Dear Ms. Hale,

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.

Dear Ms. Stuart,

Fire and Ice is the fifth and (if I’m not mistaken) final book in your Ice series, which features the agents of a ruthless spy organization known as the Committee. This one is all about the flamboyant Reno, Taka’s younger cousin.

Back in the third book, Ice Blue, Reno, aka Hiromasa Shinoda, a video-game loving Japanese punk with long red hair and teardrops tattooed on his cheeks, met up with Jilly Lovitz, Summer’s brainy half sister, who was then eighteen years old. From the moment those two laid eyes on each other, a powerful attraction was born, but Summer and Taka made Reno promise to stay far away from Jilly.

Fire and Ice opens two years later. Reno is now twenty-seven and an agent of the Committee (though how exactly he is able to do the Committee’s work looking as conspicuous as he does is not explained). In the opening scene, Reno learns that while Taka and Summer have gone into hiding from Russian mercenaries who have been hired to take out all the Committee’s agents, Jilly, unaware that they are no longer in Tokyo, has decided to pay them a visit. Realizing that Jilly is in danger, Reno breaks his promise to stay away from her in order to go to Japan and save her life.

Jilly has come to Tokyo in the wake of a one-night stand that went so badly she is uncertain whether or not she is technically still a virgin. Jilly, who at age twenty has already graduated from college and is now working on her PhD, has always been isolated from her peers because of her intelligence and her studies. In the two years since she last saw Reno, she has not gotten over her crush on him, and he is one of her reasons for coming to Japan.

Just as three of the Russian mercenaries are about to grab Jilly from Summer and Taka’s deserted apartment, Reno shows up and kills them. After escaping on the back of a motorcycle to a traditional Japanese inn where they encounter more mercenaries, Reno and Jilly head for the mountains. Reno’s grandfather, a yakuza (Japanese mafia) boss, has an onsen (traditional bathouse) there.

On the way to the onsen, they bicker as Reno does his best to annoy Jilly in order to maintain a distance between them and thus keep his promise to Summer and Taka, and even more so because he values his own freedom and recognizes that his feelings for Jilly endanger it. Jilly, meanwhile, keeps telling herself that now that she has seen him kill, her crush on Reno is a thing of yesterday. But even she realizes that she protests too much.

Just as they are about to arrive in the onsen, all hell breaks loose, leading Reno to wonder if there’s a traitor in his grandfather’s organization. So Reno and Jilly go on the run again, and this time, sharing close quarters leads to growing intimacy between them, as do close calls with death and desire.

Fire and Ice is a tough book to grade and review. At the end of my review of Ice Storm, I indicate that I have enjoyed the Ice series, but that its pleasures were diminishing for me. I loved Black Ice so much that though it’s not perfect, I gave it an A. Cold as Ice was a B+ for me, Ice Blue a B, and Ice Storm a B-.

So how did I feel about Fire and Ice? Fortunately, I am not sorry I spent $6.99 on it. But at the same time, I wish I loved it as much as I loved Black Ice.

One of the best things about Fire and Ice is that it is only nominally about the Committee. Except for a very brief appearance by Peter Madsen in the first scene of the book, the only other Committee agent who shows up in this story is Taka, and he is there far more in his capacity as Reno’s cousin and Jilly’s brother-in-law than as a secret agent.

That is all to the good in my opinion, because the Committee came very close to being reduced to a bunch of bumbling fools in Ice Storm, and I think that as a consequence the ruthless spy organization aspect of this series is pretty much played out.

Other elements we have seen before in the earlier books are present in Fire and Ice, including the pairing of a relatively innocent and softhearted heroine with a more experienced and tough hero, the hero and heroine’s going on the run together, the hero’s saving the heroine’s life while forcing her to confront her own desire for him, the heroine’s initial certainty that the hero doesn’t return her feelings, and her shock when faced with the brutality of death and killing.

While some of these ingredients are key to what made me love Black Ice, the fifth time around they don’t feel as fresh as they once did, and for the most part (with exceptions like a powerful scene in Reno’s apartment that involves an unexpected twist), I think Fire and Ice is at its weakest when they come into play.

The book is at its strongest when exploring newer terrain, such as the Japan setting, the relative youth of its hero and heroine, Reno’s fear of commitment, and the vulnerability that lies behind his punkster facade. You win big points from me for these aspects of the book. Reno, in particular, is a truly memorable character, especially in those moments where he reveals himself to Jilly or to the reader.

The fact that Reno and Jilly are in love to begin with is both a weakness and a strength in my eyes. It is mentioned on your website that a free story about Reno and Jilly’s first meeting will be available soon. I look forward to reading it, but there were times when I wished that falling-in-love process was shown more in the pages of Fire and Ice.

It’s clear why Jilly has a crush on the flamboyant Reno, and why her feelings deepen as he protects her, but it’s not so evident why Reno would feel the same way about Jilly, beyond his physical lust for her body, since although we are told she is brilliant, that brilliance isn’t shown, and otherwise there isn’t much that makes Jilly distinctive or different from many other young women, except perhaps for her for her sexual inexperience.

There is a scene in which Jilly puts together some information about Reno and arrives at a different view of him than she had before, and this scene does give a bit of insight into why Jilly might have attracted him. I would have liked to know even more about this aspect of his background.

At the same time, the presence of Jilly and Reno’s mutual obsession from the very first page of the book also serves to give the book a different twist that the previous Ice books did not have. Because he is already in love to begin with, Reno is softer with Jilly and more protective of her than Bastien, Peter, Taka and Serafin were with Chloe, Genevieve, Summer and Isobel, respectively. That is one of the things I liked best about Fire and Ice, especially since Reno is young and not ready to settle down, confused by his promises to Summer and Taka to stay away from Jilly and not sure what he wants to do about any of it.

On the whole, I found Reno intriguing enough to hold my attention easily, but Jilly less so. The Japan setting felt well-researched to me, and I was glad to read a book that was set at such a different locale. While there were times during Fire and Ice that I felt I was reading something I’d read before, there was just enough freshness to keep me interested, and I also savored your lean, tight writing style at several points. Had I not read the earlier books in the series, I would probably have liked Fire and Ice even more, but I still liked it as much as its most recent predecessor, or perhaps even a bit more. B- for Fire and Ice.

Sincerely,

Janine

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

Dear Ms. Holly,

A few years ago, I read your historical romance Beyond Innocence. While I didn’t love the book, I thought it was better than average and I especially liked your writing voice, so much so that I quoted from it in my opinion piece on style. Therefore, when Janet (Robin) recommended Catching Midnight to me, I ordered a copy of the book and took it with me on a recent trip.

Catching Midnight is the first book in a historical paranormal series that features upyrs, immortal, blood-drinking shape-shifters. Set in the medieval era, the book opens in 1349, when ten year old Gillian is cast out of her home by her mother because her baby brother is infected with the plague. Gillian can sometimes sense people’s secrets and her perception tells her that her mother prefers her brother to her. Nonetheless, she follows her mother’s advice and runs to hide in the forest, where she expects to die.

After falling asleep in the woods, Gillian awakens to hear voices arguing over her. The voices belong to Auriclus and Nim Wei, two upyr elders who both want to claim Gillian. Nim Wei and her “children” (those she has made into upyrs) live in the cities, while Auriclus’s “children” dwell in the forest. Nim Wei believes in the pursuit of knowledge and material things, while Auriclus sees a more austere and simple life as the path to goodness. When the two elders let Gillian choose which of them she will go with, Gillian, though she possesses a lively and curious mind, chooses Auriclus because even more than knowledge, she wants to be a good person.

The story then flashes forward over twenty years. Gillian is now an ageless upyr with the ability to read many creatures’ minds, and she lives in a cave with upyrs who can transform into wolves. The leader of the pack, Ulric, wants Gillian to be his mate. But although he and Gillian occasionally sleep together, she does not feel that their relationship is exactly what she wants, and because she craves the knowledge that the rest of the pack does not care about, she refuses to take a wolf as her familiar and acquire the ability to become a wolf herself.

Sensing that Ulric intends to force the issue, Gillian leaves the cave in the middle of the night. When she takes shelter in a seaside cliff, she is able to hear the thoughts of a baby falcon, and she instinctively knows that she and the bird can join their consciousnesses so that they will then be able to transform from Gillian’s form to that of the falcon and back at will.

Just as Gillian is making the falcon her familiar, Aimery Fitz Clare and his nephew Robin are planning to capture a baby falcon. Aimery is the younger brother of Edmund, the baron of Bridesmere. Edmund’s beautiful but self-centered wife, Claris, believes she is in love with Aimery, and her fixation on him has made Aimery’s life hell, since he lives in Bridesmere where he serves his brother as master of arms. Edmund and Aimery’s relationship is strained by Claris’s infatuation with Aimery, and by Edmund’s envy of Aimery’s courage. Aimery is battle-scarred and huge, and many fear him, which serves to make him feel further isolated.

