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REVIEW: Mr. Malcolm’s List by Suzanne Allain

Jane — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:10:17 +0000

Dear Ms Allain :

Thank you for sending me this book for review. I am a big fan of the traditional regency which is what I would categorize this novel as. The key to a successful traditional regency is the total immersion of the reader into the time period which is well done in Mr. Malcom’s List. Like other traditional regencies, the hero is not a lord, but a man of great means and the second son of an Earl which, during that time, was sufficient to make him a marital catch.

Selina was a paid companion who was left comfortably well off after her companion’s death. She does not want to return to her vicerage with her family and writes to her old school classmate, Julia, with a request to visit her in London. Julia is living the life of parties with other young people that Selina longs to enjoy. Julia ignores this request for months and then, out of the blue, Selina receives an invitation to visit.

Julia Thistlewaite had her sights set on marrying The Honorable Jeremy Malcolm, second son of the Earl of Kilbourne. He was the catch of the season and Julia was a beautiful, wealth, well connected member of the gentry. But Malcolm has a list of attributes he wants in a woman and Julia doesn’t measure up. (She fails item No. 4 which is “The ability to converse in a sensible fashion.”). Cassie, friend to Malcom and cousin to Julia reports back that she doesn’t meet all the requirements on the list. Julia decides she’ll use Selina to enact a revenge. Selina is to conform to all the list elements and make Malcolm fall in love with her (or at least to request her hand in marriage) whereupon Selina will crush his dreams.

Selina agrees to do this because she won’t get to stay and have fun in London unless she agrees to Julia’s schemes and because Malcolm sounds like a prig in need of being brought down to earth.

When Selina and Malcolm meet, they actually start to like each other quite a bit to the point that Malcolm does indeed think that Selina is the woman for him. When he finds out its all a ploy, he’s angered and hurt. Selina feels badly and tries to explain that she, too, has real feelings for him but he is definitely not interested in listening to her.

I actually thought the star of the book was Julia. I found her really entertaining. She was always scheming even when it went against her own interest and eventually she has to give up her vendetta against Malcolm to get her own matrimonial prize. Selina and Malcolm were a bit stiff to me, particularly juxtaposed against Julia.

Another highlight of the story is the dialogue. It’s snappy, entertaining and humorous. The plot was comedic but it felt a bit forced as the characters carried out setup after setup even until the end of the story. C

Best regards,

Jane

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REVIEW: The Husband She Couldn’t Forget by Carmen Green

Janine — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:00:46 +0000

Dear Ms. Green,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Janine

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REVIEW: The Bargain (Finding Home Book 1) by Catherine Stang

Jayne — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:51:43 +0000

Dear Ms. Stang,

Me loves a good American Civil War novel but unfortunately, most publishers today don’t agree with me so pickin’s have been slim lately. So when I was perusing the new ebooks at Fictionwise a few months ago, I decided to buy your book and give it a try.

With her three older brothers gone for soldiers, Cassandra Beaumont has taken charge of the family plantation. She, her younger sister Rachel and her sister-in-law Ellie are the only adults there. Things are grim and looking to get worse when a troop of Union soldiers arrives with orders to commandeer the place for use as a hospital. Cassie makes a bold but thwarted stand against Major Joel Bradshaw before realizing she needs his medical expertise to help deliver Ellie’s breech baby. Needs must and the two work out an agreement: his help with the delivery for her help as a nurse once the hospital is set up.

Baby Joel James Beaumont is delivered, everyone settles into the arrangement and the wounded begin to arrive. A Colonel who dislikes the fact that the Beaumont women are still there arrives too and Joel makes a hasty offer of marriage to Cassie which will allow the ladies to stay. Facing eviction and having no brothers on hand to help her, Cassie agrees. But as their feelings for each other develop, is there hope for this marriage bargain made in the final days of the war?

Let’s see – what I liked. I liked the characters and the fact that no one is a villain. No foaming at the mouth, scenery chewing bad guys to arrive in the last act. No one does a 180 character change and for the most part, everyone acts honorably.

But I felt that a lot of issues were skated over with little depth. This is supposed to be the site of a wartime hospital but precious little time is spent on page dealing with the wounded and I never got the feeling that this aspect of the novel was anything but peripheral. The extent of Cassie’s nursing is described – in past tense – as wrapping bandages and handing Joel surgical instruments. Joel’s activity is described – also in past tense – as a few operations and making his morning rounds. I didn’t see the blood, hear the cries of the wounded or get wound up in any emotional life or death scenes because there weren’t any.

Now for my main problem with the story. There’s lots of potential external conflict: We’ve got North vs South, Cassie and Joel working out their marriage, the Colonel poking his nose into whatever is going on, Cassie’s Confederate doctor brother who sneaks back to the plantation to see his family, his problems with his wife Ellie, sister Rachel and Joel’s second in command who clash but…little of this is carried through into internal conflict.

Everyone is so darned nice and polite and accommodating that whatever conflicts arise in the story are quickly dealt with in a matter of a page or two. To me, it made the characters seem flat. Oh, Cassie does something that Joel doesn’t want her to. No worries because he won’t stay mad or really do anything about it. Rachel defies Joel or Scott’s demands that she stay inside. Not a problem because a short discussion with her will turn her contrite. Ellie is mad that Jamie never answered her letters. Wait, here the letters miraculously are and all is forgiven. Usually my complaints are that conflict is dragged out past believability but with this book I was longing for a good show down. I needed something to build the tension and get me to madly flip pages to see what would happen next. Instead, after a little while, I could easily predict how these people would neatly resolve everything.

The next book in the series also promises an era little used in recent years, that of Reconstruction. I’m interested enough in that time frame to give it a shot and will cross my fingers that I find it more emotionally engaging than I did this book. C+

~Jayne

This book can be purchased at Whiskey Creek Press in ebook form.

