Review: Moonstruck Madness by Laurie McBain

Laurie McBain is an author  often underrepresented in casual histories of the genre. Moonstruck Madness did massive business. I decided to revisit Moonstruck Madness because it was the book I remembered the least. MM is a glorious train wreck of domestic violence and kitchen sink plotting. No wonder I forgot most of it.

We open with Sabrina as a small tween on the battlefields of Culloden. Battle worn and weary, she's fleeing for her life. (I didn't pause to do the math, but I think she's 11 or 12 here. Five years later her elder sister is 18 or 19, so let's ballpark it there.)  Sabrina gathers the remaining members of her family and travels to her deadbeat dad's abandoned estate. Of course she embarks on a life of crime to pay the bills and restore the estate to sustainability. This is a classic 70's / 80's thing. A couple teenage girls, a senile aunt, a servant or two with a very young heir suddenly occupy the family manor and no one ever asks where the money is coming from. Dad is off with the second family in Italy or Spain or wherever, but it's all good.

Enter our hero - Lucien, the Duke of something or other. He's got a controlling grandmother, murderous (and likely incestuous) cousins, a seriously bad attitude and Marry By This Date stamped on his inheritance. He starts out determined to capture the local highwayman, so he shoots Sabrina. In a modern Avon Romance this would form the majority of the plot. Back in the day, we were just getting started. Sabrina taking a bullet from this dude is like the meet cute. Sex happens (ow!) and she's on her way. Over the course of the book Sabrina will be beaten with a whip, slapped across the face, survive multiple murder attempts (by multiple murderers) get married, be pregnant, have PTSD, and THEN start to fall for the Duke. (I left some stuff out, this review can't go longer than my attention span.)  Ok, so after all that she and Lucien start to wonder if they like each other. They do, of course, so a bunch of other stuff happens and then they are in loooooove and the book ends. (Spoiler alert.)

Here's the thing about 70's / 80's big books. For all that I absolutely despise the normality of abuse in the relationships I also really admire how Sabrina is a person with a unique backstory. Her strength and determination to overcome obstacles is not a bug to be addressed, but a feature. Some men admire her, some are fatigued by her, some want to change her, but the women all consider her a person to deal with rather than a problem to correct. She is occasionally self sabotaging and highly emotional, but she's also a teenager. Most of the other women fall into super convenient categories. There's a cheating fianceé whose murder no one cares about enough to even resolve, a crazy psychopath for whom disfigurement is punishment enough, an eccentric elderly grandmother who holds all the power, a psychic sister who longs for a conventional life, and the demented aunt who pivots the plot at the last second. Seriously classic stuff.

What turned me off about Moonstruck Madness (and still does) is the way violence between the hero and heroine is excused. Setting aside the fact that he shoots her early in the book, their relationship is incredibly toxic. He's forcing her into situations she would rather escape. Her sister aids and abets him because of her visions and also because she seems to accept his actions as inevitable. Sabrina is a woman alone, struggling to save people who completely fail to appreciate or protect her. I found this one of the most believable aspects of Moonstruck Madness. When you are in a violent relationship people will not protect you. They will give you up without a second thought because your abuser has learned his lesson, he's really in love, he's never going to harm you now. This is both utterly untrue and a myth our culture refuses to abandon.

But back to Lucien. He's not seen by himself or the book as abusive. There are other toxic men in Sabrina's life largely given a pass while Lucien takes some of their blame along with his own. This sets the reader to be more sympathetic to him than his actions dictate. He's deceptive (so is she!) and occasionally violent (so is she!) but the book couples his shouldering of undue blame with the both sides are guilty twist to absolve him. Even Sabrina, after all that has occurred, parrots the "He'd never hurt me" lines. By the standards of the genre at the time, he won't. He's decided he loves her and that makes it different. 

*This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins.

Review: The Arrangement by Mary Balogh

Some books permanently change the reader / author relationship. Having loved Mary Balogh since her earliest days I half-heartedly defended her previous disability themed books but still cringed when she announced The Survivor's Club series. There are authors that do disability well, and then there's Mary Balogh. Her disabled characters are more Matt-in-Downton-Abbey than Harold Russell. The Arrangement is the second TSC book. In some ways it's more successful than The Proposal. (I mean, I finished it without rage reading.) Here Balogh is concerned with a blind hero and a destitute heroine.