Such is the situation when Aimery captures Gillian while she is in her falcon form. His nephew Robin names the bird “Princess.” Aimery’s gentleness with Princess appeals to Gillian greatly, and she becomes fascinated with him. After arriving Bridesmere, Gillian takes her human form to explore the castle. In her search, she stumbles across a scrying device that alerts Nim Wei to a disturbance within what is part of her domain. The elder decides to go to Bridesmere and investigate further.

Meanwhile, Gillian encounters Aimery and when he believes her to be a goddess, she does not correct his misapprehension. A mutual attraction develops quickly between the two and Gillian visits Aimery at night, while during the day she learns to fly. But she begins to fear that she will hurt Aimery by sucking his blood, and when Nim Wei arrives at Bridesmere, things become more complicated.

Catching Midnight started off wonderfully. You do an excellent job of blending historical detail with a romantic feel. In fact, the book is so strong in this regard that this aspect of it, along with the presence of honorable yet interesting characters, and the inclusion of a falcon in the story, reminded me initially first of one of my favorite medieval romances, Mary Jo Putney’s Uncommon Vows.

The scenes of young Gillian running away from plague-ridden London were vivid and powerful, as was her first encounter with Auriclus and Nim Wei. The pack and their cave were less interesting to me but I liked the character of Lucius, one of the older upyrs.

Although I was very confused by the scene in which Gillian and the falcon united, since I was not sure whether only their consciousnesses merged or their bodies as well, even after reading it more than once, I was quickly hooked again when Aimery appeared. His kindness and gentleness with Robin and then with Princess endeared him to me very quickly, and I understood why Gillian would feel so drawn to him.

Unfortunately I could not understand why Gillian would fascinate Aimery so quickly, since he had only previously known her as the bird Princess, and did not even know that she and Princess were one and the same. This was where the book did not work so well for me. I felt that Aimery fell in love with Gillian for her beauty and her paranormal nature; her external qualities, in other words, rather than anything specific about her personality.

The biggest barrier to my enjoyment in the book was this one: I felt that it relied too much on Aimery and Gillian being soulmates, and didn’t really take the time to develop the relationship. Aimery’s instantaneous feelings for Gillian made it difficult for me to care about the progress of their relationship once he met Gillian in her human form, since I felt that the progession of that relationship was disappointingly conventional and rushed. It was around this point in the story that I noticed that it was becoming easier for me to put the book down.

In addition, Gillian’s supernatural abilities and power seemed to me to develop in a way that was not entirely consistent with the paranormal aspects of the world-building and this seemed a bit too convenient.

A subplot involving Nim Wei and Edmund developed partway into the book and I found myself more and more interested in this couple and less and less interested in Aimery and Gillian. Nim Wei is a splendid character, clever and cynical, and her interactions with the uneasy Edmund were very enjoyable. I also thought the resolution of Nim Wei and Edmund’s relationship was much more fresh and interesting than the way the obstacles keeping Aimery and Gillian were removed.

Every once in a while I come across a book I feel has tremendous potential, one that raises my expectations and excites me, and when it doesn’t satisfy me as much as I hope that it will, I feel let down, perhaps more so than I should. Catching Midnight is such a book. I feel that several of its parts were special, but the sum they add up to is not all that it could be, so it gets a C+ from me.

Sincerely,

Janine

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

Dear Ms. Ibbotson,

When Azteclady asked me to review one of your romances, I was both excited and challenged. You pack so many irresistible characters into less than three hundred pages that it is difficult to do justice to these delightful folk. And how would I explain the magic by which you can take me from a lump in the throat to tears of laughter in the space of a few sentences? And yet, how could I refuse? Your books are the meringue kisses of romance novels: simple and sophisticated at once; rich and sweet and awfully charming.

A Countess Below Stairs is no exception. The story takes place in 1919 and centers, as much as it does, on Anna Grazinsky, a Russian Countess. As a child, Anna is a joy to her parents, and though they shower her with gifts, she is so tenderhearted that she never becomes spoiled. Her father calls her his “little star,” but when he is killed in World War I, Anna’s heart, as well as her mother’s and her younger brother’s, are broken.

The family is dispossessed of their fortune when the servant to whom they’ve entrusted their famous jewels disappears. They undertake an arduous journey to England and there they are reunited with Anna’s old governess, Miss Pinfold. While an old friend of Anna’s father agrees to pay young Petya’s school fees, Anna refuses to accept more help from him, and rather than impinge on Miss Pinfold’s kindness, she takes a position as an under-housemaid in a Wiltshire property called Mersham.

Mersham’s housekeeper is Mrs. Brassenthwaite and its butler is Mr. Proom. Mrs. Brassenthwaite is described thus:

Once she had prowled the great rooms, eagle eyed for a speck of dust or an unplumped cushion, and had conducted inquests and vendettas from which ashen underlings fled weeping to their attics.

As for the butler:

…Proom, like Mrs. Brassenthwaite, had once been head of a great line of perfectly drilled retainers: under-butlers and footmen, lamp boys and odd men, stretching away from him in obsequiousness and unimportance.

The war, however, has changed all that, and softened Proom and Mrs. Brassenthwaite. The paragraph describing how this came about was one of many which moved me deeply:

More than most great houses, Mersham had given its life’s blood to the Kaiser’s war. Upstairs it had taken Lord George, the heir, who fell at Ypres six months after his father, the sixth earl, succumbed to a second heart attack. Below stairs it had drained away almost every able-bodied man and few of those who left were destined to return. A groom had fallen on the Somme, an under-gardener at Jutland; the hall boy, who had lied about his age, was blown up at Verdun a week before his eighteenth birthday.

Many of the maids, too, have left Mersham to work in offices and factories during the war. And so, the house has lost its splendor if not its charm, and the servants have now begun to wonder, if, like many of England’s once sumptuous properties, Mersham will be sold.

For the whole hope of the House of Frayne now lay in the one surviving son, Lord George’s younger brother, Rupert. The new earl had spent four years in the Royal Flying Corps, his life so perilous that even his mother had not dared to hope he might be spared. But though his plane had been shot down, though he’d been gravely wounded, Rupert was alive. He was about to be discharged from the hospital. He was coming home.

But for good? Or only long enough to put his home on the market? Remembering the quiet, unassuming boy, so different from his handsome, careless elder brother, the servants could only wonder and wait.

It’s at this point that Anna arrives in Mersham, having been sent there by an agency. Proom and Mrs. Brassenthwaite can tell almost at once that she is a lady — her curtsies resemble a ballerina’s — but since Mersham is desperately in need of more staff, they decide to give her a try.

At Mersham, Anna is introduced to a community. Besides Proom and Mrs. Brassenthwaite, there is Mrs. Park, the gentle and unassuming cook; Win, her simple-minded helper; James, the bodybuilding footman whom the maids love to ogle; Louise, the crotchety head housemaid; Lady Westerholme, the Earl’s mother, who has been much given to consulting ouija boards since the death of her husband and son, and the earl’s elderly uncle, Sebastian Frayne, who loves classical music and pretty women in a maids’ uniforms.

To everyone’s surprise, Anna turns out to be diligent worker. Since, as Proom later explains, what a servant dreads most is boredom, and Anna is anything but dull, she manages to gain acceptance among the other servants, too.

Meanwhile, Rupert Frayne, the new Earl of Westerholme, has just become engaged. Muriel Hardwicke is a beautiful heiress who tended Rupert as a nurse at the hospital during his convalescence. Before his brother George’s death, Rupert promised that should anything happen to George, and should he become the earl, he would do everything possible to save Mersham from being sold so that the servants would not lose their positions. Now that George is gone, Rupert, who once dreamed of traveling the world on archeological expeditions, realizes that he must fulfill his last promise to his brother.

Not only is Muriel fabulously rich, she is also breathtakingly lovely and Rupert admires her no-nonsense manner and her wartime volunteering to tend the wounded as a nurse. He does not realize that Muriel undertook that task with the goal of snagging a titled aristocrat. Nor does he know that Muriel is a devotee of Dr. Lightbody, a lecturer who believes in eugenics as the process by which to improve mankind.

Therefore, Rupert is nothing but chagrined when, shortly after his return to Mersham, he realizes he is drawn to the new under-housemaid who curtsies like a ballerina; whom Baskerville, his mastiff, has fallen in love with; and whose gentleness can make the nightmares of his wartime plane crash fade away.

