5/52 Books Read!
Awww yeah, keeping up with my reading goal! Granted, not with especially difficult or long reads, but whatever. Being neurotic about my leisure reading is not really the goal of my reading challenge.
Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie: runpunkrun recommended this after I read Bet Me, which was timely when I was in the mood for something inoffensive and rom-com-like to read. Sophie Dempsey goes to Temptation, Ohio with her sister to help film a documentary/movie for an actress friend. Sophie just wants everything to go smoothly so she can return to her wedding video business, but then she meets Temptation's mayor Phin Tucker, and small town politics, a murder mystery, and softcore porn ensue! This makes it seem slightly serious, but I assure you it is not.
Two Crusie novels in, and I begin to discern a pattern in her male leads. Cal from Bet Me and Phin are both casually confident, communicative, witty men. As a type, I find it far less objectionable than the alpha male rakes that so dominate the historical romance genre. Phin was also a pleasant surprise for being charmingly up for anything sex-wise, and despite Sophie starting out as the "vanilla" one, Crusie manages to avoid any of the gross cliches of that dynamic. Phin and Sophie's sex scenes have a nice sense of humor to them, and include some charming awkward moments that I don't usually see in romance novels.
All in all, I found Welcome to Temptation to be a fun contemporary romance. There's still stuff that had me boggling, namely how fast Phin and Sophie were ready to jump into commitment (another thing this book shares with Bet Me), and in general I'm kind of dubious about these relationships' relation to reality (like, do people really act like this?). But still, a perfectly pleasant read!
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho: This is a sweet and fun little novella available for free via the Kindle Lending Library for those who have Amazon Prime. Jade Yeo is trying to make it as a writer in Roaring Twenties London, and she wants a little adventure before she settles down. Jade (or Geok Huay if only any Londoners could pronounce it) is charming and delightful as a narrator, and it's fun to read about her essentially cheerfully subverting romance tropes along with the occasionally sharp and wry critique of colonialism and racism. I'd have read a novel's worth of this, but as it is, it's a lovely confection of a romance novella.
Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore: The third book in Cashore's Graceling series set in the Seven Kingdoms, where certain people have "Graces" or particular talents, this one follows Bitterblue eight years after Graceling, when Bitterblue is queen of Monsea. This is a good companion to Marchetta's Lumatere books, because like them, it's about the aftermath of a kingdom's trauma. If this is to be a new trend in fantasy, I'm very pleased. It's a refreshing change from the standard fantasy formulas so many of us are used to, the ones that end with the bad guy being defeated hooray. After all, it's the part after the bad guy is defeated that's probably the hardest.
Bitterblue's kingdom has a lot to recover from: Bitterblue's father Leck ruled for 35 years, during which he used his Grace of making people do or believe whatever he said to enact unspeakable horrors. Bitterblue is left trying to heal a kingdom that's trying to run headlong away from a past it can't even look at anymore. If this is meant to be analogous to a real nation recovering from the rule of a violent dictator, I don't think it entirely works. It's a bit muddled as political fantasy, though I do appreciate that Cashore is challenging the inherent conservatism of fantasy by having Katsa and Po and friends as part of a Council that essentially goes around destabilizing monarchies and installing better rulers or republics.
All that said, while I enjoyed Bitterblue, it was kind of overlong and sloppy. I don't really remember enough about Graceling and Fire to say whether or not it fits in well with them. The only real quibble I have about Bitterblue's continuity with the other books is that Katsa and Po didn't seem like they were eight years on in their relationship. Worth a read if you like the series and want some fantasy that doesn't involve a quest or defeating obvious bad guys.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/423357.html, with
comments there.
Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie: runpunkrun recommended this after I read Bet Me, which was timely when I was in the mood for something inoffensive and rom-com-like to read. Sophie Dempsey goes to Temptation, Ohio with her sister to help film a documentary/movie for an actress friend. Sophie just wants everything to go smoothly so she can return to her wedding video business, but then she meets Temptation's mayor Phin Tucker, and small town politics, a murder mystery, and softcore porn ensue! This makes it seem slightly serious, but I assure you it is not.
Two Crusie novels in, and I begin to discern a pattern in her male leads. Cal from Bet Me and Phin are both casually confident, communicative, witty men. As a type, I find it far less objectionable than the alpha male rakes that so dominate the historical romance genre. Phin was also a pleasant surprise for being charmingly up for anything sex-wise, and despite Sophie starting out as the "vanilla" one, Crusie manages to avoid any of the gross cliches of that dynamic. Phin and Sophie's sex scenes have a nice sense of humor to them, and include some charming awkward moments that I don't usually see in romance novels.
All in all, I found Welcome to Temptation to be a fun contemporary romance. There's still stuff that had me boggling, namely how fast Phin and Sophie were ready to jump into commitment (another thing this book shares with Bet Me), and in general I'm kind of dubious about these relationships' relation to reality (like, do people really act like this?). But still, a perfectly pleasant read!
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho: This is a sweet and fun little novella available for free via the Kindle Lending Library for those who have Amazon Prime. Jade Yeo is trying to make it as a writer in Roaring Twenties London, and she wants a little adventure before she settles down. Jade (or Geok Huay if only any Londoners could pronounce it) is charming and delightful as a narrator, and it's fun to read about her essentially cheerfully subverting romance tropes along with the occasionally sharp and wry critique of colonialism and racism. I'd have read a novel's worth of this, but as it is, it's a lovely confection of a romance novella.
Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore: The third book in Cashore's Graceling series set in the Seven Kingdoms, where certain people have "Graces" or particular talents, this one follows Bitterblue eight years after Graceling, when Bitterblue is queen of Monsea. This is a good companion to Marchetta's Lumatere books, because like them, it's about the aftermath of a kingdom's trauma. If this is to be a new trend in fantasy, I'm very pleased. It's a refreshing change from the standard fantasy formulas so many of us are used to, the ones that end with the bad guy being defeated hooray. After all, it's the part after the bad guy is defeated that's probably the hardest.
Bitterblue's kingdom has a lot to recover from: Bitterblue's father Leck ruled for 35 years, during which he used his Grace of making people do or believe whatever he said to enact unspeakable horrors. Bitterblue is left trying to heal a kingdom that's trying to run headlong away from a past it can't even look at anymore. If this is meant to be analogous to a real nation recovering from the rule of a violent dictator, I don't think it entirely works. It's a bit muddled as political fantasy, though I do appreciate that Cashore is challenging the inherent conservatism of fantasy by having Katsa and Po and friends as part of a Council that essentially goes around destabilizing monarchies and installing better rulers or republics.
All that said, while I enjoyed Bitterblue, it was kind of overlong and sloppy. I don't really remember enough about Graceling and Fire to say whether or not it fits in well with them. The only real quibble I have about Bitterblue's continuity with the other books is that Katsa and Po didn't seem like they were eight years on in their relationship. Worth a read if you like the series and want some fantasy that doesn't involve a quest or defeating obvious bad guys.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/423357.html, with
comments there.