Vincent Hunt is a golden god of a man. He's also blind. He has recently acquired an unexpected title and musical ability. That's pretty much all you need to know about Vincent. Despite tons of backstory describing him as a take charge problem solving man of action, Vincent undergoes a radical personality change once blinded. His dependency extends past the physical into the emotional. His family coddles him so he runs away to pout about it. Enter Sophia, the poor relation with a comedically unkind family. Sophia is kept at home in her small village by a domineering aunt and social climbing cousin. I couldn't stand Sophia. She's one of those women who climbs on the cross and frantically smacks anyone trying to help her off it. She is a martyr of the highest order. She's also the only one in Vincent's life (he feels) to see past his blindness and into his soul. He doesn't care if his peers tell him she's not pretty (and it would be far more interesting if she wasn't). He's drawn to her voice and her innate goodness. Vincent's right hand man and alleged close childhood friend distrusts her so that seals the deal and they hitch up.

At this point I'm not certain what offended me more in The Arrangement. There is so much to choose from. It was readable and it had some lovely touches so it's going to do well with people that can set aside the problems of one note characterizations, family dysfunction, class reinforcement and random violence. Balogh asks us to believe that Saint Sophia the Self Effacing is the only person in Vincent's life that would think to put up a guide rope for his walks. Farmers have used guide ropes for blinding weather conditions since we first made animals sleep outside the house. Either everyone in Vincent's life is insanely dim or... ok everyone in Vincent's life is insanely dim. I can't come up with a second choice. Sophia presents a multitude of ideas to expand Vincent's limitations, ideas that were in place for a few hundred years prior to her arrival and yet unexamined by anyone else. But let's step beyond Sophia's innovations and Vincent's all encompassing blindness.

Remember Sophia's living situation? The family that refused to let her leave the home and then cast her out to starve? Them? Vincent encourages Sophia to resume ties with not only that crew, but also the extended relatives that couldn't be bothered to meet her. Vincent has such a large loving family that he wants Sophia to have a nest of self interested vipers to balance things out. So she does. She takes her toxic extended clan, people who left her to starve, and she embraces them. Saint Sophia the Self Effacing accepts their misdeeds and presents a clean slate to everyone. Well, almost everyone. She can't quite forgive the one who called her ugly, so Vincent arranges to beat the ever loving crap out of the guy. Nothing says "I love you" like domestic violence. (Um, spoiler alert. Sorry.)

The first half of The Arrangement is stronger than the second. Sophia doesn't really get her sainthood rolling until after she meets Vincent's friends. Characterization is stronger before Sophia is demoted from new friend to care coordinator. The relationship between Vincent and his childhood friend / devoted companion disappears once he reenters the forced world of The Survivor's Club. Whatever personality Vincent held apart from his disability is dominated by their insistence on telling us who he is despite Balogh showing us someone different. A truly bewildering dynamic between Vincent and another member of the nobility is tossed in for no apparent gain beyond pathos. It's like a same sex relationship that isn't. You'll know it when you get there.

Vincent and Sophia began as strong characters finding their way through temporary challenges. They ended as a typically Inspiring Couple made of pity and pathos. Without Sophia's guiding hand everyone else in Vincent's life (including Vincent himself) would have failed to make commonsense changes to adapt his home to his life. Without Vincent's massive cash infusion Sophia would have been forced to sex work or starvation. Luckily, they end up together and a merry band of misfits toasts their eternal union. Even the childhood friend comes around. Oh, and his mother cries. Happy tears, naturally. I just took an aspirin and moved on to the next book.
*This review was first posted at Love In The Margins

Review: Lord of Temptation by Lorraine Heath

Hated it. Hated it so much I had to stop 75 pages in and rant. Hated, hated, hated it. And I love Lorraine Heath. From any other author, Lord of Temptation would have hit the DNF pile without regret. From Lorraine Heath I had to struggle on in the belief that surely it would get better.

It did not.

Lord of Temptation is full of weary shortcuts that sketch in concepts  rather than paint portraits of real people. I didn't believe in any of these characters. Our hero is well detailed in my prior rant. He's a pirate captain and a lost lord and the sort of man who thinks of women as prey. Heath attempts to counter balance his creeptastic ways by having him passively take a few beatings and spend a lot of time thinking about what a creepier creep he'd be if not for our heroine's magically attracting ways. Our heroine is 85% social convention adherent and 15% sex positive adventurer. She's the sort of girl who can say things like "Look, I know I agreed to marry you, but five minutes ago I was banging that guy I told you I wasn't into like a shutter in a storm. Let's still get hitched, okay?" After she and her fiance work through that epic moment of truth and arrive on the morning of their wedding she asks him to stand up for her while she marries someone else.  Because it would be good for her reputation. Since I was desperate to like anyone in this novel, her refusal to be a consistent character (unless stunningly self absorbed was the object) irked me. Granted, her fiance doesn't love her but it's still all kinds of tacky from a woman who has already embarrassed the man half a dozen other ways.

