks the glamour of marriage to the Englishman who inspired the barely fictionalized sensation, "The Rake of Ronmoor" serial. A laundress has sued him for paternity of her twins, and despite his innocence, a sensational past has obliterated any convincing defense based on the truth.

While not in full ennui, Graham knows something in his life – he, most likely – must change, and that change occurs unwanted and unwontedly when Submit Channing-Downs shows up with a box of pornographic drawings featuring a much younger Graham Wessit and a popular actress. Henry’s will has instructed Submit to deliver the box to Graham, and neither is particularly happy about the result. Graham is forced to confront his unresolved feelings toward Henry, his cousin, his erstwhile guardian (Graham’s parents died tragically when he was eight), and a man who so deeply disapproved of Graham’s excesses that he did not protest when Graham was thrown out of Cambridge, prosecuted criminally, sentenced to prison, and then to the pillory for those pictures. That Graham was likely unconstitutionally capable of conforming to Henry’s expectations did not matter to either; Graham secretly wanted approval and Henry openly wanted obedience, and for years the two remained estranged.

The pictures, then, borne by Henry’s arresting young widow, seem both a punishment and a perverse opportunity. For Graham, there is one more chance to get back at Henry for being such an unforgiving son of a bitch. While Submit carries with her a small hope that Graham might help her in defending Henry’s will, which he wrote by hand in the service of excluding his only, illegitimate son, William, who is determined to win both title and property. William has already had Submit evicted from Motmarche and tied up the estate assets, leaving Submit with little money and even fewer public advocates. Graham, who has been half-heartedly lending William money, finds Submit’s independence and her isolation surprisingly appealing, even as he suffers embarrassment and anger over the "gift" from Henry of his scandalous past, hand-delivered by yet one more symbol of Henry’s superiority.

To say that Graham and Submit are befuddled and fascinated by each other is an understatement. From the beginning there is a force between them that belies their superficial differences, electrified by Graham’s antagonism toward Henry and Submit’s shock at the drawings (of course she peeked in the box!) and bafflement at Henry’s motives in sending her to Graham with them. Indeed, Henry’s presence dominates Submit and Graham’s relationship for much of the novel, by turns as judge, benefactor, antagonist, and primogenitor. At some points he seems a substantive presence in Submit and Graham’s tentative friendship, as Submit clings to his memory for support and Graham strives to re-direct Submit’s romantic interest to himself.

The extent to which Henry brings Submit and Graham together and the extent to which he keeps them at odds seem roughly equal. Graham wants so much to understand this woman who some liken to a crow (or in William’s case, to a spider), because "whatever it was about her that attracted, it was subtle." Like the way she can acknowledge Graham’s magnetism without being drawn too close to a man who dressed "as if he wanted not merely to bowl a person over but knock her down with his good looks." She disapproves of his experimentation with fireworks, while he disapproves of her unremittingly black wardrobe and dutiful mourning affect. And while both are at loose ends, emotionally, neither can find a safe harbor in the other’s company. In short, Graham and Submit rattle each other in profound ways. Submit is not interested in the trappings of Graham’s superficial bounty, while Graham is pruriently interested in what lies inside Submit’s dress, as well as her mind and heart. Graham is smarter and more insightful than he appears, while Submit is more rebellious and romantic than she appears. It is on some level chemistry – like the friction igniting Graham’s fireworks – that makes their attraction so frustrating and so irresistible:

“You are devastating,” he said honestly. Her skin, he realized, was flawlessly smooth, something a man wanted to touch. What she was was tactile. She had a fine, gold down along her cheek. He watched her mouth, waiting for it to open, thinking of the teeth that overlapped in front. He ran his tongue along the back of his own.

"Don’t do this," she said.

"Do what?"

"Pretend I’m your sort." Her eyes slid to him rather meanly. "Or you mine."

"I don’t have a sort."

"Of course you do."

"Which is?"

"Laughing, pretty women." A pause. "Mrs. Schild."

He made a disgusted sound. "So I am the dark and morose fellow with a penchant for trivial women."

"Mrs. Schild is not trivial."

He made a glum twist to his mouth. “You were meant to deny the whole description.”

He rolled out flat on his back.

In many ways, Black Silk is an elaborate strip tease, as these two characters slowly peel away their own and each other’s layers. And for much of the book, their budding friendship is quite chaste, which is ironic considering it is built quite solidly on a foundation of profanity, heretical disobedience, and impure desires. Yet there is an honesty in their evolving closeness that is disorienting enough to make them more and more visible, and therefore vulnerable, to each other. And over time that shared vulnerability begins to replace Henry’s ghostly imposition.

Henry’s importance, though, is not extinguished in Submit and Graham’s eventual union; in fact, it is the mystery of Henry’s motives that endures beyond the book’s conclusion. The aura of prurience surrounding his relationships with both Submit and Graham is not completely dissipated, either, although I would argue that it is transmuted by the authentic compatibility between Graham and Submit, as well as the prospect of their deep and lasting happiness together. And in that there might be a clue as to what Henry still has to offer these two people so powerfully shaped – positively and negatively – by what the world seems to expect of them.

Graham was confounded to remember Henry that week and his damned philosophical approach to life as he made what Henry would have called “Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.” To survive, all mortals had to trust in someone, something, Henry claimed. Though, unlike his friend Kierkegaard, Henry was not a God-trusting man; he made the leap of faith in himself-’as if he were God. In any event, for Graham it was an unsettling leap. He didn’t truly trust Tate, or Fate or Life, or even Henry or himself, for that matter.

In (simplified) Kierkegaardian terms, without that leap of faith, a person grows a hole inside that he tries to fill with various God substitutes. Thus grows his spiritual "despair," his distance from God and from peace, which creates unhappiness and dissatisfaction and can drive a person to curse and rebel against God (as Henry admitted on his deathbed he had done). So here are Graham and Submit – one of whom has so many friends and virtually no one he can trust, while the other has lost the one person she could trust, leaving her virtually friendless and homeless – feeling contradictorily attracted to someone who represents everything they distrust.

What does Henry’s refusal to take that leap of faith mean for two people Henry brought together in such a strange way? For Graham, "[a]ll his life, it had been perhaps simply this: Not wanting to be different from Henry so much as wanting all he had in common with Henry to total a different sum-’a happy existence." Submit, who had been happy with Henry, found in his death the fear that “[w]ithout him, it seemed a part of her grew dark, as if a light had been turned out, an aspect of her never to be fully known and loved again.”

There are many enmeshed images in Ivory’s novel and symbols accumulate quickly and plentifully: the black silk of Submit’s dresses and the black satin lining the notorious box of pictures; the ambiguities created by Henry’s obsessive will and the complexities among Submit, Graham, and William’s interconnectedness; Darwin’s theories and the question of whether Submit and Graham can adapt and evolve beyond their incomplete selves. Black Silk is intellectually rich and infused with a variety of philosophical and scientific principles and theories. It is a dense book, a difficult book, at times.

But for me, its brilliance lies in that powerful image of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, which is echoed and reflected in the balanced fulfillment that Graham and Submit’s relationship ultimately represents:

“Submit, listen to me. There are probably good reasons why we shouldn’t be together. But the overriding fact is I love you, and you love me-’you need me. I can keep your life from becoming hopelessly earthbound. And I need you, as sure as leaps in the air need gravity.”

The leap of faith Submit and Graham take is not essentially spiritual, although it certainly transcends anything they had previously experienced. And unlike Henry, who could never accept his own happiness with uncomplicated contentment, Graham and Submit have the opportunity to combine their very opposite, elemental characteristics such that their leap is one to faith in love – their own and each other’s – to joy and acceptance and the trust that comes from the interdependence of two unique and independent individuals. In this, I find Black Silk’s superlative (A+) genius, along with my own joy in knowing that the faith I place in the world Ivory creates is unquestionably a leap worth taking.

This book can be purchased in used mass market paperback. Avon also re-released the book in a nice trade paperback format which you can buy new or you can buy in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

This book was provided to the reviewer by either the author or publisher. The reviewer did not pay for this book but received it free. The Amazon Affiliate link earns us a 6-7% affiliate fee if you purchase a book through the link (or anything for that matter) and the Sony link is in conjunction with the sponsorship deal we made for the year of 2009. We do not earn an affiliate fee from Sony through the book link.

Related posts:

1. DUAL REFLECTIONS, PART 1: Black Silk by Judith Ivory (Judy Cuevas)
2. REVIEW: The Serpent Garden by Judith Merkle Riley
3. DUELING REVIEW: Black Ice by Anne Stuart

When I first read the book in 2001, I fell in love with it from its earliest pages. Therefore, this time, I approached the prospect of rereading it with both excitement and trepidation. How could a novel possibly be so satisfying a second time? Yet how could a book that had transported me to such heights fail to enchant me again?

The storyline of Black Silk centers, to some degree, on Graham Wessit, the thirty-eight year old earl of Netham, and on Submit Channing-Downes, the twenty-eight year old widow of Graham’s cousin Henry, the Marquess of Motmarche.

Although we only get to see him in Graham and Submit’s memories, the deceased Henry plays a significant role in the book from early on, when his will sends his widow, Submit, to present Graham with a small bequest.

Henry’s death has left behind not only a venerable Marquessate and a wealth of unentailed properties whose possession has now become a bone of contention between Henry’s widow and his illegitimate son William, but also a small, mysterious black lacquer box whose contents call into question everything Submit thought she knew about her husband.

Submit was fifteen when she met Henry and sixteen when they married. Her father, a commoner who made his fortune from a butchering business, wanted very badly for Submit to marry into the nobility, and Submit was, if not exactly true to her name and submissive, then more than willing to make a social success of herself. Henry’s interest in her was wholly welcome to Submit, although her husband was forty-three years her senior.

For twelve years, Submit and Henry had a happy marriage, and their contentment with each other was as satisfying to them as it was incomprehensible to others. Since the marriage began with Submit sixteen to Henry’s fifty-nine, for all that Submit viewed Henry as a husband, not a father, he still had a significant role in shaping her character, her tastes, and her outlook on life.

After opening the box, Submit begins to wonder if there was another dimension to Henry, one she did not know about. She attempts to deliver the box to Graham, a cousin of Henry’s whom she has never before met, hoping that he will have an explanation of its contents -’ one that will enable her to continue to view Henry with the same admiration she has always felt for him.

But Graham is not interested in admiring Henry, and he himself is also a study in contradictions. He has many flaws, as Submit and society see it. For one thing, he is often embroiled in one scandal or another, a state of affairs that began when he was a young boy and his father shot and killed his mother (since Graham had been raised by nannies, this did not damage him as deeply as it might have otherwise).

The latest of these scandals is the pregnant girl who descends on Graham at his club in the first chapter, a laundress carrying twins she falsely accuses him of fathering. It hardly matters to anyone but Graham that he is innocent of these charges, since he is guilty of much else. Even his friends accept the pregnant girl’s word without giving the matter much thought, causing Graham to alternately nurse wounded feelings and ponder all that he may have, wittingly or unwittingly, done to bring about this circumstance.

Then there is the childlike joy Graham apparently takes in everything from extravagant house parties to his very married mistress, Rosalyn Schild. Rosalyn is popular, vivacious, and American, and Graham tries to be in love with her. But the affection Rosalyn inspires in so many people doesn’t add up to the solid commitment from Graham which Rosalyn craves and Graham thinks she probably deserves.

Into this situation comes Submit, bearing what Graham recognizes as Pandett’s Box, a container he would no more open than he would “a box full of adders.” Somehow, Submit’s presence turns into an invitation from Rosalyn to visit in her home, and Submit, who is staying at a very modest inn on a limited income while the court debates whether Henry was of sound mind when he left her the bulk of his estate, accepts the invitation.

Submit hopes to pin down Graham on the subject of Henry and the box, or at least, get him to take the troublesome container off her hands. But the Henry Graham describes is not the Henry Submit knew and loved. Although he took Graham into his home as a child, Henry’s attempts to discipline Graham met with resistance, and Graham’s view of his cousin and former guardian is far more critical than Submit’s.

Graham unsettles Submit, not just because he makes it difficult for her to enshrine her memories of her husband, but because of his seemingly capricious enthusiasm for things like fireworks and photography, his disturbing self-awareness when it comes to his notoriety and leading man looks, and most of all, the way he defies easy categorization.

For his part, Graham also finds Submit difficult to catalogue. She and her relationship with Henry are two enigmas, puzzles he can’t seem to solve. She is not what Graham thinks of as Henry’s type — and yet she was Henry’s wife, in every sense of the word. Submit’s presence in Rosalyn’s home causes Graham to begin to reexamine Henry, and Henry’s motives in sending Submit to personally deliver Pandetti’s Box.

