Bat Cave Update and Mini-Reviews

The lack of blog activity of late has been a case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak. Work has been nutty.  Yeah, yeah - lather, rinse, repeat.  I'm serious - it's been nutty.  Library grand openings, my staff helping out to fill in for short staffing situations elsewhere, a long-time employee retiring, trying to bring new vendors on board - it's been nutty.  

On top of that, now seemed like a peachy time to look for a new place to live.  Good news, we found a place!  Even better news - it's going to cut my work commute IN HALF!  The bad news?  We've been in the current Bat Cave for 10 years and good Lord WHY did we keep all this crap?!?!  So weekends have been spent cleaning out clutter, figuring out what will be downsized (the new Bat Cave is a teensy bit smaller), and starting the packing process.  We'll do the actual, physical moving the first weekend on November.  I cannot wait!

I also continue to not be reading much.  I did burn through September's TBR Challenge read in one late night sitting, but beyond that?  It's been kind of a slog.  But here's a few things I've gotten through that are worth, at least, a quick mention.

Royal Crush is the third book in Meg Cabot's middle-grade series set in her Princess Diaries world.  This go around Olivia is awaiting for her big sister, Mia (now ruler of Genovia) to give birth to her twins.  As if that weren't exciting enough?  Her school is gearing up for a field trip to the Royal School Winter Games and then there's the realization that she has her *gasp* first ever crush.

Yes, I read a book meant for junior high schoolers.  I have no shame!  I love this world that Cabot has created.  It's like pink bows, glitter, cotton candy and unicorns all rolled into one.  It's my happy place and as long as she keeps writing books set in this universe, I'll be hard pressed to give them up.

Grade = B

Ask the Cards a Question is the second book in Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone mystery series.  Muller is credited with creating the first female PI character and this entry was originally published in 1982.  This time out there's a murder in Sharon's San Francisco apartment building.  Molly Antonio was the nicest person in the entire building, who would want her dead?  There's Molly's unique relationship with her somewhat estranged husband, the creepy fortune teller, Madame Anya, who foretold evil was in store for Molly, and Sharon's BFF and current house guest, Linnea, who has fallen into a bottle ever since her husband left her for a younger woman.

I first read this when I was a teen and it was surprising how much of the story came back to me.  It's interesting that back in 1982 Muller wrote a diverse San Francisco setting (completely reasonable) when so many current authors struggle with showing diversity in their stories.  That said?  Some of these characterizations haven't necessarily aged well - although the worst of them was definitely Sharon's Irish superintendent who always has a beer in his hand.  That said, solid mystery and what I always preferred about Sharon over, say, Grafton's Kinsey Millhone character is that Sharon actually has some people skills and, you know, friends.

Grade = B-

Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase was a recommendation I picked up from author Laura K. Curtis.  As Laura indicates, it's a book that defies easy classification.  It's not a tragedy, and yet it kind of is.  It's not a romance, but it is romantic.  It's not a Gothic, per se, but it definitely has Gothic elements.  It follows the lives of the Alton children in the late 1960s when they arrive at their country estate, Black Rabbit Hall, for the Easter holiday.  Naturally, something bad happens and it sends the family careening down a path of tragedy, drama, and secrets.

I can see why Laura liked this and recommended it.  It's well written, there's a good story, and the atmosphere is compelling.  That said I found it really, really slow.  I don't think I could have read this and even listening to it on audio was a bit of a slog.  Also, while not a tragedy, per se, there's a sense of doom that hovers over the narrative for nearly the entire book.  I found it suffocating.  This is actually a compliment to the author, but it was something that I don't think I was in the right frame of mind for at the time I was listening.  That said, I'm glad I persevered because I did like the ending and the author ties up all the drama leaving us on an "up note."  But I'm also not in any hurry to pick up another one of her books.  Maybe one day.  

Side note, one of the best villains I've read in a long while. 

Grade = C+

#TBRChallenge 2017: Jared's Runaway Woman

The Book: Jared's Runaway Woman by Judith Stacy

The Particulars: Historical western romance, Harlequin Historical #801, 2006, Out of Print, Available Digitally

Why Was It In Wendy's TBR?: I tend to like Judith Stacy more often than not - plus hello?  Harlequin Historical. A western.  Of course it's in my TBR.

The Review: I'm not going to lie - this book is problematic in a major way but what it gets right it REALLY gets right - and I literally inhaled this baby in one sitting.  As in I started it very late at night thinking "a chapter or two before bed" and there I was around 1:30AM finally finishing the last chapter and too wired from my gorging at the book trough to go to sleep until around 2:30AM.  Given the sad state of my reading mojo, heck yeah this one is getting a decent final grade from me.

Jared Mason is the oldest brother in a New Money family that made their fortune in construction.  All the brothers are in the business, including the one closest to Jared's age - Clark.  Clark met his wife, Beth, while he was in Virginia on a job.  They fell in love, got married - and then tragedy struck. Clark died in an accident.  Beth shipped his body and belongings home to his family in New York and then poof!  Vanished.  Nearly five years later, Jared's mother finally decides to go through Clark's things and finds a half-finished letter.  Beth had just found out she was pregnant!  She vanished after Clark's death, and Amelia wants her grandchild.  Pinkertons are hired and the trail leads to Crystal Springs, Colorado.  Jared puts a job in Maine on hold and heads to Colorado, determined to find his brother's widow and his niece and/or nephew.

