I was checking the Samhain home page for new releases and stumbled upon your book. I was looking for something short, steamy and fun and this seemed to fit the bill. I’m happy to say that it was extremely enjoyable, and a fun, flirty read.

Cat Scratch Fever has a familiar paranormal set up. The heroine, Lilly, is a lynchat (werelynx) and is going into heat. This is inconvenient for her because she’s trying to broker a business deal for land with the hero, Dante, who is a werewolf. The werewolves and werelynxes hate each other because werewolves stole the werelynx land years ago and won’t sell it back to them.

The set up promises sexy fun and delivers. In one of the very first scenes, Lilly’s overcome with lust from the heat so she pulls her car over and masturbates to relieve the sensation. Naturally the hero stumbles upon her and cannot help but watch. Writing up the description, it sounds a bit heavy-handed but I thought it was well done.

Lilly is a decent heroine. She wants the land back and will do anything to get it. She’s a bit headstrong and mouthy, but not in a way that makes me roll my eyes. She refuses to take crap from anyone, especially the werewolves. Dante is the alpha of the werewolf pack and he’s not an overbearing alpha. If anything, I didn’t find him quite alpha enough. One of the main angles of the storyline are his avoiding conflict with his father over one pack issue, and another female over another pack issue. I felt he could have dealt with these two people in a more authoritative way if he was the alpha, but it wasn’t enough to mar my enjoyment.

The sex is plentiful and fun. You promised erotic and it was definitely steamy, but nothing too ridiculous. I didn’t even pause at the ‘mating knot’. The head of his penis swells when he is in full mating mode, though it wasn’t really explained too graphically what this does, so I wasn’t too wigged out by it. I think I have become inured to unnatural penises in paranormal, which is a sad statement on the genre.

What I liked most about this book is that it was funny. Some of Lilly’s impatient lines to Dante were clever.

Fascinated, she watched those strong, tanned fingers grasp the zipper and tug it down. One notch at a time.

“Why are you moving so damn slow?”

“Impatient?”

“No, but I could have gone to a movie and filed my taxes in the amount of time it’s taking you to unzip.”

While I really enjoyed this, I’m going to have to take some points off for the ending. It’s a HEA but it’s extremely abrupt. A little aftermath goes a long way, and this wasn’t enough to ruin the read for me, but it felt as if there was a chapter missing. I’m sad there aren’t more books in this series immediately purchaseable. I give this a B.

~DA_January

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As we all know, it’s impossible to be objective about a review. And this is fine, as long as we can be honest about the sources of our lack of objectivity, if we know them. This book has flaws, even major flaws that have been pointed out to me by other really astute readers, and I will talk about these flaws. But I was and am utterly unable to be aware of these flaws as I read this book, no matter how many times I read it — and I’ve read it at least three times by now. This book ripped my heart out, stomped all over it, put it back, then did it again, only harder.

I need plot summary to explain my particular and specific non-objectivity: The story is set at some point during Victoria’s reign — gas lighting and indoor plumbing exist, for example. Lord George Albert Westin, or Wes to his very few friends, is the second son of a very powerful Marquess, painfully shy, reclusive, a brilliant botanist, completely gay, a stammerer, and addicted to heroin that was first prescribed to him by a doctor to control his panic attacks. Michael Vallant is a first class whore, beautiful, and the victim of rape at the age of twelve by none other than Wes’s father. I am giving nothing away by saying this because it’s all revealed very early in the story.

My utter lack of objectively arises from the fact that I was sent the ARC of this book a week after the Penn State/Sandusky story broke. The situation at Penn State broke my heart and made me furious, in turn/together. So the first time I read this book, all I could think of was Sandusky’s victims, who seem to have been lost in the circus of all the other “more important” players of the “scandal.” The most recent time I read this book (for this review) was about two weeks after a very close friend told me about how their heroin addiction destroyed their life and how they’ve struggled to piece it back together. So I have no ability to separate from this book. I haven’t the slightest hope of viewing it with anything close to objectivity or even impartiality. This book is real people to me, desperately vulnerable people and/or people I care about deeply.