If these two people aren’t complex enough, the other characters are also multifaceted. Henry, Rosalyn, William, and the pregnant girl I have already mentioned. There are also Arnold Tate, the Queen’s Counsel who represents Submit in her lawsuit and Graham in a paternity suit the pregnant laundress brings against him; Gerald Schild, Rosalyn’s faintly pathetic but also faintly heroic cuckolded husband; and an interesting former lover of Graham’s named Peg.

Will Graham win his paternity suit and clear his name? Will Submit win her own suit and become the wealthiest widow in England? Will William overcome the obstacle his illegitimate birth presents to the courts and become the next Marquess of Motmarche? Will Rosalyn ever come to care that her husband Gerald still loves her, or will she keep pining for marriage with Graham? Will anyone ever understand Henry’s mind, heart and his will (in both meanings of that word)? And who is writing The Rake of Ronmoor, a serial based on the thinly-disguised love life of one Graham Wessit? Most importantly, will Graham and Submit ever realize how marvelously well-suited they are for each other, despite their oppositions; how well they fit together regardless, or perhaps even because of, all their contradictions, ambiguities and sharp angles?

These are the questions at the heart of Black Silk, which is surely, from a literary perspective, one of the most accomplished novels in the genre.

I have to acknowledge that I have never had such a difficult time writing a review as I have with this one, for three reasons: (A) I was afraid I would fail to do justice to the many marvels of this book, (B) there is so much material to talk about in Black Silk that I feel I am in danger of writing a book about it, rather than a review of it, and (C) as badly as I wanted to enjoy this book unreservedly once more, the truth is that this time, I do have reservations.

Ivory plumbs her characters to an astonishing depth, and lets us see each one through the multiple perspectives of other people who are both blind to some aspects and keenly perceptive of others. She can also make me forgive almost anything — even Henry, whom I might normally view as a child molester, becomes a human being worthy of attention and sympathy.

If there is a more insightful author in the genre I don’t know who it is, and she is also a wordsmith of the first order. Her prose is like Graham: playful and celebratory. It has the richness of white chocolate mousse, and it is also filled with joie de vivre and generosity. She has a love for human foible and for every physical sense, and reading her, I feel as though she wants to fling her arms around the whole of creation itself.

The first time I read the book, I was enthralled from the very first pages, and so deeply absorbed in the many rich and subtle shadings of the characters, and in the beauty of the words themselves, that it didn’t even occur to me to think of this book as slow-paced. I remember shrugging when others complained that it crawled for them.

This time, though, I was really daunted by its length (I estimate it is about one and a half times as long as today’s single title romances) and it took me about forty percent of the book to get absorbed in the story. Oddly, it was the description of Henry’s courtship of the teenaged Submit that drew my attention more successfully than the beginnings of Graham and Submit’s relationship. But even after this point in the story, I could only read several pages at a time because there was so much to take in on each page, and the end result was that I took a full month to finish reading the book.

You know the line in Richard III, where he calls out “My kingdom for a horse!” This book is stunning, superlative, but for much of the time I was reading it, I felt I would have given a kingdom for a little more narrative drive, something to make me turn the pages- not fast, exactly, but faster.

If I had to try to verbalize what I feel, is that I wish Ivory had done more distilling. The novel lacked potency for me. There were layers upon layers of characterization, of symbolism, of subtleties, and there were linguistic pyrotechnics to equal Graham’s fireworks, but it was like something essential got lost, or tangled up, in all those layers, and eclipsed by those verbal shooting stars.

The book felt like a complex, elaborate, beautifully wrought intellectual exercise. The blood-pumping heart of the story seemed to me, this time, to be buried under layers and layers of cerebral fat. I could see that Graham and Submit were perfect for one another, but I wanted to feel a deep, irreversible connection between them. I wanted my heart to beat faster at the thought of these two people connecting.

I don’t know if it’s intellectual laziness on my part — I hope it isn’t — but when I read, I want to feel the characters are exposed to me, laid bare, in all their painful vulnerability and hearts full of yearning. Here, I just didn’t get enough of that. I got everything else about these characters, detail upon detail, but not enough of their deep, vulnerable cores. It’s like the story was as encumbered as Submit in her hoops; it couldn’t take off and run.

I felt as if there was a glass wall between me and the characters and I can’t really say why it was there this time but not the first time I read Black Silk. I can say that it makes me very very sad that I felt that way. I’m not sure if it’s a lack in the book, or a lack in me.

And so, grading the book is as difficult as writing about it. I now view Black Silk as a flawed but brilliant book; and whereas eight years ago I would have had nothing but praise for it, and given it an A+++, I will now add a word of caution for readers to be patient with it, and lower my grade to an A. Because even with all my reservations, I can’t give it less than that.

This book can be purchased in used mass market paperback. Avon also re-released the book in a nice trade paperback format which you can buy new or you can buy in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

This book was provided to the reviewer by either the author or publisher. The reviewer did not pay for this book but received it free. The Amazon Affiliate link earns us a 6-7% affiliate fee if you purchase a book through the link (or anything for that matter) and the Sony link is in conjunction with the sponsorship deal we made for the year of 2009. We do not earn an affiliate fee from Sony through the book link.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Spy Wore Silk by Andrea Pickens
2. DUELING REVIEW: Black Ice by Anne Stuart
3. Raising the Sexual Acts Stakes (Part review, part rant)

I have a bone to pick with you. I’ve got a packed read-and-review schedule for the next month or so, and I need to be able to move from book to book. But you’ve made that impossible. Yes, I blame you. It’s your fault that your book, Jellicoe Road, left me so drained and dazed that I can’t read anything else.

I tried. I tried a sexy historical romance. I tried a contemporary erotic novel. I tried a thought-provoking science fiction story. I tried one of my very favorite books from last year. I even eyed another YA. I put them all back down after a page or two.

It’s not that they were bad. They just weren’t your book. They weren’t Jellicoe Road.

It really isn’t fair of you to write a book that’s so beautiful and powerful that everything else pales in comparison.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let me explain that when I picked up this book to read for Keishon’s TBR challenge, I was cheating a bit. Yes, technically speaking Jellicoe Road was first published in 2006 (The Australian edition called On the Jellicoe Road), but the American edition came out in 2008, and it’s only been sitting in my TBR pile for a few months.

I first heard of this book here on the YA YA YAs blog. Then I heard that it won the American Library Association’s Printz Award. Then it was selected for DABWAHA. At that point I bit the bullet and bought it in hardcover, a purchase that was worth every penny and then some.

I read Jellicoe Road for the TBR challenge because this month’s theme is “Tortured hero or tortured heroine,” and I had the sense that this book had its share of tortured characters. Boy, was I right about that.

The heroine of the story, Taylor Markham, is a seventeen year old boarding school student at the Jellicoe School, which is about 600 kilometers from Sydney. Taylor was abandoned by her mother in the bathroom of a 7-Eleven when she was just eleven years old. A woman named Hannah began taking care of her at that point, and Taylor suspects Hannah knows something about her mother, but whatever it is, Hannah won’t reveal it.

Taylor enrolled in the Jellicoe School when she was thirteen. When she was fourteen, a hermit whispered something in her ear and then shot himself. But Taylor can’t remember what he told her, and she has other memory gaps as well. She also dreams about a boy in a tree who knows things about her. Sometimes her life feels like a mystery that she can’t solve.

Just after the hermit committed suicide in front of her, Taylor took off to try and find her mother. On the way to Sydney she met a boy named Jonah Griggs, who is rumored to have killed his father, and who is one of the cadets, military school students who camp near Taylor’s school for six weeks every spring and every fall.

The kids from Taylor’s school have a territorial war with the cadets and with a third group of students who live in the town, known as the townies. So Taylor’s running off with a cadet was not looked on well by her fellow students. But Taylor and Jonah made a connection. Taylor opened her heart to Jonah and trusted him, and when he called an adult to come and take them back to their schools, she felt betrayed.

Now, three years later, Taylor is unwilling to trust anyone again. She presents a hardened exterior to the world. Despite this, Taylor is chosen through some convoluted politics to be the leader of the Jellicoe School kids in the next round of wars. The leader of the townies is Chaz Santangelo, who has a history with Taylor’s friend and supporter, Raffaela. And the leader of the cadets is Jonah Griggs. So Taylor must come face to face with Jonah again, this time as two leaders of enemy factions.

And just as this is about to happen, Hannah, the one constant in Taylor’s life since her mother abandoned her, disappears from her house without a word to Taylor.

As this story unfolds, told in Taylor’s first person narration POV, it is interspersed with third person italicized fragments of another story, about a group of kids who were involved in a car accident that killed the parents of three of them. The connection between the two stories isn’t revealed until deep into the book, so I won’t say what it is.

Can Taylor lead the Jellicoe School? Where has Hannah gone to? Will Taylor be able to piece together the secrets from her past, or unearth her lost memories? What about Jonah Griggs? Is he truly the enemy, or does he care for Taylor more than he allows her to see? And how is the story of the other group of kids relevant?

The above is a summary of what the book is about, but it doesn’t do justice to how moving it is, how good the writing is, or how memorable the characters are. Taylor is indelibly so. Although she has a lot to be tortured about, she is the last person to wear her suffering on her sleeve. Instead, she has a stony demeanor.

Here, for example, is an exchange between Hannah and Taylor which takes place when Hannah informs Taylor of the transfer of some girls to the dormitory Taylor is in charge of:

“Transfers,” she says, handing me the sheet. I don’t bother even looking at it.

“My House is full. No more transfers,” I tell her.

“There are some fragile kids on that list.”

“Then why transfer them to me?”

“Because you’ll be here during the holidays.”

“What makes you think I don’t have anywhere to go these holidays?”

“I want you to take them under your wing, Taylor.”

“I don’t have wings, Hannah.”

But for all her prickliness, Taylor’s inner thoughts eventually reveal her vulnerability. Here’s a scene that comes when she is floating on water:

My body becomes a raft and there’s this part of me that wants just literally to go with the flow. To close my eyes and let it take me. But I know sooner or later I will have to get out, that I need to feel the earth beneath my feet, between my toes–the splinters, the bindi-eyes, the burning sensation of hot dirt, the sting of cuts, the twigs, the bites, the heat, the discomfort, the everything. I need desperately to feel it all, so when something wonderful happens, the contrast will be so massive that I will bottle the impact and keep it for the rest of my life.

If Taylor isn’t what she appears to be at first, neither are many of the other characters. Their layers are peeled back gradually, and involve discoveries of things neither Taylor nor the readers know, so I don’t want to reveal them. In fact, it takes a few chapters to figure out exactly what is going on, but that is part of the charm of the book, because the reader’s confusion mirrors the sense of mystery Taylor feels about her own life. Some of the puzzles take most of the book to be put together, and although I guessed at certain truths before Taylor understood these things, that did not lessen my enjoyment of the book.

In fact, “enjoyment” seems like too mild a word. After its slow start, the book gathered more and more momentum, until I was completely swept away from thoughts of my own life. I became so invested in Taylor and the other characters in the book that some sections seemed heartbreaking to read, albeit in a cathartic and healing way. I laughed and cried — or, as my husband put it, “blubbered.” When I finished this book, my tear ducts felt completely empty.

I loved the intricacy of this story, the way so many small and seemingly unimportant details turned out to be important in the end, the way the different threads connected. It’s a rare book that seems so seamless when I finish it, that takes such complete hold of me with its magic.

Despite its YA designation, Jellicoe Road deals with a lot of adult themes, and includes a romance and even a couple of brief sex scenes, so while I would not recommend it for younger kids, I do wholeheartedly recommend it to older teens and to adults.

Thank you, Ms. Marchetta, for writing such a powerful, beautiful, unforgettable book. A for Jellicoe Road.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased at Amazon. No ebook although this is a HarperTeen release and HT is fairly good about ebook releases. At least you know who to contact if you want a legitimate digital copy.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Road to Hell by Jackie Kessler
2. REVIEW: Road to Love by Linda Ford (5/08)
3. On the Road to the Final Four

Janine: The Better to Hold You was one of my most anticipated books of 2009. I’m a big fan of Alisa Sheckley’s wry, satirical chick lit novels which were published under the name Alisa Kwitney. I remember picking up The Dominant Blonde back in 2002 and being so delighted to discover a new-to-me-author who had written such an intelligent, funny and touching book. Sex as a Second Language is also a big favorite of mine.

Jennie: Yes, Kwitney has probably been my favorite contemporary/chick lit novelist for a while now, ever since I read The Dominant Blonde (at your urging, I believe, Janine!). I’ve enjoyed all of the books I’ve read by her since then, particularly Sex as a Second Language and On the Couch.

