Today I decided to visit our local thriftstore for the first time ever. They had very few books, which I almost didn't see before leaving.

Not much there, but I picked up this Regency title with a rather lurid cover without much expectation.

This is a 1981 Signet Regency
0-451-09727-0

All I can say is 'wow'.  This was one of the most intense books I've read in a while.  I really have not much to say beyond that, except that it's in 1st person from the POV of the very young female protagonist, which naturally means that there's nowhere near enough of the hero's POV, except what can be inferred (which is not surprising considering when this was published).   I could have wished that the resolution didn't happen in 4 pages.  They really deserved a bit more happiness after 209 pages of absolutely understandable, but harrowing disagreement. I do have this little demon sitting on my right shoulder saying that they could have avoided a lot of the unpleasantness if they had just talked to each other, but the one on the other shoulder says that considering that she was 17 and he in his 30s and feeling foolish to be in love with her (not to talk about the fact that he's a Cit and an illegitimate son), it made perfect sense that they didn't.

I've noticed while reading older Regency titles over the last few weeks that epilogues don't seem much in evidence in Regencies, which made me realize how much I do like this reassuring glimpse of HEA.  Definitely not for the kiddies, but for the affirmation that the hero and heroine really made it.

Anyway, if you are into angst and love intense, The Emerald Necklace is for you.  Highly recommended.

Oh, and I also found a copy of Claudia Dain's The Courtesan's Daughter. Considering that I had just decided that I was interested enough to seek this one out, it seems just too coincidental that I decided to visit this thriftstore for the first time ever, after having driven by it repeatedly and even donated clothing to it over the last 7 years.

I was lucky enough to get an ARC through the Dear Author giveaway and promised a review in return for receiving it.

I'm happy to say it was no hardship to read this book.  Despite the rather lurid title, the story is thoroughly enjoyable.

Anthony Hamilton, a man with a rather bad reputation, falls in love with his friend's younger sister, but she marries Lord Bertram without ever finding out about Anthony's marriage proposal.  Celia and Anthony meet again after her husband's death, but Celia is not sure she ever wants to marry again, since her love match with Bertie turned out to be pretty disappointing.

The first third of the book is rather more realistic than one usually gets in Regency fare and was quite a surprise to me.  We learn about Celia's marriage through short entries in her diary that chronicle her journey from happy bride to deeply depressed widow.  And she's not depressed because her husband died, but because their 3 year marriage had deteriorated to the point where she's not even sure she mourns him.  Bertie is not a villain, but after a very short courtship, neither knew the other and he and Celia were just not suited well enough to make a go of their marriage.  Bertie's father's involvement in their lives just made the situation worse. Realistic indeed!

After her year of mourning is over, Celia's mother brings her back home and invites some of Celia's friends for a house party in an effort to revive her spirits.  When David, Celia's half-brother, also invites Anthony against Celia's mother's wishes, the stage is set for the second (longer) third of the novel that deals with Celia's fears about falling in love again and ending in another bad marriage, and Anthony's concerns about his reputation and fears that he might drag down Celia because he's just not respectable.  I really liked this part and there are some fabulously tender and deliciously sensual scenes as Anthony coaxes a depressed (and I mean that in the medical sense) Celia back to life.

The last and shortest part is taken up by a subplot that seemed kind of tacked on and didn't do much for me and I wish there had been more emphasis on Celia's mother (if we absolutely had to have a subplot) instead of what actually transpired.

I also felt that the author didn't spend enough time on introducing all the characters.  I should mention that this is the third book in a series.  I'm absolutely not a friend of infodumps, but it took me a considerable time to figure out who Molly is and how Celia is related to the rest of her family.  That threw me out of the story and made me also pay more attention to details.  I had asked readers who had read the first books whether I would need to read them and was assured I didn't.  I think I would disagree at this point.  While the events of previous books were not essential to the plot of A Rake's Guide to Seduction, I was left wondering about things that could have been clarified with a sentence here or there without devolving into an infodump, but I can see how a reader who had read the previous books might not notice that there was just a bit too much shorthand going on for readers who came to the series cold, as I did.

The second thing that really threw me out of the story was hopefully a typo, but it took me a while to figure it all out and did distract me considerably from the story: the age difference between Anthony and his friend David and between Anthony and Celia. I do not believe that David and Anthony could have realistically been expected to be friends with a 7 year age difference, and even less likely that Celia, who's 8 year younger than Anthony, could have in any way been part of this group.   I really hope they catch that before it goes to print.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book.  I haven't quite made up my mind what kind of grading scale I want to use, so I'd go with good overall and very good, if I exclude the last subplot.

Recommended.

A Rake's Guide to Seduction is a June 08 Zebra Historical Romance release.

And the sun is shining and I have a pool. :) Finally, the first few days were taking up with parents and a sick aunt and doctor visits, but today... oh eat your hearts out, today I lounge by the pool. Only fly in the ointment, no internet access, so in reality I'm sitting in a parking lot sweating in my car to get my email fix right now, but ... the pool is waiting.

I should be back by Tuesday, if you need me before then, phone is the only way to get in touch.

Nope, not sunburned yet either, blblblblbl. :)

Josh Lanyon has an essay up at the Loose ID blog (http://looseidauthors.blogspot.com/) about how to create a believable story conflict in m/m writing. It's part of his book Man Oh Man which will be released on Monday, March 31st.

Go check it out. Well worth reading.

51% Geek

What a disappointment... I'm not geeky enough... grin


70

That's more like it, although I thought I'd get more than that. Amazing how long 5 mins can be at times and how terribly short at others. :)

I've been sitting on this issue for a few days after unsuccessfully trying to get some reaction out of the literally thousands of readers who are on the same romance review/promo lists on Yahoo as I am on the topic of HEA and romance, labeling, etc.