This book, if you couldn’t tell, is utterly over the top. Everything that happens, every character, every plot point, every sentence, is designed specifically to rip your heart out and stomp on it. Being the glutton I am, I love this. I’m a Romantic (Big-R, literary movement Romantic) at heart, as well as a romantic (small-R, people falling in love romantic), so I go for the grand gestures, always have. I love Over The Top. This book, therefore, utterly worked for me. But I know that’s what exasperated some of my astute reader friends who read it.

For instance, the stock characters: the villain (Wes’s father) is evil incarnate. He’s not like Sandusky was — everyone’s best friend and buddy. Daventry is only after power. You get the impression he isn’t even really a pedophile; rather, he just gets off on the utter power of “owning” a boy and doing exactly what he wants with him. He’s evil and horrible and that’s the point. Then there’s the pimp with the heart of gold: Michael’s mother (an aging courtesan) sold Michael to Wes’s father when Michael was 12. After the week with Daventry was over, Michael ran away and was saved by Rodger, who was 16 at the time and — of course — a master thief and pimp. Rodger’s basically controlled everything about Michael’s life since then, with Michael’s full permission. He knows all, sees all, controls all. But he loves Michael and wants what’s best for him. And there’s also Penelope Brannigan, the American “social worker” (an anachronistic term I’m using here just to make a point) with the horrible past that’s the reason she’s trying to save the world, one addict at a time.

While these characters are completely from Stock Central, and therefore annoy other readers, they completely worked for me because of their layers. Yes, they’re stock, but stock characters exist for a reason, and really, any representation of a pimp has become a stock representation, ditto a social worker with tragedy in her past that spurs her to do her good work. Cullinan doesn’t leave them at that, though. Rodger comes to realize his mistakes in dealing with Michael and the interaction between them is so well done. Penelope helps Wes overcome his addiction and control his stutter, but at cost to herself. And honestly, people with Over The Top issues like this do actually exist in real life. I know a surprising number of them, in fact. So it doesn’t actually seem over the top to me.

However, the ONE issue I had with this book was with Wes’s brother: if any character was cardboard, it was him, parroting their father’s estimation of Wes, focused on his son as “the heir,” not as a boy. That did bother me and seemed too OTT, even for this book. His about-face acceptance of the relationship between Wes and Michael at the end of the story (remember, this is a historical, so “sodomy” is a crime, etc.) bothered other readers I talked with, but I bought it, considering the specific circumstances (that are spoilerish so I will comment no more).

But really, the love story between Wes and Michael is strong enough that it allows me to say words which might seem unbelievable, but here I go: addiction and child rape aside, this book is about Wes and Michael, two very damaged souls, finding each other and becoming both weaker and stronger together. As always, Cullinan delivers the goods (for me). For instance, Wes (whom Michael calls and thinks of as Albert) is trying to convince Michael to wear his much-needed glasses:

Albert only smiled wryly and held out the spectacles, dangling them from his fingers. “Wh-Wh-Why will you n-not wear them? You p-p-prefer not to see?”

Michael’s cock was pounding as hard as his pulse now, and as he knew neither would get release, he lost his temper. “My lord, I make my living by my looks. How many whores have you met with glasses thicker than most windowpanes?”

He doubted he’d have been able to read Albert’s face even if he could see it. It made him angry, and he would have stormed out, but he couldn’t leave his glasses. He’d fallen asleep before he’d finished the Dickens.

“Wh-Wh-Why d-did you ask m-m-me to k-k-kiss you?” Albert asked at last.

“Because you haven’t kissed me all week,” Michael shot back.

Albert’s reply was measured, careful. “You w-w-wanted me to?”

“Yes.” Michael folded his arms over his chest. “I did.”

Albert took a step forward, his blurry form coming into partial focus. “H-How m-many c-clients h-have y-you m-met with s-s-s-such a c-c-clumsy st-st-ststammer?”

Heat raced up Michael’s cheeks. “You’re different,” he whispered.

“S-S-So are you,” Albert whispered back.

Don’t fall in love with him. Rodger’s words rose up in faint echo, a last warning.

Too late, Michael admitted, frozen in place as Albert lifted Michael’s glasses and arranged them carefully on his face.