Janine: In discussing her books with a friend, I once said that this author never flinches from showing her characters in embarrassing situations or portraying them making unwise choices, but their witty observations and wobbly egos always save them from appearing less than bright. Instead, they come across as intelligent, insightful people with flaws, foibles and insecurities of which they are acutely aware. Like soft boiled eggs, Kwitney’s characters have outer shells that crack when they are hit, revealing a shaky layer that protects an even more vulnerable core.

All of this is true of Abra Barrow, the heroine and narrator of The Better to Hold You. A 29-year-old veterinarian interning at New York City’s Animal Medical Institute, Abra is also the daughter of a washed up B-movie actress and a Spanish director. Abra’s husband Hunter is a writer who recently visited Transylvania to investigate werewolf myths. Since his return to Manhattan, Hunter has been writing obsessively, craving meat, and playing dominance games both in and out of bed. Abra also begins to suspect that Hunter may be cheating on her.

Meanwhile, at the Animal Medical Institute, Abra’s instructor Malachy Knox, a brilliant researcher whom the interns have dubbed “Mad Mai,” lectures about the lycanthrope virus, which he believes can change some people on the cellular level. Malachy thinks Hunter may have learned something important about the virus during his visit to Transylvania.

When a dog named Pia, who appears to be part wolf, is brought to the institute for medical treatment, Abra and her friend Lilliana suspect that Malachy might experiment on Pia unless they prevent it. Abra is presented with the opportunity to do so when a scruffy man she previously saw on the subway comes to the institute and introduces himself as Red Mallin, a wildlife removal operator from out of town, and a friend of Pia’s owner. Abra decides to take the chance that Red is really who he says he is, and entrusts Pia to his safe-keeping.

The meeting is brief, but Abra is struck and flattered by Red’s obvious attraction to her, since she has never felt entirely secure in her marriage to Hunter. Though Hunter is much more her type — urban, handsome and well-educated — he has always seemed to Abra to be a little bit out of her reach. Going back as far as college, when their relationship began, Abra has never been certain that what Hunter saw in her — “a little nun, perfectly at peace with herself” — is really there.

Disagreements begin to crop up more and more in Hunter and Abra’s marriage, but Abra is afraid to stand up for herself, because she doesn’t want to lose Hunter. She begins to dream strange, vivid dreams. When Abra visits her eccentric mother, her mom does a tarot reading which reveals that magic is coming into Abra’s life, that the universe will be playing a trick on her, and that Abra may be in danger.

The tension between Abra and Hunter escalates, leading to an ugly discovery. Eventually, Hunter decides to relocate to the country, and Abra follows him to the town of Northside, where she encounters Red Mallin, and things that go bump in the night…

The Better to Hold You is a tough book to review because, although there are paranormal goings on throughout the book, Abra, the narrator, doesn’t see them for what they are until more than halfway through the book. So without getting into spoiler terrain, it is difficult to describe these.

Jennie: I think you’ve done quite a good job without giving too much away. I really like your comparison of Kwitney’s character’s to soft-boiled eggs. Very apt! And it encapsulates why I like her heroes and heroines so much: Kwitney manages to create heroines that are relatably neurotic without being pathetic or weak. She creates heroes that manage to retain an appealing masculinity while showing quite a bit more vulnerability than your average romance hero ever shows (a few of Kwitney’s heroes could fairly be described as “bumbling”, but it doesn’t take away from their charm or lessen their masculine appeal).

Janine: I so agree with you about her heroes! Before going into the many things I enjoyed in The Better to Hold You, I’ll admit that because the novel is classified as urban fantasy, I was expecting a different book — one where the fantastical elements were more pronounced throughout. I got impatient waiting for Abra to realize what was going on around her, though in hindsight, I think it was very realistic that she wouldn’t. How many of us would believe in werewolves and other monsters? For Abra to deny what was going on was actually pretty sensible on one level.

Jennie: I sort of had the opposite reaction, in that I think I expected what I got – a Kwitney book with paranormal overtones. But I actually got more annoyed by Abra’s denseness as the book wore on – to the point where it seemed that it wasn’t so much sensible behavior from a character’s perspective but perhaps necessitated by the plot. I also felt the lack of a big “aha!” moment – it was more like: denial, denial, denial, and then, “oh, okay, all this stuff is real”, without as much dramatic tension as I would have expected from such a revelation.

Janine: I didn’t feel that Abra’s denial was out of character, but I do agree with you about the lack of a dramatic revelation. One thing that was really interesting was the way Abra’s denial about the supernatural happenings around her mirrored her denial of the problems in her marriage to Hunter. Even though Abra didn’t see the signs as clearly as she could have, they came across to me as a reader.

Jennie: Yes, and I think that’s what created some frustration for me as a reader. Particularly in first person narration, to have events presented to the reader by the narrator and interpreted by the reader through the narrator, and to have the narrator come to very different conclusions…well, I think it creates a slight sense of dissonance. There is just something different about first person narration (which I am a fan of, by the way) – being inside a character’s head creates an association that, at least for me, makes the character’s blind spots harder to take.

Janine: That is interesting, because I actually have the opposite feeling. I expect blind spots from a first person narrator (what is termed “the unreliable narrator” in English classes). I enjoy the tension these blind spots create, the feeling that I realize something that the narrator does not. It is actually when blind spots are absent, and the narrator’s perception is matched or validated by that of all the other characters, that I become frustrated, because that never happens to anyone in real life. So I was glad that wasn’t the case here. My only problem with Abra’s denial was that it made the fantasy elements of the book less visible, and I wanted a full blown urban fantasy book.

To get back to the storyline, Abra’s fear of being dumped by her husband prevented her from taking a stand and asking for what she wanted and needed from him, and my feeling was that this in turn was one of the things that made Hunter more aloof.

This book really made me think about something that romances don’t always address — the fact that so often in romantic relationships, there is one who wants or needs the other more than he or she is wanted or needed in return.

In Abra’s relationship with Hunter, it was Abra who was in the less secure position. In her interactions with Red, though, she was in the more secure postion. Sheckley showed both the appeal of both Hunter and Red: the appeal of the unattainable man, and the appeal of the man who makes you feel like a queen.

Jennie: Yes, I think Scheckley did do a good job portraying this realistically – and even tying in some of the fantastical elements (the idea of the alpha male being depicted in a rather literal way, here).

Janine: Yes. I wish I could say I loved either Red or Hunter, the way I loved Liam from The Dominant Blonde. But just as she showed the attractive sides of both men, Sheckley also showed their unattractive aspects. Red was a little too country for Abra in many ways, while Hunter, who on paper was more her type, didn’t show her the same level of devotion.

Jennie: See, I found Hunter just insufferable. He was realistically insufferable – I’ve seen relationships that are slightly less exaggerated versions of Hunter and Abra’s in real life. But I don’t find it appealing to read about, and the more appalling Hunter’s behavior got, the more I wanted him to get his comeuppance.

I think Red looked good in comparison to Hunter. He was such a contrast, in almost every way. He worshipped Abra, and I liked her enough to want her to be worshipped. No, I didn’t love him for himself as much as I loved Liam or some of the other heroes from the author’s Alisa Kwitney books. Perhaps I didn’t identify with him quite as much because we never got Red’s POV. But I did like him, quite a lot.

Janine:I liked him as a person, but he was not exactly romantic hero material to me. Hunter had more of the romantic glamour that I look for, but with a big downside. I did like Abra very much though. She was an insightful, witty and caring woman, and I felt she deserved someone who could fulfill her needs.

Jennie: Yes, exactly. And as with the best romances, I think there was some recognition that Abra herself needed to change in order to get her happy ending.

Janine: Good point. Let’s talk a bit about Sheckley’s prose style. I feel that in terms of sheer craftsmanship, she is one of the most skilled authors of contemporary romantic fiction and that she deserves to be much better known than she is. Here are some of the reasons why:

1) Her dialogue is spot on, as in this conversation between Abra and her mother:

My mother sighed and lit a cigarette, watching me get myself back under control. “Here. Do you want a cigarette? Don’t look at me like that, sometimes it helps.” She shook out the match. “Why you want to keep him with you, I’ll never understand. He’s a bastard.”

I gave a little hiccup of a laugh. “You just think all men are bastards, Mom.”

“It’s a safe assumption.”

“God.” I folded the tissue and blew my nose again. “How my father stayed married with you for ten years, I’ll never know.”

“You talk like he’s such an angel. Remember who left!”

“Mom, you were having affairs right and left. And you hounded him all the time. I remember when I was ten you actually had a fight where you said he was personally responsible for the subjugation of women in the Spain.”

“He was a filmmaker. There’s a responsibility there. Besides, he said a lot of shit about me.”

2) She also has a great way with narration and metaphors:

The problem with Manhattan is, everyone comes here eventually -all your old friends, enemies, lovers, demons. People you met on vacation in Nepal will wind up beating you out for a taxi. The bully who called you dog breath all through first grade will turn up at your local diner, and will remember you didn’t come to his sixth birthday party, which is where the whole trouble began. Don’t come to the big city to become anonymous. New York is like Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West turns out to be the lady who didn’t like your dog back in Kansas.

3) Another thing I love is her wry social satire. For example, there is this great spoof of self-help books when Abra picks up a book called Understanding the Alpha Male:

Is your mate an Alpha Male? Take this test.

1. Would your mate describe himself as:
A) A team player
B) One of the guys
C) A highly autonomous individual with leadership capabilities
D) Your lapdog

2. When confronted with a major life choice, does your man
A) Ask your advice
B) Ask an expert’s opinion
C) Tell you and the expert what’s wrong with both of you
D) Pant and whine

3. When driving, if cut off by another car, does your mate
A) Curse and yell
B) Pursue the offending vehicle very closely and then swerve off at the last possible moment before impact
C) Physically assault the small dog sitting in the other driver’s lap
D) Shake uncontrollably, often losing control of his bladder.

Jennie: Yes, I love this author’s voice. I was happy that the change in genres didn’t change her prose. I also really liked the clever weaving of fairy tale elements into the story. Even when Scheckley went a bit over the top with them, late in the story, I appreciated that here was a paranormal that didn’t take itself too seriously.

Janine: I think I actually wanted the book to take itself a bit more seriously. I feel a little torn on what to grade The Better to Hold You because, though the charms of Sheckley’s writing are many, this particular book was somewhat slow to get off the ground, and I wish that I’d fallen in love with one of the male characters. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it and am glad I read it. I look forward to the next book in the series, Moonburn, which comes out May 19th. My grade for The Better to Hold You is a B.

Jennie: My grade is also a B (though a high B; it was almost a B+), and I will definitely read the next book in the series. I think ultimately my issues were mostly centered on the power imbalance between Hunter and Abra; if the villains had been punished more thoroughly for their misdeeds, I would have found the book as a whole more satisfying.

Janine: My take on that was that the villains weren’t punished more thoroughly because we’ll be seeing more of them in future books. I agree with you about the book being a high B — not quite a B+ but better than many other books I’d rate a B. I hope readers give it a try.

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

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It’s taken me a while to get around to reading your debut, The Spymaster’s Lady. Back in the winter, Robin asked me if I would review it in a conversational review with her before your next book came out, and I promised that I would. When I got to reading it last week, my repsonse to The Spymaster’s Lady was far from Robin’s own experience of the book and she suggested that I convert the notes I had prepared for a conversational review into this letter instead, so that the review could stand on its own.

Readers who have not yet done so can find a plot summary for The Spymaster’s Lady in Jane’s A- review. Another opinion can be found in Jayne’s A- review. And readers should also be aware that this review will contain spoilers.

The writing in The Spymaster’s Lady is crystalline in its beauty and sharpness. The prose is just gorgeous, scintillating, and as others have noted, the French dialogue and Annique’s POV thoughts in French are absolutely spot on in capturing the cadences of the French tongue. You are a brilliant stylist, a wordsmith of the first order, and I am just in awe of your gift for language.

Therefore, I want so badly to love this book and give it my whole heart, and it is frustrating that I can’t.

My frustration centers on Annique’s character, but I don’t really dislike Annique herself. I feel that she is cute and therefore could have been endearing, but the problem I run into is that I don’t feel that her portrayal is consistent, or that she is all that she is being described as. To explain what I’m saying, I will go through my issues one by one.

First, we are told that Annique is an amazing spy, but as a good friend of mine pointed out when we discussed the book, every time Annique and Grey grapple in any way, he always gets the upper hand. When he wants to entrap her in chapter two, he succeeds (and he does it by using her thirst for water against her, as if she were a wild animal). When she tries to escape in the carriage, he stops her. When she tried to escape again (being softhearted and not wanting to kill him in the process), he knocks her away and hurts her. When he decides to drug her with opium so that she won’t attempt another escape, she does not detect the opium in her coffee, even though she’s blind and so her other senses are supposedly acute. And on it goes… He gets the upper hand every time, and puts one over on her more than once in the process.

