October Review Recap

October fell victim to the Halestrom.


One Hit Wonder by Elyssa Patrick

For Love and Liberty by Alyssa Cole, Kate McMurray, Lena Hart and Stacey Agdern

True Spies by Shana Galen

Talk Sweetly To Me by Courtney Milan

DNF Review: When You Give a Duke a Diamond by Shana Galen

I've been doing a lot of DNF reading lately. Sometimes I set a book aside and try again. Sometimes I soldier on, carried aloft by the wave of hate reading. It's pretty rare that I hit a book two, three, four times and just say forget it. (2013 has not been a good year for me.) Lord & Lady Spy was the first Galen I abandoned. When You Give a Duke a Diamond is the second.

Meet Juliette. She's famous for being famous. She plays men off each other, collecting their offerings of wealth. She has a scandalous protector who is actually, um, something that gets revealed in the part of the book I didn't read. In the first half he's off the page. Apparently she and two other women are pretending to be his lover. He sets them up with the cash and the flash and they're going to find aristocratic husbands. Because that is the natural outcome of life at the high end of the sex trade. (If the Hermetically Sealed Heroine had a cousin, she'd be the Secretly Chaste Courtesan.) Juliette is divorced yet oddly eager to reenter the matrimonial state. Given that Juliette's ex husband is a scary abusive creep I would've expected her to have some reluctance. Perhaps, with her gift for social climbing, she might have considered actually becoming a courtesan. In that life she would have an escape hatch. But this is a tale where abuse issues are excuses for bonding. Or bondage. We'll get to that.

Juliette meets William in a series of nonsensical events. They aren't just tedious to follow, they don't pass the logic test. William leaves his fiancee on the balcony. When he returns she is missing. Juliette claims the woman has been murdered. There is a bullet in the wall and no sign of dead fiancee. Since dead fiancee has been having extramarital sex (unlike Juliette) no one but her parents worry much about this. William wavers between believing Juliette and repudiating her. They engage in some public scenes where neither of them are terribly lucid. Juliette runs to William (whom she barely knows) for protection from a known threat rather than the men she already has on the string. Once forced into his life, she challenges him at every step with such stunningly tone deaf antisocial behavior that my sympathy began shifting to her ex husband. Juliette wears entitlement like a perfume. Bravado or not, it's shocking when William begins craving her company. Of course, William is a Duke. And Juliette is known as The Duchess, one of the Three Diamonds who are the alleged lovers of the Earl of Sin.

I just typed that. With my fingers. I could insert a lecture on the mine cut diamonds of the pre-1900 era and the frequency of foil backing as a method to improve their appearance, but I will just bow to the De Beers machine and move on.

William has OCD from his abusive father's questionable parenting methods. Rather than act like almost every formerly abused child I've ever known (and I've known plenty) William acts like the Abused Child of Fiction. He cannot be free. He lives his life, despite unimaginable access to power and resources, in the narrow constraints his father dictated. He upholds the order bequeathed to him without question. Having been unloved, he does not form attachments. He is a stern and rigid man. He and Juliette bond over tales of - what is the word for dog murder? Is there such a word? Canineicide? Anyway, they had a puppy and then they didn't and it was their fault for being such bad, bad boys and girls. (Take a moment here to wonder why William didn't buy a litter of puppies to piss on his father's grave daily.) Dead dogs mean I love you. Or something. Soon Juliette is introducing Surprise Bondage to their lives and trying my nerves in new and inventive ways. Someone attempts to rape her. Is it the guy who killed William's forgotten fiancee? Is it Juliette's ex husband? (She not only dismisses that possibility she fails to share  the thought.) I suddenly realized I didn't care. I was more interested in the dead fiancee than either of the people pretending to look for her.

Postponed Review: Lord & Lady Spy by Shana Galen

Shana Galen, she's my popcorn girl. She's my reliable not sure what I want tonight read. I just can't get behind this one. Other reviewers love Lord And Lady Spy. They love it so much that even though I can't finish it myself I bought a copy for my aunt. I am possibly the only reader that will ever dislike it. We're discussing Lord And Lady Spy not to refute those reviewers, but to think about Authorial Choice.

Recently Dear Author has seen a few discussions evolve that are (at their core) about Authorial Choice and the reader's willingness to accept that choice or not. Authors have weighed in with mixed results. I've become interested in authors I never would have considered. Authors in my TBR pile shifted to my Do Not Buy list. Authorial Choice is about taste. You can't tell a reader they must like something. You cannot counter a lack of enjoyment with a lecture on historical plausibility.

Which brings us to Lord And Lady Spy. Historical plausibility is pretty much out the window on this one, leaving the reader with the choice to enjoy or not enjoy. Taking the Mr. And Mrs. Smith concept back to Romanceland, Shana Galen sets up an interesting conflict with two spies cut loose from their assignments. Married, yet blind to their shared profession, the challenge is to transfer the attention and thrill that espionage gave them into their life together. Add in emotional distance caused by a miscarriage and Galen has given herself plenty to work with.