The impetus for the story is that Wes and Michael meet by accident at a not-quite-ton party. Michael is there to find tricks (which in retrospect seems odd, considering how much he stays at the brothel during the rest of the book), but is instead being harassed by a rejected customer; Wes is there to see a rare orchid (he’s a botanist) but is unable to control his social anxiety enough to ask his hostess to see it. Wes and Michael are trapped together by Michael’s irate former customer and “talk” to each other on Wes’s notepad, allowing them to have a conversation without consideration for Wes’s stammer. They have a sexual encounter which sends Michael into an unaccountable tailspin of flashbacks to his abuse at the hands of Wes’s father. Unable to earn his keep anymore, Michael asks Rodger to find Wes, hoping that another encounter with Wes will fix him (Michael), just as the first one messed him up. It doesn’t, but after Michael’s panic attack, Wes buys a month of Michael’s time, during which they spend every afternoon together, learning each other, falling in love, and struggling with what life has thrown them.

Cullinan’s writing is brilliant, as usual. Michael and Wes are amazing characters; their relationship is perfect for them. They don’t cure each other. There’s no insta-cure in this book for heroin addiction or for PTSD flashbacks to child sex abuse. But their love for each other makes them want to try to be better, however much they stumble along the way. But I also love how the characters don’t just strengthen each other — they weaken each other as well; their relationship makes things worse for them as well as better. It’s brilliantly done.

Once again, I feel like my review doesn’t begin to do justice to the book. Honestly, yes, the book is over the top and if that’s not your thing as a reader, then this book will NOT work for you. But, you know what, every now and then I’m confronted with the fact that some people’s lives are like this: maybe none of Sandusky’s victims will end up with a recovering heroin addict for a partner, but both deserve happiness just as much as anyone else (except Sandusky himself, of course). Sometimes the love story should be about the victims, the non-Alphas, the ones who are left behind, the ones who aren’t strong — but of course, are the strongest of us all. That is this book. And I adored it.

Grade: B+ (Recommended Read for February)

Best regards,
-Sarah

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Perhaps I wasn’t the best choice to review your latest novel Everything You’ve Got. I’m married to a physician and have worked in and around the medical field for most of my adult life. Your heroine, twenty-seven (I think) year old Dr. Kat Dayton, struck me as unbelievably immature and the problems she faces in her medical practice seem to be in large part of her own making. For most of the book, she annoyed the hell out of me and I couldn’t see why your hero, the literally heroic Luke Hamilton, put up with her.

Kat and Luke have both grown up in the small town of Justice, Nebraska. Everything You’ve Got is the second book in the series Anything and Everything. I didn’t read the first book, Anything You Want, in which Luke and Kat are introduced, but that wasn’t a problem for me. Their back-story is clearly explained in Everything You’ve Got. Kat has been hung up on Luke for years but he spent most of that time stuck on the heroine of Anything You Want, Sabrina. Sabrina is now happily married to Luke’s best friend Marc and Luke has realized the woman he really loves is Kat. The two share a highly charged kiss involving handcuffs the night of Luke’s birthday party and immediately become a couple. As Luke says to Marc after he walks in on the two of them making out madly,

“And we’re both about to have a love life.”

“You’re getting a girlfriend?” Marc asked with a smirk.

“Yep. Terrific gal. You’ll love her,” Luke said.

“And Kat’s getting a boyfriend?”

“Guy who’s crazy about her.” Marc chuckled and Kat rolled her eyes as she took Luke’s hand. “Let’s go. Dining room.” Luke sighed and followed her into what could only be his surprise birthday party.

Kat’s never had a really serious relationship with any man although she’s had many a fling. Not only has she been crushing on Luke for years, Kat has serious intimacy issues. For years, Kat has kept the world at bay with her kick-ass attitude and her physical presentation.

She knew that most people saw her as a tough, confident, no-bullshit kind of woman. And that was absolutely the image she worked to project. Most of the time it was easy and most of the time it made her feel that way. But there were days like this, when even the boots, the makeup, the piercings and body paint didn’t make her feel tough.

