Open Thread for Readers for May 2023
Got a book you want to talk about? Frustrated with a book or series? In love with a new one? Found a buried treasure? An issue that keeps popping up in the books you are reading? Just want to chat about stuff in general? Post about it here!
A big thanks to those who recommended “Set My Heart to Five” last month. It was exactly what I needed, so much so, I thought it might end my reading slump. Unfortunately, it didn’t, but I did enjoy it more than most of the books I’ve read this year.
I have two favorite books so far this year: DIAMOND RING (2023) by KD Casey and SEASON’S CHANGE (2022) by Cait Nary. They are both angsty m/m sports romances (baseball and hockey, respectively), and both deal with some serious subjects such as mental health issues and the stresses of being closeted while playing professional sports. DIAMOND RING covers ten years in the relationship between a pitcher (bi) and a catcher (gay) who fall in love in their first season working together but then fall apart when a missed pitch (or was it a missed catch?) loses their team the World Series. They drift apart for nine years, but then reunite when they find themselves on the same team again. The spark is still there of course. SEASON’S CHANGE is about two hockey players (one gay and deeply closeted, the other bi and rather casual about it) who become roommates-with-benefits while playing professional hockey. Mental health issues and homophobia (internalized and from others) are major themes in the book, but so are caring for others, what it means to be part of a family, and how coming out is an ongoing process. Both books are beautifully written and totally immerse you in the worlds of their characters. I’m a huge baseball fan (I know next-to-nothing about hockey), so I have to give the edge to DIAMOND RING, but both books are highly recommended.
@DiscoDollyDeb, you’ve been rating KD Casey’s Unwritten Rules series so highly that when I had the energy and focus to try a new series this past month, her 3 books were the first ones I turned to. Thank you! I really enjoyed them. :)
It’s been a busy month as my semester winds down … a lot of grading and meetings with students to discuss how they could pull up their grades, haha. (I teach English at a smallish community college.) Mostly I’ve spent my downtime this month rereading as a way to de-stress: Lyn Gala’s Turbulence, Anne McCaffrey’s Freedom/Cattenni series and some of her Pern books, Keira Andrew’s Honeymoon for One, Avon Gale’s Scoring Chances, and KJ Charles’ Band Sinister as well as The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting. Related to that last one, I read Charles’ newer Thief in the Night and her free short A Rose by Any Name. I also finally read Kay Simone’s One Giant Leap after seeing it recommended by so many people in the online reading communities I lurk within. Like Casey’s baseball books, I’m so glad that I finally gave Simone’s book a shot. I deeply enjoyed it.
I’m hoping to do more reading now that the semester is essentially at an end, for me at least. This week is our college’s finals week, but I don’t hold any exams in my composition or literature classes, so I just have a few more sets of assignments to grade and the graduation ceremony to attend on Saturday and then I’m done with work for three weeks. (Why did I sign up to teach classes in the summer?! At least they’re online and NOT composition classes….) I’ll probably reread more of the Pern series but I don’t know what else I’ll turn to…. TBD, I guess.
@JPeK: I haven’t reviewed them yet, but if you like Pern (especially early Pern), I recommend Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestor trilogy which begins with Red Sister. It’s got a completely ass kicking, slightly Lessa-like (except much less antisocial) heroine and the world is somewhat Pern-ish in ways I don’t want to spoil. But more than that they are just incredible books. Layla and I plan to review them together at some point soon–we both read the whole trilogy and we both loved it to bits.
Nona, the main character, is unforgettable. The books follows her from around age nine to around age nineteen, but I wouldn’t characterize them as YA. The tone is very adult (but with none of the rapey stuff that’s in the Pern books, or anything else offensive as far as I can tell. Which is not to say they aren’t dark).
They remind me slightly of the K.D. Edwards Tarot Sequence books too, in that they have unexpected twists and a lot of action and emotional intensity. If you haven’t read the Tarot Sequence series (I can’t recall) I recommend those too.