There were a few times when Annique was able to do something that showed a bit of competence, especially toward the beginning of the book. I would get my hopes up that maybe the strong, successful spy described in everyone’s POV thoughts would materialize, but then Grey would set out to best her again, and she’d fall for his next trick. This made the feel stymied, especially in the book’s first half. By the second half, when Annique began to give away the most important state secrets she possessed to a man whom she thought was a complete stranger, I had given up my hopes that there was a brilliant female spy to be found in the pages of The Spymaster’s Lady.

Second, Annique also seems too vulnerable and innocent to me for someone who has been spying since childhood. I felt that her innocence and sense of wonder were childlike to a point where the age and power gaps between her and Grey were disturbing and made me uncomfortable at times, most especially when they were having sex.

There are places where the dialogue reinforces Annique’s extreme youth and inexperience, for example, Adrian actually says to her “Annique, you will not grow up to be big and strong if you don’t eat your vegetables” (I realize this was a witty remark, but it encapsulates the way I saw Annique). And Grey says, “You’re not a child, Annique. Stop acting like one.” Adrian calls her “Ma pauvre” and Grey, “My little halibut.” To me these sound like the kinds of things parents say to children. It made me feel that the heroine was being infantilized.

Third, I feel that Annique’s virginity is very improbable given how she makes her living. When Grey realizes that she doesn’t have much sexual experience, he has this thought:

How many men, Annique? Not many, I’ll bet. Did your masters keep you unawakened so you could play the boy more convincingly? Their mistake. It left her vulnerable. Achingly, ignorantly vulnerable. He’d use that against her, sooner or later.

It’s that “Achingly, ignorantly vulnerable” that I have a problem with in a character who is said to be a super-competent spy. And I also don’t understand why staying a virgin would make it easier for Annique to act the part of a boy. It’s my opinion that one is either a good actor, or a bad actor. I don’t see how sexual experience or lack thereof makes a difference.

Since I don’t feel that it’s a logical motive to keep a spy a virgin, especially when she already knows how to act the part of a courtesan and could no doubt glean important secrets through sex, I feel that the real reason for Annique’s virginity is to telegraph to readers that despite her being a French spy, Annique is a good girl and pure of heart. And using a heroine’s sexual ignorance to show that she is virtuous is admittedly not my favorite trope in romance.

I felt that the virginity=virtue trope was reinforced by the way Grey at first thought of Annique as both evil and a whore, and even tried to dress her in a whore’s clothing until he came to the realization that she was not an evil killer and not sexually experienced. The two realizations coincided with one another and came at the same point in the story.

This reminded me a bit of some of the romances from the 1970s and 1980s, like Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, where the hero thinks the heroine is a whore and treats her badly until he finds physical proof of her virginity. I am glad that Grey did not go that far, but he did treat Annique coldly at first and his realization that she was neither sexually experienced not evil came on the heels of a scene in which they come close to loveless sex, so I was very strongly reminded of this “whore or virgin” trope.

A fourth reason why Annique’s character does not work so well for me is that she is a paragon. Vulnerable, brave, supposedly smart and said to excel at her job, brilliant at memorization, virginal, pure and gallant — not a personality flaw in sight. Nothing to give her a shade of gray. And that, especially when combined with her improbable virginity, makes her less than believable for me, and harder to relate to.

A fifth problem I had with the book was not in Annique herself but in the British spies’ reactions to Annique. Not only was she a paragon, but I kept feeling I was being told (in the hero and his friends’ thoughts and dialogue) what a paragon she was. How clever, how brave, how good, how expert a spy.

The hero and the secondary characters’ going on about Annique’s virtues made me feel that I was being told how to interpret Annique’s character. In other words, it felt heavy-handed. And since I did not agree with their assessment of Annique as a great spy, the feeling that I was constantly being told that she was something that she wasn’t was extremely frustrating to me.

There were times when other things felt heavy-handed to me as well, for example, there’s a conversation between Grey and his men when he tells them that Annique was in Bruges when some of their fellow spies died. Adrian and Doyle start recapping who died there, who they served with in the past, and how it was supposed to be an easy exchange of the Albion plans for the gold. But I saw no reason for Adrian and Doyle to be telling Grey that — he’s the section head spymaster, so he already knows all this. Which makes me feel like the information is there only for readers, and not because it is a natural subject matter for the characters.

Something else that felt heavy-handed to me was Annique’s admiration for the English spies. It was like the mirror image of their admiration for her, and those were places where I felt that rather than being left the room to interpret the characters of Grey, Doyle and Adrian for myself, I was being told what to think of them.

And that brings me to another topic, which is that the way entire British Service behaved around Annique seemed out of character for spies and interrogators who needed the information she held so badly.

In a nutshell, my problems with The Spymaster’s Lady all come down to the issue of believability. Spying is a rather ruthless and dirty business, and that was not reflected in the book, at least, not to my satisfaction.

I had difficulty suspending disbelief and that’s where I feel that I needed more — more competence from Annique, whose ineptitude only grew in the book’s second half, more ruthlessness and shades of gray from all the characters, more showing and less telling me (via the chorus of Annique’s admirers) what to think and feel. One of the things I look for in a book is room for interpretation, a place for my own imagination to connect with the characters, and for all the gorgeous writing, I don’t feel that I got that here.

At this point I have reached page 311 (chapter thirty-three), but the more I read, the more frustrated I grow. I don’t think I’d have made it this far if not for my original commitment to Robin. I’ve now read well over four-fifths of the book, so I could force myself to finish, but then I’d have to grade it, and there is simply no grade I could give The Spymaster’s Lady that would be reflective of both my appreciation of the beauty of the language, and my growing frustration that I did not find this book believable, realistic, or convincing. The more I read, the more the latter overshadows the former, and so, I think it best that I stop here. DNF.

Sincerely,

Janine

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

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I first heard of your book, Wicked Gentlemen, when it was nominated in the GLBT category of our DA BWAHA March Madness tournament. Wicked Gentlemen made it to the third round of the tournament, which means it was the runner-up in the GLBT category.

At the time we were collecting votes, K.Z. Snow mentioned that the prose and storyline in the pdf excerpt posted on your site were phenomenal. Since I’m always hungry for the combination of phenomenal prose and storyline, I proceeded to read the excerpt. I was very impressed, and I quickly ordered the book.

Wicked Gentlemen is comprised of two closely connected novellas which blend the genres of steampunk paranormal, M/M romance, suspense and allegory smoothly and expertly. The first novella, “Mr. Sykes and the Firefly” is written in first person and narrated by one of the book’s two heroes, while the second novella, “Captain Harper and the Sixty Second Circle,” is written in third person, in the POV of the book’s other hero.

Both novellas are set in a world patterned after Victorian England, but one in which the descendants of demons, known as “Prodigals” have risen from hell to accept salvation from human priests. But instead of salvation the Prodigals encountered persecution. They are confined to the city, where most of them live in a subterranean ghetto called Hells Below. If they are suspected of any crime, they can be arrested and interrogated by the Inquisition, a religious police force.

Belimai Sykes is a Prodigal who resides above ground and makes his living by offering various services for hire. Like other Prodigals, Belimai possesses pointy ears, black nails and yellow eyes. Besides these, his demon ancestors also bequeathed him paranormal abilities, but since the nature of these aren’t revealed immediately, I won’t spoil their discovery for readers. In his past, Belimai was captured and tortured by the Inquisition, an experience which left him scarred and addicted to a drug called ophorium.

As “Mr. Sykes and the Firefly” begins, two men arrive at Belimai’s door. One is a physician, Dr. Edward Talbott, and the other an inquisitor, Captain William Harper. The two men are brothers-in-law. They want Belimai to investigate an abduction. Harper’s sister, Joan, who is also Tablott’s wife, has gone missing. She was last seen in a carriage which had been broken into. While Dr. Talbott reported the break in, his wife rode home in the carriage. But on their arrival at the Tablott residence, the driver and groom discovered that the interior of the carriage was empty.

Before her disappearance, Joan had been receiving warning letters from a Prodigal named Mr. Roffcale. Joan and Roffcale were both members of the Good Commons Society, an organization of activists that agitates for suffrage for both women and Prodigals. Joan’s involvement with the Commons was not a matter of public knowledge, though she often wrote controversial pamphlets. Now Captain Harper has arrested Roffcale and is holding him in a cell, but he hopes to avoid interrogating Roffcale since he doesn’t want Joan’s activism to become publicized.

Belimai agrees to take the case, and he and Captain Harper go to the Inquisition House to question Roffcale. Just entering the Inquisition House is agony for Belimai, who is assaulted with painful memories of his stay there. But worse is yet to come. When Belimai and Harper reach Roffcale’s cell they find only his disemboweled remains.

The sight leaves them both shaken, and when Captain Harper suggests that he owes Belimai a drink, Belimai prefers getting drunk to a sleepless night of trying to forget the murder. While they are drinking together, Belimai warms to Harper, despite his being an inquisitor. A drunk Harper then ends up in Belimai’s bed, but the next morning, they dismiss their lovemaking in what is a wonderful bit of dialogue and narration:

“About last night…” Harper shifted slightly. “I think it would be best if we got it clear between the two of us–”

“I have no intention of telling anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about.” I smiled so that Harper could see my long teeth. “And I don’t think you’re likely to go bragging about it, so what’s left to say?”

“No, I meant between us… We were both pretty drunk. I just wanted you to understand that… ” Harper paused, unwilling to go on. Steadily, the pause began to spread into a lingering silence. He seemed unable to make himself speak of the night before. It amused, but didn’t surprise me.

“You want to make it clear that it was just a drunk fuck?” I filled in for him at last.

Belimai is incredibly hard on himself, but his self-deprecation is also part of what makes him fascinating. For example, his response to the above conversation is as follows:

It was pleasant to find another man as willing to let go as myself. Others had lingered in my bed and concerned themselves with the syringes scattered across my desk. They had clung to me as I descended into ruin. Some had attempted to save me. I had been wept on, slapped, and pulled into a dozen chapels by men who had mistaken me for their true love.

None of them had understood that my moments of sweetness were pure ophorium. Everything that they seemed to love about me came from the needles they detested. The man they desired was an illusion, an ugly stone made briefly beautiful by a trick of the light. In their own ways, each of them had fallen as deeply in love with my addiction as I had. None of them had known how absurd they were, begging me to leave behind that drug that was the source of all they loved most about me. My kindness, my calm, even my careless ease. Ophorium made me their perfect lover because it erased the truth of what I was.

But Belimai is in fact a better person than he believes he is, and Captain Harper is also not quite what he first appears to be. As they investigate Joan’s disappearance and Roffcale’s murder, which seems to be related to other killings, they begin to see through each other’s facades, even as things become more and more dangerous for them.

Wicked Gentlemen is a one of the most original books I have read in a long time. Though I’m not an expert on the paranormal and fantasy genres, the world building here struck me as fresh, consistent and startling.

The world of Wicked Gentlemen is constructed of unexpected combinations of pieces from our own history and mythologies that fit together into a flawless design. You also use physical, sensory details like the Prodigals’ sensitivity to light and holy water, and the humans’ sensitivity to heat, to make the reader feel that world.

Not only that, by making the priesthood police force threatening and dangerous, and the Prodigals victims of persecution, you raise thought provoking questions about the line between maintaining law and order and allowing personal freedom. But though it can be read as an allegory about racism, homophobia, and other forms of persecution, Wicked Gentlemen never feels preachy.

The characters of Belimai and Captain Harper are both appealing and extremely interesting, and a few of the secondary characters are almost as intriguing. Even though some of them only appear in a few pages, they felt very real to me.

The mystery and suspense plots are also well-executed, especially the one in the second novella, “Captain Harper and the Sixty Second Circle.” I wish I could say more about this novella, as I enjoyed it very much, but since it picks up where Belimai and Harper’s lives and relationship were left at the end of “Mr. Sykes and the Firefly,” I think that to do so would reveal too much.

Suffice to say that Harper, when we finally get his point-of-view in the second novella, is just as intriguing as Belimai.

The contrast between Belimai and Harper is the engine that drives the book.
Where Harper is a respected member of high society and a priest-inquisitor, Belimai is viewed by the same society which so respects Harper as guilty until proven innocent. If Harper is the pinnacle for which some men aspire, Belimai is viewed as the dregs.

