Vacation to Virgin River

My review of Robyn Carr's latest, Sunrise Point, is running this weekend on AAR, my birthday weekend, which makes the book doubly special to me.  Sunrise is Tom Cavanaugh's story, the Tom who was featured in the book right before this one, Redwood Bend, about biker and former child star Dylan.

While I can't sit up long enough to write a lot about Sunrise, I did want to mention how wonderful it was to take a break from recovering from surgery to take a virtual vacation to Virgin River.  Tom and Nora's story helped smooth the time between pain pills and will do much, much more for readers who don't need pain relief.  'Nuf said.

Back from Surgery

On May 2, I had a growth removed from my right kidney.  The growth proved to be benign, and since the second I've been recuperating.  Before I went into the hospital, however, I read and reviewed as many books as I could.  Here are the reviews that ran on the AAR site while I was away from the computer:

All for You by Lynn Kurland was a real disappointment especially since I was looking forward to it.  Now I'm getting the feeling that Kurland has lost interest in her de Piaget time travel romances.  In fact this one seemed like a mediocre bone flipped to her baying readers.  And we'd hoped for so much better for Peaches who'd been burdened by an unfortunate name and now an unsatisfying romance.

Missing by Shelley Shepard Gray really grated on me.  This is the first of a three book series.  What this means for Gray is that readers who want to know the answer to the central mystery will have to buy each one of the short $13 books (for a total of $39) to do so.  If the other two have such simplistic romances, there's no bargain to be found.

Fortunately, Just Down the Road by Jodi Thomas saves this trio.  Rancher Tinch Turner and ER doctor Addison Spencer are a wonderfully wounded couple, and Thomas makes their coming together totally believable.  I also enjoyed watching the YouTube video of Thomas talking about how she got the ideas for the book and where she writes.

Before Surgery a Disappointing Inspirational

As I go into kidney surgery today, I see that my review of Naomi King's Abby Finds Her Calling is running on AAR.  This truly was one of the strangest books I've read in quite a while.  For starters the Abby of the title has found her calling from page 1.

Stranger still is that Abby loves wishy-washy James who loves Abby's younger sister Zanna who loves black sheep Jonny. Fortunately Zanna bags Jonny by the end of the book, and equally fortunate, Abby and James still aren't together.  And Abby, the Abby of the title, still has the calling she had at the beginning of the book.

So why isn't it called Zanna Finds a Husband since that's the point of the book?  Got me.  And I have to wonder which editor at NAL didn't read this book at all, but grabbed it because Amish books have made a resurgence.