DNF Review: Buttercup by Sienna Mynx

The Kindle Sample for Buttercup consists of the prologue and a few sentences from the first chapter. I wish the sample had been longer,  because I don’t know that the prologue is a fair representation of the novel. If it is, then Buttercup absolutely isn’t for me. Having a weakness for both the 1930′s and sideshow life I expected to enjoy Buttercup. Instead I struggled to complete the sample.

When we meet Silvio and Buttercup she is dancing on stage and he is masturbating. (I somehow missed that this is an erotic romance, and not a romance with erotic elements.) For reasons I didn’t understand they progress to a one on one physical encounter. Through his arousal, Silvio reflects on events, events that apparently separated them. Here I was confused. Silvio has “bedded the whore, the virgin, the widow” but he is angry that Buttercup may not have been faithful to him. He’s had to seek her out, indicating they were not in communication, but here she is dancing (and disrobing) for him with barely a word.

Because Silvio is revealing their story between “slick sheens of sweat” it was hard for me to stay interested. It seems that Buttercup did something six years ago that endangered Silvio’s life. Four years ago he got out of prison. Two years were spent with his gang, searching for Buttercup while also trying to forget her. Buttercup is apparently indebted to, and protected by, the carnival she works with. She is such a fantasy figure in this prologue that I wasn’t sure she was real. At the end of the prologue is seems clear that this is meant to represent an actual encounter, not a dream of Silvio’s. I also wasn’t sure of the timeline of past events.

“Buttercup was different than in the past, but she was a girl of barely seventeen and he was a kid himself. He paid it no mind. They had both changed. His mind was on one thing. Reclaiming what was taken from him prematurely.” – Kindle Location 219, Buttercup by Sienna Mynx

I think this passage means she is twenty-three, but I had to read it twice. My initial pass seemed to indicate that she’d been eleven during their prior sexual encounter. I know Sienna Mynx is very popular and Buttercup was suggested to me by several different fans but I didn’t purchase the book. As a set up for an erotic novel, the world of a 1930′s carnival is fresh and original. If I were looking for an erotic read I probably would have been more interested than I was. I needed a contrast between Silvio’s sexual needs and who Buttercup is as a person. Because she felt like a fantasy, and he a stalker, I DNF’d the book and moved on.

* This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins

Review: Jim Crow's Counterculture by R. A. Lawson

As a music fan and a person of Southern descent, my celebrity obsessions might be different than yours. I had the opportunity to review three very different books recently. Heat Wave is a biography of Ethel Waters from Donald Bogle put out by Harper Collins, while Jim Crow's Counterculture and Blue Smoke both come from LSU Press by authors new to me. I'm on my third read of Jim Crow's Counterculture. It's not as instantly accessible as Blue Smoke, but it's far and away my favorite. There's something about Lawson's style that says Pay Attention Now.

When I was young it was an established 'fact' that Blues were most authentic when they were most rustic, that accomplished musicians had been tainted by white cultural influences. This was racist poppycock, of course. Then (as now) black musicians were serving two very different masters. The first was what the white public wished to hear and by extension the white executives wished to record. The second was what the black public wanted to hear. Covering the period from the beginning of Jim Crow to the end of WW2, Lawson illustrates how the male blues musician (who performed a very different type of show than the female) was a vehicle for protest against Jim Crow and the dominant culture. Even so, it was a very constrained avenue. (During WW2 songs of revenge against the Japanese are quite common, but it's a rare song that dared to speak out against the Germans. As much as they were our enemy, they were still white.) Within those confines black artists  recorded their lives, their aspirations, and changed their own possibilities. As Lawson says - 


"Black southerners during Jim Crow were forced to be deferential, yet bluesmen projected powerful braggadocio. Black men were often emasculated or condemned as rapacious beasts, yet the bluesmen openly celebrated their sexuality. Plantation sharecropping, levee building, and logging exploited black workers in the Delta, so the musicians tried to abandon manual labor." 


Through blues music the black southerner could move in white circles, he could amass material goods that were out of his reach through traditional means. While he was certainly not relieved of the strictures of Jim Crow, he could move between social boundaries more freely. The life of a black southern musician, while often itinerant, could offer far more independence than that of a sharecropper or manual laborer. Wearing the clothes of a laborer for his white audience the musician was defining how they saw him, but they were no longer defining who he was. Things could be said in song that could not be said in words. Of course there was not a total freedom of expression. As Ice-T leaned with "Cop Killer" the dominant culture still maintained a strong sense of what was an appropriate thing for the artist to say. Reading Lawson's section on the emergence of the bluesman as an identity made me reflect on modern black music. "Thug Life" isn't a far stretch from the lawless hedonism of the early bluesman's image. The refutation of morality and law as a path of rebellion for the project dwelling youth of today comes as a straight line from the refutation of same by the young southern sharecropper. Jim Crow may be behind us, but it's legacy of limited opportunities, of devalued black lives, of a dominant culture defining what is possible remains. Lawson uses music to illustrate points in his text, indeed Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere" could be about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.