It is not long before Muriel, too, arrives in Mersham, and while she is too arrogant to realize that Anna could displace her in Rupert’s affections, it does not take her much time to make everyone, from the sweet-natured cook to the Jewish neighbors to Rupert’s best friend’s young sister, miserable.

Rupert is smart enough to realize this, but he is honor-bound by his promise to his dead brother to go through with marrying Muriel. And so, Anna must work hard on the preparations for the wedding of a man she is gradually falling in love with.

A Countess Below Stairs is a kind of children’s story for adults. Like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, Mersham has been neglected and waits for true love to restore it to its former glory. Like Sarah Crewe, the heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, Anna does not allow her fall from her elevated position to change her generous heart, and eventually, she is rewarded for her kindness. How Anna, Rupert, and the servants of Mersham all arrive at their happy ending, I will not reveal, but we know all along that some way, somehow, everyone will get what they deserve.

And yet, for all that, and for all that there are no sex scenes in the book, there is a sophistication to the language, to the unexpected plot twists, to the gentle humor and to the continental sensibility that makes it clear that this book is intended for grown ups, albeit ones who have not outgrown a love of fairy tales.

In the hands of a lesser writer, a heroine as good-hearted as Anna could have been dull, but you make her delightful. A hero like Rupert, tied to the scheming Muriel, might have lacked strength, but nothing is further from the case here, and Rupert proves to be far more heroic than most.

The supporting characters also shine, like rays of sunlight refracted through the prism of your words. You can sketch a personality or a relationship and fill it with dimension in just a few sentences. For example, here is this description of the reaction of Rupert’s neighbor, Lord Byrne, to his wife’s request that he wear a costume for a “fancy dress” ball:

Lord Byrne looked at his wife. He had married her blind, knowing nothing about her except that she had a quiet voice, a sensible manner and some spare cash. Now, eight years later, he would have died for her without a second’s hesitation. To dress up as a hussar in Wellington’s army would be harder, but he would do it.

It is on a note of gratitude for paragraphs like the ones I’ve quoted here that I’d like to close this letter. Thank you for bringing me such joy and delight, and for writing such heartwarming stories.

Sincerely,

Janine

PS A for this one, if you haven’t guessed.

This book can be purchased in paperback (I think it is trade). No ebook format.

Dear Ms. Joyce,

When we first encounter Colin Radcliffe, the hero of your fifth book, Shadows of the Night, it is the morning of his wedding day and he has just risen from the bed he shared with Emma Morel, his married mistress. Colin agrees to Emma’s suggestion that they spend a few months apart rather than resume their affair immediately following his honeymoon, but he feels inconvenienced by the need to do so.

Fern Ashcroft has been raised to be a good wife and mother. It’s not until she and Colin are married that Fern realizes that while she knows everything there is to know about running a household and hosting a party, she knows almost nothing about her husband, or about how to make a marriage work. While Fern is filled with confusion and fear about how to proceed in her relationship with her husband, Colin shows no such hesitation. Fern reflects on the differences between them thus:

A woman was not cast in the same mold as a man, as her mother had so often told her. A woman was made of finer stuff, both more delicate and more sublime, and so she should be like a climbing rose, wrapping herself around a sturdy trellis, thereby embellishing it as it supported her.

A slight rebelliousness stirred at that simile, as it always did, but she suppressed it. She was not mythical Amazon to go charging about like a man, even if there was a small part of her — a very small part that seemed almost to belong to someone else — that whispered that it ought to be otherwise.

On their way to their honeymoon in Brighton, Fern and Colin each discover a side of the other that doesn’t bode well for their future together. Colin is impatient with Fern’s nervousness, and that only serves to put Fern further on edge. Neither of them looks forward to their wedding night, but despite the fact that Colin has too much to drink, he succeeds in seducing his wife and congratulates himself on marrying such a sensual woman.

But for Fern the pleasure of the marriage bed is a blow, because the intense sensations that her body feels in response to Colin’s touch only make her feel more helpless and in her husband’s power. As she sees it, Colin has stolen something from her.

The next morning, Fern feels vulnerable and angry, and the small flame of her rebelliousness begins to grow. When an opportunity to assert her independence arrives, Fern attempts to do so, and when Colin responds by putting his foot down and telling her that she is never to disagree with him in public, she shocks both of them by dealing him a slap. But Colin’s reaction is not what either of them expects: for the first time that he can recall, he feels truly alive.

Pain sharpens all of Colin’s senses, arouses him, and also causes him to see Fern as a person with feelings of her own for the first time. Because he wants to experience this again, Colin tries to provoke Fern to strike him once more. But Fern is sharper than he expects, and quickly realizes what it is that Colin desires from her. She becomes cognizant of the fact that she is no longer as helpless as she was the night before.

The power of his new feelings makes Colin feel vulnerable, and he cannot bear to remain among society while his transformation from a man who merely goes through the motions life requires of him into a living being takes place. Therefore he decides that he and Fern should go to Wrexmere, a remote property that he has recently inherited.

Upon their arrival in Wrexmere, Colin and Fern discover that the manor house is in disrepair despite the income that the property’s steward has been collecting. But what at first looks like a simple case of embezzlement turns out to be more complicated, and Fern and Colin find themselves having to contend with an ancient mystery, a spooky atmosphere, the people they are becoming, and eventually, with Colin’s past.

There is a lot that I found to like about Shadows of the Night, most notably its unusual characters. Colin gradually becomes more than the selfish man he appears to be at first, and Fern more than the prototypical Victorian “angel of the house” that she seems to aspire to be in the beginning of the novel. Both of them begin as people defined by society’s expectations, but by the end of the book, they have arrived at a different place.

I especially liked the way both Fern and Colin initially wanted the superficial trappings of marriage but eventually came to realize, through the confusion and vulnerability that their arguments and sexual encounters engendered in them, that even if they didn’t know what a real marriage was, and even if they had to grope in relative blindness to discover that, it was what they truly wanted.

There were layers to Colin and Fern that they gradually peeled back from one another, and it is this peeling process that made them interesting to read about. That, and the fact that neither character starts out possessing many of the qualities one expects to see in a romance hero or heroine based on readings of other books in the genre. Instead, they begin as two imperfect people formed by their time and place and social class. It is in the process of discovering the other that each of them also discovers who they themselves really are.

Perhaps because I enjoyed this process of psychological discovery so much, I was a bit frustrated when the action moved to Wrexmere and the house’s ominous atmosphere and old mysteries began to loom large in the novel. You do an excellent job of creating a spine-tingling ambience but I felt that its very power overshadowed the more subtle interactions between Fern and Colin.

There were times when the dialogue seemed a little stiff, particularly when Fern and Colin’s thoughts turned inward and they explained their motives to one another. I also found it hard to be equally invested in the mystery that went back centuries as I was in Fern and Colin’s unfolding relationship. For this reason, the first third of the book felt strongest to me. But the latter two-thirds still held my attention, and overall I quite enjoyed the book.

For its unusual characters and the sensitivity with which it explores them, as well as its hot love scenes, I recommend Shadows of the Night. I feel that it is a cut above most historical romances, and it earns a B from me.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in mass market . No ebook format I could find.

The question of whether there is a divide between authors and reader/blogger/reviewers has been discussed and debated here and elsewhere. To me it seems clear that it does, at least in some quarters. Some reader/blogger/reviewers, including some of my fellow bloggers here on Dear Author, have called out some authors for behaving badly. And some authors have called out reader/blogger/reviewers for being mean girls. Recently, Janet (Robin) blogged here about her own response to some authors’ reactions to the recent Cassie Edwards scandal, saying that “It felt to me (and still does) that there was a frighteningly easy shift into reader v. author discourse.”

But nowhere, perhaps, is the rift more evident than in the relative absence from the romance community of people who bridge the gap — those who are both writers or authors, as well as bloggers and reviewers.

I don’t mean to suggest that this hybrid is completely nonexistent in the romance genre. Authors HelenKay Dimon, Alison Kent and Stephanie Feagan all write reviews for Paperback Reader. Bam is a blogger and former reviewer who is now published. There have also been some unpublished writers who have reviewed for AAR, including Kathryn Smith, Marianne Stillings and Megan Frampton, all of whom went on to be published. And there are others as well.

Still, those are a handful of women out of a far larger number of published authors and aspiring authors. It is enlightening, too, to read Frampton’s comments on her decision to stop reviewing.

…I don’t think other writers would do anything close to an objective job in terms of reviewing their peers. I know when I was writing reviews AND fiction, an author told me I had to make a choice: either I was a reader/reviewer or a writer. If I continued to do both, I would face awkward situations and possibly snubbing, etc. in the authors’ community.