The gap in their positions, and Harper’s seeming flawlessness in comparison with Belimai, is epitomized in the first moment of intimacy between them:

I led Captain Harper back to my rooms and peeled off his black coat and his priest’s collar. Slowly, I worked his gloves off, exposing his long fingers. His nails were as pink and glossy as the insides of a seashell. Each was tipped with a perfect white crescent. I kissed the soft skin of his palm. His stainless body was everything mine could never be. I hungered for that perfection.

It is that gap in their status that makes their relationship forbidden on all sorts of levels. Not just because they are both men, and the world in which they lived is Victorian in its sensibilities, but because of the mistrust, prejudice, and bigotry that separates their two races, and also since their stations in life are so very different that most of their acquaintances would not understand the relationship if they became aware of it. The barriers they face make their hunger for each other extremely compelling.

Harper and Belimai’s personalities are different as well, at least on the surface. Belimai is a sarcastic, self-deprecating rebel who is often contrary just for the sake of being contrary; Harper is seemingly devoted to duty. But the disappearance of his sister triggers long-dormant impulses in Harper, impulses that reveal that he too, is at heart a rebel, if one of a more quiet and less overt sort.

Just as the two men contrast, so do the two novellas, which differ not only in their suspense story arcs and POV characters but also in the fact that the first is narrated in first person and the second in third person.

Although I found that choice unusual, it worked for me because it made the book more textured and varied, and because while first person narration was suitable to Belimai’s talkative personality, third person was more appropriate for the quiet and private Captain Harper.

I have just a few quibbles about Wicked Gentlemen. First, there were a few times when I felt that the grittiness of the descriptions was slightly overdone, such as for example in a scene in which Harper just barely dodges the contents of a chamberpot. Second the description was frequently vivid and sharp; I loved, for example, this bit of ophorium high:

Two hours later, the night blossomed. The sky unfolded in rich waves of purple and blue velvet. Breezes traced pale violet ribbons through the darkness. Tiny buds of glittering stars burst into brilliant illuminations.

But as much as I loved your writing style, I noticed, after a while, that all the sentences were either short or medium-length, and I would have loved a little more variety in sentence length — an occasional long sentence here or there would have been nice.

Lastly, there were so many interesting characters, situations, and backstories in Wicked Gentlemen that I would have loved for the book to be a bit longer so that these could have been explored in more depth. More of Belimai and Harper’s relationship would have been good, too.

For our readers who may be wondering, I should mention that there is only one explicit love scene — but that one is pretty high on the heat meter. There is also violence in the book, but though I tend to be fairly sensitive to violence, I was able to handle it.

Although Wicked Gentlemen is not perfect, it is so sharply observed, so uniquely constructed, so original, and so touching in places that I have to give it a high recommendation. I am not in the habit of reading M/M romances but I enjoyed this one so much that I was very glad of the chance I took by spending $12.95 on it, and I’m now off to buy the anthology Tangle, which contains your novella, “Feral Machines.” As for Wicked Gentlemen, it’s an A- for me.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in trade paperback from Amazon or directly from the publisher. No ebook format.

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I mentioned before that your trademark seemed to be really great dialogue, snappy flirtatious banter. This book was no different. The problem was that while it had your trademark dialogue, it just had too much of it. I guess there really is too much of a good thing.

Gabrielle Pearson thought that she was developing a great relationship with her geeky, but hot, new boyfriend until he dumps her with the lame ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line. Reed Larkin thinks he’s doing Gabby a big favor. He’s been assigned to monitor her activities to see if she is involved in anything nefarious. To do so, he’s gotten close, determined she is clean and decides that to be involved with her anymore would endanger her life. Reed would really like nothing better than to take Gabby home and make sweet love to her, he decides to break it off ‘for her own good.’

Thus begins the pattern of Reed’s entire engagement with Gabby. He is always making decisions which he feels are in Gabby’s best interests. I found this terribly grating and while Gabby purportedly did as well, she took very little action to deter it. But more on that later.

The book is told mostly in dialogue. There is little introspection that is not played out in dialogue between the characters. The emphasis, too, in the dialogue is on smart, witty rejoinders. While the comebacks were relentless, I found my attention drifting.

Part of this was that the setup seemed thin. Reed had to get close to Gabby to find out what her involvement was with Benson, the son of a known criminal. Gabby, however, had her own reasons for her involvement with Benson that Reed didn’t know about. It was hard to see how Reed was an effective agent when Gabby’s real life was so hidden to him. Further, it was hard to see Gabby as effective when Reed was so easily able to deceive her. Even at the end when the motivation behind the trouble Reed was in played out, I found myself shaking my head in confusion and non belief.

While there was strong and concerted effort to place females in superior roles–both Reed and Gabby’s supervisors were females–the emotional and mental dynamic between Reed and Gabby was very traditional. Even Gabby recognizes in the very latter part of the book where she notes that Reed is always treating her like the helpless female. He does and it is insulting. But Gabby never really seems to take charge. She talked about it but she never did.

For example, Gabbyand Reed are with Gabby’s client. Reed pretty much takes over the meeting. Gabby is fuming internally and chews him out afterward but made no effort during the meeting to take control. It showed her to have no competence. And she didn’t. She didn’t do anything. She talked a big game but never delivered.

This book has a couple of the best opening scenes in a contemporary but all the talk and no action left me disappointed. It is a sexy book with two individuals that I wanted to like, but it failed to deliver an emotional impact. C

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in trade paperback or ebook format.

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Black Ice is my favorite of all your books — the ones I’ve read, that is. You have a huge backlist and I have not come anywhere near reading them all, but I’ve read several of your most popular titles, including A Rose at Midnight, To Love a Dark Lord, Moonrise, Nightfall, Ritual Sins, three more books in your Ice series and others as well. I have enjoyed some of them more than others, but not until Black Ice came along did one of them blow me out of the water.

Twenty-three year old Chloe Underwood is a translator of children’s books living in Paris and longing for a little more sex and violence in her reading material. Little does Chloe know that she’s about to get more of both, but it won’t be in the pages of a book.

Chloe’s British roommate Sylvia is a fellow translator who had lined up a side job for herself, translating for some business people over the weekend in a chateau. At the last minute, Sylvia’s wealthy lover invites her to spend the weekend in his company. Sylvia’s dearest hope is to marry for money, but in the meantime, she can’t afford to lose her job. So Sylvia pleads with Chloe to take the weekend translating gig in her place, and Chloe reluctantly agrees. When a limo comes to pick up Sylvia, Chloe, with a suitcase full of Sylvia’s glamorous clothes, gets into it, little realizing the impact this action will have on her life.

Meanwhile, an operative whose real name is not revealed until later in the book has spent over two years establishing an identity as an arms dealer named Bastien Toussaint. Bastien, as he is referred to, works for a shadowy organization known as the Committee. At the Committee’s behest, Bastien has infiltrated an international cartel of arms dealers — the business people Chloe will be translating for. Bastien is ruthless enough that he will do whatever the job requires of him, or so he believes.

When Chloe arrives at the chateau, she makes the mistake of letting the cartel members, who claim to be food importers, believe that she speaks only French and English. In reality, she knows several other languages as well, and can understand them when they speak Italian or German. Bastien quickly deduces this, and also notices that Chloe’s clothes don’t fit her that well. The two things make him suspect her of being an operative sent to the meeting to kill someone — perhaps even himself.

Chloe, of course, is entirely innocent, but she is still in grave danger. Gradually the members of the cartel grow more suspicious of her, and they have no compunction about killing her. Chloe can feel menace emanating from some of the cartel members, but the situation she is in is so outlandish that rather than trust her nagging instincts, she tells herself that she is being paranoid.

The organization Bastien works for, though purportedly in business to save the world, is as ruthless and brutal as it needs to be in pursuit of that goal. And though Bastien believes he is every inch the bastard he needs to be to get that job done, his thoughts from his very first appearance in the book reveal that he is not quite as sanguine about every aspect of that job as the Committee expects him to be.

Pondering the fact that chateau staff members are carrying semiautomatics under their loose clothing that may very well be weapons that he himself provided, Bastien thinks that “It would be damned funny if one of them killed him.” Later on, speculating about Chloe’s purpose in coming to the chateau, he muses:

Had she come for him, or for someone else? Was the Committee checking up on his performance? It was always possible — he hadn’t bothered to hide the fact that he was weary beyond belief, no longer giving a damn. Life or death seemed minor distinctions to him, but once you went to work for the Committee they never let you go. He’d be killed, and probably sooner rather than later. Mademoiselle Underwood, with her shy eyes and soft mouth, might be just the one to do it.

And there was only one question. Would he let her?

Those are the earliest, but by no means the last, signs that Bastien has a death wish. After years of performing his job superbly, he is starting to get erratic.

Since he is playing the role of a married womanizer, Bastien can act on the attraction between Chloe and himself. He comes on to her and suggests that they have sex, but Chloe, conscious of his wedding ring as well as feeling that he is out of her league, declines.

Eventually the other cartel members become suspicious enough of Chloe that Bastien is expected to interrogate her, find out how much she knows, and then either kill her or allow another of them to do so. And so Bastien is faced with a choice — to continue taking lives in the name of saving the world, or to save one life, Chloe’s, and in doing so, save what’s left of his own soul.

Bastien makes his choice, but not before Chloe suffers at his hands, so that by the time he rescues her and they go on the run, Chloe hates and distrusts him. Eventually she realizes that her life depends on Bastien and his proficiency at the very skills that disturb her so much. She must grapple with just how much to trust someone that has done the things Bastien has done, and with what else she might be feeling for him.

Black Ice is not a perfect book; for one thing, there are some annoying discrepancies, such as the fact that Bastien’s age is given as both 32 and 34, and his aunt’s name is first referred to as Celeste and then as Cecile. Contradictory information is also given about the location of Chloe’s passport.

Also, even after six or seven readings, I’m still not clear on why the cartel members would want to bring in an outside translator rather than training one of their trusted employees to do that job. If they had a good reason for that, I think it should have been provided in the book.

But there is so much that I love about this novel. One of the wonderful things about Black Ice is that it isn’t just a book with a dark hero, it’s a book with a dark world; many of the secondary characters are violent or corrupt, to such a degree that reading it is like entering another dimension. I loved that world because it created countless moral ambiguities and dilemmas for the main characters.

There’s some wonderful dialogue in the book, and one of my favorite bits comes when Chloe figures out that Bastien is not who he claims to be:

She stared at him, a cold, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Can you tell me one thing? Are you part of the good guys or the bad guys?”

“Trust me,” he said wearily, “there’s not much difference.”

This little exchange encapsulates one of the things I love so much about the book: that though very violent, it is also about how violence can, after a while, make us not as different from those we fight as we want to be. In the process of battling ruthless killers with violence, Bastien and his organization became ruthless too, until they were little better from those they wanted to save the world from.

I love the moral complexity of that, and of the fact that rather than idealizing people in violent professions in this book, you made me question the heavy cost of collateral damage, the morality of the people who accept it as necessary, and even more so, the morality of our asking others to do that kind of dirty work for the rest of us.

I know that some readers, including my fellow blogger Jayne, feel that Chloe, in her innocence, is not a good match for Bastien, and on my first reading of Black Ice, I did feel that she wasn’t as interesting as she could have been. But since I still loved the book enough to read it several times after that (including three rereads right after I finished it), I’ve gotten to know Chloe better in my rereadings and come to like her very much just as she is.

I am now more in agreement with the writer of the Publisher’s Weekly starred review of this book, who described the characterization in Black Ice as brilliant. I feel that Chloe’s innocence serves an important function; her reactions to the shocking violence that unfolds around her reminds the reader that violence should shock us, that each individual life has a value. Whether death claims a friend, an enemy or a stranger, Chloe is shaken because she is sensitive to violence, and that serves to sensitize the reader, as well as the desensitized Bastien.

I also think that Janet, another of my fellow bloggers, was onto something when she once said that Chloe also serves as a mirror that reflects Bastien’s long-suppressed desires and that she therefore has to be neutral, or in her case, clueless. I agree with that; I think that Bastien’s questioning of whether Chloe is innocent or deadly may be his way of examining himself. As Janet said, it’s his own degraded self that Bastien sees when he discovers Chloe’s innocence, and that is what prompts him to act to save her.

Third, there is also a normalcy to Chloe that, in the midst of all the surreal violence, grounds the story. A heroine whose personality and background was more like Bastien’s would have made this book relentlessly dark, and would have deprived it of a window into the safe and secure world we all take for granted.

Chloe has some wonderful lines in the book, such as when she wonders if she is her growing attraction to Bastien is a sign of Stockholm Syndrome, when she compares Bastien to a highwayman in a poem, and when she thinks of Bastien that “He was a monster, not even human. But he was her monster, keeping her safe, and she was past the point of caring.”