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REVIEW: Yours for the Night by Jasmine Haynes

Jane — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:00:29 +0000

Dear Ms. Haynes:

Dr. Brooke Magnati has come out as the face behind the prostitute Belle Du Jour. Dr. Magnati was finishing up her PhD and running low on cash and decided that having sex for money would be a way for her to keep her day job, make ends meet, and presumably have time to herself. Magnati as Belle du Jour wrote a number of bestseling books regarding her life as a prostitute and Showtime has an adaption of this series called Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

Why bring this up? The social messaging of this book is that sexual commerce can be an empowered female concept. Problematically, the stories really don’t play out that way. Instead, as one person mentioned to me, this is Pretty Woman done three ways. Each story in this collection is about a high class courtesan/prostitute/call girl who leaves the empowered life of hooking when a fabulous looking guy who happens to be super rich marries her. A woman is matched with the client. The client pays a fee to the company and the woman gets paid through “tips” or other forms of compensation (jewelry, clothes, etc) if the client is happy with the “date” which is how the agency and call girls refer to the client appointments.

The Girlfriend Experience. This was the weakest and least favorite of the collection primarily because Marianna was so irritating.

Thirty five year old Marianna finds herself in a financial fix when her father won’t give her a loan. Marianna has a good time blaming her problems on her father. After all, he and her mother want her to have a lifestyle that fits their image of wealthy and successful while Marianna would like to be read books to kids and do other good deeds. Unable to be successful in real estate and unable to live a less expensive lifestyle, Marianna is unable to make ends meet. Her girlfriend gives her the idea of becoming an escort. At first, Marianna is aghast, but her friend tells her that not only is it sexy, getting paid for sex, but it’s also powerful.

Okay. “Doesn’t it make you feel sleazy and dirty?” Marianna was dying to know.

The smile was slow to grow on Jewel’s lips, but when it came, it was sexy, sultry, secretive. “Getting paid for it is the hottest thing I’ve ever done, and so damn sexy. This is better than a one-night stand, and you don’t have to worry about how to get rid of him in the morning. Oh my God”—Jewel rolled her eyes—“if a one-nighter is looking for a relationship . . .” She punctuated with ﬁnger quotes. “If I decide I don’t like a guy, I tell my consultant not to put his calls through.”

After his wife died, Chase Ramirez focused all of his attention on raising his daughter. She’s a sophomore in school now and Chase is suffering a bad case of boredom. He exhibits signs of serious depression: ” Yet as hard as it was to get up in the morning, if he didn’t have work to occupy him, he’d simply die. And he needed to stick around for Krista.” Clinically, this would be known as suicidal ideation. Anyway, Chase’s buddy convinces him that he just needs to get laid and provides a number for an exclusive call girl company (Marianna’s in fact!). The idea of buying someone for sex appeals to Chase. The anonymity of it, the immediacy of it, and of course, the transient nature.

In Marianna, Chase finds the perfect antidote for his loneliness. Bonus, even his daughter likes her.

*****

Payback. This was the best of the collection because it actually takes some time to explore both the positive and negative sides of sex and commerce.

Dominique Lowe is a long time contractor with the call girl agency. She was once the perfect wife of a wealthy man until she found out she couldn’t have children. Edward, her ex, cheated on her, impregnated a young woman, divorced Dominique and married the pregnant girl. Dominique was humiliated and hurt. Making men pay for sex was one way in which she enacted revenge against her ex.

At a party, Gabriel Price watches an interesting tableau play out across the room. A woman encounters a younger pregnant woman and an older man comes and ushers the young pregnant woman away. The woman, Gabrielle, is hurt and vulnerable and this appeals to Gabriel.

Gabriel and Dominique engage in a torrid limo encounter after which Dominique hands him her card and suggests that he call up and ask for a date, through her agency. Dominique is encouraged to date Gabriel without the agency involvement but Dominique is adamant that she is only in control through the agency set up:

“I’m a courtesan, Isabel. I can’t go back to a normal life with a normal relationship. I like the power too much. And a man is never going to accept what I do for a living. You know it as well as I do.” She snapped her purse closed as if that solidiﬁed her decision on the matter. “He pays like everyone else does.”

Dominique’s post divorce identity was so strongly wrapped up in her work.

When she was with Gabriel, Edward ceased to exist. No other man had done that. Not the sheik with his thirty-thousand-dollar gift. Not Trevor with ten thousand dollars or diamonds and emeralds. No amount of money, no present, made her forget. It only gave her power when she imagined showing Edward her worth to other men.

Gabriel made her powerful without the symbol.

Unfortunately, Dominique was sure that Gabriel was just fascinated by her because she was something new and shiny to him and repeated engagements would wear down the novelty. While Gabriel would like to pursue something more meaningful, Dominique keeps trying to return it to a business transaction. She finally comes to the realization that no amount of money or perceived power will restore her and that with Gabriel, she has the opportunity to move forward.

Triple Play. This story is the most outre of the collection. Noelle St. James is kind of a sex addict. She loves sex, all kinds of it, with all kinds of people. Courtesans provides her an opportunity to get paid for doing something she craves. Lately though, something is missing. Like an adrenaline junky looking for her next fix by taking on increasingly risky adventures, Noelle is no longer satisfied by her “dates.”

Fortunately, Dax Deacon arrives on the scene. Dax has a fetish that ordinary dating can’t fulfill. He loves to watch. Recognizing that most women won’t enjoy being constantly asked to have sex with others, Dax has turned to the professional sex trade and in Noelle, he finds the perfect partner. Nearly every fantasy that he can dream up, Noelle wants to act out. In this, they find the perfect partnership.

One thing I did like was that all the characters are older. The heroes are in their forties and the heroines are late 30s to late 40s. There aren’t too many books that feature protagonists over forty and this collection makes a good case that older doesn’t mean less sexy.

The sex scenes in the story are well done and the book is as hot as you’ve ever written. So long as the reader totally focuses on the fantasy, these stories are both romantic and sexy. I never did, however, buy into the idea that getting paid for sex, particularly in the manner that these women were paid, was empowering at all. Being a courtesan in the historical time period was empowering because it was one of the only ways a woman could be truly independent. In modern times, however, I have a hard time believing in this fantasy, no matter how convincing the pen of the storyteller. C+

Best regards,

Jane

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REVIEW: Ice by Linda Howard

Jane — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:00:08 +0000

Dear Ms. Howard:

I confess that I was at first taken aback by the length of this hardcover. I remember thinking unkind thoughts about this format when Janet Evanovich put out her first Christmas hardcover. Those have sold like crazy so I guess that readers are unfazed by the length of the story and the cost. After all, a story is a story, right?