A little under two years ago, there was an interesting debate on this topic on AccessRomance All-a-Blog. In comment #43, author Leslie Kelly said:

…The romance fiction industry, despite the number authors, is an *incredibly* small community. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody talks. There’s a lot of loyalty between friends and catty backstabbing between enemies. Honestly, I think a reviewer-author can be shooting themselves in the foot if they rip apart the wrong book and offend that author and alllllll her friends. And, by the way, her editor! (Um, I have personal knowledge of this one. I know an editor who will NEVER buy a particular author because that author has publicly slammed the editor’s authors & basically said their books shouldn’t have been published. Uh, EXCUSE ME? You really think the editor who bought those books is going to buy you after that???)

If a good friend of NYT bestselling author A is ripped to shreds by author/reviewer x and someday author/reviewer x wants a cover quote, or wants to do an anthology, or a miniseries, or in any way interact with NYT bestselling author…hmm–what do you think the answer will be?

And in comment #47, author Julie Leto chimed in:

And I thought I’d mention here that unpublished writers or aspiring writers who trash published books are doing themselves a disservice. My editors read reviews…and those names stick with them if the reviewer has been unfair or cruel.

Leto went on to clarify her comments in comment #56:

I’m not talking about reviewing in general. I’m talking about TRASHING.

But since she also said (to author/reviewer HelenKay Dimon) “Maybe we’re talking apples and oranges. I don’t know…but maybe what you see as an honest review I’d see as an snarky attack,” and since author/reviewer HelenKay Dimon admitted in this same thread that “I’ve gotten hate mail, two of which I viewed as threats,” (comment #70) it is with trepidation that I make my confession here today.

Here it is: I write. I’ve been writing since elementary school, and in a variety of forms. I’ve written poems, plays, short stories, and movie reviews in the past, among other things; I currently write book reviews and the occasional letter of opinion here at Dear Author. But the reason for this post is that my current writing project outside of Dear Author is also my first attempt to write a romance.

Let me take a moment to also admit that trying to write a romance, and trying to write one well, is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted. What a humbling experience it is to come up against the limits of my abilities on a regular basis. It has a way of making me appreciate the effort that’s gone into each and every book that I review, whether or not that book works for me.

And here I come to the crux of the matter: I am an unpublished writer who is also a reviewer and blogger.

How did I come to be all these things? Well, I’ve been reading romances since I was thirteen. I cut my teeth on books by Johanna Lindsey, Rosemary Rogers, Kathleen Woodiwiss and Jude Deveraux. Later I discovered Judith McNaught, and later still, Mary Jo Putney and Linda Howard. When, in my twenties, I found Laura Kinsale, I was stunned by the power of the feelings that her books evoked in me. When I discovered Patricia Gaffney a few years later with To Have and to Hold, it was electrifying.

But as much as I adored some books, I was also beginning to feel dissatisfied with many others. At thirteen, just reading about romantic and sexual love was thrilling, but by my mid to late twenties, many of the books I found in bookstores were feeling very familiar to me. I was desperately craving something new and different, something satisfying, but trying to find it by picking up books at random at the bookstore wasn’t working for me.

And so, about ten years ago, I hit the biggest romance reading slump I have ever experienced. For about a year and half, I read mainly in other genres and, except for rereading those few romances I loved and waiting for books from a handful of authors to come out, I became jaded where most of the genre was concerned.

It was around this time that I discovered the internet. For a while, I hung out in a reading community where people mostly discussed books in other genres, which is what I was reading at that time. Then, one day, I found AAR, and soon thereafter, TRR. I can’t begin to say how wonderful it was for me to find these sites: wonderful because for me, they re-opened the world of romance.

Through the recommendations of their reviewers, and in the case of AAR, of readers on their boards as well, I was once again able to find new books I loved — able to discover new-to-me authors like Mary Balogh, Carla Kelly and Connie Brockway.

If it hadn’t been for those reviews, I wouldn’t have plunged back into the romance genre, wouldn’t have realized that there were so many more good books out there than I’d been aware of before. If it hadn’t been for reviews and for the book discussions that have kept me so engaged, I would not still be an avid romance reader today, much less trying to write a romance.

As the introduction to this opinion piece makes clear, I am aware that in the romance community the majority of writers, both published and unpublished, don’t speak publicly about books that didn’t work for them or that they did not enjoy, and do not write critical reviews.

Perhaps if I had come into the romance community with the intention of being a romance writer from the beginning, I would not have done so either. But when I first discovered the romance boards, I did not intend to write a romance, and at first, I also had no awareness of the negative perceptions that some people in the community had of readers who examined in public what did and didn’t work for them in a book.

In hindsight, I wish now that over the years, I had stated some of my opinions more courteously. But I can’t, and don’t, wish that I’d never put them out there. The discussions of books with fellow readers have become a huge part of my love for the genre. And it’s partly for the readers who I’ve met and befriended that I’m now trying to write a romance as well. Because it’s in large part this ongoing internet conversation that’s seduced me and made me fall in love with this genre all over again.

When Jane and Jayne approached me about blogging for Dear Author, I was faced with a dilemma. But ultimately, I decided to join Dear Author because I liked and respected Jane and Jayne, because I wanted to see what my thoughts on books would look like in a more formal format, and because I wanted to contribute and give back in the same way that review sites had given so much to me.

I believed, and still believe, that there is a difference between thoughtful, polite criticism and bashing, and the former is what I have tried to provide here at Dear Author. I don’t know if I’ve always succeeded, but I do know that I have tried.

I know that even thoughtful, polite criticism can sometimes sting the author whose book is being examined. But I also know that one can’t publish something, be it a book, a review or an opinion piece like this one, and expect everyone who reads it to love it. Even Shakespeare didn’t get universal approbation in his time. Why then should we expect everyone to say they love a book, or else to say nothing at all? Doesn’t an open, thoughtful conversation about our differences of opinion also have something to offer us?

I believe that it does. A well thought-out review is of benefit to readers, because it can help them decide how to spend their purchasing dollars, and make them aware of books they would not have known of otherwise. It can also, of course, be a source of publicity for an author.

In addition, having had my writing workshopped in writing classes and critiqued by fellow writers, I know that the process of having your writing examined for flaws as well as strengths can be difficult, but I also know that I have grown as a writer as a result of this same process. Reviews aren’t exactly the same thing, but (at least when some thought has been put into them) they’re also not completely dissimilar.

And finally, I believe that discussions of what makes some books stronger than others can help strengthen the genre as a whole. If the best books in the genre (and I am not saying I am the arbiter of what is best — that is something that is up to the entire community to determine; my role as a reviewer is merely to help keep that discussion rolling) remain read and in print, examined and discussed, then they can only influence and inspire new writers to attempt to equal those books.

Despite all that I have said here, I reserve the right to stop reviewing if I come to some fork in the road. If I find I simply don’t have the time, or that I no longer enjoy it, or if I get published and feel that it creates a conflict of interest. I’m not saying I’ll feel that way in the future; I simply don’t know how I may feel.

For all these reasons, I do not judge anyone else who makes a different choice than the one I’ve made. But I would like to encourage writers and authors to think about what I’ve said here, and consider the possibility of putting opinions of books out in the public eye.

I know that some authors won’t even say what their favorite books are when asked to name them in an interview, and for that reason, I’m glad every time I see a writer or author pipe up to say why she loved a particular book, or explain why some aspect of another book didn’t work for her. Because it makes me feel less alone here in the blogosphere, yes, but also because I truly think that this kind of conversation is the lifeblood of a genre, and that any time writers enter into these discussions thoughtfully, they are making an important contribution to the community.

In closing, I’d like to return to last week’s topic of ethics in blogging. The reason I’m disclosing the fact that I aspire to be a romance author isn’t because I’ve suddenly become courageous. It’s because I have two friends who are about a month away from being published for the first time. Sherry Thomas and Meredith Duran aren’t just my friends, they are also my critique partners.

At one time, I thought that I could, if I disclosed my friendship with them, and if another reviewer offered a second opinion, review Meredith and Sherry’s books (The Duke of Shadows and Private Arrangements, respectively). But as their publication date has neared, I’ve become more uneasy with doing so. It could be argued, I think, that I have a conflict of interest, and I don’t want my actions to reflect badly on Dear Author.

And so, I have decided not to formally review Sherry or Meredith’s books, and to disclose my relationship with them so that if I comment on the reviews of their books in the comment sections, or mention that I think both Sherry and Meredith are immensely talented (as I do) you can all decide for yourselves whether or not to take what I say with a grain or more of salt. It seems to me that transparency is the best way to take an ethical approach to the situation.