It had always fascinated her how outward appearance colored the way people perceived things. She’d chosen her battle armor back in junior high. She changed the color of her hair and the body jewelry and paint she used, but her general look was the same— don’t mess with me.

It had worked like a dream in junior high and high school to keep the mean girls away and the cocky boys at arm’s length. A guy had to really want to get close to make a move. She admired those that tried.

The look had followed her to college and even med school. She was very comfortable with it by then and liked seeing how people responded to her. Some avoided her, feeling intimidated, some labeled her a rebel, some a bad-ass slut.

Some found her intriguing, some figured she was just trying to be odd, still others assumed she was disturbed and felt sorry for her….

She was more than a little fascinated by the whole thing. She’d grown up in small-town Nebraska, so she knew she was an anomaly. After all, it was completely on purpose.

No one knew that behind closed doors she preferred baggy sweats, no makeup and that nothing was pierced or painted anywhere others couldn’t see it.

It was armor, a costume, a Spiderman suit for the Peter Parker that lurked inside her—awkward, unsure, and breakable.

Kat thinks maybe she could let Luke in, but then, something bad happens. As she’s admiring her new boyfriend’s butt at his surprise party, her phone rings. A patient Kat saw in clinic earlier in the day—he came in complaining of arm weakness and a headache after working in the yard—whom she then sent home has just had a massive stroke and is unconscious. Kat realizes she misdiagnosed him—his symptoms were those of someone who had a mild stroke. Kat begins to freak out. Had she realized that Tom, the patient, had a stroke, she would have sent him to the hospital for testing and treatment which then, possibly, might have prevented the huge stroke he subsequently had. Kat doesn’t tell Luke about the issue that night nor does she tell him about the discussion she has with the senior partner in her medical practice who, the next day, essentially forces her to take a leave of absence, and begins the process of forcing her to quit practicing in Justice.

In the meantime, Luke, who always has a plan, decides what he and Kat need to do to take their relationship to the “we’re getting married and having six babies” stage is to kidnap her and take her on a trip in an RV to Nashville—it’s a favor, in part, for Sabrina, a musician, who will be performing in Nashville and needs the RV there, but is pregnant and wants to fly rather than drive. So, Luke handcuffs Kat and off the two go—Kat with her secret career problems and intimacy issues, Luke with the conviction she’s perfect for him and everything’s going to be great.

So many things are wrong with this set up—it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with Kat and the way she presents herself. She’s supposedly brilliant and wants nothing more than to treat the small town patients she sees at the clinic. And yet she never thinks that her appearance might make some uncomfortable with her as their physician. She wears black leather skimpy clothes, pierces her face, covers her body with wild body paint and still wants to be seen as a trust-worthy family practitioner in a small town in Nebraska—the 11th most conservative state in the country. Where I live, in a liberal part of North Carolina, most of the hospitals and medical practices don’t allow their medical employees to have visible tattoos or any visible body piercings other than ears. One can argue this is dumb, archaic, and based on an irrational premise—people who are tattooed and pierced aren’t as trustworthy as those who aren’t—but the bias in patients and medical administrators is real and it seemed ridiculous to me that Kat didn’t appear to give it any thought.

Then there’s the misdiagnosis. Kat is a young practitioner—she’s been licensed for less than a year. And it’s true the patient presented with symptoms consistent with a possible minor stroke. But, the misdiagnosis Kat makes is a common one, and it seems unlikely, had she correctly diagnosed the patient earlier in the day, that diagnosis would have prevented him from having a massive stroke less than twelve hours after she saw him in the clinic. Furthermore, if every time a physician made a misdiagnosis or didn’t catch a problem, she were immediately put on leave, we’d have very few working doctors in this country. It made no sense Kat was not allowed to continue to practice and even less sense that she, who is known for being both a medical whiz and a strong woman, would have allowed herself to be professionally treated in this way. This is a woman who has been to four years of college, four years of medical school and, probably, three years of residency. She’s spent years and—although it’s never mentioned—money to become a doctor. One bad call and she’s on the run, terrified she’ll never be able to hold her head up in Justice again, worried she’ll be ruined in a malpractice suit (unlikely given the circumstances), and, in general, overwhelmingly awash in anxious self-pity.