When I started ICE, I began to get excited. A good category length Howard is worth hardcover pricing. I know that I would have paid quite a bit to read the Diamond Bay trilogy because it was so good. The first and second chapters read like a vintage category Howard romance and if it had kept in that vein, I would have been able to recommend this unreservedly. However, in keeping with your current writing voice, this book is far more focused on the action/suspense than it is on the characters and their relationship with each other.

The story takes place, mostly, over the space of one afternoon. There is an impending icestorm and military policeman, Gabriel, is home on leave. His father, the local sheriff, sends him to retrieve Lolly Helton from her mountain home because she won’t be able to survive up there if there is an icestorm. Gabriel is not thrilled about his father’s assignment. He wants to spend the afternoon with his son and he doesn’t really like Lolly. When they were in high school, Lolly always looked down her nose at him. Him! The highschool jock, son of the sheriff, friend to everyone; yet Lolly was always using her sharp tongue to cut him down. Still, Gabriel isn’t going to refuse to do what his father asks and heads up the mountain.

Lolly is preparing the family home for sale. Her parents have moved south and Lolly doesn’t live in the area. The local grocery store owner invites Lolly to stay with them over the icestrom and Lolly acquiesces. She knows the danger. She heads back up the mountain to get the supplies she needs. Her return to town is cut short when two meth addicts break into her home and prepare to rape, rob, and kill her.

It’s about the time when the meth addicts appear on the scene that the book kind of falls apart for me, maybe because I was hoping and anticipating Lolly and Gabriel interaction. no matter how hard you had Lolly explain everything to me, I was beset with questions regarding the plausibility of the suspense. For example, meth addict 1 is male and tries to rape Lolly only his girlfriend, Meth 2, comes in and starts to beat Meth 1 about the head. Why would Meth 1 think that he could get away with raping Lolly when his girlfriend was standing right there? Did he have a history of this? Was it simply to place Lolly in further sympathy with the reader? When they put Lolly in a room upstairs, it easily allows her to escape. Why not just tie her to a chair in the same room as the Meth heads? Or why wouldn’t they try to secure her in some fashion?

Now the answer may be that the Meth addicts are high and who can explain their actions, but they seemed capable of executing a plan (targeting Lolly in the grocery store and following her up the mountain, getting her to give them money, etc). It was no quick grab sort of thing.

Gabriel comes along and they try to escape together but they are found out by the bad guys so Lolly, Gabriel and the bad guys are running in the woods in the mountain during the icestorm. Only Gabriel and Lolly are affected by the cold. The Meth addicts seem impervious. Where Lolly is nearly hypothermic, Meth addict is able to plot, plan and carry out an effective threat to both Gabriel and Lolly’s lives.

The interaction between Gabriel and Lolly is quite brief and there is no real character development. The focus is squarely on the icestorm and the meth addicts and the danger the two pose for both Gabriel and Lolly. While the story ends with Gabriel and Lolly pursuing each other, I wasn’t convinced of much of anything at the end, least of all their ability to form a lasting connection. C

Best regards

Jane

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REVIEW: Tangle Girls (anthology edited by Nicole Kimberling)

Janine — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:00:31 +0000

Dear Readers,

Back in July of 2008, I reviewed Tangle XY, an anthology of short speculative m/m stories. Earlier this year, Blind Eye Books, the publisher of Tangle XY, came out with Tangle Girls, an f/f anthology. As with Tangle XY, some (not all) of the stories are multicultural, and many have fairy tale or science fiction elements, but in this anthology the commonality all the stories share is the focus on girls who love other girls. Here are my reviews of the six stories:

“Raccoon Skin” by J.D. EveryHope

In “Raccoon Skin,” Sophia, a college student, arrives at her parents’ home on a pre-dawn morning. After seeing that her parents’ trash can that has been upended by a raccoon, Sophia goes outside to put it back up, and while there, she sees crows attacking a golden eagle. The eagle falls to the snowy ground, and Sophia chases the crows away. Just as she is debating whether to take the eagle inside, the bird shifts shape and turns into a human girl — and not just any girl, but Sophia’s girlfriend, Caterina.

Caterina and Sophia met in college and began dating, but Sophia never told Caterina that she hadn’t come out to her parents. Now it seems Caterina has also been keeping secrets: not only is she a shapeshifter, she is also a princess from another realm, and her younger brothers’ lives are in danger. Caterina wants to return to her land and rescue her brothers, but her injuries are serious. Sophia convinces her to ask Sophia’s parents for shelter and help and allow Sophia to save her brothers instead.

Caterina gives Sophia a ring which will open a path to Caterina’s world when dawn arrives. Just as Sophia is about to go through the portal, a raccoon speaks and warns her that Beyond, where she is about to venture, is a dangerous place. Her odds of success will be better if she and the raccoon trade skins.

Sophia agrees. Clothed as a raccoon, she enters Beyond and it is indeed a dangerous journey. Fortunately, the raccoon skin proves very helpful.

“Raccoon Skin” is a charming quest story that reminded me a bit of some of fairy tales I read as a child. I loved the way the mundane was transformed into the magical, and enjoyed the clever ways Sophia found to see past the deceptive illusions of the Beyond. It was also neat to see the traditional gender role upended, so it was a heroine who charged to the rescue. I would have liked to see more of Sophia and Caterina’s relationship, but on the whole, I really enjoyed the story. My grade for “Raccoon Skin” is a B+.

“Amazons” by Jesse Sandoval

“Amazons” was the reason I plopped down $12.95 for Tangle Girls. I loved Sandoval’s story in Tangle XY, “Los Conversos.” The setting of “Amazons” is unnamed, although the title of course alludes to the Amazon. As the story, which appears to be historical, begins, its unnamed female narrator is rowing a boat on a jungle river. She observes the crocodile beneath the water and the black snakes hanging from the trees above with respect.