And now, let me turn this over to all of you. What are your thoughts on the possibility of a backlash to writers and authors who choose to review? Is it real or, as a friend of mine suggests, merely imagined? What are your thoughts on the role of the ongoing conversation about books? What do you think about unpublished writers as reviewers, published authors as reviewers, authors commenting on books, reviewers reviewing their friends, or any other topic that came up in this post?

Dear Ms. Long,

Of the authors writing historical romance, you are one of my absolute favorites. Not too long ago, I sang the praises of your previous book, The Secret to Seduction, in what is one of the longest, most detailed reviews I have ever written.

After I finished reading that book, I was tremendously excited to share my enthusiasm for it with the world and to try to understand the reasons it had been such a magical reading experience for me. In contrast, after finishing your newest book, The Perils of Pleasure, I find this review far more difficult to approach.

How does one do justice to a book that had all the potential to be sublime, but instead was better than average, good, worth reading, but not quite all that one was hoping for? How do I balance out its weaknesses and its strengths and convey to readers both my frustration that this book fell short of greatness and my hope that they will give it a chance nonetheless? I suppose the place to start is with the plot summary:

Colin Eversea is both a gentleman and a scoundrel. At least half the women in Pennyroyal Green, the village that Colin hails from, are in love with him. And though Colin himself has always thought to marry the beautiful Louisa Porter, he has never let that stop him from dallying with countless others.

But now Colin’s charmed existence has come to an end. Colin is accused of murdering a man who insulted his sister, and the only witness who can prove his innocence has vanished. Colin is sentenced to hang and jailed in Newgate, and he is uncertain who is responsible for what has befallen him. Is it one of the members of the Redmond family, whose feud with Colin’s family goes back centuries, or is it his own older brother Marcus, who is in love with Louisa Porter and who is scheduled to marry her within days of Colin’s execution?

Colin is certain that he doesn’t have long to ponder these questions, but on the day of his execution, he is rescued, blindfolded and then brought to a hiding place where a mysterious woman tells him she will not release him from his bonds.

To Madeleine Greenway, Colin is nothing but a job. Madeleine has been paid to save his life and promised a generous final payment upon delivery of Colin. The final payment will enable Madeleine to purchase a farm in the United States and leave her life in England behind her. Madeleine doesn’t know who the person who paid her is or what that individual plans to do with Colin, and at first she doesn’t care. But when the money is not delivered and instead an attempt Colin foils is made on Madeleine’s life, she reluctantly agrees to let Colin tag along while she tries to figure out why anyone would want her dead.

For much of the rest of the book, Madeleine and Colin have to dodge the soldiers who are on the hunt for Colin and other people who might turn him in for the reward that has been offered for his capture. In the process, the two grow closer as they piece together the clues that will help them discover who tried to kill Madeleine and who arranged for Colin to be arrested for a murder that he did not commit.

And Madeleine and Colin are both torn. For Colin it is a question of whether his resolve to marry Louisa is stronger, or whether his new feelings for Madeline are more powerful. For Madeleine, it is a question of whether she will let Colin charm her and leave her as he has countless others, or whether she will listen to her instincts of self-preservation, which whispers that she could have that farm in America if she turns Colin in for the reward.

The Perils of Pleasure could have been a keeper for me, if it hadn’t been for a few flaws.

First, I felt that the humor and charm which I so love in your writing did not suit the dark subject matter of the book, especially in the first half, which was set in London’s rough neighborhoods and which had the hero cheating death on the gallows and then on the run as a fugitive. While the jokes were occasionally funny, I also felt that they distracted me from the intensity of the situation the characters faced and sapped some of the grittiness that section of the book needed to have.

Second, I felt that there were some inconsistencies in the characters’ backgrounds.

In Colin’s case, I found it difficult to reconcile his rakish past with his powerful determination to stop his own brother’s wedding because he himself was so committed to the idea of marrying Louisa, especially since Louisa herself lacked spark and it was hard to see what would attract both Colin and his brother to her.

In Madeleine’s case, I found it hard to believe that the woman who was clever enough to effect Colin’s rescue with flash bombs and black powder (even if she had to hire others to do that work) would not be able to tell that the gunpowder in her gun was no longer good, or that she would think of turning Colin in for the reward on the one hand yet put her last penny in a child’s shoe on the other.

There are times when contradictions in characters can serve to make them multi-dimensional, but in this book, I felt that the inconsistencies undercut my ability to fully believe in the characters.

Perhaps another reason for that was that in certain ways, Colin and especially Madeleine seemed opaque, since Colin’s motivation for having both commitment to Louisa and a wandering eye was not revealed until the end of the book, and most of Madeleine’s past remained shrouded in mystery until around the halfway point of the story. (Since as as a reader I spent a good portion of the book in Madeleine’s POV, it also began to seem contrived that she did not reference her past in her thoughts for half the book.)

I thought the second half of the book was much stronger than the first. Here, we were given many of the answers to the questions about Madeleine, and learning the truth about her past made her character more whole and complete. This was also the part of the book where Madeline and Colin grew closer and their circumstances improved, so that the charm and humor which had seemed jarring in the book’s first half were more fitting in the second. I enjoyed the second half of the book very much.

I want to mention that The Perils of Pleasure has quite a few strengths. Among them are the unusual plot and setting. I thought the piecing together of the mystery was very well done, and I loved that the book was set in parts of London we don’t often see and featured some unusual side characters.

I also feel that Madeleine’s background was unique in a romance heroine and that she was very intriguing for that reason. Although I wish her past had been revealed earlier on, I really liked her streetwise mindset and her strong sense of self-preservation.

Finally, I love your way with language (metaphors especially); for example, this description of a countess: “She looked like a delicate, provocative little moth.” I really appreciate the fact that you find new and unusual ways to say what it is that you have to say. Even when your plots and characters seem familiar, your words invigorate them.

In this case, plot, heroine and language all felt fresh and new, which is why it is frustrating that the book did not fire me into the stratosphere as a couple of your others have. Perhaps the challenge for authors is one of high expectations. Unfair is it may be, the truth is that the more you blow me away with one book, the harder it becomes for the next book to please me. Despite that, I still enjoyed The Perils of Pleasure, and I believe that other readers will, too. B.

Sincerely,

Janine

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

Janine: My friend Jennie F. and I had so much fun doing a conversational review of Jane Lockwood’s Forbidden Shores that we decided to do it again. Lo and behold, the subject of this discussion is also a novel about an erotic entanglement that involves two men and a woman! This time, it’s Megan Hart’s Tempted.

Jennie F.: Yes, it seems to be a theme with us!

Janine: LOL! Jennie, I’d like to start with a brief discussion of the labeling of this book and of its cover.

First, Tempted is described as “An Erotic Novel” on its front cover; and simply as a “Novel” on the spine. Are the book’s romantic elements strong enough that you would consider it a romance? Are its erotic elements prominent enough that you would call it erotica? Or do you feel that “erotic novel” is the right definition?

Jennie F.: I think coming up with a niche for this book (and to some degree, Hart’s other books) is a bit problematic. I would have a problem calling Tempted a romance, because I didn’t find the resolution very romantic; it was more bittersweet. The erotic elements are not prominent enough for me to label it erotica, though. Even calling it an “erotic novel”, I think, may mislead some readers.

Perhaps it’s just my own personal definition of “erotic novel”, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect to face some of the heavy emotional issues that Hart writes about in a novel labeled that way. I suppose “erotic novel” or simply “novel” works best for me, although the latter might leave some readers (albeit readers who don’t bother to look at the racy cover or read the back text) a bit shocked at the content.

Janine: Those labels work pretty well for me, but I brought it up because labeling and the way it sets up reader expectations has been a much discussed issue here at Dear Author. If we expect a certain kind of ending or a certain kind of content because of the way a book is labeled, and then we don’t get it, we can often feel very frustrated even though the book itself may be well-written.

Jennie F.: Yes. I think Hart is extremely difficult to classify; I’d almost call her erotic women’s fiction, but not the kind of women’s fiction that is at all chick-litty, more the sort of serious kind. I don’t think that label would fit on a spine, though. :-)

Janine: I understand what you mean, because Hart’s books do deal with women’s issues, and yet, I hesitate to call them erotic women’s fiction because I have this association to women’s fiction as a genre in which the characters sometimes lack a kind of romantic glamour that I crave; but Hart’s characters have that glamour in spades.

Getting back to the issue of genre and how much we want books labeled accurately. At the same time, I think it’s often true, for me at least, that some of the books that are most interesting and exciting to me are those genre-benders that are hard to categorize. The Time Traveler’s Wife, anyone?