My nickname for the hero, The Pirate Stalker, was more apt than I could have predicted when I first applied it. He spends more time thinking about how he usually leaves women, how when he is done with them he just disposes of them, than he does the heroine. Sleeping with the heroine is high on his list. Not having the heroine change him is right up there too. This was the sort of book where the hero spends 90% of his time whining about how the heroine is trapping him with her magic vagina. She wants things he doesn't. In real life we call that irreconcilable differences. In Romanceland it often means they haven't sexxed their problems away yet. So they have at until they do. Compounding my inability to care about this shallow pond is the unrealistic sibling relationship. In the prior book three young boys escape certain death and vow to return for their revenge. They plan their return for ten years out (legally dead at seven, but never mind that). This book resumes events two years after the return. The three brothers are still emotionally estranged, if cordial. This leads Heath to write some truly ridiculous scenes. Tristan (the hero) barges into his brother's Rafe's office (after a two year gap) to demand information on the heroine. Rafe tells him he has a nephew and Tristan is like, ok, cool, so about my question? These men are so far apart that even the news of a child isn't transmitted between them but they can barge in and out of each other's homes without challenge? Later Tristan does almost the exact same thing to his other brother. "Hi, give me what I want. Ok, bye." Whose life works like that?

You can't even cheer on the side characters. The Pirate Stalker has his own stalker, a deluded young woman determined to chain him to her side on the basis of nothing. He refuses her to her face and continually shows preference to another. Of course she steps forward and claims he is her lover. Then, scant pages later, she sits in public, in society, openly, at his surprise wedding where she is easily subdued by a whisper. Her eyes open and she realizes she's been ignoring the man for her all along. Since said man is willing to move past years of deluded thinking and a false accusation of seduction, I suppose she's right. Mental, but right. This is the sort of shortcut plotting that passes for depth in Lord of Temptation. I'm fighting to give the book two stars when I do my Amazon review because there are truly worse books out there, I just don't think Lorraine Heath wrote them. If you're looking for escapist sexxy times 1978 flashback pirate pages, Lord of Temptation is for you. It was absolutely not for me.

Review: Right State by Mat Johnson and Andrea Mutti

Political commentary is hard to do correctly. I'd love to tell you that Mat Johnson has pulled it off but he falls into a familiar pitfall. There is no one human in Right State. These are puppets we've played with before. While obviously coming in from a liberal viewpoint, Johnson isn't that far from Frank Miller's recent conservative ravings. Johnson is gentler and less bigoted but still delivers a book without any relatable characters. There is no one for the reader to walk beside in  Right State. The most sympathetic character is a heavy handed stand in for a point of view. I leave Right State unsure of it's agenda. Nothing here is likely to shed light to anyone else. If you are a conservative Right State will feed your belief that liberals consider you ill educated at best and a racist head case at worst. If you are a liberal it oversimplifies the appeal of the far right political movement. There is a danger in assuming your idealogical opponent to be fundamentally different from yourself.

Ted Akers is a pundit. He speaks passionately for money without deeply believing his own words. He is rhetoric in a suit spreading a toxic point of view for profit. He is, of course, a good guy. No one ever thinks they are the problem. Right State has a strong set up here. Several far right pundits have recanted their past beliefs. Discovering you are part of the problem is not a simple journey to take. Instead of a gradual discovery of his own blindness, Akers is quickly immersed in a full fledged conspiracy. Reluctantly drafted to thwart a death threat against America's second black liberal president (no, Right State is not a futuristic thriller) Akers finds himself surrounded by extras from Deliverance. These undereducated militants consider Ted Akers a national hero.

I want to pause here to refute the easy assumption that the patriot / militia movement is made up of cult leaders and dim thinkers. The election of President Obama may have galvanized them, but it did not create them. I have known sophisticated, intelligent, articulate people who have moved deeper and deeper into these movements over the last fifteen years. To conflate an extreme far right belief with insanity is to underestimate the attraction of this movement. What the KKK was to the 1960's, they are to us today. A plot on the level that Akers is sent to unravel would not consist of one crazed cult figure and dozens of dimwitted followers. While crazed cult figures and dimwitted followers can certainly exist in any party it lessons the impact of Akers awakening to have it precipitated by such a group. It also relegates Right State into a preach-to-the-choir stance. This book will no more reach across the divide than Miller's Holy Terror. This is a shame.

Akers, of course, discovers there is more at work behind the scenes than he realized. The militants are being manipulated by forces high in the opposition party, the party Akers once defended. His disillusionment is as swift as it is brutal. For the reader, it's a bit of a yawn. How much more compelling  would Akers awakening in place have been? How much could Johnson have said about our broken system of shouting if Akers awoke after a successful plot? If the catalyst was not being tossed down the rabbit hole but awakening in Wonderland and realizing the cost? What if the revelations in Akers came from the implementation of the change he advocated for? Right State is a lost opportunity. Johnson tells the story of a man confronting the crazy fringe he inspired. It may be the tale Johnson set out to tell but it is a well worn and cliched one. The fish in this barrel have already been shot. Johnson is better than this material and I hope he takes another shot at our great divide. Right State was all wrong for me.

