Joan/SarahF
 is a literary critic, a college professor, and an avid reader of romance--and is thrilled that these are no longer mutually exclusive. Her official specialization is Romantic-era British women novelists, especially Jane Austen, but she has recently joined the exciting re-visioning of academic criticism of popular romance fiction. Sarah is a contributor to the academic blog about romance, Teach Me Tonight, the winner of the 2008-2009 RWA Academic Research Grant, and in the process of founding the International Association of the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) and the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS). Currently, Sarah pretty much only reads BDSM romance, gay male romance, Suzanne Brockmann, J.R. Ward, and Kresley Cole, although she hopes to be able to beat her TBR pile into submission when she has time to think. Sarah teaches at Fayetteville State University, NC.
Dear Authors:
 I opened THIS anthology because I liked Sindustry I. But this volume is so obviously all the leftover stories from the Sindustry I anthology that didn’t quite make it into the first volume. And most of these stories should NOT have been included. This anthology had very few redeeming stories and some that make me want to puke, which kinda dampens any enthusiasm I might have for the whole. Mostly it’s filled with stories with awful, weak, boring, TSTL characters who couldn’t characterize their way out of a paper bag, and their ridiculously over-protective and unrealistic saviors. I have never really understood what m/m readers are complaining about when they say that that one of the characters doesn’t have to be the woman, but I do now. In this volume, one half of the relationship was invariably the damsel in distress who needed saving, the other the knight in shining armor who knew just how to take care of things, pretty lady…uh, I mean lad. Yech.
As in Sindustry I, the premise is that these are all stories about people in the sex industry, either strippers, prostitutes, or porn actors. This volume does a …
Dear Authors:
 I only opened this volume when Dreamspinner sent it to us because Madeleine Urban had a co-written story in it. I adore her longer co-written stories with Abigail Roux, and the volume started off with “Reluctant,” so I thought I’d have a great little story and then skim through the rest. Instead, “Reluctant” was truly awful and the rest of the stories saved me from chucking the volume off my computer.
At 332 pages, this is a seriously hefty volume (electronic, of course). And with only 12 stories, that’s between 25-30 pages a story, much longer than the usual short stories crammed into an anthology. This gives enough time to actually flesh out the characters, plots, and themes. Or time for the story to move from blah to boring and awful.
The theme for the volume is sex industry workers: both low- and high-end prostitutes and strippers, mainly. What was fascinating to me more than anything was how each story used the sex industry angle—as a meet-cute, as conflict, as a moral failing, as a perfectly legitimate profession, with or without comment. I’m strangely fascinated by this particular profession and by how …
Dear Mr. Lane:
 As I immediately emailed to you when you sent met his book, “Good God, the fairy godmother of cover images likes YOU, doesn’t she?!” I adore this cover, as I did the cover of the first Amaranth novel. (Anne Cain did the art. One might almost say “Of course, Anne Cain did the cover art.” I’m not sure she’s capable of doing a bad cover.) And while I read the novel in one sitting, unable to put it down, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Dark Heart and, despite its labeling on Loose Id, I wouldn’t call it a BDSM novel as such.
Coryn is a newly trained Master Mage, a healer. On his travels one day, he stops three men from slaughtering a plague-ridden slave. He heals and claims the slave as his own, then goes to the plague-ridden city Elverton to help the people there. Days later, he has healed so many people, he himself is dangerously weak, but he’s not closer to figuring out where the plague came from and how it’s spreading, which is when he calls in more of his Guild, healers …
Dear Ms. Rossetti:
 This book recently won a Passionate Plume Award from Passionate Ink, the erotic SIG for RWA. I’ve long been intrigued by the blurb on EC, so thought I’d check it out. I’m very glad I did. It’s part of a series, but completely stands alone—I haven’t read the rest of the series, after all, and although I could tell I was missing things here and there, and the external plot was obviously part of something much bigger, the core romance was more than enough to make Strongman worth reading by itself.
Strongman is set in an alternate world (or maybe a far future Earth, technologically diminished?), something I’m usually not interested in reading because world building bores me. But here it’s done so smoothly, so organically, that I hardly noticed I was learning about the world as I was reading. I loved the very short Encyclopedia entries beginning each chapter, explaining parts of the world just as they became important to the story. New species and situations were introduced and explained seamlessly, with no info-dumping, no “As you know, Bob” moments. Perfect.
Griff is a tumbler, part of a circus act. …
Dear Ms. Somerville:
 Remastering Jerna is a remarkable book that harkens back to the beginnings of the novel in the eighteenth century. It is a spiritual autobiography, a travel narrative, a psychological exploration of extreme stress, a prison story, the memoirs of a whore — all the stuff of the novel’s infancy and growth. Although Remastering Jerna is brilliantly constructed and a stunning tour de force, it is only a romance in its last third, perhaps its last half, which is going to make my review slightly schizophrenic.