Jennie F.: Oh, absolutely. Honestly, that’s a large part of Hart’s appeal, for me. Her prose is decent, but not remarkable, IMO. It’s the way she tells a story and combines different elements, confounding genre expectations. Usually that’s a good thing, but I think maybe not so much in Tempted.

Janine: I myself like her prose and think it is better than average. But before we launch into a discussion of the book, I want to know, what do you think about the cover?

I bring it up because I was grateful for online bookstores when I purchased this book. The photo on the cover is so explicit that I’m not sure I could have got up the nerve to grab this book from the shelf at a brick-and-mortar bookstore and bring it to the front of the store and then present it at the register.

On the other hand, when I did get the book in the mail, I was struck by the beauty of the cover, too. So I was wondering if it made an impression on you.

Jennie F.: It is lovely, but I’m a little uncomfortable with overtly erotic covers. I can bring myself to buy them in bookstores by reminding myself that the clerk probably doesn’t care *that* much what I’m reading.

Janine: You’re a braver woman than me! I still buy them, but off the internet.

Jennie F.: Hee. I still remember years ago buying a Black Lace book at Borders, getting a male clerk, and being so flustered that I forgot my change and he had to call me back for it. Very. Embarrassing.

I don’t usually buy erotic books (or romances, for that matter) in brick-and-mortar stores anymore, but that’s because my purchases in those genres are usually more planned, whereas the books I buy in brick-and-mortar stores (literary fiction or non-fiction, generally) tend to be impulse buys.

But reading them in public would be a no-go. Though that’s true of a lot of the more bodice-rippery romance covers, too, though for a slightly different reason (for the former I worry that people think I’m a pervert; for the latter, a twit).

Janine: I read Hart’s Broken (the cover of that book made it clear it was erotic subject matter, but wasn’t as visually explicit as the cover of Tempted) in a public place, but I have to confess that I felt self-conscious about it and wondered if people were looking at me and if so, what they were thinking.

I really wish I had a little more “Who cares what people think?!” in me.

Jennie F.: Yeah, I’m saving that for when I’m 80. I plan to use it to harangue various low-level functionaries about typographical and grammatical errors (like the movie marquee I saw recently that advertised the film “Before the Devil Knows Your Dead”). I’m too aware of how fussy and pedantic I’d come off doing it now, but I figure with one foot in the grave, I won’t care so much.

Janine: LOL.

Jennie F: I think the cover of Tempted nicely conveyed what the book is about, though.

Janine: Yes, I agree. And it’s also a thing of beauty — the beauty of the human body.

Jennie F.: Right. It was sexy, and as I said a little too explicit for public consumption, but still tasteful and beautifully done.

Janine: Next, I’m going to launch into a description of the book for the benefit of our readers who haven’t read it:

Anne Kinney is in her late twenties and happily married to James, a nice, attractive guy with a good job. They have a house on the lake and what seems like the perfect life, until James gets a call from his childhood friend Alex. Alex and James were best friends for years until they had a falling out.

Alex moved to Singapore shortly after that, and when James and Anne married, a long distance friendship between Alex and James resumed. Now Alex has sold his company in Singapore for millions and is on his way back stateside. James invites him to stay at his and Anne’s house for a few weeks, and Alex takes James up on the invitation.

James is not his usual nonchalant self when he talks to Alex on the phone, so right off the bat, Anne is very curious about Alex and about James’s friendship with him.

While waiting for Alex to arrive, Anne meets with her three sisters to plan a 30th anniversary party for her parents. But Anne’s father is alcoholic, and although she doesn’t admit it to anyone else, Anne doesn’t understand why her mother puts up with it and why her sisters never really admit there is something deeply wrong in their family.

James’s family seems far more normal to Anne, but she also feels that she will never please James’s mother, who desperately wants Anne and James to have children. Anne is grappling with endometriosis and with memories of an unwanted pregnancy that ended badly, and she doesn’t know if she is ready to have children yet.

When Alex arrives, attraction flares between him and Anne. Anne discovers that Alex too comes from a dysfunctional family, and his bad boy allure is as powerful in its way as James’s good boy appeal. She finds herself telling Alex about the time her drunken father took her out sailing as a child and they almost drowned, something she never told anyone else about.

At the same time, there are times when Anne feels shut out by the rapport that Alex and her husband share. Yet James seems to desire her more than ever now that Alex is their houseguest. The boundaries between the three slowly begin slipping, and it is not clear to Anne what it is that any of them wants. Is Alex in love with James? Is James in love with Alex? And who is Anne more in love with, James or Alex?

I don’t want to reveal too much more about the main plot, although it should be obvious to anyone who has glanced at the cover that eventually Anne, James and Alex end up in bed together.

There are also storylines about two of Anne’s sisters that get developed later in the book.

Tempted is written in first person from Anne’s point of view and I thought Anne was a well-developed character. I liked the way her life seemed flawless on the outside but that in fact, she was not as mature as she thought she was.

Jennie F.: I didn’t love Anne, personally. But then, I wasn’t entirely crazy about Elle in Dirty, either. My favorite Hart heroine is Sadie from Broken. I think Hart writes heroines who are flawed in interesting ways, but maybe in ways that make them less sympathetic to me.

Anne’s lack of direction made her less relatable to me. Not that I’m a real go-getter, but she was what, around 30? She didn’t have a job, didn’t seem to have much in the way of plans for getting a job. I wondered what she did with her days (before all the hot sex with Alex). Maybe I was jealous of her!

Janine: I haven’t had a problem sympathizing with any of these heroines, actually. I had Anne pegged as a little younger; in her late twenties perhaps? Her parents were having their thirtieth anniversary, so I don’t think she was thirty yet. More specificity about the characters’ ages and career situations would have been good, I think.

Jennie F.: I do agree that there was an interesting dichotomy between the superficial trappings of Anne’s life and what was going on inside her. But I’m not sure that dichotomy was resolved to my satisfaction at the end of the book.

Janine: Yes, I see your point, and yet, there was realism to the resolution in that it fit Anne’s character. I liked the fact that the attraction between the three main characters had an impact on Anne and James’s marriage (I’m trying not to give it away) and was not simply there to titillate the reader.

Jennie F.: Yes, I agree with this. It was really an emotional attachment between the three characters, not just a sexual one, which in many ways is why it ends up becoming a source of conflict.

Janine: Exactly. And that’s also what makes it interesting. Especially since two of them are married, and yet, no one can be called a cheater in a threesome.

Jennie F.: I wasn’t sure how I felt about James’ setting Anne up for the affair with Alex. It did feel a little sleazy to me. If James had been better developed as a character, it might not have bothered me. Not that it bothered me excessively, but it was one more thing that made James a little less appealing.

Janine: I didn’t feel that way at all. It was actually one of the things that made James’s character interesting to me, especially since I wasn’t sure at first if his motivation for that was competitiveness with Alex, attraction to Alex, the desire to see all Anne’s needs and desires fulfilled, or fear that if he didn’t suggest it, an affair between Anne and Alex might still happen.

I felt that Hart did a good job with Alex’s character. He was a bit mysterious but that was as it should be, since there was so much Anne didn’t know about him. For me, Hart succeeded in making Alex edgy, appealing and human, not an easy feat.

Jennie F.: Alex was appealing, perhaps too much so; he and Anne seemed to understand each other in a way that Anne didn’t share with James. It left the triangle a little unbalanced.

Janine: I didn’t feel that he was too appealing, though I agree that the triangle was a little unbalanced. I think it could have been more balanced had James’s character been developed better.

Jennie F.: Maybe it was because Alex was more of a traditional romance hero - bad-boy, sexually experienced and adventurous, successful in everything he does despite coming from a disadvantaged background. It made James fade into the woodwork a little.

Janine: While I liked James well enough, I agree he was neither as interesting nor as appealing as Alex. But what was a bigger problem for me was that I felt that there was too much I didn’t know about him. Since Anne is the narrator and I have the impression that she and James have been married for a few years, I felt that Anne should have known him more thoroughly and been better able to familiarize us readers with her husband.

Jennie F.: Yes, that was a lot of my problem with the book as well. The presence of Alex, and the dynamic between Alex and James, made James less appealing, perhaps even a bit less manly, in my eyes. He seemed weak when measured against Alex’s vibrant energy.

And while Alex and Anne shared the bond of troubled childhoods, James’ seemingly charmed existence made him feel flat. It did have the effect of making it seem like Anne didn’t really know him, in spite of their years of marriage. She seemed to idealize him. Not in a worshipful way, but as if she only saw the surface of his happy-go-lucky persona. I ultimately wondered if Anne was with James for the right reasons.