Review: Brave by Pixar

Hey look, Pixar used a girl. Check out that weapon! Merida is going to use her abilities in a traditionally male arena to win recognition of her equality, right? Yeah. Not so much. In fact, Merida is going to realize that her true power lies in submission. It's going to be so awesome. Unless you have an abuse background and then it might be traumatic. Let's get to it!

I saw Brave in a group of six people. Three adults, three kids. Of the adults, two have an abuse background. Of the kids - well that's for them to decide, isn't it? Anyway, the children and one adult proclaimed Brave "Heartfelt, life affirming family fun." No really, someone said that. The other two adults hated it for different reasons. The first adult felt Brave was antifeminist, normalized domestic violence, telegraphed it's intentions, lacked charm and changed characters to suit the needs of the plot. The other adult was vaguely traumatized and wished walking out halfway through had been an option. But the rendering was cool.

For me, Brave failed on every level. (Since this will make me the least popular reviewer on the internet, I'm going to explain why in detail. You might want to see the film first then come back, because I will be talking about all major plot points.) We meet Merida in the traditional pre-titles happy family opening sequence. Then a bear ruins it all. Instead of semi-orphaning Merida as one might expect, the bear just traumatizes her father. He has bear issues. It's like, his thing. Merida's father wants her to be able to take care of herself, despite being a Princess. (The faux Scots things is all over Brave but I will leave that for someone else.) Merida's mother, who wears her hair tightly bound and extra long to show her feminine strength, wants Merida to play the dulcimer and meet the domestic pinnacles of princessdom she herself holds. In what is meant to be a send up of princess culture, Merida's mom rattles off all those traditional values while Merida rolls her eyes. Too bad the film undermines that. To begin with, Merida's father dwarfs The Incredible Hulk. Merida's mother is a slight and beautiful wisp. So the only thing Merida gets from her father is her hair. A hulking muscle bound Princess? Please. Merida's mother even complains that Merida overeats, because a Princess has an eating disorder. It's ok. Merida really only eats the occasional apple. Her plate of cookies is just for show. And her brothers. They can eat what they want because, you know, boys.

Mostly Merida's mom is just impatient with her willful teenage daughter. Things don't boil over until Merida's mother announces that the clans have been invited to compete for Merida's hand in marriage. Merida understandably balks at this announcement. Her mother tells her not to be silly, it's just marriage. Even she was nervous when she was handed off. Let's take a second here. Merida's appetite is unacceptable. Her physical prowess is unacceptable. Pimping her out to the neighbors is just fine. (Traditional family values for the win.) Merida attempts to use the traditional rules of the firstborn being able to compete for the hand of the princess to circumvent the bartering of her sexuality for social order. This infuriates her mother. Repeatedly Merida is told she doesn't know what she's done. Unless someone is allowed to marry her (read, have nonconsensual sex with her for life) the kingdoms will go to war. This message is repeatedly driven home to Merida in a number of ways. Without the Queen's calming and stoic voice controlling them the men fall into violent chaos. Without the right to marry Merida, conflict breaks out. The only thing holding these base animal men back is the dulcet and accepting tones of a confined woman. Okay then.

Moving on from the landmine of sex trafficking and young girls, we encounter Merida's plan to save herself. She runs off to cry. That's about it. She yells at her mother, and storms out. She doesn't set out to lead her own life. She doesn't open an archery school. She doesn't take a meaningful step toward independence because that is what a boy would do. Girls flounce. The magic of the forest leads her to a Miyazaki style crone in the woods who sells her a way to poison her beloved mother. To be fair to Merida, the bear obsessed witch never says the word poison. Neither does Merida. She wants to change her mother (not herself) and thus change her fate. She doesn't want independence or a solution - she wants to control her controlling mother and thus alter in some unspecified and therefore clearly unimportant way, her future. The witch is like hey, I did this once before and it really didn't work out so well but if you're paying, I'm playing. Merida tricks her mother into eating the poisoned cake.  Her mother promptly turns into a bear. Wow! A bear! (Hey wasn't there another bear at the start of this movie?) Merida is like, I didn't ask for a bear. I just asked a complete stranger to feed mind altering chemicals to my mom so she'd stop being such a drag. WTF, bear?