Fairly early there is a scene that will be familiar to many - an afternoon with the in-laws. Sophia is stuck entertaining her husband's family, people she doesn't particularly like. (Many women can relate to that dynamic.) Through a series of events the family assumes Sophia is pregnant. When Adrian returns home this is the news that greets him. Sophia does not correct this misinformation and here I make the Reader's Choice to hate her. My exact thought was "What a vicious selfish bitch." I no longer care what Sophia has or has not had happen to her, I no longer care what will or won't evolve for her, I just hate her.  Adrian now believes his wife has been unfaithful, Adrian's family now believes an heir could be on the way and Sophia stands silent. Why should she correct what she never claimed, she thinks. Why should she have to? Why wouldn't Adrian simply know it to be untrue? She wraps herself tightly in her passive aggressive victimhood and stalks out. I want her to get hit by a carriage, die quickly, and clear the path for a heroine to take the stage.

This is an example of a completely valid choice by the author meeting the equally valid choice of a reader. It may be utterly necessary for Sophia to carry her injured pride forward, it may be necessary for Adrian to believe she's slept about. I don't care. I don't want to have him in pain, reacting against her or choosing to forgive her when all she had to do was utter three small words. "It's not true." By keeping her mouth shut she's unleashing emotional pain on herself and those around her. I don't care why she does it. I can't overcome the action. If the hero ultimately forgives, I won't. As a reader, I was unable to set that aside. A book succeeds when it carries a reader past those stumbling blocks, when the author's choices are presented in a way that overcomes the reader objection. For one reader, the heroine should never sleep with her brother. For another reader, the heroine can't be a sexual puppet without repercussions. For this reader, once I think your heroine is a vicious selfish bitch, it's hard to stay with her. Sophia's silence is completely plausible, it's historically accurate and it may be a good choice by Shana Galen for the plot she's crafting. Many other readers had no difficulty with it at all. Sophia and I, we had to break up over it. Amazon is selling it for 90% off for a limited time - for 79 cents you can see how you feel. (I don't mind having paid full price, I try to buy my go-to authors on release day as a show of support.)

Review: Sons of the Revolution by Shana Galen

Shana Galen is one of those authors that I tend to forget about. When I look at her publication list, I realize I've read all of her books.  Although I can't recall a single detail, it's an overall positive impression. That's the case with the Sons of the Revolution series as well. On your left, a young orphan working as a governess is forced into life as a spy, where she discovers she is destined to be a Duchess. On your right, a young orphan is forced into life as a governess where... ok, that's not exactly fair. But that's the thing about a Shana Galen book. It's easy to fault them on the details.

The strongest section of both books is the prologue. When Julien and Armand are escaping the siege of their home the events are immediate, cinematic and relatable. Those sections of the book are up there with Joanna Bourne's work. In both cases, she has set up an excellent canvas. The eldest and his young mother escape the mob, leaving her husband and younger sons behind to face certain death. Awesome! (Ok, maybe not awesome, exactly... but c'mon! One kid wakes up to flickering lights on the ceiling. It's like riding Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney, but with actual terror!) Afterward, established in London and rich again, Julien's mom seems kind of sad. All the time. Those are the emotional stakes of the subsequent action. Sure, Julien keeps slipping in and out of France looking for his brothers. But the emotional repercussions of their experiences are not deep and traumatic. This is not angsty romance. Armand, who spent a decade in a solitary confinement, goes from mute and feral to resentful sibling fairly quickly.  At one point Armand challenges Julien "You treat me like I am an idiot!" Dude. You've been refusing to speak, wear shoes, or handle utensils. You wanted he should give you a medal, maybe? Julien responds that Armand has no idea what it cost Julien to keep searching for him. I guess Armand thought Julien found his way to France and infiltrated a prison on a lark, because Armand is all hmm, good point.

Of course, as easy as strolling in and out of the prison is, perhaps Armand can be forgiven his error. By the time it's his turn, he heads off to his former cell (guess he forgot his toothbrush) with less thought than I use to walk up to the corner for milk. (Here's another easy swipe - a spy in England knows where Armand is being held, but everyone in the prison has no idea who he is and all the people looking for him on the outside have no idea where he is, and the criminal element in France has no idea where he is... how does the spy guy figure it out? If Armand is mute, who told his jailers the name Armand?)  I could easily break these books down by missed opportunities, but it would miss the point. I enjoyed them. Do I think Shana Galen could really write something astonishing? I don't know. She has some great characters, she has some great situations, but the execution of them is enjoyably rote. The genre equivalent of the popcorn movie. You can see everything coming long before it hits, the clues to future events are clubs with kleig lights attached. It's the getting there that's the fun. You can settle down, have a read, and enjoy it. You don't need the collectors dvd afterward, it's just Tuesday night and something to do.

I will probably read everything Shana Galen ever writes. I expect to forget who she is at least three more times in my life, but I will still have that good impression. She's a fun evening, but not the girl I want to marry.