Kinsey Templeton has been running for five years, working menial jobs and doing her best to care for her son, Sam, alone.  After years of looking over her shoulder she's landed in Crystal Springs - working two jobs to make ends meet.  She likes it in town and Sam is happy.  Still, she tries to check every stage and train that rolls into town - something that has gotten trickier of late since the town is booming.  That's when she spies Jared Mason and she knows that her luck as run out.

Jared never met his brother's wife, so while Jared and Kinsey don't have a shared history, I would still classify this as an Enemies to Lovers story.  They're at cross purposes.  Kinsey, like most mothers, will fight until her last dying breath to protect her son - and that includes protection from the Mason family.  Jared will do anything to bring his nephew home, into the family fold, so the child can claim his birthright.  At first blush, he wants Kinsey to come back to New York as well - the Masons will take care of her - and is shocked when she outright refuses to the point of belligerence.  She's determined they stay, and Jared is determined that Sam goes back to New York.  The first half of this book is basically the hero and heroine waging war against each other with 5-year-old Sam caught in the middle.

So yeah, it's not exactly pleasant even though the author does have a light touch and God bless her, Kinsey ain't no pushover.  She's a heroine who will fight dirty.

It gets better in the second half, which is where this story really sings.  For one thing, earlier in the proceedings, the author throws in a really well done twist.  Then we finally get to the moment where Kinsey and Jared come to an uneasy truce.  This involves him staying in town, getting roped in to building a new church (the old one burned down), the various small town dramas that fill out some nicely done secondary story lines, getting to know his nephew...and Kinsey.  There's an immediate attraction between Kinsey and Jared bordering on Insta-Lust, but instead of jumping into bed right away, the author unfolds it as a slow burn with an undercurrent of tension that sizzles between them throughout the story (aside from the tension involving Sam).  I believed in this romance.

But what makes this story, what truly makes it, is that this is a romance where the men (remember those secondary story lines I alluded to?) make sacrifices for the women.  Given the "small town" vibe of this setting and romance, the role reversals in this story read like a breath of fresh air (OK, so the book was published over 10 years ago - but you know what I mean).  Naturally Kinsey and Jared have kept some things private - Kinsey, her reasons for not wanting the Masons near Sam ; Jared, the reason behind his determination to bring Clark's son home to New York.  The resolution for Kinsey in this one aspect is dealt with, but it doesn't have a stinging air of finality - which I did want.  But that said?  Given Jared's declaration of his feelings for her, and those sacrifices I mentioned, I would have overlooked a tacked on serial killer subplot or a martian beaming down from outer space.  So it's hard to quibble over the lack of spoon-feeding in that one instance.

No, it's not perfect.  You've got two grown adults at war with each other and a child in the middle.  It's only Stacy's light touch that keeps this from being totally unpalatable.  But for readers who can persevere (and "the twist" certainly helped propel me forward!), the second half was a joy to read.

Final Grade = B

Reminder: #TBRChallenge for September

For those of you participating in the 2017 TBR Challenge, this is a reminder that your commentary is "due" on Wednesday, September 20.  This month's theme is Historical.

But what if you don't like to read historicals? "Wendy, you will pry contemporary settings out of my cold dead hands!"  Hey,  no problem! Remember: the themes are optional!  The whole point of the TBR Challenge is to read something, anything, that has been languishing for far too long.

You can find more information about the challenge, and see the list of participants, on the 2017 Information Page.  (And it's never too late to sign-up!)

Review: Y Is For Yesterday

Sue Grafton was one of those authors I discovered in my teen years while browsing the stacks of my small town public library.   In my early twenties, freshly minted with my library degree and with what I foolishly thought back then was a "lengthy commute" (Future Wendy laughs in the face of Past Wendy....), I picked up the series again on audio book.  So, needless to say, it's one of the rare series I'm actual current on.

The last several entries have been...well, not that great.  I don't remember anything about V at all.  W was OK, I guess.  And X was a hot mess.  So I walked into Y is for Yesterday with some trepidation.  It's not without problems, but this is by far the strongest entry in the series since U is for Undertow (says me). 

Trigger Warning: sexual assault / rape.

The chain of events started in 1979, when 14-year-old Iris steals the answer key to a standardized test to help out her new BFF, Poppy, at Climping Academy - an exclusive private school near the central California coast.  It ends with a missing sex tape and another girl, Sloan Stevens, dead.  Fritz McCabe ends up going to juvenile detention for firing the fatal shots, and now, at 25, has been released.  His parents have welcomed him home, only to get a copy of the missing sex tape in the mail shortly after his release with demands for $25,000.  The "sex tape" shows Fritz, along with another boy, Troy, assaulting a drunk and stoned 14-year-old Iris.  There's a James Spader Preppy Baddie-type, Austin, orchestrating the whole thing while another boy, Bayard, acts as camera man.  The threat being that if the tape comes to light, Fritz goes back to prison - even though everyone involved in the making of the tape (including Iris) swears it was "a joke," not to be taken seriously.  The McCabes have no interest in paying blackmail, but also want to protect Fritz, so they hire local private investigator, Kinsey Millhone, to chase the whole sordid business down.