Once I saw one of those snakes lift a grown man off his feet and swallow him whole. The man pissed himself as the snake wrapped herself around him as if she were falling in love. She opened her thin mouth and took him in a deep kiss. I watched her eyes the entire time. She had the mesmerized gaze of utter adoration, as if this man’s form, his meat and muscle, had entranced her and drawn her into an unthinkable action.

I remember seeing that same unflinching stare long ago, looking back at me from a silver mirror. My hands trembled as I tried to load the pistol, the slender bullets wavered and slipped between my fingers. Then I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I gazed into my own eyes, the wide pupils dilated, entranced with desire. My reflection knew that I was a murderess before I did. She passed that assurance to me in a glance. My fingers have never trembled since.

How did the narrator come to look in the mirror and see a murderess? Since this story is only six pages long, I don’t want to give it away, but the story begins in Europe, where the main character met a woman named Maria, with whom she shared slices of cake and stories about the New World.

The imagery in “Amazons” has a hallucinatory beauty that captures what it is like to be drunk on love, willing to do anything for the other person. The story is haunting and powerful, though I wish it were longer so that I could feel I really knew Maria. I can’t wait for Jesse Sandoval to write a novel or a short story collection so that I can drown in his gorgeous prose. Ms. Kimerbling, if you’re reading this, can you do anything about that? My grade for “Amazons” is a B+/A-.

“The Conclave” by Trent Roman

Tanya Drake has been dating Erin, a centuries-old fey, but the relationship is becoming frustrating for her. The two met at the private Catholic school in which Tanya was enrolled. It wasn’t long before they became lovers. But Erin has a habit of comparing Tanya’s lovemaking to that of lovers from her past, lovers as famous as Sappho and Gengis Khan’s concubines. Erin also disappears for days on end only to reappear expecting the relationship to resume as though she’d never left.

After one such disappearance, Tanya tries to question Erin and find out how serious she is about their relationship. To make it up to Tanya, Erin offers to sneak her mortal lover into “the biggest bash in two worlds,” a party for immortal beings known as the Conclave. What kind of adventures will Tanya have at the Conclave, and how will they affect her relationship with Erin?

“The Conclave” is written in a crisp, snappy style I enjoyed. I liked the way Tanya and Erin arrived at the Conclave, too. But though Tanya is said to be a high school student, the character comes across as older. Erin is jaded and doesn’t treat Tanya that well, taking their relationship very lightly, so it’s hard to care about her, but Tanya isn’t sure if she’s serious in her feelings for Erin, either, so it’s also hard to care about how the relationship will change.

I felt that essentially, nothing that is deeply important to the characters happened in the story, so nothing that happened was all that important to me as a reader, either. After “Raccoon Skin” and “Amazons,” it was hard not to be disappointed in this one. My grade for “The Conclave” is a C-.

“Under Suspicion” by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon

Set on the spaceship Mastodon, “Under Suspicion” begins when a shipwide alarm sounds, alerting United Star Fleet Ensign Lily Branoch and her fellow crewmembers to an accident in the main hanger. In the process of helping to rescue people trapped under “cargotainers,” Lily encounters a beautiful marine whose name she doesn’t catch. She glimpses the woman again before she learns that she is Lt. Cruz-Ortega.

Lily is powerfully attracted to the woman, so much so that she can’t get the lieutenant out of her mind. But this distraction becomes a problem when Lily begins to suspect that the beautiful Daniella may be involved in a plot to smuggle weapons off the Mastodon. Could Daniella Cruz-Ortega’s lovely face be hiding treachery? And even if not, will Lily ever get up the gumption to ask her out?

“Under Suspicion” was an enjoyable story and it probably had the most relationship focus of any of the stories in this collection. Lily was likable and the enigmatic Daniella was compelling. The worldbuilding was solid and I liked the military atmosphere. My main complaint is that due to the nature of the plot, the relationship between the two women did not develop that much. Nonetheless it was fun, though I would have liked it to be a bit more substantial. C+/B- for “Under Suspicion.”

“Cupcake” by Erin MacKay

Erin MacKay’s “Cupcake” takes place in the future, on a colonized world. The viewpoint character is Stasya, a professional assassin. As the story opens, Stasya receives an assignment from Rupi, a man who has hired her to kill in the past. This time Stasya is astonished at the target, whom she describes as “just a…a cupcake.”

Mitusko Jennings-Villega’s husband wants to collect on his wife’s life insurance policy, but Mitsuko is constantly watched by her wealthy father’s guards. To kill her, Stasya has to infiltrate “High Street,” Mitusko’s rarified world of corporate celebrities. Yet once she meets Mitusko, Stasya is in for a surprise. Mitusko realizes she is an assassin, and she is willing– no, ready — to die. Will Stasya be able to kill the woman she is beginning to admire and care for?

“Cupcake” is written in clean, straightforward prose and while the worldbuilding isn’t completely fresh, it’s well-executed. The story felt a little oppressive to me (though not nearly as much as MacKay’s story in Tangle XY, “Crossing the Distance”), but on the whole I liked it.

Stasya is a compelling character, though I wish her past, and especially her reason for becoming an assassin for hire, had made her more sympathetic. Mitsuko isn’t as morally ambiguous, but her life hasn’t been very meaningful. Though neither character is always likable, the story still kept me involved, probably because of the danger and high stakes. My grade for “Cupcake” is a B.

“Dead and the President” by Tenea D. Johnson

Set in a dystopian future, Tenea De. Johnson’s “Dead and the President” begins when the consciousness of the main character, a young black woman named Dead, is inhabiting the body of the President. Dead intends to speak to the world from within his body, but the President pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head.

Dead then begins recounting her history to the reader. She was born in the Basin, where many people have inherited the special abilities given to blacks by a doctor who believed he was making genetic reparations. Dead’s talent is “phasing” into other people and controlling their actions.

Dead is a motherless twelve year old when she is tagged by the Internal Processing Department, which tracks those with unusual abilities, and uses her talent to escape. She ends up Topside, where life is much nicer and safer, but she can’t forget about the hungry kids she left behind in the Basin, and eventually, she hatches a plan to help them.