The evolution of Chloe and Bastien’s relationship is fascinating because even as Bastien becomes less accepting of the world he inhabits and of the dark side of himself, Chloe, as she grows more familiar with the world in which Bastien lives, condemns him less and less.

Just as I love seeing Chloe contend with who Bastien is and what her attraction to him means, I love seeing Bastien struggle with Chloe’s growing importance to him. If Chloe serves as the book’s moral center, Bastien is on a kind of see-saw in his thoughts and emotions, alternating between wanting to save Chloe and wanting to stop feeling responsible for her so that he can get back to focusing on his job.

There’s a gap between the blunt way Bastien forces Chloe to confront certain unpleasant truths and even threatens her at times, and the way he protects her over and over that makes him absolutely fascinating to me. He is pulled in three different directions, one by his training to obey the Committee and his tendency to look out for his own skin, another by his weariness and his death wish, and a third by his need to for once save a life.

It’s this combination of ruthless competence, weary vulnerability, and the almost quixotic need to save one American girl that makes Bastien such a layered and complex character. His internal conflict works perfectly because in trying to get Chloe out of the cartel and the Committee’s reach, Bastien is trying to get himself out of their reach, too.

The emergence of love from such a place, and between two individuals who would normally never have sought each other out, is a big part of what makes this book so romantic to me. There are sections in the book, particularly in its final third, which are as moving as anything I’ve read in a romantic suspense. Bastien has a speech in one scene in a hotel that, coming from a man who is so emotionally shut down, has to go down as one of the most romantic speeches I’ve ever read.

I don’t want to close this review without saying a few words about how much I enjoyed the Paris setting (Why, or why, aren’t more contemporary romances set outside the United States?), the wonderful use of snow and ice both for atmosphere and as a kind of metaphor for death, and the lean, terse writing. I think that in this case the spare tone is perfect for such an action-driven story, and I love the way (especially evident in the chapter endings) you conjure a mood with so few words.

For me, Black Ice remains a bona fide keeper, and I give it an A.

Sincerely,

Janine

****

Dear Janine,

I know your tastes in books don’t precisely align with those of your blogging partners. However, they very much align with mine, sometimes to an amazing degree. We often love the same authors. And often, out of ten or fifteen books that a favorite author has written, we’d luurrve the exact same three or four.

You read more widely than I do, to my lasting benefit. Upon your recommendations I’ve discovered, with great joy, the books of Sharon Shinn and Shana Abà©. Megan Hart and Pam Rosenthal are on top of my TBR list because of your enthusiasm for them.

Yet once in a while, a book comes along that illustrates just how individual reading is, even for two people who come as close to being two peas in a pod as we do, in terms of what we demand and desire in a book. Four years ago, we had a passionate difference of opinion over Laura Kinsale’s Shadow Heart, an imperfect book that I loved deeply and that you, as much as you wanted to, didn’t.

This time, that book is Black Ice.

Having not the least compunction about setting a book aside as soon as my interest wanes for whatever reason, I start many more books than I finish. And usually, if I finish a book, it’s an automatic A–”it’s no mean feat holding my attention, as I’m both fastidious and lazy as a reader.

I finished Black Ice on the day I started it, but it’s not a keeper for me.

There is much to recommend. Stuart writes a muscular prose that is perfectly suited to her fast-paced, danger-laced story. You’d warned me that the first 100 pages or so might feel slow. They didn’t feel slow to me. The pace was tight. The scenes both illustrated character and propelled the story forward.

The background of the Committee and the cartel was sketchy. But hey, I adored Mr. and Mrs. Smith , so that didn’t bother me. Chloe was simply that girl at that place at that time. But that in itself didn’t bother me either–”I loved the romantic thread in The Bourne Identity in which the heroine was exactly that girl at that place at that time. It didn’t even bother me that Chloe was a sweet puppy of a heroine–”and I’ve spent most of my adult life writing various incarnations of the anti-heroine.

I agree that it is essential that Chloe be helpless and innocent, in order to trigger what remained of Bastien’s conscience, i.e., at this stage, Chloe is less a character than a plot device to tilt him over from mere weariness into action.

This is where my first problem came. I didn’t buy Bastien’s death wish. We were told about it–”in the paragraph you quoted in your review–”but I never felt it viscerally. Bastien had not messed up anything. He was doing everything he was supposed to. The impression I received was less a man who wanted to die than a man in need of a good, long vacation–”like how the accountant in me thinks longingly of the simple, concrete pleasures of 1065 tax returns when I couldn’t hack another day of character motivation. I would have been much better convinced had there first been a smaller crisis from which he pulled back and didn’t act and was psychologically devastated by it, thus precipitating his change of heart when faced with the next crisis, rather than have him jump in all of a sudden, when Chloe’s life was threatened.

Two, I wish I’d felt more of their initial attraction. For Chloe to be a catalyst on such a scale, I needed a lightning strike of an attraction, rather than the fairly typical one I got.

Three, while I support the theory that a darker heroine would not have worked here, couldn’t we at least have a stronger one, if not at the beginning, then by the end?

This book is overwhelmingly Bastien’s book, and I can understand that, because he is as dark, interesting, and layered a character as you said he is. But that Chloe is no match for him at all is something that does bother me. A lot.

I didn’t expect or need Chloe to turn into a kickass heroine. But I had to see a great deal more of gravitas and strength of character from her in order to believe that she could form the moral center of this relationship with this enormously complicated man. I needed to see not just tender care from Bastien’s part toward her, but respect, a ton of respect. And to believe Bastien would respect her, I had to respect her.

I liked Chloe, but my respect for her never rose above lukewarm, as she alternated between growing wiser and taking WTF action. And then, during the final confrontation, whenlargely because she was acting irrationally, he had to tie her up to shove her into a crawl space to save her, rather than tell her that was what she needs to do and trust that she was mature enough to understand that was the only way for her to be safe and for him to do his job in getting rid of the bad guys, I mentally bonked my forehead on the nearest sharp object and lost whatever respect I had for her and most of my belief that this relationship could work long-term.

I think this book would have worked better as an action movie where the romance takes a distant second place. Or, alternately–”because my heart is black and poison flows through my veins–”as a straight action/suspense novel in which either Bastien or Chloe dies. There would be great poignancy in Chloe’s death, as it is shown to Bastien the true cost of his life of massive amorality, not in that he cannot repent, but that the innocent ones he subsequently touches must pay the price for him. And if Bastien had died, then it would be sort of like Titanic. Chloe would go on and live a normal life, but she would always remember the mysterious, charismatic stranger who gave up his life for her and saved his own soul in the process.

As it is, I close the book not very convinced of their HEA, or even happily for a year. All the interactions between Chloe and Bastien had been driven by the adrenaline rush of life-or-death situations. Other than boinking, I cannot see the two of them do normal stuff together. And because the world Anne Stuart had created was so dark, I’m just about 100% sure that someone(s) would come for Bastien and/or Chloe. And if Jason Bourne couldn’t keep his girlfriend alive, well, what hope do the rest of us have?

Bastien is such a great character, and Stuart has crafted some truly touching moments in his unthawing, and in the primal way he both conquered and protected Chloe. But ultimately, I can delight in a hero only as far as I can admire the heroine. So in this case, my enjoyment of Bastien’s journey was marred by my frustration with Chloe. I would still recommend this book, with the caveat that readers who go into a homicidal rage at the sight of a weak heroine approach with caution.

B-. (I got this book at the library. Not sure how my feelings would change if I’d had to pay for it.)

But, dear Janine, although this particular recommendation didn’t hit the target, I would still go on trying other books that you recommend, and even part with cash for them. :)

Sincerely,

Sherry

This book can be purchased in mass market.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Black Ice by Anne Stuart
2. REVIEW: Ice Storm by Anne Stuart
3. REVIEW: Cold as Ice by Anne Stuart

The latest book in your Ice series, Ice Storm, opens with a bang. Literally. In a prologue set sometime in the past, we are introduced to nineteen-year-old the heroine this way:

Mary Isobel Curwen had never shot a man before. She stood there, numb, unmoving. She’d never fired a gun before, and the feel of it in her grasp was disturbing.

A paragraph down is there is some more terrific writing:

Had she blown a hole through his head? His chest? Was he dead or just wounded? She knew she ought to check… She’d had every reason to shoot him but you couldn’t very well let a man bleed to death, could you? she thought dazedly. Even if he’d been trying to kill you?

Or maybe you could. Maybe you could drop the gun, turn and run, as fast as possible, before he suddenly stood up and came after you, before one of his buddies came running to see where the noise had come from. Maybe you could take the gun with you, just in case.

I love the creative use of second person here, the way you put me in Mary Isobel’s head. So I was very excited to sink into this book and find out more about what made Mary Isobel, or the mysterious Madam Isobel Lambert of your Ice series, tick.

As chapter one opens, the mysterious board that oversees the secret operation known as the Committee gives Isobel, who now heads the agency, the task of extracting a former terrorist who has also served as second-in-command to ruthless dictators out of Morocco. Serafin the Butcher, as he is known, is ready to trade all the intelligence he holds in his memory in return for safe passage to England.

Though she appears to be “of a certain age” Isobel is in fact only thirty-seven or so. She is more vulnerable than most people imagine, and it is her task to get Serafin out of Morocco and to debrief him. Just before she leaves, she gets a photo of Serafin and is shocked to recognize Killian, the man she shot and left for dead all those years ago, the man she had believed she killed.

Alternating with the present day chapters are flashbacks to Isobel and Killian’s past, which reveal that Isobel was once a normal American girl, planning to enroll in the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and to hike around France before that. In Marseilles she wandered into a bad neighborhood and was attacked by a gang, but a mysterious young man saved her.

The man was Killian. Though Mary Isobel didn’t know it, Killian was in France to join a group of terrorists planning to assassinate the leader of an African country. To provide himself with a cover, he invited Mary Isobel to hike with him, planning to seduce her to keep her blind to his plans, and then leave her when he reached his destination. Of course, the plan went awry, Killian wound up shot and left for dead, and the experience was the catalyst that led Mary Isobel to change her name and join the Committee.

On arriving at their meeting place in Morocco eighteen years later, Isobel is greeted by a twelve year old boy soldier with an AK-47. The boy, Mahmoud, leads her to the man who is now known as Serafin the Butcher. But he is so changed that Isobel is not certain if he and Killian are one and the same. Gone is the good looking young man who seduced her so expertly, and in his place is a paunchy, black-toothed, washed out but ruthless man. Soon, he and Isobel are on the go and in danger. And Isobel discovers that the attraction between Killian and herself did not die, anymore than he did.

Interspersed between Killian and Isobel’s story are subplots about other characters from previous Ice books. Harry Thomason, the previous head of the Committee, thinks the organization has gone to pot under Isobel’s leadership; Peter and Genevieve are dealing with infertility. Taka sends his cousin Reno to England for training to become a Committee recruit, and eventually, much to my delight, Bastien and Chloe from Black Ice appear in the book as well.

Ice Storm is action-filled, entertaining, and moves along at a good clip. As in some of your other books, the dialogue is often ironic or confrontational, and frequently terrific. Here’s an example, from one of the flashback scenes, when Killian is just getting to know Isobel, and she is still clueless about his identity.

“I’ve got a thermos of coffee,” he’d said by way of greeting. “Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.”

She just looked at him. “I don’t like sugar.”

He shrugged. “Well, if we’re going to be traveling together we’ll have to compromise. There isn’t really that much sugar in it.”

“I thought you said ‘sweet as love.’”

“I find love bittersweet, don’t you?”

She opened the thermos and poured some into the cap, taking a tentative sip. “I’m not sure I find love at all,” she replied.

While I enjoyed this and other aspects of the book, I also had some problems with it. To begin with, I was disappointed with the portrayal of Isobel. I had hoped for a heroine as ruthless and competent as the male agents in the Committee.

Isobel is likeable enough, and I don’t mind your showing her past as a vulnerable teenager who fell in love with the wrong man. I also had no objection to your portraying Isobel as a woman who has become weary of her job, or to the way meeting Killian again brought back some of her youthful vulnerability, as it was bound to do.

What bothered me was the way the book glossed over some of the most interesting pieces of Isobel’s past, her induction to the Committee and her work in the field. Not only that, there was little evidence of her training in the Isobel of the present, so that I became conscious of a double standard in your portrayal of Isobel when compared to that of the Committee’s male agents.

Bastien in Black Ice was bone-tired as well, but that didn’t stop him from being a killing machine for much of that book. Isobel, though she could take a life, was always left shaken afterwards.