The point of the bear is twofold. The first is for Merida to show her mother that the life skills she gained from her father were not useless. The second is to normalize domestic violence. Merida quickly realizes that since her mother is a bear, if her father sees her she will be murdered. This is all Merida's fault. If she had just let herself be pimped out, none of this would have happened. Later, Merida's mother attacks her and lays open her arm. Merida assures her regretful mother that it is Merida's fault. If Merida hadn't acted so hastily and foolishly, her mother wouldn't have hurt her. (That's right kids, it's always your fault.) Merida's father sees the torn clothes of Merida's mother and decides the bear has eaten her. The only way to avenge her death is to kill the bear. The bear that is actually his wife. If you change to the point that your husband doesn't recognize you (although all four of your children do) he will kill you (because he loves you so much) and it will be your daughter's fault. Men are scary irrational creatures women barely hold in check and upsetting that balance has terminal consequences. Merida has to keep her mother alive, control her massive father, keep the kingdom from going to war, and apologize about fifty times. If she had only been a little bit skinnier and a little bit sluttier none of this would be happening.

Of course it is through her brains and her brawn that Merida wins the day and saves the kingdom, right? Well, not so much. Mostly it is through accepting her fate. Merida apologizes a bunch more and demurely walks into a crowd of warring men to use her placid feminine voice to calm them and agree to marry at once so no one has to die. Her mother, still a bear, has seen that Merida holds more value than her stone face and untouched vagina, so she intervenes by giving Merida permission to refuse the marriage. Well, sort of. Merida postpones the marriage by suggesting that free will be given in the choosing of sex partners. No one is really into this until the young men agree that maybe they don't want to sleep with Merida either. The fathers agree that Merida will be courted by the sons and choose one later, maybe after falling in love, thus deferring the still planned upon matrimonial ending. Or course her mother is still a bear and her father still wants to kill her. Merida has to rush upstairs and do some sewing (really) run after her enraged father, fight him off to defend her mother, then cry an awful lot and beg her mother's forgiveness. You see, Merida's mom has always been there for her. All she asked of Merida was one little thing (her entire life) and Merida was so ungrateful that she refused, poisoned her, and brought the kingdom to ruin. If only Merida had just done what was expected of her everyone would be safe and her father wouldn't murder her mother or brothers.

Well, I feel empowered, how about you?

Merida breaks the curse, the other bear is revealed (and defeated) the kingdom is happy, etc. Merida's mother learns to let her hair down a bit (literally) Merida learns her proper place, and with his women returned to their roles the king settles down and doesn't kill anyone. Along the way some small children dig around in a buxom maid's breasts and millions of young girls learn valuable lessons. You can be whoever you want, as long as you have permission. Control over your own body is granted by others. Strength is nice to have, but it's not what really counts in the end. Love means always having to say you're sorry. They wouldn't hurt you if you weren't so difficult. It really is your fault. Crying can totally solve things.

I have long defended Disney's Princesses. I will make a case for the ability to be empowered by any of their willowy young beauty queens. I have to make an exception for Merida. That chick is toxic and so is her whole movie. Thankfully the youngest girl in our group said "Ok, I don't see why Merida had to say she was sorry though." There's hope for the next generation.

Review: Third Grave Dead Ahead by Darynda Jones

I didn't like it.

I'm so incredibly disappointed by this that I can't think how to begin. I've been cheerleading the Charley Davidson series as the best thing to happen to light and ridiculous paranormal since Sookie Stackhouse. Third Grave Dead Ahead has me wondering if I will ever read another volume. Remember that moment in the Harper Connelly series where you realized Harris really was going all in on the pseudo incest? It's sort of like that. The abuse dynamics in Third Grave are turned way, way up. Intolerably hot. It's not even the sort of abuse dynamic where you can say "But he doesn't hit her!" because he does. He absolutely does. Then there's the painful info dumping. (If you want to hear 23 times that Charley bound Reyes into his corporeal form, then be my guest. Walk right past this review and get to reading.)

Everything you'd need to know for a book four can be extracted from book three and summarized into two sentences. The overall plot gets two sentences of advancement. Possibly one if I chose my words carefully. From the opening chapter to the last third of the book the story drags it's heels. Opening with a clown named Ronald (classic Charley but not an attention grabber) the reader is bogged down in multiple and lengthy asides recapping the prior two books. This is not an author who has grasped the delicate art of giving just enough to keep the new reader engaged without destroying the very soul of the established fan. Not even a little bit. So, strike one for Holy Info Dump, strike two for plodding pace (for the first 2/3) and strike three for abuse dynamics. Adding insult to injury is the final plot reveal.