Set in…an alternate world (?) that is very much like our own but with a different political system, different money, and a matriarchal religion, Remastering Jerna is the first-person narrative of Jerna Setiq, teacher, husband, father…and repressed masochist. He agrees to tutor Davim Korei, the apprentice of his former master, Kimis, the master he broke with when he fell in love with and married his beloved wife Tyrme, mother of his two young children. Davim is almost 17, underage in this society where the age of consent is 18 for everything, and when Jerna finds out that Davim is Kimis’s current sexual submissive, he forces Kimis to stop …
Dear Mr. Lane:
 I reviewed your Dark Heart in February (the book of the gorgeous cover), which I very much enjoyed. So when you sent me White Flag, I was thrilled to have it, short though it is (only 68 pages). And it was an enjoyable, if predictable, little read. But I’m really writing about it because of its place in another conversation I’m having about romance.
Charlie is a travel writer, a rolling stone, content never EVER to settle. On a canal in the French countryside, he meets Matthieu, scion of a vineyard family, who is attractive, seductive, determined…and has put down roots so strongly there’s no way to uproot him. Instant drama. Instant, unfixable conflict.
As I said, it’s a short little book, told from Charlie’s first person POV. Every now and then it’s got the emotional disconnect that I associate MFA program writing, in which the characters are observers of their own lives, not actors. But that’s appropriate for Charlie, who’s terrified about being dragged out of his observational mode and into the life of a boisterous, loving family. But then the emotions come back, most especially when Charlie and …
Dear Ms. Burkhart:
 As a college professor, I had to overcome very many squicks and ethics twitches when reading about a professor who not only starts a sexual relationship with a current student but ends up spanking her over his desk as a “Final Exam.” I also don’t do well with male dominant/female submissive stories, but I liked your writing enough on your prequel posts on your blog that I decided to persevere. I’m glad I did, because I appreciated how well you depicted the BDSM. It’s just a shame that your heroine annoyed me, that you added a quirky paranormal element, and that the narrative progress better resembled a bumpy road than an arc.
Admittedly, the professor/student relationship fail was five years prior to the story. After the “final exam,” the heroine Rae is freaked out (ya think?) and runs away from Conn, the hero, who is racked by guilt because of his perceive failure–not that he started the relationship at all, but that he took her too far too fast. In the meantime, Rae marries and divorces another guy. Although they seem to live in the same town, Conn can’t find her …
The new academic organization, International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, is up and running and doing some exciting things:
1. The Members’ Forum on the IASPR website is a standing messageboard where IASPR members (and non-members) can interact, sharing news of and discussions about popular romance studies. Anyone can register as a member of the board but members of IASPR will have access to a members only section of the forum.
2. IASPR has a Cafe Press store where you can buy shirts, mugs, and pins with our logo as well as fun slogans like “Romance Readers Make Better Scholars,” “Romance: Think About It,” “In UR bodice, analyzin UR literachur,” and many more.
3. A few IASPR Officers and members will be at the annual conference of the Romance Writers of America in Washington D.C. next week at various events:
- President Sarah Frantz, Vice-President Pamela Regis, and NYT best-selling author Sabrina Jeffries will be presenting “If you like the Classics; Or, How to recommend romance to Literature Snobs in your library” at the Librarians’ Day on June 15, 2009.
- Sarah, Pam, and IASPR member, Jessica Lyn Van Slooten, will be presenting on “The Wit, Wisdom, and Writing Advice of Jennifer
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 Evangeline Anderson’s books are my dirty little secret, my secret shame, my love that dare not speak its name. I don’t know WHY her writing makes me feel oh so fulfilled but in such a wonderful dirty way, but it does. They’re so full of *angst* and *melodrama* and *gay for you* and all the things that usually just make me roll my eyes. But they’re quick reads, hott! as anything, rollicking good fun, and you totally don’t notice the huge gaping plot holes until after you’re done and REreading the damn thing when you go, Hur? (like I just did). Her books are the one reading habit I’m ashamed of, but it’s the squidgy, yummy shame that you just want to share with people. So let me share…
Str8te Boys is pretty much dorm porn with extra-angst. It’s a short little story–under 70 pages–but so much fun. It’s told completely from the third-person perspective of Maverick (ORLY? I mean, that name? Really?!), an arrow-straight (uh-huh) jock at the end of his senior year of college, who happens to play “gay chicken” with even straighter, party animal roommate and …
Dear Ms. Mitchell.
 This book reads like what I imagine being inside a guy’s head must be like. Lots of stonewalling, lots of mixed motivations, lots of confused emotions. This ability you have to get emotions perfectly right and to show how they are so very wrong-headed is both the beauty and the problem with this book.
Daniel Gardner is back at his childhood home in Easton, PA for Christmas and then to supervise the final packing for his mother’s move to Harrisburg. The story opens with a break-in at his mother’s house on Christmas Eve. In the aftermath, he meets Detective Trey Erikkson, his teenage crush and first-fumblings compatriot. They haven’t met in 15 years since Trey ran away to bootcamp and there’s hard feelings between them, as well as the mystery that encompasses the break-in, Trey’s mother’s murder and father’s imprisonment for it, and later criminal shenanigans.
It’s the suspense plot that made the book less than brilliant. While I could get behind the conspiracy theory of the final revelation and I enjoyed the slow reveal of Daniel and Trey figuring out the mystery, the plot itself was Swiss cheese. Why would Daniel’s …
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