Peter of Cold as Ice was willing to sleep with men to get the job done. And Taka, Bastien and Peter all understood that sex can equal power when used expertly enough. Not so Isobel.

In addition, there are so many hints that not everything about Killian is as it seems at first, and hints about other things as well, that I wondered how it was possible that I could easily pick up on them, while Isobel, who had supposedly spent years as an ice cold undercover operative, never had a clue.

No amount of emotional vulnerability or fraying would have made Bastien, Peter or Taka so blind, so I was left conclude that Isobel had never shared their cold competence, and to wonder how on earth she had ever been accepted into the Committee in the days when Harry Thomason ran it.

Much of the story is told from Isobel’s POV, with briefer sections in Killian’s. I can understand why you made that choice, because the story requires that Killian be shrouded in mystery. But the end result is that while I liked Killian, I was not convinced that he was “the most dangerous man in the world.” I never really felt I got much insight into his character, even at the end of the book, and he remains somewhat sketchy to me.

I was also, once again, and more than ever before, disappointed in the portrayal of the Committee. Gone is the ruthless, amoral, brutal and relentless organization that made Black Ice such a riveting book. When, in one scene Harry Thomason waxes nostalgic about “the good old days, where enemies were straightforward, where you trusted no one, and any inconveniences and anomalies were wiped out,” I found myself nodding in agreement.

I wondered if Thomason was right about the effects of Isobel’s leadership, since the Committee under her had evidently dwindled to a few people, most of whom had forgotten how to do their jobs. Their sudden incompetence felt like a contrivance to allow Killian to have the upper hand over Isobel for much of the book.

Still, the book was thoroughly involving, the sex scenes hot enough to make me fan myself, and I very much enjoyed the dialogue, the international settings, the lean and taut writing, the subplots about Peter and Reno, and the revelations about Mahmoud. Bastien’s appearance in the story made my heart skip a beat, and the final scene of the book was truly superb, just perfect.

For all these reasons I think that despite the problems I had, I would probably buy the book again, given the chance.

Ice Storm was deeply entertaining, but it could have been so much more. Black Ice was an A read for me, Cold as Ice a B+ , Ice Blue a B, and so, it’s with a mixture of gratitude for the enjoyment I’ve gotten from those books, sadness and the over this series’ diminishing returns for me, and the hope for more from Fire and Ice that I give Ice Storm a B-.

Sincerely,

Janine

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

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Ice Storm by Anne Stuart
2. REVIEW: Cold as Ice by Anne Stuart
3. REVIEW: Ice Blue by Anne Stuart

For me, reading The Secret to Seduction, was like having a glass of champagne. First the effervescent joy of being introduced to your characters through the liquid clarity of your voice, then the warmth of being immersed in the sensations and emotions that those characters grow to feel, and finally the blissful buzz of the happy ending.

I put off reading this book a while because, though I’d very much enjoyed Beauty and the Spy and liked Ways to be Wicked, I’d heard from a couple of disappointed readers, and even Jayne, though she enjoyed the book and recommended it, was a bit less enthusiastic than I’d hoped.

Silly me. I should know by now that opinions can vary widely, and that, though I have a lot of respect for Jayne’s, it rarely lines up perfectly with mine. I’m so glad I finally picked up the The Secret to Seduction, because for me, it was a delight from start to finish.

Sabrina Fairleigh, the adopted daughter of a vicar, is in love with her father’s curate, Geoffrey Gillray. So when her friend Mary suggests that Sabrina accompany her to a house party at the home of Geoffrey’s cousin Rhys, the earl of Rawden, which Geoffrey will also be attending, Sabrina jumps at the chance. Sabrina wants to become a missionary, and she knows that Geoffrey will be asking his cousin for money with which to finance a mission. She hopes that when the earl of Rawden grants Geoffrey’s request, Geoffrey will ask for her hand in marriage.

Meanwhile, Rhys Gillray, the earl of Rawden and famous poet known as The Libertine, is suffering from boredom and ennui. He is experiencing writer’s block and even the temperamental tiffs of his mistress, the opera singer Sophia Licari, have become less exciting than they used to be. At the bottom of Rhys’ lifestyle is the need to escape guilt for his past misdeeds. Neither Rhys nor Sabrina is aware that that same past connects them, and that Rhys wronged Sabrina before he ever met her.

Therefore, when Sabrina expresses sympathy for those people who are so unfortunate as to be at the mercy of animal passions, Rhys is just bored enough to decide to prove to her that she is just as capable of passion as he or any of his other houseguests.

But what begins as a casual game to Rhys turns into a dangerous whirlpool as he and Sabrina are swept up in their burgeoning attraction to one another, and eventually, they are caught in a compromising position and forced to marry where neither of them wants to. While Rhys and Sabrina reluctantly begin to fall in love, Sabrina’s biological sisters from whom she was separated as a child, Susannah and Sylvie, come closer to finding Sabrina, and the secret from Rhys’ past threatens to tear the newlyweds apart.

The setting (Regency) and setup (rake and virgin) of The Secret to Seduction are as familiar as they get. And if I’ve read one book in which the hero sets out to awaken the heroine to prove a point or in which a couple is caught in an embrace and forced to marry, I don’t know how many I’ve read.

There were a few missteps in the book, too. Sabrina’s adoptive brothers and Rhys’ surviving sister (his mother and other sister died when he was young) are mentioned so briefly that I wondered what the point was in mentioning them at all. Susannah, Sylvie and their husbands get very close to finding Sabrina at one point, and then it takes them a lot longer to resume their search than it seems to me it should. At age thirty, Rhys is a war hero, a successful, sought after poet, a man who restored his family’s fabulous fortune, an earl, and gorgeous too — it seems a bit much even for a romance hero. Also, he is not shown attempting to write much or hobnobbing with other poets, so that aspect of his character feels weak.

And although I’m far from an expert on the Regency, I have my doubts as to the historical accuracy of some details — for example, would a marriage between an earl and a woman of unknown birth really have been accepted by society? And once married, would it be acceptable for Sabrina, now a countess, and for Susannah, a viscountess, to associate with their brother-in-law, Tom Shaughnessy, who was born in the gutter and once owned a bawdy theater?

Given all this, how and why do I still love The Secret to Seduction? Let me count the ways:

I. The Voice

Much has been said lately about the value of a strong writing voice. For me, few books illustrate this as well as yours do. You have a voice to turn a choir of angels envious. When I read your books, I can almost feel it twining around me like a vine that then puts forth beautiful blossoms. To illustrate, here is a paragraph of description from page five:

But only little patches of snow remained, scattered across the green like lacy handkerchiefs. The wan early sunlight was gaining in strength, and the bare birch trees crowding the sides of the road shone nearly metallic in it, making Sabrina blink as they flew past the carriage. She wondered, idly, why trees didn’t become woolly in winter, like cats and cattle, but instead dropped all of their leaves and went bare.

In just three sentences, there’s so much to dazzle me. The metaphor of the snow scattered like lacy handkerchiefs. The imagery in the adjectives and verbs. Instead of trees just being on the road side, they are crowding it. They don’t just shine; they shine “nearly metallic.” And rather than describing the carriage as going past the trees, it is the other way around, the trees that “flew” (another great verb) past the carriage. There is also a lovely rhythm and cadence to the words, and some nifty sound effects, like the alliteration of “woolly in winter” and “cats and cattle.” Finally there is the wonderful contrasting of the trees to the animals, which grow fur in winter rather than shed.

Except for the rare jarring metaphor, yours is the kind of writing style that can cast a spell over me and carry me away from the stress of my daily life as few things can.

But this paragraph isn’t just great description, it’s also great characterization, because it reveals so much about Sabrina. Her youthful sense of wonder, her being awake to the world around her (wonderfully reinforced with her blinking), and her whimsy and sense of humor all come through in just three sentences. And that brings me to the next thing I loved about your book.

II. The Characters

Let me start with in an unlikely place — with the villain and side characters. It is very unusual to come across genre fiction that gives such careful attention to them as you do. Oftentimes, in many of the books I read, the villain or the other woman or the hero’s friend can seem more like afterthoughts, devices to create conflict or move the plot in a certain direction, than like living breathing people. That isn’t the case in The Secret to Seduction. Here, even minor characters can reveal hidden dimensions, something that charms me more than I can say.

As I’ve indicated before, Sabrina and Rhys fall into types, the young, virginal heroine and the jaded rake. What makes me interested in them, however, is the way that you give individual flaws and vulnerabilities that makes these characters feel fresh to me. I’ve already enumerated Sabrina’s humor, whimsy and alertness. Let me add that she is also more sensual, proud and temperamental than she wants to admit at first, and more clever and insightful than Rhys wants to own up to.

In some ways, The Secret to Seduction reads almost like a coming of age story, one about Sabrina’s awakening — to passion, to life, to the vulnerability that love can bring as well as to the happiness that it makes possible.

Rhys too, is very proud, and for him a lot of that pride is bound up in the fact that his venerable family lost almost everything when Rhys was very young. The family name and image are of utmost importance to Rhys because he lost his parents and one sister when he was quite young. Unlike Sabrina, Rhys knows the pain of loss and therefore fears to fall in love, especially when he realizes how his past connects him to Sabrina. He carries a heavy weight of guilt that he seeks to escape, and I, like Jayne, was glad that his past transgression wasn’t a minor one.

Additionally, I loved that like Sabrina, he too was clever and insightful. Both Rhys and Sabrina see deeper into the other than the other wants them to. And so, they uncover each other in layers, not just physically, as Rhys awakens Sabrina’s senses and comes to feel more alive than he has in years, but also emotionally and psychologically. Which brings me to the next thing I loved.

III. The Chemistry

There is a certain magical alchemy that can exist in fiction just as it can in real life, and just as it is difficult to explain the whys and wherefores of its presence in our world, it can be tough for me to put my finger on why, it is exactly, that I do or don’t feel sparks between a pair of lovers in a book.

Maybe it is the way that Rhys and Sabrina can peer into one another’s souls. Maybe it is their humorous exchanges of dialogue. Maybe it is that they share the same strengths — including deep familial loyalty, intelligence and sensuality and vulnerability. Maybe it is that they have their flaws — pride and temper –in common, too, as I’ve already mentioned. It could be any or all of these things together that make me feel that they belong together despite the very different lives they lead before they meet, and make me want to see them find happiness together.

IV. The Conflict

Another of the things I loved in this book was that even after they are very attracted to one another and things get pretty intimate between them, Rhys and Sabrina are still quite reluctant to marry each other. They realize that chemistry isn’t everything, and that they may not have enough in common. Their marriage starts off on unsteady footing because they both feel trapped to some degree.

Likewise, I loved Rhys’ determination to lead a separate life from Sabrina. I know Jayne felt that some of his actions in the book’s middle section made her less sympathetic to him, but I really enjoyed the way these actions made me feel his conflicted emotions toward his marriage to Sabrina more intensely. So often in romances rakes settle down with a speed and commitment that seems unlikely to me, given their past. This was not the case here, and that made the book more compelling to me than many other rake reformation stories.

Sabrina’s realization that attempting to build a marriage with Rhys might lead nowhere but to heartache gives her conflicted feelings, too, as do the moments when she comes to understand how important it is to Rhys that she behave like a countess rather than a village girl. And when Rhys’s secret finally comes to light, the conflict between the couple becomes even more intense.

All of this is just a long way of saying, perhaps, that after reading a lot of books in which there is nothing serious to keep the hero and heroine apart, it was great to read something like this, where the characters’ mixed emotions were very real and kept me jolted awake and turning the pages to see how things would be resolved.

V. The Way it Made Me Feel

Just as I felt when I read Beauty and the Spy, I’m astonished that a book can sparkle with so much freshness when it follows so many conventions so closely. All I know is that against all odds, this book almost made me forget that I’d ever encountered those familiar aspects before.

As a reviewer, I try to give weight to originality of plots or to books that go unexpected directions. Here the originality of the language, the charm of the characters, the magic of the chemistry between them and the strength of the conflict that threatens to tear them apart were all enough to enchant me so much that, if the plot was not so new, I hardly noticed or cared. I was so entertained, involved and happy that little else mattered.

I’ve tried to lay out my thoughts on how exactly the spell your writing weaves works as clearly and in as much detail as I can; tried to work out for myself and for our readers the secrets of this particular seduction. And though I’ve written what just might be the lengthiest review this blog has seen, I’m still don’t think I’ve got it all figured out. But now I’ve come to that QED we readers rely on in the end: that joyous emotional response that goes to my head like champagne. Proof positive that I’ve just read a keeper. A-.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in paper form at amazon or in ebook form at Books on Board or Fictionwise.