Dead has the potential to be a sympathetic character, and there were a number of relationships that could have been involving in this story, not just the sexual one Dead eventually has with another young woman, but also her friendships with a girl named Nina in the Basin, and with an elderly woman named Cecilia in Topside. But these pass by the reader quickly, like houses glimpsed briefly from the window of a moving car. It is hard to get invested in these people, even when they mean a lot to Dead, because we readers hardly get to spend time with them.

What gets the most attention in “Dead and the President” is the setting. Dead’s world is an interesting place, but I almost stopped reading a few pages in, when the unfamiliar terms became difficult to decipher. I still don’t understand exactly what a couple of them mean, even after reading certain paragraphs three or four times. Johnson has a nice writing style, and another thing I liked about the story was the way the futuristic setting reflected social and political injustice. This aspect of the worldbuilding was well handled and thought-provoking, but for me, it’s not enough to make up for what’s missing. C- for “Dead and the President.”

Overall, the anthology was a bit uneven, but still worth reading in my opinion, with four enjoyable stories and two weaker ones. I want to reiterate my plea for more fiction from Jesse Sandoval, who writes so beautifully. I will be keeping my eye out on future offerings from Blind Eye Books, too. My overall grade for Tangle Girls is a B-.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased at Amazon. No ebook.

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REVIEW: Redline Lover by Charlene Teglia

Jane — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00:20 +0000

Dear Ms. Teglia:

Thank you for sending this novella to me for review. I know, having read erotic romance* for several years, that here is a real skill in delivering believable and sexy consummation scenes. You have that skill and I appreciated the delivery of that content. The overall construct, perhaps because of the length, was problematic.

Maggie Parker and Adam Richards were a couple until Maggie up and left one day, leaving Adam sleeping and a post it note breaking up with him. She moved to Chicago to take a job with a magazine. When Maggie’s sister gives birth to a son alone and abandoned by her husband, Maggie returns to her hometown near Washington, D.C.. Of course, that puts her back into proximity with Adam.

Adam feels like there was unfinished business between them and proposes that Maggie have sex with him until she leaves for Chicago again. Adam wants to sex Maggie out of his system. Maggie is given a remote assignment to come up with a story about Adam, race car driver who leaves it all behind to start a mechanic shop.

I wasn’t sure why Adam and Maggie started dating in the first place and I never got a sense of where their relationship was when she left. They obviously had communication issues. Maggie never explained to him that she was searching for jobs outside the D.C. area and Adam never explained why he gave up competitive racing. Some of the conversations they had was if they had never dated before. Adam really didn’t see Maggie’s departure coming. He was curiously even keeled about Maggie leaving him. He was more frustrated and wondering if his strong desire for her had driven her away.

There are great little touches here and there that convey a lot of emotion and provide great setting but the coherency of the story lost me from time to time. I was confused about how Maggie could maintain any journalistic integrity by sleeping with Adam and I was confused about Adam’s desire to both push Maggie away and sex them both into exhaustion. For example, Adam swung back and forth after their first sexual encounter. First he leaves her on the bed, wanting more and hoping that she is gone when he is done with his shower. When she comes in to the bathroom to say goodbye, he draws her into the shower and they proceed to satisfy each other. I needed something to signal his own internal conflict if that is what you wanted me to read into this. If he wanted to fuck her out of his system, why did he engage in delayed gratification to heighten sensory satisfaction?

I did love the explanation of what the redline was and I wish that this were teased out even more. I thought it was an interesting concept that was brought up but never fully integrated.

There was a nice circling of around for Maggie, from running away to staying and deciding to risk Adam’s rejection in order to find out if they could be together. As I said in my opening, your sex scenes are always well done and this book is no different. I wished that there was more cohesiveness in the character motivations. C

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased at Samhain in DRM Free multiformat.

* I’m not sure I would tag this an erotic romance. I didn’t find the scenes to be any more erotic than in a Blaze.

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REVIEW: Falling Through Glass by Barbara Sheridan

Jayne — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:00:05 +0000

Dear Ms. Sheridan,

When Tina submitted a list of new books to Dear Author for possible review, “Falling Through Glass” grabbed my attention. Hmmm, time travel to 19th century Japan in the waning days of samurai warriors. Can’t get much more different than that.

Since I’m feeling lazy this morning. I’m just going to steal the blurb at Liquid Silver.

Los Angeles
Present Day

Japanese-American Emiko Maeda set aside her film school studies following the sudden death of her father. At odds with her mother and burdened with the guilt over her role in the tragic accident, she moves in with her uncle Jake and comes into possession of an antique mirror. While accompanying Jake to Japan on a film shoot, Emmi is caught in a freak storm and plunged through time–into Feudal Japan and the world of samurai.

Kyoto, Japan
1864

The city of Kyoto is ablaze with violence and on the brink of civil war. Nakagawa Kaemon is a young samurai with a secret. He gathers information on those who claim to “Revere the emperor” but harbor their own agenda to control the country. Kae is honor bound to execute anyone who poses a threat to the throne even if it is Emmi, the unusual young woman he has come to love.

The first 50 pages of this book almost lost me. Way too much telling and not showing. I had actually put the book down at this point only to rethink it the next morning. I want to promote different times and places in books so I hefted it up and kept going. I’m not sure if it was my determination to finish the book or at this point you started more showing and less telling but it’s then that things started to pick up and become more interesting.

But I have to ask, what is with heroine casually accepting that her Uncle Jake has time traveled? I’d be all “WTF?!” but she just brushes it off in the conversation almost like Jake was merely saying he’d gone to San Diego for the day. Then when she tells Kae she’s from the future, he does the same. Or at least initially, though later he does think a little on what she’s said. But it’s more that he wants to see this future than any freaked out, “OMG! (or Japanese equivalent), she says she’s from the freakin’ future!” Emmi’s g-g-g-whatever grandfather is the same. His “visions” were never actually explained to my satisfaction. Ditto how Emmi’s mother’s monk works in the story.