Charley gets off on Reyes being the super bad boy son of Satan guy. Attempts are made at establishing triangles but it's always been clear that Charley is as hung up on Reyes as Bella is on Edward. He is the one boy in all the world for her. While Reyes was in a coma all the dire warnings from people that knew him better fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, Charley had crazy incorporeal sex or was saved from imminent harm by her dark lover. (Can we take a second here for a PSA? I don't care how great the guy is in the sack, if people are telling you that you don't know him, that he isn't the guy you think he is, that he is bad news and the ultimate destroyer you better wake up to face some reality. Every damn time the news story starts with "She thought she understood his soul" and ends with caskets.) Ok, so Charley, banging Reyes. Reyes so misunderstood. Reyes so damaged. In this book Reyes is awake and angry at Charley. If she tries to sleep for even a second, she is instantly having "angry sex" or as I like to call it, rape. Her enjoyment is not her consent. If she was consenting, she'd be sleeping. Mainlining coffee for 14 days is not consent. Reyes claims she is raping him, as he cannot stop his actions. According to Reyes, Charley is totally asking for it, controlling his actions, and forcing him to come to her when she slumbers. He is angry at her for her actions in waking life, for her lack of knowledge of her supernatural side and her having nonconsensual sex with him. All of this is deeply problematic. Then he starts hurting her. Which she punishes him for by kissing someone else. FFS, really? He kidnaps her, threatens to kill her family (oh, but he doesn't MEAN it), knocks her out, blackens her eye, duct tapes her mouth, ties her, handcuffs her,  sets her up to be stalked and tortured by a crazed killer and tells her she brought it on herself. She's too attractive. She's too independent. She forces him to hurt her. The author tries to offset this by showing Reyes being horribly abused in childhood (after coming to earth seeking out Charley) and being badly injured when Charley naps (forcing him asleep as well). So when he is injured, it is her fault. When she is injured, it is her fault. Things are Charley's fault. All the time. How hot is that?

Right. Not at all.

Charley's response is to get angry and ... not much else. She still cries over him, she still obsesses over him, cusses him out and kisses a biker. She's so independent and self actualized! Charley has gone from interesting character to absolute victim. As always, Jones telegraphs her plot moves. Given that the Davidson books are WTF popcorn reads, I can't really fault her for that. I can fault her that one of those moves had me silently begging her to stop. I absolutely never use the phrase "jump the shark". I hate it. I hated the Happy Days episode it's based on, I hate the way it's used like salt on the salad of internet conversations. I loathe it. You know what I loathe more? The spoiler I'm about to reveal. Charley picks up a guardian. The angels of Heaven have sent her a Caretaker for protection against non-living beings. Yes, Charley gets a dead dog. A Rottweiler to be precise. Consider that shark well and truly jumped.

Review: The Beginner's Guide To Rakes by Suzanne Enoch

People are not happy with my Amazon review of this one, but I have to stand by it. Diane is bat-shit crazy. By any yardstick you care to use, she is dangerously unhinged. Oliver at first seems to be fairly balanced, if a walking STD but by the end of the book you see why these two crazy (and I do mean crazy) kids are together. I've seen a number of reviews focus on the title, completely ignoring the insanity contained within. Look, I like Suzanne Enoch but she's a roller coaster of an author. When she's good, she's very very good and when she's bad, well, Sweet Jesus. I got over the whole conflating I-95 with the turnpike thing in her West Palm Beach series, I got over half of the Adventurers Club, but I have no idea where we go from A Beginner's Guide To Rakes. Suzanne, it's not you but it is definitely, absolutely, positively Diane.

Ok, so let's spoil this one. There is no way to adequately represent how much Oliver needs a restraining order without doing so. When we meet Diane she is determined to open a gaming club. As a respectable young widow who lost everything to her dead husband's gaming ways, she has decided to turn the tables and become the house. Since her business partner has turned up dead, her solution is to blackmail a former lover (Oliver) into loaning her tens of thousands of dollars and training her (all female but not whores) staff so she can realize her dream. Forget the incredibly slender thread of blackmail she has. Forget that Oliver KNOWS she is a master forger. Just go with the fact that he will be blackmailed. Oliver knows she's a master forger because after her husband's death Diane forged all the non-entailed property deeds into her name. (Keep in mind, the rightful heir is the villain of this book. How DARE he want his family property after Diane suffered a bad marriage to his brother? All of that is hers!) Ok, so Crazy-pants Criminal is our heroine and Walking STD is our hero. (He's one of those guys who pulls out of one chick while thinking about banging another in a few minutes. How tedious of these women who want to be treated like actual beings instead of a vessel for his pleasure. How histrionic of them.)

Still with me?

So Diane has her all female gaming club in the renovated downstairs of her stolen home with her blackmailed ex-lover living upstairs. Diane hates Oliver. HATES him. (Dead bunnies in the bed hate. Shredded clothes dipped in her own blood hate. Crazy hate.) She hates him because after two great weeks in bed a few days after the death of her husband he left her. She carries a gun in her pocket, she is so angry. She checks drawers to make sure a gun is always at hand. She threatens to shoot him to get her money. A few days later after some flirty action, he kisses her and walks from the room. So she does what any bat-shit crazy heroine would do. She shoots him in the back. Which everyone treats as normal. Of course you would. Never mind infection, never mind lack of antibiotics, never mind that she is bat-shit crazy, who wouldn't shoot a guy after a kiss? Duh! It's not like it slows Oliver down. No infection, no disability in movement, no discomfort wearing his clothes - within two pages he is his old agile un-shot self. Now he checks the rooms for guns before dealing with her, so her staff keeps threatening to shoot him.