@Janine: Thank you! I just borrowed the first two books in the trilogy and placed a hold on the third. Rereading the Pern novels is still fun, but I’m noticing so much more now than when I first read them as a 12-13 year old. :/ I look forward to reading Lawrence’s work. I have read the Tarot Sequence (what’s been published so far), so the comparison makes an added draw to Lawrence’s series. :)
@JPeK: I hope I haven’t overhyped them! I’d love to hear what you think of the books if you read them.
I’ll report back once I do! :)
I’m enyoying the audio version of The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen thanks to the reviews here
Just finished Reverb, the final book in Julie Kriss’s Road King series about the 4 male members of rock band, who after a long hiatus come back together and find renewed fame and romance. Reverb was great fun and I thought a great finish to Kriss’s series. The whole series, I thought was decent, with Duet and Reverb being my favourites.
I also just read Sarah Morgan’s The Island Villa (UK title: Summer Wedding). Morgan used to produce nice, fun comfort reads, but her more recent books have moved from romances that focused on one couple to more woman’s fiction with intertwined plot lines about 3 women usually of varying ages/temperaments. As well in her more recent books the 3rd Person POV alternates only between her three female protagonists; the male love interests have no voice. The multiple plot lines and no male love interest POV means the characters (especially the male ones) feel underdeveloped and the romances lacklustre. I’ve pretty much downgraded Morgan to a library-only author, but I’m not sure if she will even remain that.
@Kathryn: I enjoyed REVERB too (I’m sure people are tired of me asserting how underrated Julie Kriss is), but I’m wondering if it really will be the last Road Kings book. It seems to me that Kriss was possibly setting up some secondary characters for their own romances in the future, particularly the Road King’s manager and the man who was anonymously funding the group’s reunion tour. They seemed to have a lot of on-page time for supporting characters, so I’m expecting another Road Kings book or a spin-off.
@DiscoDollyDeb: I also thought that there were strong hints of additional books in the Road Kings world, I just assume that it would be a spin-off series, but maybe they will be part of the Road Kings series. I also noted that the mysterious backer of the Road Kings was connected to Tower Venture Capital, whose founding partners were the protagonists of Kriss’s Filthy Rich series. So maybe Kriss is going to offer a quick glimpse of some of those guys in a future book — it’s mentioned in Reverb that the Tower partners are wondering what is going on in Portland with their former associate.
@DiscoDollyDeb: I think Kriss posted somewhere that she’s going to write more in the Road Kings world. It may not have been planned originally, but I too expect books for the manager and for their backer.
@Kathryn: That is good news about Reverb being up there with Duet for you because Duet was the only one of the first three books I thought was special. I couldn’t stand Neal (what a charisma lacking character) so I didn’t read the entirety of Riff though I did skim to the end. Rhythm was better. I really liked the hero. The heroine though was one of my least favorite heroine types.
@DiscoDollyDeb: Have you read the new Elizabeth O’Roark? I haven’t gotten to it yet but I plan to.
@Kathryn:
It seems as if a lot of romance authors are headed down this path. Of course, as I type this, I can’t think of names right now ….