Emmi is young – and she does act it at times. Pouting when Kae leaves her alone, excited about her wedding night – let loose your inner slut!, hasn’t had her maternal hormones kick in yet as seen when she takes Matsuhito out slumming through the festival, worries about possible STDs after her hot wedding night. Emmi also creates a ruckus whenever she’s let loose. I just wish she’d take a little more responsibility for the people she injured and the property she destroyed. Instead she pouts some more and tries to put the blame on everyone but herself. It takes possible deadly consequences to others (Emmi have you ever heard of seppuku?) before she finally does realize when she’s done something wrong.

Lucky for Emmi that Kae can look deep into her eyes and “just tell” that she’s not a traitor. Which he’ll believe until she does something – yet again – to make him rethink his position on that. At one point, Kae thinks that he wished he had more time to just sit with Emmi and get to know her. So did I. These two fall in love fairly quickly given all the unusual aspects of how they meet and get to know each other.

At first, I wondered if we’d get Emmi’s view of how things differ from her world vs 1864. Specific things and not just, “wow I’m in the past.” I loved her thoughts on the Shimabara brothel district, the palace, the hair gunk and face paint, the whole physical process of dressing for the wedding and actually walking in her outfit. This made the story more immediate and interesting to me.

Along the same lines, the scenes of the fair when Emmi and Kae attend as well as when she takes Prince Matsuhito there, are fun and a wonderful way to “show” the past and how Emmi views it.

The use of the historical actions as a way to decide whether or not Emmi’d stay in the past or return to the present is great. With TT books, I dislike any lingering regrets of “should I stay or should I go?” You remove all doubts about this. I was a little lost at times with regard to the historical action going on at this point in Japan but not enough for the story to lose me.

I hope that she and Kae work out their differing views on marriage and a woman’s place in it. But hey, at least he’ll buy her lingerie! Oh, loved the haiku poem but did you not want to include any of Emmi’s crappy poetry?

Like Mrs. Giggles, I also got the impression that this is a sequel to some other book. That I was missing some information that would allow some of the incidents in this book to make sense. There is a lot I like in the story and I wish I could give this book a higher rating but with all the issues I have with it, I’m afraid not.

~Jayne

FTC discloser – A free copy of this ebook was provided to Dear Author by the publisher for a potential review.

This book can be purchased at Liquid Silver Books.

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REVIEW: Transformed into the Frenchman’s Mistress by Barbara Dunlop

Jayne — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Dear Ms. Dunlop,

A friend of mine married her Frenchman so when I see books with French heroes, I check them out. Since I’ve found that the Desire line tends towards less assholic heroes, I decided to give “Transformed into the Frenchman’s Mistress” a shot.

If there was anything Charlotte Hudson had learned in her twenty-five years, it was how to be proper. So how had the ambassador’s granddaughter ended up on a wild movie assignment, ensconced in a centuries-old Provençal castle with notorious French playboy Alec Montcalm? While her relatives from Hudson Pictures were busy filming at Chateau Montcalm, the real drama was going on behind the antique wooden doors–beneath satin sheets. Charlotte knew their crazy, scandalous secret liaison wouldn’t last. And then she discovered she was pregnant….

This is a hard book for me to grade. There are some things about it I loved and other things that drove me nuts.

Charlotte actually has a backbone and is fairly intelligent. When she arrives at the Montcalm chateau to ask her school pal Raine Montcalm
if her family can rent it for a movie location and finds she’ll have to deal with Alec, with whom she has a slight history, instead, she shifts gears quickly and comes up with a plan of attack. What she agrees to do to get the shoot, isn’t something sleazy. No, all Alec negotiates with her – and I loved the fact that they negotiate instead of Alec going all demanding about it – is that she’ll stay there during the shoot and keep an eye on the production staff.

Alec does have his eye on Charlotte and wants to finish their earlier, unfinished business from three years ago. But he takes his time, is gracious and charming and well mannered about it. Early in the book when Charlotte throws his “playboy” ways in his face, he defends himself by pointing out that a lot of what he does is for the Montcalm business, he doesn’t poach other men’s women and why shouldn’t he enjoy taking out lovely women if they want to be taken out by him? He even dislikes his assistant’s idea that he be seen with Charlotte to deflect attention from the female star of the movie. Hey, I like this guy.

When he and Charlotte start their physical relationship, Alec is determined that she enjoy it, he doesn’t force anything, he’s delighted when she refuses to let him pay for everything during their worldwind – okay more Europewind – buying sprees and together the two are having a great time. Wonderful.

Then they head back to the south of France and things head south with them. Charlotte’s Hollywood mogul family – all from whom she’s estranged though, like a child with her face pressed against the glass of the candy shop, she clearly longs to be a part of it – has arrived and the book turns into an info dump of the previous couple in the series plus a preview of the upcoming attractions. There’s just enough of these other people taking up breathing air to annoy me without enough explanation to make me care at all about what might happen to them.

And – the moment I’d been dreading – Charlotte finally realizes she’s knocked up. Oh noes, she can’t tell Alec! Oh dears, she’ll head off on her own – no worries as she does have money of her own – and have the child by herself. “But you can’t,” Raine and Charlotte’s sister-in-law rightly tell her. So she tells Alec and basically gets called a money grubbing bitch slut by this man who up until now had been charm itself. Talk about a personality 180.

Except that Charlotte’s estranged brother finally acts like a brother and slugs Alec. At which point Alec tells Jake about how Charlotte feels like the redheaded stepchild of the Hudson family which leads to a too sudden reunion between Jake and Charlotte which didn’t satisfy me at all after 22 years of her family’s neglect. Then Alec sees the light because Jake informs him about the family money so – gosh! Charlotte can’t be one of those women who only wants him for his cashola – it must be twue love.

I really wanted to like this book. I really started out liking this book when it centered on a smart heroine and a charming hero but the herd of Hudsons, the incompletely dealt with family issues and Alec’s frankly slightly frightening 0-> 180 trip to bastard and back changed my view. C+

~Jayne

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

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REVIEW: Hidden Conflict by Various Authors

Joan/SarahF — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:00:01 +0000

Dear Authors and Readers.