Janine: I wouldn’t use the words flat or weak to describe James, but he had not been tested by life the way Alex had, and so in some ways he felt more like an unproven quantity.

I also felt, though, that I didn’t hear as much as I wanted to about James, didn’t have enough of a sense of his hopes, his dreams, his disappointments in life — in sum, what made him tick. And since the narrator was his wife, a woman who had been married to him and should know these things, it felt like a glaring lack to me not to have more of these things communicated in the book.

In many ways I felt that James had the potential to be the book’s most interesting male character, because Alex was much closer to the typical romance hero character, and James was more unusual. I wanted Hart to really plumb his depths to a greater degree than she did, but I still enjoyed reading about him.

Your comments on James and Anne are very interesting to me, because I see that where I had put down the feeling I had that Anne didn’t know James well enough to Hart’s choice to go into the subplots about the family members rather than develop James’s character more deeply, you put it down to a deliberate choice on the author’s part to show that Anne chose not to see beneath James’s surface.

Jennie F.: Yes, and it makes me wonder if Anne just didn’t understand James very well, or if perhaps there just wasn’t that much to understand - he wasn’t that deep. Take, for instance, the situation with his mother - James’s mother was really rather a nasty character, to Anne and, it is later revealed, to Alex as well. And yet her ugliness apparently was never turned on James, nor did it rub off on him. It seems to have no effect on his life, his familial relationships or his worldview, until he does finally tell his mother off on Anne’s behalf.

I was left feeling frustrated and didn’t know if I should blame the author for not giving James more depth, James himself for being shallow, or Anne for not seeing beyond James’s facade. Though it is a good sign, incidentally, when I’m willing to blame the characters rather than the author for their shortcomings; it means that they did come alive for me, at least to some degree.

Janine: That’s a good point. Regardless of the other issues I had, all three main characters came alive for me as well in this book.

As I’ve alluded to, there were times when I felt that Hart took on too much material in this book, with the numerous subplots about Anne’s family members. These characters reflected aspects of Anne’s life, but I think I would have preferred fewer pages devoted to them and more to exploring the triangle of James, Anne and Alex.

Jennie F.: This didn’t bother me as much, though I also didn’t find any of these other storylines hugely compelling. The resolution of the older sister’s problems felt particularly pat to me.

Janine: Yes, I agree on both counts. These storylines weren’t compelling in and of themselves (though I liked the way one of them connected to Broken) and were mostly interesting in what they revealed about Anne.

It’s not that I felt they were without value, but more that I felt that the emotional engine of the book was in the triangle between Alex, James and Anne, and that I wanted to know more about each of the men and their relationship with one another, as well as with Anne. The book was long enough that I think if one of the subplots had been dropped, there would have been room to develop the triangle more equally, and then it could have been a fantastic read.

Jennie F.: Yes, I agree. Since I didn’t find them that compelling, I think the book could’ve lost at least one of them easily.

Janine: The last scene of the book made me feel that the author, like her heroine, wanted to have her cake and eat it too. The recipe of sexual fantasy and gritty reality that Hart has been so exceptional at blending in her two previous books for Harlequin Spice, Dirty and Broken, felt like it wasn’t gelling quite as well here as it has in the past.

Jennie F.: Yes, I totally agree. Perhaps because in the other two books, the heroine’s emotional growth was spurred by her relationship to the heroes of those books. Whereas here…I suppose that was the intent, but at times it felt like two separate stories occurring side-by-side. While the heroine came to peace with her issues, to a degree, I’m afraid that I felt that in some respects she was “settling” for her life as it was rather than really resolving things and moving forward. Which is undoubtedly more realistic, but just as undoubtedly less romantic, at least to me.

Janine: I felt somewhat as you did, but it wasn’t a strong feeling for me. I feel that Anne would have lost something and gained something no matter what she’d done at the end of the book. The last scene actually seemed a bit unrealistic to me, and I would argue that a more realistic choice might have been more romantic as well. Ultimately, though the book wasn’t as romantic as Dirty and Broken, it did not seem unromantic to me, either. I was okay with it, in the romance department.

Jennie F.: Hmm. Maybe it just comes down to my expectations as a romance reader. I think I would’ve liked it best if it had ended with the ménage still in place. I felt like Anne lost something when Alex left, and that the three-way relationship gave each of them something that they needed. That did make it bittersweet for me.

Janine: Well, I just can’t see the ménage continuing in Hart’s suburbia with no problems, but maybe I’ve watched too much of HBO’s “Big Love,” LOL.

I still recommend Tempted though, because even when she’s not in top form, Hart keeps me interested, and because her view of contemporary America feels so much more real to me than what I see in many contemporary romances. And also because, if I haven’t mentioned it before, some of the sex in this book was quite hot.

Overall, though Tempted isn’t her best work, I wasn’t sorry I spent $13.95 on it, either. I will definitely read Hart’s next book, too, since I’m very eager to see what she will write about next.

Jennie: I fully intend to keep reading her, for the reasons you mention. Romances deal with sex and erotica deals with sex, but often neither does so in a particularly honest or realistic manner. Hart is different in that respect - I do feel that her take on sex and relationships is less fantasy-based (which again, *can* mean less romantic, though I don’t think it has to). I would not warn anyone off Tempted, but would suggest that if you haven’t read Hart before, you start with Dirty or Broken; both are superior books IMO.

Janine: I agree completely (Isn’t it funny how we have a way of doing that?). What grade do you give Tempted, Jennie?

Jennie: I would give it a C+

Janine: I think I liked it a bit better than you did. For me, it’s a B-.

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

Dear Ms. Turner,

Since in reality, our reviews are at least as much for readers as they are for authors, let me begin this letter with a warning to readers who haven’t embarked on your YA fantasy series beginning with The Thief. The book I am about to review here is The Queen of Attolia, second in this series, and because of the way the series is constructed, any review of this book would be chock full of spoilers for the previous one.

(So readers, if you haven’t read The Thief yet, and have an interest in doing so, you might want to bypass this review entirely, and if you haven’t done so yet, go read my review of The Thief instead.)

As The Queen of Attolia opens, Eugenides, also known as Gen, master thief, is in Attolia, a country that is enemy to his own homeland of Eddis. Not only that, he is in the palace of the Queen of Attolia, which he has infiltrated many times, and is now trying to escape undetected. But this time, the Queen of Attolia is one step ahead of Eugenides at every point, and for the second time in his life, he is captured.

Having been humiliated by Eugenides when he escaped from her earlier, Attolia, as she is known (the monarchs in this world all bear the names of their kingdoms), is determined that Eugenides will not escape again, and that she will mete out a punishment that will impress on everyone the folly of humiliating her.

At first Attolia thinks to execute Eugenides, but when the ambassador from the Mede Empire suggests that the Queen of Eddis, on whose behalf Eugenides’ greatest theft in Attolia’s kingdom was perpetrated, would prefer that he die quickly and painlessly, and reminds Attolia that she could ransom Eugenides for a tidy sum, Attolia decides to cut off Eugenides’ right hand instead.

And thus, Eugenides, Queen’s Thief of Eddis and cousin to the Queen of Eddis herself, is returned to the palace in Eddis, wounded both in body and in spirit, grieving for his lost hand and his lost art, and desperately afraid of being maimed forever in the afterlife, as well as of what further vengeance the Queen of Attolia might wreak on him before then.

In Eddis, Eugenides isolates himself in the palace library and only rarely comes out. Even after his physical injury heals to the extent it can, he still finds the most basic social interactions painful and suffers from nightmares in which he relives the moment when his hand was cut off.

The Queen of Eddis, who loves her cousin and Thief dearly, is greatly concerned about him — and about the precarious situation that his capture has plunged her kingdom into. For Eddis is a small but strategically placed kingdom wedged between Sounis and Attolia. And not only does the threat that Eugenides might slip into his castle and kill him no longer prevent the King of Sounis from attacking Eddis now that Eugenides has lost his hand, but Eddis’ retaliation for the cutting off of her cousin’s hand has incited a threat of war with Attolia, and the Mede are hoping that this war will give them power over Attolia, Sounis and Eddis.

Eugenides is kept in the dark about the turmoil that surrounds his country, but when the magus of Sounis visits him, Eugenides learns that war is brewing, and realizes that no matter how terrified he might be inside, he must now conquer his fear and embark, one handed, on the greatest theft of his career on behalf of his Queen: stealing nothing less than peace.

The Queen of Attolia makes a good continuation to The Thief, but it is clearly aimed at a somewhat older audience than the earlier book. Whereas in The Thief, Eugenides was referred to mostly as “Gen,” and portrayed as a boy on an adventure, here we see him mature into a man who is far more aware of his own vulnerability and limitations, a man who, due to his amputated hand now has to rely less on the dexterity of his fingers, and more on the cleverness of his mind to pull off the feats of his heroic thefts.