Luke, who knows none of this, kidnaps her—her office tells him it’s fine because she’s due for some vacation—and Kat goes with him, running away (for most of the book) from the nasty senior partner threatening her professional life. Kat, while on the road with Luke, when she’s not freaking about her awful horrible no-good mistake, is freaking out about having Luke see her without her makeup and body paint. She hasn’t let anyone—anyone!—see her without makeup or body paint since she was in ninth grade. She doesn’t normally take off her clothes when she has sex. And now, she’s stuck in an RV for days with a man who says he wants to marry her and she’s terrified to show him the real her. So, she spends her time alternately trying to get in his pants or panicking her life is going to fall to ruins. One page she thinks she loves him and he can be trusted; the next she’s sure he’ll leave her when he finds out the people of Justice will all think she’s fatally flawed. She’s so all over the map emotionally, I found it hard to either like her or make sense of her feelings.

Luke is also a cipher. He was apparently in love with Sabrina, or thought he was in love with Sabrina, for years. After she hooked up with Marc, Luke realized he just wanted to take care of Sabrina because he’s the kind of guy who wants to take care of everyone and everything. I don’t know why he loves Kat initially—he has a hero complex and she, on the surface, comes across as someone who doesn’t want anyone to be her savior. Then, as the two travel and she opens up to him, he sees she is a far more complex person than he thought and he begins to feel hurt she isn’t offering him much more than just her body. Luke also, unlike Kat, fits in beautifully in Justice. He runs a restaurant there he loves, he’s involved with the community, someday he’d like to be mayor. His dream is to marry Kat, have tons of kids, grow old in Justice, and be the most loved guy in town. He can’t seem to see Kat might not be the right person for that specific future and Kat, who is sure she is not, in the wake of her medical practice problems, that person, punishes them both for this disconnect. It’s an annoying version of the “I love you but I can’t be with you because I’m wrong for you” thesis and, by the middle of the novel, I wanted them to both start seeing other people—in Kat’s case, I hoped it would be a good shrink.

Finally, in the middle of the book, Kat comes clean to Luke in more ways than one. She allows him see her “naked,” tells him about her professional problems, and lets him go down on her. (She’s only ever let anyone do this to her once before—it makes her feel too vulnerable.) And, at this point, I had hopes the two might begin to resolve their issues constructively. My hopes were dashed. I disliked the way this story resolved itself. Kat never really stands up for herself in Justice and Luke, in order to have Kat, not only puts up with way too much crap from her, but gives up almost everything he cares about. The ending is written as though it is a happy, even blissful, one but I didn’t by it. I wanted to say, especially to Luke, (stealing the words of the great country music songstress Kathy Mattea), “Darlin’, you’re not dreamin’ big enough if that’s what you call love.”

The book is dedicated to “to anyone who’s ever been bullied or made to feel like you’re less than you are.” (Is there anyone who hasn’t, at some point in their life, been made to feel less than they think they are? And is that necessarily a bad thing? There’s a reason the ancients were obsessed with hubris and that the ability to succeed is closely tied with the ability to fail.) It’s clear the message of the book is we should all accept everyone on his or her own terms, not judge others by their appearance, or try and force people to fit into limiting social expectations. And yet, in her own way, Kat has a very difficult time not doing just those things. She’s judgmental, struggles to compromise, and needs to control how others see her. She sees the people of Justice as less than they turn out to be and she, one could argue, bullies Luke into a relationship based far more on her needs than his. I have a hard time with pat morality inherently—I had an even harder time with it in this book given the actions of the heroine.

I did like the writing in the book. The sex scenes are pretty hot and parts of the novel are funny. Anyone who has ever waited in a doctor’s office has to smile at this passage:

An hour and forty minutes later, Luke was sitting in the waiting room of the Alliance Medical Partners clinic flipping through a Cosmo magazine from 2009. Still, he couldn’t argue with the seven ways to seduce a man outdoors and the position-by-position guide to “The Best Sex of Your Life” seemed timeless.

But, overall, Everything You’ve Got did not work for me. I give it a C-.

Dabney

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