If you will excuse a personal history, you will see its relevance to my review. I enlisted in the Army National Guard after 9/11. I became a US citizen and commissioned (became an officer) in 2003. I accepted a medical retirement in May of this year, at the rank of Captain, after 7 ½ years of service. I never went overseas, but I served in the Katrina response in Louisiana. I was a soldier and damn proud to be so.

But I am also bisexual (with some extra kinks outside the Kinsey continuum). This is the first time I’ve been able to admit this in public (well, I came out on Twitter on National Coming Out Day) since figuring it out because of the US military’s destructive Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. My sexuality in no way affected my service. All outward appearances show a happily married, monogamous, heterosexual soldier, which is mostly what I am. But every now and then the issue came up and I had to bite my tongue. I could have been kicked out of the service if anyone had dug too deep, for a reason that didn’t affect my service or that of others around me.

At a time when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is destroying the careers of loyal, hard-working, supremely competent soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen of the American Armed Forces, this fictionalized retrospective of men who serve together and love each other is never more necessary and welcome. I was thrilled to receive it (free) from the publisher (through Jane) and while it did a great job of showing the soul-destroying problem of homophobia in general, I could have wished that it had focused more specifically on the subtle differences of the problem of being gay in the military, rather than just showing gay military men.

“Blessed Isle” by Alex Beecroft
I don’t know what it is about Beecroft’s writing that ravishes me so. Maybe it’s that her prose is like Keats’ poetry to me: redolent with scent, aching with color, and beautiful with taste and sound. Maybe it’s how she scours me inside with the deeply-felt emotions of her characters. But this story manages to do in 58 pages what False Colors did to me in more than 300.

Set in the late eighteenth century, Captain Harry Thompson, late of her Majesty’s Navy, safely ensconced in Rio, begins a journal of his relationship with his Lieutenant, Garnet Littleton. They met when Harry took his first command of the Banshee with orders to escort three transport ships to Australia. Buffeted by storms, typhus, mutinous convicts, and his own yearning for the free-spirited Garnet, Harry only finds happiness when he and Garnet are marooned for months on their own small Pacific island. The actual sexual activity is minimally detailed, but you feel every prick and rush of longing and satisfaction, the abject fear and bone-deep rightness when the men fall in love. See how much Beecroft can do with so few words:

When we woke, that first morning, we made love. Nothing needed to be said; we both understood it would happen as soon as we had the physical resources to allow it. It was sweet and weary and gentle, and afterwards I held Harry tight and mourned for all the things he had had to lose to make this possible. I wished I might give his prudishness and his confidence and his career back to him. And in a petty part of myself I wished he might have come to me despite them, instead of needing to be ruined first. But I will say that holding on to him afterwards, in the warm glow and satisfaction of coitus, I entertained the inexcusable thought that the past months had been worth it.

Harry and Garnet find their happy ending and record it for posterity, for a time when their love might be celebrated rather than reviled, for a time after their death when they don’t have to pretend. The story is told in journal form, with Harry’s memories interspersed with Garnet’s as they reveal to each other, even after years together, their feelings and motivations in the past, as they reveal them to their reader, who also becomes a character in the story. So even the journaling has a place in their relationship. Brilliantly, perfectly done. Grade: A+

“Not to Reason Why” by Mark B. Probst
This is a narrative — a very boring narrative – of Custer’s last campaign, told from the perspective of a corporal (I think? Too bored to go back and look). Brett has the hots for Dermot. Dermot is married to Sarah. Dermot loves Sarah very much, and Brett is jealous of Sarah. There’s absolutely NO indication that Dermot feels anything at all for Brett beyond deep friendship and besides one kiss Brett almost (but not quite) forces on Dermot a few days before the big battle, there’s nothing overtly romantic about this story at all. In fact, there’s nothing covertly romantic either. This is not a romance (especially since it does not end happily); this is a narrative representation of a campaign: They saddled up, then they stopped here, then had dinner, then dicked around in the evening as soldiers tend to do, then slept, then had breakfast, then saddled back up for another grueling day of chasing Indians, then stopped for lunch, then…. Seriously, with a little more detail to prove that Probst had done his research (They stopped under overhanging cliffs. They crossed the stream eight times.), that’s what the story is like. Every now and then Brett will think something emotional for a sentence or two, but then he’ll ignore it and move on. I hate to play to stereotypes, but this read like it was a “romance” written by a man, and hey, look! It was written by a man. Okay, dude, you did your research; now tell me a fucking story.

And seriously, someone please proofread: “Dermot was in line looking none the worse for wear, though Brett could see his eyes were still vacuous from lack of sleep.” Really? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

And if we’re going to have a story about a man who runs away from battle, who deserts his troops, then lines like “The heat was stifling and there were times Brett would have welcomed a warrior arrow straight into his heart just to end it all” are not only not helpful, they’re patently wrong.

After Brett does desert, the level of his thought processes about his actions are symptomatic of the level of emotion and characterization in the rest of the book:

The wind and his body heat had dried his clothing and he began to warm up. His thoughts were a jumble of images and confusion. He couldn‘t sort it out enough to put together a plan of action. A piercing accusation kept surfacing—You are a coward and a deserter. Was he? What good would it have done to have stayed and died with the rest? Perhaps a couple more Sioux and Cheyenne may have been wounded or killed, but it would not have saved a single soldier‘s life. He longed to be unconscious so he didn‘t have to think. After the celebrating quieted and morning drew near, he got his wish and fell asleep, lying on his side on the creek-bank.

Oh! Coward! Deserter! Right, check. Let’s move on, folks, nothing to see here.

The author didn’t seem to be aware of the weight of his words, and coming after Beecroft’s clarity and precision, it was almost painful. At one point, Brett engages Dermot in deep conversation:

“Wrong side?” Dermot frowned. “How can you say that? There is no wrong side against the Indians.”

“I mean wrong side, in that it may not be the victorious side.”

“There‘s nothing wrong with dying to protect your country.”

“Dermot, haven‘t you ever noticed how these things are reported in the newspapers? When we win they say it‘s a victory, but when they win they say it‘s a massacre.”

