What's Up with Maine

Suddenly it seems every contemporary I read these days is set in Maine.  The latest, Janet Chapman's Spellbound Falls, reviewed on AAR today, which I've put in my Desert Island Keeper pile, makes Maine seem a mystical place with delightful, down-home people.  While I only know one Maine couple, Jackie and John Tiere, Chapman would recognize them as typical Mainers (Maineites?).

I think of people in Maine akin to people from Nebraska where I grew up.  Nebraskans of my era are practical, hard-working folk.  But there is a streak of the other world in them, a streak of fantasy that helps pass the dull, cold winters--especially that stretch from the end of the football season (Go Huskers!) to the onset of spring in mid- to late May.

Since Spellbound takes place during that pseudo-springtime when the frozen lakes are starting to melt but no crocuses have hatched, the world is ripe for romance and surprises.

And isn't the cover of the book lovely?  I'd like to visit for that picture alone!

First of a String of Winners

One of the joys of reviewing is reading a book that makes me sigh and feel really happy that I've read it.  Logan's Outlaw by Elaine Levine was the first of three books that made me feel this way lately.

I remember reading my first Levine Western a few years back and thinking at the time that she was an author to watch.  And watch (and read) I did.  Her books illustrate her love of the Old West and her love of history.

Best of all, her Old West isn't the PG-13 version of movies or televisions, but rather the Old West warts and all.  Logan is just what one would imagine a man who's been leading a solitary life for quite a while would be like.  Sure, he owns a string of outposts and trades with Native Americans, but most of the time, he's alone.  Being a thinking man, he's got his own opinions about the world around him which make him more than those who drift through life.

Sarah, for her part, while terrified of bigger, stronger people, is crafty enough to think her way out of difficult situations and has enough grit not to give up when life gets tough.  As it should, it takes her quite a while to understand that Western men can be kind a trustworthy.

Levine's book is the kind of Desert Island Keeper that is even better reading the second time around.  And Logan is the kind of hero every girl wishes to meet (and marry).

Holding the Bag

One of the more interesting, but underplayed parts of With This Kiss by Bella Riley (reviewed today on AAR) is that the real villain of the piece is Stu, the fiance who is found kissing his best friend by the bride-to-be.  Instead of manning up, Stu decamps with his best friend, leaving Rebecca not only to tell everyone the wedding is off but also to run the inn he owns and to pull off the festival he's organizing.

What a stellar fellow!

Since Rebecca was feeling that she and Stu weren't a match made in heaven, breaking off the wedding is the best thing to happen.  But to leave her with the rest of the responsibilities without a word is downright ugly.  This being fiction, Rebecca mans up.  But still, if Riley is planning a book around Stu, there's no way I'll ever read it.  Dumping on a friend like that makes him not worth the time or trouble, as far as I'm concerned.

Trust Fund Baby and Yes Man?

I'm still uneasy about Kristen Higgins' Somebody to Love even though I gave it a B grade on AAR.  Trust fund baby Parker was just so resentful of her father's right hand man, James, and was so hatefully snarky when she referred to him has "Thing One," that it was often stretched believability almost to the breaking point that they would happily get together.

I knew going in that Higgins isn't an easy writer to read.  She's like Delilah Marvelle, whose book Forever a Lady, I just read for Booklist.  Neither of them sticks to the romance ruts, so sometimes their books become messy or odd or too much to take.

But what's the point of reading the same formula over and over again?  Isn't it better to read something that might not quite work, but gives the reader an interesting ride?  My gut says yes.  The same old same old gets wearisome otherwise.

Thank you, Kristen Higgins, for taking chances and going upstream. Somebody to Love was an interesting ride.

When Opposites Actually Attract

In my review of From Father to Son by Janice Kay Johnson (posted on AAR today), I talk about how realistically an author brings together two different types of people and make their connection realistic.  Johnson has that touch.

What was really striking about his book was that the Niall who didn't think he wanted anything to do with a family didn't just slide comfortably into the role of father like so many romance books would have it.  Instead he backslid quite a bit, often barricading himself in his house and pointedly ignoring the people who loved him, most notably a little boy.  It was heartbreakingly real and made his acceptance of fatherhood more deliberate and therefore sweeter.

Oh, yes, and what I didn't talk about in the review was that Niall played the bagpipes for the Scottish Games.  I just wish Johnson had done a little more with that side of his personality.

And finally, we can add this cover to the desperately bad category.  I'm glad I didn't see it before I started reading the book.  I would have passed it by.

No New Vampires under the Sun

Turns out that there's nothing new under the sun, especially in the world of vampires.  (Snicker!)  I allude to this in the review of Nice Girls Don't Bite Their Neighbors by Molly Harper today at AAR.

While this is a bumbling vampire story, it's definitely not the first one with an inept protagonist and her hunky, aristocratic fiance.  But as compared to the better-known vampire, Harper's Jane Jameson is less snarky and more even-keeled.

My favorite character in the book, however, is teen football hero and all around BMOC Jamie who thinks it's awesome to be turned into a vampire even though he misses his family and doesn't think it's fair that he can't participate in spots because he'd be really awesome on the field.  Harper wrote a real sweetie in Jamie.

A Small Online Rant

If I'd written this to a newspaper and it had printed it, my AAR blog piece, A Slow Books Addendum, would be called an opinion piece.  When I worked as an editor at the Houston Chronicle and edited the op-ed page, I thought of the people who wrote in as the crazies.  They wrote impassioned pieces about sewers and transportation and what I considered everyday minutia.  Now, as Pogo would say, I are one of them.

But I truly am incensed that a person or group of people can decide what's good and right for the rest of us to read.  It was bad enough when the Literary Canon was compiled by old white guys, but even worse when feminists got involved and decided to be as didactic as their male counterparts.

Where's the new day, new millennium when children are allowed to read what speaks to them?  When we aren't told what's "good" for us and what's "bad" but are allowed to figure that out for ourselves?  So what if I don't pick something you think I should love?  We're both reading.  And thinking.  And that's really the point, isn't it?

Youth and the West

My review of Matthew by Emma Lang went live on AAR today.  This was a maddening book that should have been fun to read.  But Matthew at 25 alternately whined and commanded like someone in his early teens. Why any woman would be attracted to this idiot is beyond me.

If the main character and the plot (marriage for Matthew's convenience) weren't enough, the PhotoShopped cover is totally impossible.  First there's the Matthew character looking much older than the whiny 25-year-old in the book.  Worse is his poor shoulder which looks like a ham-handed doctor or neophyte PhotoShopper "fixed" it.

To compound the problems are the wild-looking horses in the lower left corner.  Horses?  Yeah, sure, Matthew is a rancher, but horses have so little to do with the plot that it took me a moment to figure out what they might be doing on the cover.

All in all, the entire package of Matthew is a mess.  I read so you won't have to.