@Janine: yes, I did, and I have to say I was somewhat ambivalent about it. My “review” from Smart Bitches What Are You Reading? (April 8):
I’m in two minds about Elizabeth O’Roark’s incredibly angsty THE SUMMER WE FELL, a dual-timeline (2013 & 2023) story of a woman’s tangled relationship with her late boyfriend’s best friend. On the one hand, it does a great job with getting inside the head of a woman who, despite major success in the music industry, still bears the deep psychological scars of a dysfunctional childhood full of abuse and cruelty, along with a sense of shame for the part she believes she played in the death of her boyfriend. On the other hand, the book edges very close to melodrama in how truly horrible the heroine’s situation (both in the past and now) is and how she feels she deserves the contempt & hatred being heaped upon her. After enduring terrible abuse in her childhood home (cw/tw for off-page references to sexual assault & physical violence, on-page verbal abuse and attempted sexual assault), teenager Juliet is taken in by a church pastor and his wife. Juliet is truly grateful for the safe harbor her foster family has provided, but she can’t help resenting how everyone expects her to spend her every waking moment proving her gratitude. O’Roark is excellent at showing how “good” people, with the best of intentions, can decide what’s best for others, not caring if that’s really what they want or need. O’Roark is equally insightful about Juliet’s ambivalence toward the people who are providing her with shelter: she goes to school, waits tables in a diner, helps the pastor’s wife with housework, cooks and serves dinner, sings in church, and still feels she cannot take even a few minutes to play her guitar or sing for her own pleasure. While living with the couple, Juliet falls into a romance with their son, Danny, who is a couple of years older than her. Danny’s feelings for Juliet are clearly rather shallow and based on his expectations of the church-centric life he’s mapped out for himself; but, again, Juliet feels she cannot tell Danny the truth about her feelings (much later in the book, someone comments that Danny wanted “something uncomplicated, but that’s something you can’t have with a complicated girl”). Then Danny brings home college friend Luke (a football player and surfer), and things begin to escalate as Luke (also a product of a dysfunctional home life) is the first person to actually “see” Juliet, to understand, believe in, and encourage her. Their burgeoning feelings for each other create an ominous sense of something bad about to happen—especially as O’Roark rapidly moves the timeline back-and-forth between then and now, and we swing ever closer to the events leading to Danny’s death. Needless to say, Danny’s death is only the first in a cascade of events that threatens to destroy both Juliet and Luke—and certainly destroys their feelings for each other until they are unwillingly reunited years later. Far more than O’Roark’s previous books, THE SUMMER WE FELL reminds me of books by Mia Sheridan or Aly Martinez—full of emotional upheavals and circumstances that have no truly good options—and I can’t help but assume that this stylistic pivot is being pushed by the current primacy of Book-Tok with its emphasis on romance heroines having to suffer misery piled upon misery as a prerequisite for an HEA. I’m cautiously recommending THE SUMMER WE FELL, but I really feel that Book-Tok has a lot to answer for.
@Kathryn: yes—and there’s an offhand reference to Sienna (heroine of REVERB) being the cousin of a couple of the heroines from Kriss’s Bad Billionaires series too.
@DiscoDollyDeb: Hmm interesting. I don’t mind an angsty book at all but melodrama is another story. The concept sounds interesting though. I’ll almost certainly read it but I’m glad to go in with slightly lower expectations. I don’t follow Book-Tok but I’m sorry to hear it if it’s created a pivot for O’Roark. I loved The Devil You Know so much.
@DiscoDollyDeb: Juliet appears in The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and she’s in Hawaii following someone who wouldn’t want to see her (Luke, of course). How much of her story was planned that far back is another matter, though.
I agree with your take on the strengths of The Summer We Fell. I also agree that it’s tonally different than the Devil books – more serious and dramatic, and indeed veering into melodrama at times. Personally it’s my favorite of O’Roark’s since The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, which is why I won’t recommend it to Janine; we have completely different tastes.
@Rose: I liked The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. A B is a very strong grade from me. A Deal with the Devil was the one I didn’t care for.
We do have pretty different tastes but I wouldn’t rule a book out just because you liked it.
@Rose: Also, I can definitely think of some books we’ve both liked. Miranda Neville’s historicals and Good Time Bad Boy by Sonya Clark come to mind.
There are people whose tastes are so diametrically opposite of mine that I would probably not try something they loved, but it takes a consistent love of authorial voices that don’t work for me. You and I sometimes like the same author, just different books by that author (O’Roark is a perfect example), so you don’t fall into that category for me.
@Janine: I’m halfway through Red Sister, having started it on Tuesday. It’s really good! It didn’t grab me from the first page but by the time I was about 10% in, it had my full attention. Thanks again for the recommendation! :)
@JPeK: Thank you for letting me know! I’d love to hear what you think of the later books in the series too if you want to share.