Review: Who Ya Wit' 3 by Brenda Hampton

* This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins.

Brenda Hampton’s Who Ya Wit’ 3 makes up the first half of Carl Weber Presents Full Figured Plus Size Divas 5. I have a lot to say about Who Ya Wit’ 3 so I’ll leave the second story of the anthology for a later review. After a number of Kindle samples that didn’t compel me to read more, it was almost a surprise when Brenda Hampton caught my attention. WhileWho Ya Wit’ 3 is part of an ongoing series, I had no difficulty following the storyline. Dez, a forty something single mother of two, is in and out of a difficult relationship with the younger Roc. The respectability politics at play between them seem to impact them more than the age difference.

Dez is very frank with her sexuality. (While the content is low overall, it’s very direct.) Dez is a woman who has sex when she pleases, with whom she pleases. She knows what she wants and asks for it bluntly. Dez also  harshly judges the sexuality of others. Her first marriage ended when her husband was unfaithful, something she is still very damaged by. There is a married character who is serially unfaithful. Dez has an extremely low opinion of him and his lovers. When Dez thinks her son may be considering an affair she blames all three parties. Yet Roc has multiple sexual partners. Dez pursues Roc while he is living with his pregnant girlfriend. She does not consider herself to be trash nor Roc a cheat and neither does anyone around her. The dividing line appears to be marriage.

Hampton definitely keeps the reader engaged. I was completely uncertain which man Dez was going to end up with, or for how long. Roc is unusually in touch with his emotions and expresses them without apology. This is definitely a Bad Boy tale with a bit of Hood Made Good around the edges. Roc swears, gets high and has children with multiple women. He’s also romantic, in touch with who Dez is and emotionally available. The dynamic between Dez and Roc seems pretty toxic at points, but it’s a different toxicity than I’m used to reading. While Roc is obviously the hero of the series I am not sure he’s the hero of Dez’s life.

Having promised a plus size heroine, Hampton delivers. Dez is a size 14/16 who enjoys eating. She considers losing weight when her self esteem is low but is encouraged by friends to worry more about enjoying her life and less about her size. Dez considers herself attractive, as do the men in her life. She has realistic concerns about money. When she has it she spends it and when she doesn’t she scales back. There are no tycoons in Dez’s world. Everyone works for their cash. I found Who Ya Wit’ 3 to be much closer to the working class contemporary romances I’d like to read than I expected from the pitch. Hampton is not an especially polished author but her conversational style works for her story. (It reminded me strongly of Charlaine Harris.) I think I will be back for another book.

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.

Review: Delusion In Death by J.D. Robb

*The world does not need another In Death review. I understand that.

I've been comfort reading after the trauma of breaking up with a few favorite authors. Delusion In Death is number 503 of Nora Robert's popular futuristic crime series and... ok, it's really only number thirty-something. Robb is good about including background detail for new readers without so much detail that long time readers feel bogged down - with one exception. Eve. Put her childhood to rest. Please.

I understand a background as dysfunctional as hers never leaves but at a certain point you've got to just get on with getting on. Each entry to the In Death series occurs in a very short interval of time. Because of the major changes in New York to Dallas Robb is still tying off loose ends with Delusion In Death. Stop already. Where Eve's issues were once compelling and fresh, they've become tiresome. I don't know how new readers would take to Eve without a full background (my guess is just fine) but long time readers have had it. Take away Eve's dysfunction and you still have strong procedurals with interesting side characters. Several successful tv shows have been launched off the same dynamics. People like this stuff. Go with it. Less dead parents, more Morris. Or someone. (But not Dr. Mira.) Oh, and if you tell us who the candy thief is you'd better end the series. (I personally believe Eve eats her own candy in a trance while contemplating how NY became so full of epic crazies that even Batman couldn't keep up. Otherwise she'd keel over in a hypoglycemic event before chapter two.)

Right, so THIS time the epic crazies are New Yorkers. (I live in God's Waiting Room so the idea that a pack of lunching New Yorkers would suddenly turn and eat each other's faces without any visible motivation was completely plausible. Possibly even mundane. If I was Eve I'd tell the owner they should've honored the Early Bird coupons at lunch (because lunch is earlier than dinner) and wrapped the case. Eve never even looked at that angle, which is pretty lucky since diner discounts were not the motive. It doesn't matter much what the motive was. People read In Death to visit with the crime solvers more than criminals. Stuff happened, here's why. What makes In Death a comfort read is the respect. Respect for the reader, respect for the characters, respect from Eve for the dead. Death isn't fawned over. It's a horrible thing, done by horrible people. Even if the victim is a horrible person, it's not right.

Too much romantic suspense is rooted in misogyny. Women chained to things, women skinned alive, women trapped in cages, women running for freedom only to be cut down. Women stacked like cordwood in a fictional charnel house. Here are the women, let's kill a bunch of them and be sad. It's sick. It's not what I read for. Some of my formerly beloved authors are becoming tough reads. In the world of Eve Dallas women are murdered, but men are too. Victims are often saved and when they are not, they are mourned. It's not the begging cries of terror she lingers over but the satisfaction of justice done. The books close with the satisfaction of knowing she's built a solid case that should see a conviction. I never saw The Silence Of The Lambs. I stopped reading horror more than a decade ago. To everyone their fiction, and in mine I want less time in the minds of sadists and sociopaths. I want more time in the minds of people trying to live ethically, even when faced with impossible situations. Delusion In Death was a great chapter in the series but more importantly it didn't make me feel sad when I ended it. I felt entertained, relaxed and ready to read again. There's not enough of that going around lately.

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: I'd Like To Apologize To Every Teacher I Ever Had By Tony Danza

First, the title. This thing is Fiona Apple long. I'd Like To Apologize To Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year As A Rookie Teacher At Northeast High. That's like, 19 words. Let's just call it My Bad and move on. You know, the way one of Danza's students tells him her name and he thinks "Oh, I'll just call her Nick." (But Black Nick cause we already have White Nick.) My Bad is kind of awesome. It sidesteps most of the Rich Man Teaching pitfalls to deliver a straightforward look at what standardized testing has done to American's teachers and students. Of course Danza's students need more resources, better home lives and a more supportive system. But Danza doesn't condescend. When he encourages his kids to grab the opportunities they do have he never comes off as above them. Danza speaks to the students and the reader directly, as an imperfect man in an imperfect world.

In doing so he does the teaching memoir a great service. People who would never read a book about schools (unless it had recently been made into an uplifting Oscar film) will read My Bad because Tony Danza wrote it. His celebrity will illustrate that the grades given your child's school are not an indication of the passion or performances within it. His writing style is open and engaging. While nothing in the book is particularly surprising, the journey is pleasant. Danza admits that he struggled greatly with 20% of the average teacher workload and far more resources. He illustrates how the tasks we are asking our teachers to perform are impossible. As well, he doesn't fall for the One Teacher Who Cares myth that many teaching memoirs do. He recognizes that the teachers care. It is our society that does not.

My Bad is imperfect, like the subject it covers. Danza is a product of his times. While he works to keep race out of the book there are times he slips. Faced with a racist parent he blames "the culture" of the other children. A student on a downward slide demonstrates her unhappiness through the "extreme hairstyles" of an afro or cornrows. His good old days are of a certain tiny slice of American life. These things appear to be based more in ignorance than bias, as Danza otherwise presents himself as an open and rational man. Danza admits his imperfections to the reader, often harsher on himself than we would be. As a result he comes across as sincere and charismatic. Working in the story of a failed reality series (the excuse for his year at Northeast) Danza is desperate not to fail his students. He certainly doesn't fail the reader. My Bad is well worth checking out.