Last week I bought a 90 odd page novella from an e-pub which was labeled as a gay romance.  I felt the price was on the medium to high side (lots of e-books are really pushing it lately with very little word count for lotsa money!), but the writing in the different excerpts I'd read over a period of several weeks really really made me want to read the story.  I sounded like it would be a fabulous relationship story between two believable characters who really loved each other.

Now, I understand that erotica does not necessarily guarantee a HEA, but if something is labeled something or other romance I DO expect a HEA or at least a HFN.  I've read romance for 20+ years and I have yet to meet somebody who's a long time romance reader who would dispute that what we commonly call a romance novel is defined by the HEA and that if there's none then it's women's fiction or erotica or something else, but it's NOT a romance.  Incidentally, we recently had a discussion on RRA-l about mislabeling of books as romance to get more readers, since romance sells.

So I get to the last few pages of the novella and the story up to that point is very well written, beautiful descriptions and a believable development of a love story between the two cops who are partners.  Yes, there's some mention about concerns about going public towards the end, but there's absolutely no indication that on the last few pages we will get to see one of the guys rationalizing why it's okay that the other is hitting on a woman and them giving up their love relationship and reverting back to being friends because of 'what would their fellow cops say when they find out'.  Literally, the last word is 'Someday'.

If this had been a paper book it would have hit the wall at this point in time.

The story was heavily promoted on numerous Yahoo romance groups.  So I went to a couple of them and expressed my dissatisfaction with having been lured into a story that had a clear romance set up and was promoted as a romance only not to be one.  Quite honestly, the writing was so good that it came as a total shock that there was this weird cop-out at the end.  It was a real kick in the gut and I felt jerked around.

Apart from the fact that I expected a HEA, I find it completely impossible to believe that you can fall in love and have sex only to revert back to a platonic friendship and working relationship at the drop of a hat and be completely resigned to the guy you are in love with hitting on women again. 

There was little response on this topic, some people went into outlandish explanations how romance originally means novel or is derived from romance languages (huh? yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?) and then the author in question wrote a rather defensive and defiant missive about how she will not 'denigrate' her love story by not calling a romance (btw, I didn't mention title, name nor publisher and very little detail about the book, so that was very interesting to me) and how she's aware she's not making friends this way and it may cost her readers and how that's bad for her as a new author, but she's not gonna tell anybody whether or not her stories have a HEA.

She is certainly entitled to her opinion.  I can however say with certainty that I won't be spending any more money on any of her books and will avoid her publisher like the plague.  Doubly disappointing as I really liked her writing style and the intensity she brought to her characters up until that psycho ending.

After reading her message I can also not help but feel confirmed in my original perception that the non-HEA ending was a deliberate decision, meant for the shock value alone.

I guess this means that before I buy ANY e-books in the future, I'll have to email the author to find out if this is really a romance or not.    I have a real issue with people messing with the definition of what a romance novel has been for the last several decades and the fact that I cannot depend on the label any longer.   If I wanted a 'realistic' outcome I can watch the news or read a so-called literary work in which everybody either dies at the end or lives their life in misery.

I am *not* amused.

Well, I don't know about the boldness and energy thingie. :)  But the bonding too quicky, yeah, that would be me.

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Yesterday was a bad day.  I got a phone call at 6am from RJ telling me that Jack had passed away in the night. While not completely unexpected - after all we've known for over 2 years that his heart disease was progressing  - it nevertheless came as a horrible shock.



He was fine Sunday night, eating, playing with Midi and RJ and then just didn't wake up Monday morning.  He was only 4 years old.

To make matters worse, we had made tentative plans to donate his heart to HCM research, but due to the fact that the researchers are on the West coast it took 6 hours to finally find out that they don't need it after all.  By then it was too late to do the procedure correctly for the researchers in Denmark, who have also found a mutation that causes HCM. 

At least I was on the phone all morning trying to make arrangements.  Poor RJ was just waiting to hear what to do for all that time.

It's some solace that it seems Jack's heart just stopped and he didn't suffer any of the awful things that can happen to HCM cats - stroke, heart attack or a clot that would have caused horrible pain while paralyzing him. 

It still SUCKS.

Jack was a big boy, who didn't weigh enough due to his heart condition, but people never could quite believe that he was as tall on his legs and as long as he was. He had the most darling little chatter and was a lapcat and a brat when he went after Gwennie occasionally. He would jump on the kitchen counter and throw stuff down and always came to take his pills in the morning and at night.

We will miss him terribly.

This story just creeps me out:

FBI wants palm prints, eye scans, tattoo mapping

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/04/fbi.biometrics/index.html


This is so outrageous, one does not want to believe it could be true, but then we do live in the good ole US of A.

I wanna cry. I've been following the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books expose on Cassie Edwards' plagiarism both at http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com and on http://www.dearauthor.com and posted a couple of comments on Jennifer Crusie's attitude and the issue of how the 'sisterhood' defines what it seems we as readers may or may not publicly say about authors.

I've also brought it to the attention of the RRA-l list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rra-l). After some posts on how this isn't really plagiarism since she only lifted research and not plot points, I posted a definition of plagiarism.

Now we get an author saying, well if the books are out of copyright she not sure it's really legally theft.

Weep, my fellow humans, weep.

75 words

Touch Typing for free

Now, to find a job where I can use that blazing speed... :)

Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Neither You think neither like a man nor like a woman. What you are you may decide for yourself. Most people will consider you strange, alien, weird or funny. You are probably quite interesting. Neither 71% Either 68% Female 68% Male 50%

Well, I've finally caved in and gotten a livejournal account. 

Not too long ago, I was thinking about some very old memories, realizing that I'd forgotten more than I could remember and regretted that I never did keep a diary.

Here's to baring my soul to the world! :)