The Ballerina and the Sheriff

I'm not sure why I chose to review for AAR Slow Dance with the Sheriff by Nikki Logan.  In it, two people who've fled New York City for Larkville, Texas, after being scarred by traumatic occurrences are drawn together.  They both resist the pull, but in the end come together.  This is a romance, after all.

Logan writes some truly inspired scenes in the book, one of which has stayed with me all these weeks after having finished reading and reviewing it.  Jed, the sheriff, takes former ballerina Ellie to see bats leave their cave at dusk.  As she watches them soar, she starts moving and finds her joy in movement that she lost right before she came to Texas.  It's a lovely scene in which readers get to experience broken Jed give Ellie a gift that's more priceless than any he could buy her in a store.

It's scenes like that that make me feel wonderful and are found so rarely in other genres.  Romance, I've found, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex, but rather how we interact with others on a personal level.  Standing in the near dark and holding another person's hand as bats fly from a cave isn't sexy, but it's pure love.

Honey, Does This Make Me Look Fat?

Erotica seems to be branching out these days.  In the far-ago past when I first read erotica stories and novels, they were wall-to-wall sex scenes with very little binding them together.  In fact, they were what I imagine early porn movies were like: no characters, only body parts.

My review of Heavy Issues by Elle Aycart went live on AAR this morning, and as I say in the review, this is a good erotica novel for contemporary romance readers who've toyed with venturing into the erotica pool.  There are real characters and real issues in this book as well as sex, sex, sex.  Aycart is good at writing steamy scenes and personal angst, which is a real feat.

Heavy Issues is a slender book that could have been fleshed out (sorry for the pun!) to make it a viable contemporary romance.  Just a few more scenes between Cole and Christy is all I ask!

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Writer Writes about Love

Okay, I'll freely admit it:  I love Lisa Kleypas' writing.  I think I first fell in love with it when I read Suddenly You, which to this day is one of my top 10 favorite romances.  Kleypas doesn't make life easy for her lovers, and often bringing them together comes a little too close to real life.  Jack in Suddenly You isn't always the nicest of guys, but when he falls, he falls hard and will do anything for the one/s he loves.

But Jack is purely Regency as were all the other books I'd read.  So I was surprised when Kleypas ventured into contemporary country.  Sometimes authors who go from one to the other show facility in one but become clunky in the other.  Not Kleypas.  Sugar Daddy begat Blue-Eyed Devil, and while neither is an easy book, both are beautifully written and worthwhile reading.

Now comes Rainshadow Road, which I reviewed for AAR.  Kleypas adds a bit of magical realism that enriches the story and makes what might have been just another women's romance tale about an idyllic small town a memorable waltz between two people who discover that love is a mystical binding agent.

Sam from Rainshadow is my newest Jack. 

A Home by the C

My review of Christina Skye's confusing Home by the Sea was posted on the AAR site today.  Every once in a while I have to wonder what authors are thinking as they finish a book that is 180 degrees different than the book they started writing.  Do they not care that their readers will be confused?  Or do they think their readers are essentially clueless and won't notice that the premises at the beginning of the book crumble and a substitution is made?

I guess it's the reviewer's job to point out the confusion.  But you would think that the agent or editor would have not only caught the problem, but suggested ways to fix or alter it.  I've got to wonder why that didn't happen in the case of this book.  It's sad since Skye is a good writer, but obviously weak plotter.

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.

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.

So Disappointed

My review of The Survivor by Shelley Shepard Gray is posted on AAR today.  I really, really was looking forward to reading this book since Mattie was such a compelling character in the other books.  In one of the previous books she nearly renounces her faith and her God when her cancer grows and grows.  She gets mad at her long-suffering mother and at the love of her life, Graham, because they have to see her at what she thinks is her worst.

When I read that Graham was going to be accused of fathering a child and then abandoning the pregnant mother, I was ready to see Mattie rear up like a dragon and defend her stalwart friend.  Instead, she, like the rest of the Amish community, believed the girl and didn't listen to Graham's denial.  What?!?  This is the loyalty his undying support provoked in her.  More than anything, I was disappointed in Mattie's character since she didn't seem to be worthy of Graham's love.

Unfortunately, at some point I'll bet that Graham will realize Mattie's defection and wonder about her profession of love.  I would if I were he.

Don't Discredit Christian Romance

The review for Robin Lee Hatcher's Belonging is running on today's AAR site.  If romances in general are looked down upon by some people, it seems Christian fiction is often seen as being lower than the low.  In fact, until I started reading them for review, I often caught myself disparaging them.

But I and anyone else who does look down on the books as a whole are wrong.  Hatcher's book is a prime example of a Christian romance fiction book that is entertaining while still keeping its religious roots.  These aren't Bible-thumpers as most of us aren't, but regular small-town Idaho citizens trying to make a living at the end of the nineteenth century.  Like any group of people, there are good ones and not so good ones, but all are realistically drawn and compelling people to read about.

After reading this book, I'm definitely putting Hatcher on my "watch for" list.

Finishing Texas Blue and Starting Rebel with a Cause

Fortunately, Texas Blue is living up to my expectations.  In fact, I will probably end up buying it for my Kindle and making it one of my Desert Island favorites.  Author Jodi Thomas has written a nice juxtaposiion between a gambler and a woman wary of men, and has added a nice subplot with a lawyer/Texas Ranger and an abused native Mexican woman.  With about 50 pages to go, I still have high hopes for this book.

I've gotten a little over 40 pages into Rebel with a Cause and am already dismayed.  My likes for romances are so minimal: two people who are decent, likeable characters and a love story I can buy.  So far Mr. Hero isn't too likeable, so I'm getting leery about liking this one.  Really, it's difficult to wish jerks well.  But things could change.  He may be prickly and rude for a reason - but it better be a pretty good reason for me to buy his lack of manners and haughty attitude.