I Wish I Could Love All Review Books

I think the universal truth about reviewers is that they hope every galley turns out to be the best galley they've ever read.  I know it's true for me.  I start reading, not looking for the negatives, but eager to read something brilliant that takes me outside of myself for a few hours, and if I'm lucky, sporadically for a few days or months while my mind wanders to what I learned or how much I enjoyed certain passages.

Unfortunately, books like The Cost of Loving pop up, leaving me perplexed as to how they got published without someone--a friend of the author's, an editor, someone--mentioning to the writer all the problems the manuscript has so that the writer could fix those problems.

There are so many improbable situations in Cost of Loving that I can't imagine the book previous to it would actually make Loving make sense.  But as a reviewer I live in hope that what I don't understand might make a little sense to someone else.  However, for me to honestly say that I like a book, the very basic requirement is that I understand what's happening in the book and don't have the problems I did with this one.

What confused me?  Why didn't this book work for me?  Click the link on the title above and read my review.  It says it all.

Where Have All the Editors Gone?

Reading Robin Kaye's Back to You was quite a challenge since it was written with so many gaping holes in the storyline and with protagonists whose illogical actions begged for more than the suspension of disbelief.

What bothered me?  Let me list some puzzles:

• The first third of the book is a vicious and stupid tennis match of insults between the love interests where the reader doesn't learn anything except that they had a thwarted sexual encounter many years before.
• After this, readers learn that purportedly an adult, Storm (yup, that's his name, folks) designs luxury yachts and maintains a home and business in New Zealand, yet thinks it's appropriate to teach a ten-year-old child to drive a car--even when he realizes her feet don't touch the pedals.
• Bree, the heroine he nearly had sex with before he ran yelling and screaming from her room (okay, a slight exaggeration there), refuses to have sex with him years later when he returns, but when he takes her out on a yacht he's designed, she's not only ready but willing to have a night of sex.
• After their night of sex, Bree is ready to become friends with benefits, but Storm doesn't think that's such a good idea.

At this point my reaction was "huh?".  Is this supposed to make sense to anyone?

Kaye's Bad Boys of Red Hook series is one in a long line that I'll skip.

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.

Saving Readers' Time

After someone has over 30 books published, you would think she's become proficient in her art, right?  Well, Colt by Georgina Gentry is the book that proves this theory wrong.  (Read my review posted on AAR by clicking on the title of the book.)

A few years ago, there was a hoopla about Gentry's Diablo, Booklist saying it gave Beauty and the Beast a Western twist.  Those of us who like to see fairytale plots used in different connotations bought the book and I suspect many who bought it read it.

I you read Diablo, then you might be hoping that Gentry has gotten better.  The answer is a plain and simple NO.

So That You Don't Have To

My husband and I were talking about books and reviewing the other night.  I was reading a review book that I really, really wanted to like, but the author was making it so hard for me that it was essentially a losing proposition.

"Why do I read these things?" I asked in disgust.

"So that others don't have to," he replied, and his response struck me as the truth. 

It's also helping me get through books that I know I'll be panning.  Often this happens halfway through and there seems to be no way for the author to recoup from all the losses to either the characters or the plot, or both.

A case in point is The Last Cowboy by Lyndsay McKenna.  McKenna probably heard how rugged, testosterone-driven men are the staples of Western romances.  So she piled on macho posturing, troubles galore, and manly spirit.  It's as if a cook says she likes chocolate, so she mixex every kind of chocolate she can find--liquid and solid--into a cake pan combined with powered cocoa and calls it a cake.  Not only does it look awful but it tastes worse. 

McKenna's novel is all the tropes about cowboy romances written to their maximum.  Only a reviewer would read the first hundred pages about a mean-spirited cowboy and keep reading and hoping for him to become the hero.

The good news about this book, however, is maybe now that McKenna has written about the Last Cowboy, she'll write about something, anything else in the future.

Sadly, this is the best Western romance cover I've seen in quite a while.  I only wish the inside were as wonderful as the outside.

Not So Good Book Reviewed Today

My review of Teresa Southwick's To Have the Doctor's Baby went live on AAR today.  At AAR reviewers get to request books to read.  I'm not sure why I requested this book.  What about the premise -- a woman asking her ex-husband to impregnate her -- seemed appealing to me?  Maybe I just wanted to see how an author would handle the premise.  Whatever my reasoning, the results were disastrous.  Is it better to review these books or just leave a void in the review world?

Reviewed: How Not to Write a Romance

It's distressing for me to read and review a book whose only redeeming quality is that the writing flows.  My review of Her Scottish Groom on the AAR site is a case in point.

Maybe there is nothing new under the sun as far as Regency and Victorian romances go, but regurgitating an already trite formula and throwing in so-so sex scenes doesn't add anything to the subgenre of romances.

I hate giving D's or F's to books, but some seem to demand those grades.

Sigh.