Soon Diane needs more money. When faced with a blackmailing bat-shit crazy gun-toting criminal who hates you, the obvious solution is to pay her to bang you. But not just bang you, Oliver has a whole romantic escapade planned. He left her high and dry after their two week fling because he was beginning to love her. Oliver, this isn't love, this is STOCKHOLM SYNDROME! Run, dude! Run fast and far!! Even worse, this book is sequel bait. We're going to meet more of the ladies in the gaming club and their psycho self justifying boss in later books. By the time Oliver breaks through her ceiling for sex (while the club is open, the hell?) I'd lost any concern for him either. Benchley, the rightful heir of the house is not the bad guy! Trying to get his property returned is not evil! Toward the end of the book Enoch seems to realize this and hastily makes Benchley a slimy gambler who blackmails our loving couple. It's a bit late. I can't even get into the society matrons demonstrating on the steps and being bought off with a charity version of Diane's successful Ladies Night, much less her tour of White's. I'm as much a fan of Romanceland as the next girl, no stickler for historical accuracy when a good tale is spun - but c'mon, son!

This book was one long WTF for me. It might be a brand killer, I have to sit and think about it for a time. Enoch and I, we had some good times together. We had some bad times together. But we've never had bat-shit crazy times before. I never want to read about Diane again, if this is the launch of a series I'm probably going to have to sit it out.

Retro Review: Mastered By Love by Stephanie Laurens

When you've been reviewing as long as I have you can't be expected to recall every word ever written. I've done reviewing as a paying gig (not currently) as a hobby (that would be this) and as that person at the party who won't stop talking to you.  I've seen a million books and failed to be rocked by them all. Still, when a comment notification came up in my inbox I was surprised to find that not only did I fail to recall this 2009 review - I failed to recall being a member of the site it was on. (It's totally me though, my password and everything.) While it punches a little harder than I would generally swing on It's My Genre, Baby I am going to reprint it here because it makes me laugh. (My joy is your reason for existing, duh.)

Also, I think I was high. I believe I was doing a lot of Cytoxan in those days. (Kids, if it has the word Tox, like in Toxin, it's not going to be as much fun as you think.) Um, if you're Stephanie Laurens you might want to stop reading now. I stand behind really not liking the book, but I'm not wanting to pull the wings off butterflies or anything like that. Kthxbye. Oh no, wait, no Kthxbye yet. What is up with this cover? Is that the world's largest dental dam? She's naked and really happy - he's kind of on her hip bone - I dunno, it's confusing me. This color purple is the exact color of the book I once painted my nails to match so boys would notice me on the beach. Somehow I thought if my nail color and book jacket were in harmony, it would be hot. I wasn't the smartest kid. (I'm not sure this review is going to argue for my adulthood. Let's be real - I wrote part of it to the tune of Kidnap The Sandy Claws.)

Ironically (is it?) I get this reminder of why I stopped reading Laurens just as a Viscount Breckenridge arc showed up in my mail. Fingers crossed, kids. Fingers crossed.

Title: Mastered By Love
Author: Stephanie James
Genre/Historical Period: Regencyland
Grade/Rating: Is there a G?
Summary: An absolute chore
Part of a Series?: Bastion Club (Finale)
Would I recommend this book?: Oh hell no
Planning to read anything else by this author?: Not anymore.

OMGZ you guys I hated this book soooooooo much.

And if that was the entire content of my review, I'd have exceeded the quality of the book already.

I don't know - I think this book would be popular with a tween looking for a great deal of sexual description without having to be caught reading an erotic book. It has it all. Pages and pages of all. From 'she was sopping wet already' to crimson silk sheets and blindfolds, it's like a checklist of sexual cliche and excess description. She can summarize a major plot scene in two lines, decades of his life in three paragraphs, but its dozens of pages of sex, a few paragraphs to set up the next day, and then back in bed.

She forgot to include the romance. But it's not erotic either. It's just tiring. Like trying to be interested in a poorly shot porn video your friends made when you haven't slept in hours and don't really care. The prevailing feeling is how soon can I get away from these people? It leaves you emotionally fatigued and diminishes everyone involved.

There are GREAT building blocks here - a spinster running the dukedom, the sudden and unexpected death of the estranged father, an international plot centered on a master traitor and the cadre of spies who've been hunting him, (and honestly, by the time the spy is revealed you realize the only way he ever beat anyone was by their being bone stupid) and multiple base born adult children existing on their estranged brother's estate.