"Looka here the water now, Lordy, levee broke, rose most everywhere, That water at Greenville and Lula, Lord, it done rose everywhere, I would go down to Rosedale, but they tell me there’s water there."

Lawson has written a tremendously engaging book. It might not be for everyone, but it is certainly for anyone. I consider Jim Crow's Counterculture an absolute bargain as an e-book. Kindle has it at the standard $9.99 price, hopefully to all regions. A truly rewarding read.

Missed Review: Taken by Desire by Lavinia Kent

Don't buy this e-book.

That's the short version. I'd like to apologize to Lavinia Kent, because my advice to avoid this title has nothing at all to do with her. In fact, I'd selected her as one of my Agency titles to buy this month. Often I buy no Agency priced titles, but it's the holidays so I decided to treat myself. I used to buy Avon's (and a few other imprints) complete monthly run. It was automatic. Now I pick and choose. I scour reviews. I look at smaller publishing houses first. I consider what I have in non fiction, I watch obscure dvds.

The ebook version of Taken by Desire is priced $2 above the paper version. Not $2 above what the paper version can routinely be had for - $2 above the suggested retail price of the book. Effectively, this makes the title (in USD) over twice as expensive in a DRM restricted version than it is in a paper version. Or, you can steal it for free. I wish that you would not. I wish that you would simply join me in not reading this title, in finding another publisher to purchase from.

I am beginning to feel like the Agency authors are in an abusive relationship. I know they want me to buy their books. I want to buy their books. The editors want me to buy their books. But someone higher up than all of us has a different plan. When that someone holds you close at night and whispers that it's not him who drove us away, that he's only protecting you from the pirates, that we just didn't try hard enough? Don't believe him. What we had was real, but I won't be treated this way. You shouldn't be either. We're better than that.

Edited to add - It is my understanding that the price of this e-book has now been lowered to match the MSRP (if not the prevailing cost) of the paper book. Make your choices as you will!

Review: Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor by Lisa Kleypas

If you told me this book was published in the 1980's, I'd believe you. That's not a negative sentence, it is just an indicator of how strongly Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor reminded me of an early Nora Roberts or even maybe a Billie Green. It was refreshing to read a story where the characters' relationship was rooted in things like conversation. I've gotten so used to the obligatory chicka-bow-wow of most contemporary romance that I'd forgotten how to read without it. It's like turning the literary dial from HBO After Hours to the Hallmark Channel.

It's hard to tell I loved the book, isn't it?  Let me take a moment for the marketing. Look at that cover! It's beautiful. It's the perfect cover for a holiday gift book. It says 'A Novel' so you know it isn't a romance. I mean, it is, but if you call it A Novel then people who aren't into reading romance will adore it, because hey, they like novels. It's got that "Nicholas Sparks (note, he does not write romance, he writes... did you guess it?... novels where couples fall in love!) meets Skipping Christmas" ready for gift giving appeal. Everything about the marketing for Christmas Eve At Friday Harbor gently whispers bestseller and I salute the production team. Toss a couple pensive profiles to the right of the main boat and you've got the Lifetime movie poster.

The book itself is a perfect comfort read. You've got the holiday tragedy as the book opens with Mark claiming his orphaned niece, Holly. There's the requisite ugly dog, the dinner disaster, the small town where everyone knows Mark's name, the estranged brothers trying to make a go of it collectively for the child, the well intentioned but obviously too self involved girlfriend and the girl next door type recently arrived in town to open a toy shop and forget the losses of her own not so distant past. Mark recognizes that Maggie is the sort of girl he'd put in the friend category, Maggie notices that Mark is the complete opposite of her type but still very attractive, and it's on. You know the shelf life of the current girlfriend is limited no matter what Mark says.

There are fantastic elements here. Mark's strained relationship with his siblings, his sincerity as he bonds with Holly, Maggie's baby steps out into dating again, it all feels real. You understand exactly why they make a great couple and exactly why they hesitate to become one. My problems with Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor are small. The most significant is Holly. I find it hard to believe that a child who has suffered such a great loss would ask Santa for a new mother in just a few months. The timeline doesn't work for me. A year, two years, even eighteen months - but her very first Christmas without her mother and she's ready to replace her? I don't see it. But if you give the plot that suspension of disbelief then everything else flows naturally. The second quibble is that the book is short. On consideration, I'm not sure if that's a fair complaint. If Kleypas sexed it up to current romance standards, the book would be conventional length and I would have read the same number of pages. I think it may be that less is more. Buy this one for Grandma but sneak a read for yourself first.