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3. REVIEW: Beyond Seduction by Stephanie Laurens

Your first novel takes place in the summer of 1947 on Long Island, in and near the Hamptons, where the wealthy have summer homes. Not far from the Hamptons is Amagansett, a working class community. The two communities coexist side-by-side, but not without tension. Through political maneuverings in the state government, the wealthy are trying to take the fishing rights away from the local fishermen.

As the book opens two Amagansett fishermen, Conrad Labarde and Rollo Kemp, pull up something unexpected in their net: the body of a young woman in her twenties.

Both Conrad and Tom Hollis, the police officer who is sent to the scene, notice that the dead woman drowned while still wearing her earrings. And that makes both of them suspect foul play.

After investigating for a bit, Hollis identifies the woman as Lillian Wallace, daughter to a very wealthy businessman. Lillian’s grief-stricken brother Manfred is a man with political ambitions.

Why and how was Lillian murdered, and can the crime be proved? The main characters are Tom Hollis and Conrad Labarde, who both want to know the answers to these questions.

Hollis is a former New York City investigator falsely accused of police corruption and sent to Long Island after his success as an investigator made him powerful enemies. His ex-wife has recently divorced him to be with another man, and since then he has let his house go and his life disintegrate.

He does have two friends, a photographer and his girlfriend, who try to cheer him up. In the course of investigating Lillian Wallace’s death, Hollis becomes romantically involves with Mary Calder, a divorcee with strong ties to the community. The relationship gives Hollis hope for the future, but his dedication to the investigation threatens to come between him and Mary.

As for Conrad, a minor spoiler revealed about 90 pages into the book is that he was Lillian Wallace’s lover. Their doomed across-the-tracks romance unfolds in flashbacks as Conrad, haunted by her death, tries to find out who killed her and why.

The skeins of Conrad and Hollis’s investigations and loves are braided together with Lillian’s brother’s perspective and together emerges a picture not just of Lillian and the reasons she ended up dead, but also of post-war Long Island.

Amagansett is therefore part mystery, part thriller and part historical fiction. It is also not just about the search for the killer's identity but also about the search for justice.

The book meanders at times, taking side trips that reveal the main characters’ histories — Conrad is a Basque who survived both the Great Flu and World War II, and his experiences of these events give Amagansett scope and texture.

The pacing of the book is stately, and in a few places (with long descriptions of fishing and hiking) too slow. There was more information about fishing than I ever wanted to know.

One of several things I loved was the homage to another book about Long Island’s wealthy, The Great Gatsby. Like F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Amagansett is concerned not just with the seductive glamour of the rich, but also with the corruption that privilege can bring.

I recommend the book quite highly to anyone who wants to read something different. The characterization and writing were good, the period flavor excellent. I've read that you are a screenwriter and it shows in the wonderful dialogue. I could easily imagine this book being adapted for the screen. It would make an excellent period film. My grade for Amagansett is a B+.

Sincerely,

Janine

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When I read Viva Las Bad Boys!, I was struck by how great your voice was for smart, snappy dialogue. But writing a full length book wasn’t the same as writing three novellas and I admit to being a bit worried that smart, snappy dialogue couldn’t carry an entire story. I was also concerned that the heroine would be irritating rather than smart given the title. Thankfully, I was wrong and I enjoyed Your Mouth Drives Me Crazy a great deal.

Kane Travers is on a forced vacation while his shooting of a young man is being investigated by Internal Affairs. He’s about run out of things to fix in his house when a naked female body washes ashore on his part of the beach. Annie Parks is in Hawaii on a revenge mission but her attempt to achieve justice is cut short when she’s thrown overboard a yacht.

Annie’s quite sure that she both needs to stay with Kane but not give up any information. Each question that Kane lobs her way, Annie diverts with a sarcastic retort. This could get tiresome fast, but Kane is quick to catch on and plays her game. Their exchanges were sexy and funny.

“Last night.” His lips flattened into a thin line. “Not funny, by the way.”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Not in the mood he was in. “Oh, come on. It was a little funny.”
“Hysterical.”
“You're just mad because I didn’t fall for your act. You expected me to throw off my clothes and beg you to make love to me.”
“Would that have killed you?”

The unique part of this book was that it takes some old romance tropes: the amnesiac, the revenge plot, the burned by love so not going to love again and makes them new again while gently mocking them.

Annie is playing the amnesiac so she doesn’t have to answer uncomfortable questions about why someone tried to kill her. Annie is the one with the revenge plot and not the hero. When Kane tries to pull the old – all the females in my life have died so I don’t want to get attached – his best friend makes fun of him.

Kane tried that life once and it didn't work. “She’s leaving. Her life is somewhere else, which is better.”

“Not that I-kill-every-woman-I-know bullshit.”

Kane and Josh’s exchanges were some of my favorite with Josh calling Kane “warrior boy” being a constant source of amusement for me (and apparently Josh). For the reader who yearns for the guy’s guy and not one who thinks things sound “heavenly” (review for that book to come tomorrow), this book will satisfy. The parts that I loved about the book were the setting: I learned alot about Hawaii and its culture and background in a very un-intrusive way; and the interplay between the characters, particularly the dialogue.

The parts I didn’t love was the suspense portion which seemed contrived at times. The suspense had to be fueled by Annie’s holding back information when it was clear that she trusted Kane and the villians lacked depth. There were a couple of confrontation scenes that were so over the top as to be comical instead of tense.

Overall, though, the book had good balance between the darker feelings of loss that both Kane and Annie had suffered in the past and the completeness that they felt together. B

Best regards

Jane

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What a wonderful, challenging, envelope-pushing, smart and astonishing book you’ve written. Reading it wasn’t always easy or comfortable, but in the end, it was more than worth every penny of the $14 I spent on it and the effort it demanded of me as a reader.

At first glance, the relationship between Kit Stansell and his estranged wife Mary seems beyond salvaging. After nine years apart, Kit and Mary have a brief encounter at an inn in Calais, France. They manage not only to have sex, but to get into a raging argument about their political difference of opinion and the considerable pain they caused each other in the days when they lived together as husband and wife.

Kit and Mary both grew up together in Derbyshire near the village of Grefford. Kit was one of the Marchioness of Rowen’s illegitimate children, passed off as her husband’s third son. Mary was the daughter of a wealthy brewer. To make matters worse, their fathers hated each other because of a land dispute. Despite that, Kit and Mary befriended each other as children, fell in love as teenagers and later ran off to Gretna Green to get married.

The marriage failed quickly; Kit cheated on Mary and even got himself an actress mistress; Mary, in revenge, took Kit’s best friend Richard to bed. When Kit caught them together, his relationship with Mary disintegrated completely. Kit joined the army and nearly got himself killed in the war. Mary kept herself busy by befriending poets and reformers. And nine years passed.

During the years of their separation neither Kit nor Mary slept alone. But now Mary’s lover, a wealthy manufacturer, wants very much to marry her and is willing to stand by her through the scandal of a divorce. Therefore, just before Kit and Mary part company in France, they agree that Kit will sue Mary for divorce on the grounds of adultery.

I admit that at this point in the book, I wasn’t sure there was much hope for Mary and Kit, and for the book itself, at least as a romance. But I kept reading, partly because I was impressed the unfailingly British-sounding dialogue and the unusual literary techniques you use, such as the nonlinear flashbacks, the brief section in present tense, and the inclusion of snippets of dialogue within the narration. These weren’t always easy to keep up with, but I can’t complain, because I was ultimately so richly rewarded.

Kit and Mary return to England, Mary to visit her sister and niece in Grefford, Kit hoping for a job with the Home Office in London. But instead the Home Office sends Kit to Grefford, to investigate rumors of a political conspiracy that poses a danger to England. And once they are both in Derbyshire, Kit and Mary not only realize they need to combine forces to find out more about the conspiracy, they also find it hard to stay away from each other.

Meanwhile their flashbacks take us from the ugly breakup to the newlywed giddiness to the childhood friendship and further, so that the first negative impression of Mary and Kit is supplemented with new evidence.

And that’s the genius of this book. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the flashbacks of the past are put together piece by piece, just as Kit and Mary’s relationship is put back together little by little, so that the true picture of their feelings for each other emerges only gradually. As I read, I began to understand how wrong I had been about Kit and Mary, how much there was to them and to their feelings. How long they had loved each other, and how much they needed to make restitution, to help one another heal, to (figuratively speaking) kiss the scars from the wounds their younger selves had inflicted.

I love being won over in this way. It was a wonderful surprise to discover all the layers of the characters and of the book, and to follow The Slightest Provocation down its intersecting paths (rather like those on Kit’s family’s estate). I love its meanderings into the minds of other characters such as Peggy, Mary’s pregnant maid, or Elizabeth, Mary’s niece, and her cousin Fannie, which give context to Mary and Kit’s relationship by exploring class differences, the impetuousness of youth, and the community life of an English village. The conspiracy subplot touches on an issue that is a part of our lives, the tension between our need for freedom and our need for security, and moreover, shows how gradually Kit and Mary both become more willing to listen and less quick to judge.

Finally, I feel that this book is also about memories and the passage of time, growth and maturity, and the power of love (even physical love) to heal.

Thank you for giving me so much to think about. Thank you for challenging me and for moving me. Thank you for having the courage to break so many conventions, to write something so complex and unique (I almost feel I should thank your editor as well, for giving you such free reign, and the cover designer for one of this year’s loveliest covers). You have created what is in my opinion a remarkable book, and so I give The Slightest Provocation an A.

Sincerely,

Janine

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After this book, I am on an anthology diet because as a general rule, I find them dissatisfying. Your stories, particularly your first two, were like a breath of fresh air through the stale anthology shelf.

Viva Las Bad Boys is set, well, in Las Vegas, of course. It features three stories that take place at the The Berkley Hotel and Casino, a premiere luxury destination on the Strip. All three stories feature great dialogue with funny and smart exchanges between the hero and heroine. If that is your hallmark, I’ll be buying alot of your books. Good dialogue, particular flirtatious funny banter, is as rare as it is enjoyable. The last story didn’t really live up to the standards set in the first two but not by too much.

I hesitate to say much about your stories because I don’t want to spoil the fun reveal that takes place while reading. Jackpot features a jilted bride and a man jilted by his business partner. Not all is what it seems. This is a deception story and what makes it work is that the character being deceived doesn’t mind being deceived because initially their encounter is all about the sex. When it grows into something more, the characters are savvy enough to realize when someone is actually trying to hurt them and when they are trying to help. The Big Mis would have been an easy way to pad the story but you avoided that dreadful trap and ended with a strong, believable HEA. B for this entry.

Green light. He leaned forward, letting her soft fragrance drift around him. “You know, Laine, I just might be the man to help you with that.”

She snorted. “Is that a line?”

Oh, yeah, he definitely needed more liquor. A new move might not be a bad idea either. He slid back on the uncomfortable stool and signaled for the cocktail waitress to bring him a big glass of something dark and unholy.

“Admittedly that wasn't my best work. Maybe the dry air is throwing me off,” he blustered his way through the ego beating. “I might need to reassess my strategy.”

“No need. It works for you somehow.”

Player’s Club showcases a different type of heroine: one who is self aware. She was devoted to her job, but also recognized that she had power as a woman. This is so rare in books these days, particularly contemporary ones. The heroine is a consultant hired by the hotel to reform the bad boy cook. The heroine catches the bad boy chef in a compromising situation and the way in which she deals with that scene is hysterical. No stammering, no blushes, just cool, calm manner which caused the hero to feel quite awkward. The heroine and chef engage in a steamy game of one upmanship (perfect for a Vegas themed book) wherein both end up winning. B for this one too.

The fall ended with his head wedged between her soft breasts and his upper body flush against hers. The position was a little piece of heaven. His bottom half certainly thought so and swelled in welcome.

“What exactly was that supposed to be?” She choked out the question.

Too much to hope she'd be so wowed by his masterful skill to be upset about the tumble. “That didn't go as planned.”

“What, did you plan to throw me out the window and missed?”

Two of a Kind portrays a jet set hotel critic and Alex Mitchell, the hotel’s manager. The two of them get stuck in the casino’s spa when the blackout takes place. TOAK is another deception story wherein the hotel critic hides her identity from Alex. Alex doesn’t find out until late and his accusations against the critic were valid. I liked this story less as it seemed to be a bit disjointed and I didn’t find the quick resolution to the couple’s problems believable as I did in the previous two. C+ for this one.

Overall, this was a good anthology with great dialogue, good humor and belieavable HEAs. Based on the first two novellas, I can’t wait for your single title: Your Mouth Makes Me Crazy.

Best regards,

Jane

PS. Love the Bellagio and the Shinto restaurant in particular.

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