Then after the Brett escapes/deserts, he listens to the Indian victory drums: “It went on for hours. The chanting haunted him. He wanted it to stop. It tormented him by constantly reminding him of the massacre. He sat huddled on the riverbank; the drums felt like his own heartbeat.” Completely, utterly without irony, Probst uses the word he’d previously questioned.

Dermot was cardboard, Brett was an unlikable, whiny, cowardly turd, there was no romance, no emotion, no connection. What there was was wishy-washiness. Was this deep, thoughtful commentary or just campaign details? Neither. Sorry. Grade: F

“No Darkness” by Jordan Taylor

Okay, so when the book starts like this:

“Lieutenant Darnell!”

“Sir?”

“Oh, there you are. Why are you skulking, man?” The red-faced, broad-shouldered platoon sergeant did not wait for an answer but plowed on before Darnell could even open his mouth, “Find someone to take with you down to the cellar. There should be half a ton of supplies in this bloody shack and no one seems able to find so much as a tin of jam.”

Private Morgan stepped forward and saluted the sergeant. He had large front teeth and matching ears that reminded Darnell of a corgi.

“Sir,” the private said. “Me and Stokes searched the cellar already. Nothing, sir. No sign anything‘s been in there for some time, sir.”

The sergeant walked right past him as if he had neither seen nor heard the private. “Well, Lieutenant? What are you waiting for?”

I’m confused. Unless things are very different in the British army in World War I from the US Army now, lieutenants don’t call platoon sergeants “sir” and platoon sergeants don’t call lieutenants “man” and give them orders. And no one salutes NCOs. So I don’t think much of your research abilities if that’s how the book starts. I mean, seriously. And my father (British AND British history buff) also confirmed for me that the officer corps in 1915 was still very much of and from the upper classes and Darnell is not upper class. He’s almost the opposite of upper class.

Inaccuracies aside, this has to be one of the most depressing stories I’ve ever read. This is precisely why I don’t read stories that aren’t romances with HEAs. Yes, I understand that World War One was a desperately horrible war. Yes, I understand that being gay in the military is terrible. AND, I understand that the purpose of this anthology was not all about the happy endings. But can we have ANY bright points of light? Can we have ANY happiness in the story? Apparently not.

LT Darnell and PVT Fisher get shelled into a cellar with no way out. Fisher’s broken so many ribs he can’t do anything to help get them out. Darnell literally ruins his hands digging them out, but even when they get out, it takes days to find anyone else and of course when they do, disaster strikes. There’s only a relationship between these men on the level of two men who find themselves stuck in a cellar together, trying to get out. The fact that they’re both gay doesn’t really factor into it at all.

What I do think is interesting is that both this story and the last both conform to the melodramatic abjection of the married gay man being the one to bite it. Think Brokeback Mountain, right? Sure, Jack’s more out, more comfortable with himself than Ennis, but he’s the one who marries first and stays married so he’s the one who has to die. Ditto these two stories.

This story isn’t a romance. Not in the slightest. Not that it’s trying to be — and that’s fine, of course. But it isn’t really even a story about being gay in the military. It’s just a depressing story about a horrific war. I don’t know how to grade it. It’s not badly written like the previous story (research abilities aside). It’s just…not something I choose to read. So, I guess…Grade: C-

“Our One and Only” by E.N. Holland
This is the only story that truly deals with the problems that being gay specifically in the military can produce. Philip is Eddie’s lover, but when Eddie dies in France in 1944, Philip is left feeling invisible, able only to admit to being Eddie’s best friend, not able to fully express his grief over his beloved’s death. The story is told over 40 years, at intervals of a decade. We see Philip deal (or not) with Eddie’s death, even though every now and then you want to hit him over the head and say “Get OVER yourself already!” The story shows the expected and unexpected repercussions the life and death of one soldier have on his friends, fellow soldiers, and family. While not amazing, this story is thoughtful, interesting, and eventually has a hopeful ending (not with Eddie, obviously).

One thing pulled me out of the story. In 1954, Philip thinks, “he always thought war was sort of pointless and his feelings only sharpened after Eddie‘s death.” Maybe this is just me overthinking things, but if there was one “just” war, one necessary war, it was World War Two and I don’t think very many people can disagree with that. Yes, war is devastating and horrible, but with Hitler as an aggressor, there’s not much else that the Allies COULD have done besides what they did. WW2 was not a pointless war; of any war in history, it was the least pointless. The mindset Philip expresses is very much a post-Vietnam mindset and I found it jarring in this story.

Other than that, I enjoyed watching this man through 40 years of his life and I was very happy that he had a hopeful ending “blessed” by his long-lost partner. Grade: B

Overall, while I think that an anthology against DADT, showing the emotional devastation it causes, is a wonderful idea, it was only the last story that really dealt with the peculiar problem of being gay specifically in the military. Because in 1790, 1876, 1915, and 1944, being gay was a problem NO MATTER WHAT. So being gay in the military was no more or less difficult that being gay anywhere else (it might have been easier, perhaps, considering close proximity). I would really like to have seen the awful Custer-era story or the depressing WW1 story dropped, and a story about the Gulf War or even Iraq or Afghanistan added, to make the point that “being gay in the US military” specifically IS an issue NOW, because being gay now is much more accepted than in 1876 and it’s the military that’s ridiculously behind the times.

I once had someone ask me why a gay person would join the US military when they know they’re not wanted, and the question made me shake with rage. Gay and bisexual men and women want to join the military for the same reasons as everyone else: we love our country and want to defend it, we like the opportunities and benefits, we’re loyal and hard-working and honorable people. Just like everyone else. Why should we not be able to serve? We have just as much to offer — more, perhaps, since we’re joining knowing we’re not wanted, joining knowing we’re going to have to hide who we are in order to serve.

Anyway. Overall, I’d give the entire anthology a high C+ or a low B-, but the whole thing is completely and utterly worth buying just for the sublime Beecroft story, “Blessed Isle,” with a nice added bonus of the gentle “Our One and Only.”

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

This book can be purchased at Amazon. No ebook version that I could find.

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