For this reason I was more interested and engaged in reading The Queen of Attolia then I was when I read The Thief, but that is not to say that I was always thoroughly entertained. As much as I enjoyed reading about this more mature Eugenides, I also felt that the book lagged somewhat in the first half while I was waiting for the main character to come out of his depression, and especially for the romance I had heard about to take off.

Yes, there is a romance and it is quite wonderful, but it doesn’t really become the focus of the book until two-thirds of the way through. There are a lot of things I could say about this relationship, especially in regard to some fascinating dynamics that emerge from it, and to its freshness and originality, and the ways in which it, to quote a friend, runs counter to the usual romance tropes, and is so unexpected and yet quite romantic. But I’m limited by the fact that since it comes so late in the book, to describe it further would be to lean into spoiler terrain.

Therefore, instead I’ll talk about the nitpicks that (sorry Michelle!) keep this book from being an A for me. While I loved the final third, I felt that the The Queen of Attolia took a bit too long to get to that part of the story. As in The Thief, the first half, though interesting, was less exciting than the second.

There were also, interspersed with Eugenides’ story, some summaries of the battles between Eddis, Attolia and Sounis. These were dispensed out in a rather dry fashion, without dramatization, and seemed to me to be examples of what is sometimes known as info dumping. Fortunately these sections weren’t that long, but as I read these paragraphs, I was forced to resist the urge to impatiently skim them and return to the characters I cared about.

I also want to mention the narration. The Queen of Attolia is written in third person, and while I do feel that this was probably the right choice for this book since it adds the diversity of multiple viewpoints, I nevertheless missed the liveliness of Eugenides’ chatty first-person voice from The Thief.

Despite these quibbles, I enjoyed The Queen of Attolia more and more as the book progressed, and I loved the maturation of Eugenides as well as the many colorful and clever secondary characters. I liked the fact that beyond the made up kingdoms, the fantastical elements in the story were kept to a minimum, so that when they did come into play they were all the more potent. The marvelous romance in its final third left my mouth watering for the third book, The King of Attolia, which lies on my desk as I write this and glance at that book longingly. Other reviewing commitments are keeping me from getting to it right away, and oh, how I want to pick it up right now!

Assigning a grade to this book is a conundrum. Yes, The Queen of Attolia was slow in places but the romantic elements were terrific. Only I wish there were a whole lot more of them. Oh, but what there was in the way of romance was so smart, so mature, so very worth reading! If only there had been more…

In evaluating The Queen of Attolia, I keep wanting to section it into thirds. The first third would earn a B-, the second a B or B+, the third an A-. But I have to grade the entire book, and so, I end up in that awkward midpoint between a B and a B+, and those are the categories under which I file this letter.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in mass market.

Dear Ms. Wilson,

Lord of the Fading Lands first came to my attention when my blogging partner, Jane, sent all her co-bloggers an excited email after reading an ARC of the book back in the summertime. Soon afterward, Jane blogged about the book and since then, others have fallen in love with it, both here and elsewhere.

Since I often enjoy romantic fantasy and love a good epic romance, I have been wanting to read Lord of the Fading Lands for a while, and now that I have I can say that while the book was enjoyable enough that I wasn’t sorry I read it, I also won’t be reading it a second time.

Lord of the Fading Lands is the story of Rain Tairen Soul, an ancient and tormented fey who once nearly destroyed the world when he lost his mate. Now Rain’s people, the fey, are in grave danger, and Rain senses that to save them, he must find a red haired mortal woman whose image he sees in a prophetic orb called the Eye of Truth.

For the first time in a thousand years, Rain leaves the feys’ Fading Lands and journeys to the kingdom of Ceileria, where he senses the woman, Ellysetta Baristani, when she is injured while watching him in a crowd. He also senses that she is his soulmate — something that should be impossible for a Tairen Soul. Part of Rain is a tairen, a large, predatory cat capable of flight, and it is when Rain is shapeshifted into this form that he tries to come to Ellysetta’s rescue, and succeeds in frightening her and the Ceilerian spectators.

Ellie, as her family members call her, is the adopted daughter of a woodcarver and his wife. Since childhood Ellie has been plagued by strange and frightening dreams. She has terrible memories that she represses, but has also had romantic daydreams about the very same man who now claims she is his mate — Rain Tairen Soul.

Another man also wants Ellie for his wife. Den suspects Ellie of being capable of magic which he wants to harness for his own benefit. Ellie find Den repugnant and would rather marry anyone else, so even though she is afraid of the tairen in Rain and thinks that he will never love her as he did the mate he lost in a war a thousand years earlier, she prefers him to Den. But Den, of course, won’t step aside so easily.

Lord of the Fading Lands isn’t just the story of Ellie and Rain’s courtship; it also features many other characters, including Ellie’s kindhearted father; her mother, who fears any kind of magic; her two little sisters; the five fey warriors who guard Ellie at Rain’s behest; the king and queen of Ceileria; Den; a mysterious and evil man who is stalking Ellie; and Ellie’s friend whom that man is willing to use as a pawn.

If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. The breadth of this book’s scope and the large cast of characters are its greatest pleasures. Reading it, I realized how much I had missed reading books with multiple subplots, and between the excitement over this series and the popularity of J.R. Ward’s books, I wonder if others have also missed those big, thick books which contain a strong romance but focus on other characters as well.

I also found the world-building in this book superior; far more intricate and detailed than what I frequently see in paranormal romances. The development of that world that was one of the book’s strongest aspects. The writing style was nice as well and at first, I was really charmed by the spell that, much like your fey characters, you wove over me.

As the book progressed, however, Rain and Ellie’s courtship began to seem repetitive in that it pretty much consisted of Ellie thinking that Rain couldn’t possibly be attracted to a simple woodcarver’s daughter like herself, and being drawn to him yet afraid of the tairen inside Rain. There wasn’t much progress to the relationship, and because of the way their soul-mate connection was written, I never got to see them wonder who the other were or try to figure each other out as they got to know each other.

Another problem for me was that Ellie was so unfailingly sweet, kind and caring to everyone around her. The only time she ever got impatient and irritable was due to a supernatural event. Characters who are that good are not only a bit unrealistic, they also make me feel disappointed in myself, for being so much more flawed in comparison.

It’s not just Ellie who is good and kind. This is the kind of book where many characters have hearts of gold and almost all of the few characters who aren’t kindly, patient and good-hearted are at the opposite extreme — dastardly and villainous. For me, that made the world of this book a very comforting place to visit for the first few hours of my reading, but by the two-third point of the book, I was hungering for something with more social and psychological complexity.

Lord of the Fading Lands is also a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy in that it’s ultimately about how sweet, kind, patient but seemingly rather plain and average Ellie is one day rescued, swept away from a humdrum life by a very powerful and gorgeous man and rewarded for her sweetness, kindness and patience with the discovery that she is not plain or average after all, but possesses magical powers and the ability to win the loyalty of several powerful warriors who would consider it an honor to die for her.

There is nothing wrong with an old-fashioned Cinderella story — they can be very satisfying to read. But in this case, the wish-fulfillment aspects of the story were so pronounced that after a while, I became too conscious of them to enjoy them deeply.

Finally, I also became conscious after a while that much of the dialogue consisted of a character having something explained to them. That is, of course, how the details of the world-building were conveyed to us readers, but while it was enjoyable in its way, it also got repetitive, too, and I started wishing for dialogue where characters did not explain yet another aspect of their worlds to each other, but simply interacted and developed relationships.

I wonder if it is fair for me to make the judgments I am making about this book without having read the rest of the series, since clearly, Lord of the Fading Lands is not a finished story. It’s possible that the second or third installment of the story would show things becoming more complex than they have so far. Since I have only read the first book, that much is all that I have to go on.

Despite all that I have said, I did enjoy Lord of the Fading Lands. I loved its large canvas and though I wish the book had been more nuanced, I have to admit that its good vs. evil simplicity made for a pleasant escape from my shades-of-gray reality. While I wanted to see more progress in Rain and Ellie’s relationship, I also enjoyed the relaxing pace at which the rest of the story unfolded, the pleasing tone of the writing, and the charm of the intricate world-building.

I don’t believe I will read it again, however, nor do I feel an urge to read the sequel, which Jane recently reviewed, although it’s very possible that I will get to it eventually. I am not sorry that I read Lord of the Fading Lands, but I wish I shared Jane’s excitement and enthusiasm for this series. For me, the spell you wove was pleasant if not long-lasting, and I give the book a C+.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in mass market. No ebook format available.