Live from the Lavender Library

I read from Behr Facts tonight while we had an evening of milk and cookies at Sacramento’s Lavender Library. Want to see my small portion of the evening? Well, here’s the video on Scott’s Facebook site.

Also reading from their books tonight were Kim Fielding, Amy Lane, D. L. Kent, LE Frank, Genevieve Wolfe, and Scott Coatsworth. It was a great evening with a small but attentive audience. We’ve consequently been asked back for a fall event and to share the Library’s booth for upcoming Pride events. So this should be a really interesting year!

By the way, the audio book version of Behr Facts is on sale at Amazon for $1.99, down from its usual price of $14.59. Quite a savings if you like audio books. (And the narrator, David Ross, reads it much better than I do!)

Racing TBR (To Be Read)

Challenge: More Than One (An author who has more than one book in your TBR--to be read--pile)

Title: Racing for the Sun

Author: Amy Lane
Grade: A

First off, I don't have one TBR pile.  In fact, my TBR pile has a bunch of TBR piles.  How does that work?  Well, I like to keep things semi-organized, so my TBR pile is divided by subgenre--review books, gay books, Westerns, contemporaries, and non-fiction.  I also have a miscellaneous TBR pile with bits and pieces which don't fit in the bigger piles.

I always enjoy reading Amy Lane's gay romances, mainly because her books feature such quirky and lovable-despite-themselves characters.  But she writes way faster than I can keep up, so Amy Lane novels seem to pile up quickly on my TBR list.

Racing for the Sun is another in a long line of her anti-heroes who turn out to be larger than life heroes.

Jasper "Ace" Atchison bonds almost instantly with Sonny Daye when Sonny joins Ace's Army unit.  Although Ace immediately knows that Sonny is hiding something, he also knows that short, frail-looking Sonny needs protection from those bigger and meaner than he is, and Ace is just the right man for the job.

Both of them love cars, and Sonny is a mechanic who can build the fastest race car around.  Leaving the service, they set up a garage together and start street racing, winning both with the adrenalin high and the betting money.

But as in all of Lane's angst novels, the past barrels down on Ace and Sonny, nearly wiping them out.  To say more is to spoil the book.

What makes this book special is its tone.  Written in the first person from Ace's point of view, the novel shrieks of rural America, the good-ole-boys standing around an open garage talking about the fish that got away or the car that could go 0-60 in half a second. 

Images of grease-stained coveralls and grimy, calloused hands underlie the tender emotions and electric link between Ace and Sonny.

Both Ace and Sonny are so vivid that even those of us who live in cities and rarely see mechanics working in garages will know them intimately.  Lane's stark prose breathes life into them and makes the unknown believable.

This is one of those books that lives on in the back of readers' minds and bubbles up when least expected.  It's made me move the rest of Lane's backlist to the forefront of my TBR pile.

Very Little Behind the Curtain

Usually I love Amy Lane books and can't get enough of them.  I was really excited about reading a book of hers about the theater, especially the behind the scenes people because I was once a costumer at the Alley Theatre in Houston.  Also I live in Sacramento near where the story is set, and I used to teach in a community college just like the one the protagonist attends.  As far as I was concerned, Lane's Behind the Curtain should have been the best book I've read this year.

So you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when it fell way short of my expectations.  Lane's made a career writing about lonely, lost gay boy/men who are struggling to find their way in this mad world of ours.  In almost all of her books, she gets to the heart of the men, and each story is an individual study of how one person's demons either help or hinder him in attaining happiness.  The Johnnies series of porn stars in Sacramento is a case in point.  Each man's story, while filled with angst and past unhappiness, is a story of overcoming adversity and discovering who he is in order to be fulfilled.  There's no mistaking David/Dex for Chase or Tommy or Kane.

But in Behind the Curtain even the mega-talented Jarod is nothing more than an anonymous ballet dancer who's seen the world but never lived in it.  Dawson and Benji, while joined at the hip as friends, never break apart and become living, breathing entities like the Johnnies sex machines do.  In fact, at times Dawson-Benji became so intermixed that I lost track of which one I was reading about.  When I have to remind myself Dawson = gay and Benji = straight just to differentiate the characters, I know the book is in trouble.

So what's going on, I asked myself.  I have to wonder if Ms. Lane has lost the passion for writing that she had a few years ago.  I hope not.  I believe in her and her talent.  But I think that readers and publishers and especially all her fans should just give her a little breathing room to write at her own pace and let her become rejuvenated by her passion for writing.  In this age of instant gratification, we should all give our favorite authors space to create and thereby produce their best work.

In London, Mouses Rule

My review of Amy Lane and Aleksandr Voinov's City Mouse, an offshoot of their Country Mouse novel, is typical of Amy Lane's wonderful character building and clever plotting.  For me, the unknown quantity was Voinov whose work I'd not read before.

Together, however, they've created an interesting mix with a carefree American on tour and a staid British banker, a couple no one but Lane would think to bring together.

While I'm not certain these two will remain together much longer than the fling they've started in the book, the story of how they bridge the huge gap between their lifestyles is not only readable but enjoyable.

Now I'm wondering what Lane is working on next, hopefully one of the gay-for-pay novels like Dex in Blue or Chase in Shadows.  And I'm putting Voinov on my "catch up with" reading pile.

Bad Is a Relative Term for This Boy

Why are sports figures so compelling to readers?  What players do and what readers do are so different that you'd think they'd never cross paths.  But Jaci Burton's Play-by-Play series is just a tip of the iceberg that encompasses sports-related romances.  My review of her latest, Playing to Win, went live today on AAR.

My biggest question about the book is how bad is bad.  Cole Riley, the wide receiver protagonist, seems more burnt out and bored than "bad."  Supposedly, he gets really feisty with the press, and (oh, shocker here!) plays the field with an assortment of women.  He also likes to go to a club with what he terms "friends" even though most of them are just happy to be around someone famous.

All that is "bad"?  Uh, no, not really.  Misguided.  Juvenile, maybe.  But bad?  Hardly.  Now if he threw a photographer through a window, hit a woman, trashed a hotel bedroom, or some of the other nasty stuff we read about, then yes, I'd say he was "bad."

I got the feeling while reading the book that Burton can't really afford to have her heroes be "bad" in the real sense.  It would definitely take more than a few hundred pages for a reader to come to like and accept a really bad boy's transformation.  With Burton's upbeat, glossy style, transforming a true bad boy wouldn't be the kind of book her readers expect.

So the term "bad" is relative in her books.  She's not Sarah Mayberry, Amy Lane, or Anne Stuart.

(Although I absolutely HATE cover art that cuts off faces, I'll make an exception this time.  Go figure.)