Why use ANY of that when you have crimson silk sheets? And you've decided to make your all powerful hero inept and bungling? His study of people, his abilities to guess what they will do before they know themselves, all out the window in favor of a generic Tru Hero Who Sux At Luv. And the mastermind behind all the traitorous acts of the entire series? A bumbling freak who talks to himself incessantly. Seriously, he CANNOT shut up. He spends a page and a half while he thinks the heroine is out cold deciding how to rape and kill her best - like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman as a deranged killer. THIS is the guy who outwitted everyone?? He leaves the most mindnumbingly obvious clue to their location, but it doesn't matter, because Our Hero And His Buddies are TSTL and with a force of at least - well - more than three - decide the answer is for most of them to hide outside and make no noise while the other approaches via Certain Death Trap alone. I can think of at least seven different ways to approach the situation that are less idiotic than the one they choose - but hey. That lets the heroine be drugged, assaulted, murder someone, and then go back to her party!!!! No harm, no foul!

Did I mention they were passing out TSTL candy like it was Halloween? Cause they were. Which made me think of Mr. Talky the Villain Of Self Soundtracking as the missing member of the Nightmare Before Christmas Trio -

Kidnap the Chatelaine
Take her to the mill
Throw her on the big stone slab
And monologue at will.

I'm breaking up with her. Meredith Duran and I have been flirting lately, I think it's time to offer her the spot on my auto-buy list. I hope Stephanie Laurens doesn't go all stalker on me, she needs to understand that when she does me like that I have to move on for my own self respect. I wish her luck, there's someone for everyone, right?

Review: Silk Is For Seduction by Loretta Chase

Pity Loretta Chase.

At a certain point every successful author hits the invisible wall where no book can ever measure up to the book the reader thinks the author should have written. Either it's too this or it's not enough that. If you've really made it, they will claim that you phoned it in while sipping Mai Tai's on The Cartland or hired someone to write for you while you ate bonbons with Other Famous Writers and giggled about the ease with which one can dupe the book buying public.

So she can't win.

Loretta Chase could be forgiven for giving up or phoning it in considering nothing she writes is ever again going to surprise us with it's brilliance. With Silk Is For Seduction she's done neither. Chase has started a new series with an absolute joy of a heroine. Single mother, successful business woman, frantic older sister keeping too many balls in the air - Noirot is wonderful. I loved her clear eyed cynicism, her unapologetic ambition, her realistic parental fatigue and her willingness to say "Screw it" occasionally and embrace life. When we meet her, she's chasing a Duke. (Because there is always a Duke, isn't there?) Choosing the incredibly underused time between George IV and Victoria (Is this the first King William IV romance? I think it might be. I can't recall another.) Chase sets Noirot after the Duke intent on capturing his future wife's patronage. Not him.

The Duke isn't really there for me. When I think about him he's kind of great, but on the page he was The Guy Noirot Is Talking To. But hey, he's a Duke and apparently the only one around. He's into her being a working woman, he never degrades her for it. Over the course of the book he grows up a fair amount, he's good with kids, he knows how to apologize and to grovel if he needs to, but he's still The Duke to me. I was bracing myself for the moment where he asks her to give up her independence for love, but it never comes. He actually respects her. (I know!) So that's a win.

What keeps me from being over the moon about Silk for Seduction is a bit of a drag in the middle and a slice of the Master Race. When you start the book you know Noirot has the proper degree of inbreeding for  acceptance among the nobility, if not the proper amount of cash. The Duke has an annual income I calculated to be about 83 million bucks a year. (I dunno, you do that math, it's complicated due to fluctuations in buying power and stuff like that, but he has an income of 100K in 1830-whatever.) You'd think, with 83 million bucks a year, that he could just buy some friends if they don't like her. I guess not, because there are several mentions of Noirot having the right ancestry. It's not that she looks great (she does) speaks well (you know it) or has flawless manners (give that a check mark) she's one of the servants betters. His staff is all, oh, we can totally tell. She is the Princess to our Peas. That one, she's Nobility By Birth and all.

Look, I am not unfamiliar with the inbred classes. They are as varied as the rest of us. Take away their cell phones, dump them on Survivor, and you'd have a hard time basing personal worth on their DNA. I do not deny the class system or the realities of Ducal Mating, but c'mon. Even the wage slaves have to claim roses fall from her lips when she speaks? She can't just be a hard working single mom without the genetic stock showing through? It sort of does Noirot a disservice. She can't simply be a kick ass woman, she has to be a woman who is kick ass through the power of Eugenics. I'd rather she had one of those pyramids made out of drinking straws people hung over waterbeds in the 1970's. The science is roughly equivalent. (I had a fun fact for you as a reward for making it through that rant, but I think we'll just stop with Pyramid Power. That's fun enough.)