Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Austen Love

Can I quote from my own review?  Oh, sure, why not?  As I say in the first paragraph of my review of Victoria Connelly's A Weekend with Mr. Darcy:

"As Jane Austen might write if she were here to see the industry her works have propagated: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a female reader in possession of a copy of Pride and Prejudice, must be in want of a Mr. Darcy. Or so today’s publishers would have us believe."

This is an absolutely delightful book that goes beyond the same old, same old romance tropes.  Connelly's characters are not only immersed in Austen and her works but they also are fully aware that Austen herself would be amazed at her present-day following and aware that there is something in their lives that makes them obsess the way they do over her books.

The cover, obviously, doesn't do the book justice not to mention it makes the content look like it might be aimed at high school girls when the protagonists are in their early thirties!  Really, Sourcebooks covers are pretty much always a disgrace to the writing they enclose.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Not Head Over Heels

I really, really wanted to like Head Over Heels a lot.  Shalvis is my kind of writer--straightforward, witty, charming--all the ingredients for a must-read author as far as I'm concerned.

But when she gives the female protagonist a condition that is really familiar to me (asthma) and then makes her adult character disregard her condition and do potentially dangerous actions as if they were nothing, I'm left wondering how Shalvis can be so cruel.

Main character Chloe's best friend Lance has cystic fibrosis, and while I'd love to read a romance about how he finds and woos his girlfriend, I shutter to think what Shalvis might do with a storyline like that after reading some of the really deadly places she went with Chloe.

Unfortunately, this book doesn't just do a disservice to asthmatics, but also to those who don't know much about this condition and might think putting oneself in danger isn't that big a deal.  How sad.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Back in the Saddle

My review of C. H. Admirand's Dylan, the second of the Secret Life of Cowboys series, runs on AAR today.

Take a good look at the cover because another book I'm reviewing in the next few weeks will have a similar cover image.  When I saw the second book, Shadow's Stand by Sarah McCarty, my first thought was that I'd already read the book.

For months I've been laughing at the covers on Stumbling Over Chaos on which the blogger Chris makes a story from book covers with similar (often the same) stock images.  (As I write this Tyler, the first book in the Secret Life of Cowboys, is the first book in the story.  So I guess the Sourcebooks stock file is being heavily used by its "creative" staff.)

Anyway, Dylan was too cute to be believed, y'all.  Tyler and his brother obviously didn't thump the kid up side the head enough to make him a real person.  On the plus side, however, some of the guy-to-guy scenes rang true.  But readers will have to dig to find those scenes.