This is actually one of Grafton's stronger plots in ages, but that being said, it's a shocking read.  The Kinsey Millhone books could never be classified as "cozies," but neither have they ever been overly graphic.  There's not a lot of violence, blood and guts splashed on the pages.  So having gone through the previous 24 entries in this series, it was shocking to read the details of the sexual assault not once, but twice, over the course of this story.  I'm, generally speaking, a reader who can roll with most violence in fiction - but I'm not going to lie - this was upsetting.  Once was more than enough.  Twice borders on psychological torture p0rn, in my ever so humble opinion. And it's such a departure in tone from the previous books - I cannot believe I'm going to be the only reader who feels a little blindsided by it.

But, as troubling as the details of the sexual assault are, the plot itself is quite good - although honestly Kinsey is kind of dense in this one.  I felt like I caught on to things much quicker than she did - although Grafton once again employs dueling timelines, so to be fair, there were things the reader is clued in on well before Kinsey is.

Much like the last several books, Grafton cannot seem to help herself when it comes to secondary story lines.  Ned Lowe, a homicidal holdover from X, is still at large and gunning for Kinsey.  He takes up some serious word count in the second half of the book, along with Kinsey's annoying cousin Anna and homeless holdover Pearl (both introduced in W) who both need to get thrown in a fiery pit already.  It makes the book much too long and takes focus away from the primary story line, leaving us with an ending that ends more with a whimper than a bang.  This has been a criticism of mine for the last several books.  It's like Grafton can't settle on one idea and instead wants to cram three or four into the same book, short-changing all of them.

Which makes it sound like I really didn't like this.  I did, but it's definitely meh in parts.  Honestly, it's such an improvement over X that I was practically riveted to the audio during my daily commute and treadmill sessions.  However, it's still got the same issues that the last several books have had (too much meandering, too many outside distractions) and then there's the shocking "surprise" of the graphic depiction of a sexual assault filmed on tape.  That's just not the kind of thing I expect when I pick up a Sue Grafton Kinsey Millhone novel.

Final Grade = B- (for fans only)

Review: Devil's Cut

I'm old enough to remember when J.R. Ward first launched her Black Dagger Brotherhood series and each new installment was Must Read TV uh, Reads.  It was all anybody talked about in Romancelandia for weeks months on end.  I never got hooked on the series for a myriad of reasons that I won't bore you with (OK, fine if you insist - the weak-as-tea-strained-through-a-sock heroines, the completely inane dialogue, the Scribe Virgin thing that made no sense....), but when I first heard about her new Bourbon Kings series - I couldn't help myself.  I am, without a doubt, completely and hopelessly addicted to soap operas.  I'm largely a recovering addict.  I've given up the hard liquor of daytime soaps, but I'm still drinking the wine of prime time (I don't care what anybody says - Game of Thrones is TOTALLY a soap opera).  But given my less than sterling opinion of Ward's BDB books, I approached this new contemporary series a bit wary.  And then, just like listening to a BDB fan justify her need for a fix, there I was hooked on Ward's brand of Southern-Fried Soapy Shenanigans.  "Yes, the books are problematic but...but...but...."  

Devil's Cut is the third and final book in the trilogy and God bless her, Ward manages to wrap up the entire train wreck (no small feat) and leave me with the satisfying, refreshed feeling of a particularly well mixed mint julep.

Warning: There will be spoilers for the first two books in this series.

Last we saw the Bradford-Baldwine clan Lane was trying to divorce his trophy wife who was carrying his father's baby so he could be with his One True Love, gardener Lizzie; Gin had just gotten married to the abusive Richard Pforde and was concealing the fact that her 16-year-old daughter Amelia was the product of her never-on-always-off affair with lawyer Samuel T. Lodge; Edward, broken by a South American kidnapping his Daddy arranged was cooling his heels in jail after confessing to killing the man; Sutton Smythe, CEO of her family's company was still pining for Edward; Lane's friend Jeff was trying to save the Bradford Bourbon Company from the shambles the not-dearly-departed William Baldwine left it in; and Miss Aurora, (there's no nice way to put this - the most blatant Mammy character I've ever read) was lying in a hospital bed dying from an aggressive form of cancer.

So yeah, train wreck.

And yet, somehow, Ward makes it all work.  It's not always pretty (like the resolution to the Lane's soon-to-be-ex knocked up by his Daddy story line) and the problematic elements somehow manage to get more problematic (seriously, Miss Aurora...), but darn it all if I even wasn't happy that things work out OK for Gin in the end (OMG, that woman - seriously).  The whole series is one giant Oh No He/She Didn't! after another.

And yet, it's shocking to me that this series hasn't done better.  With each new book I kept hearing that the sales weren't as robust as the publisher was hoping for - to which my theory is that they weren't marketing correctly.  When the first book appeared I think a lot of Ward fans (especially the lapsed ones...) were hoping she was returning to her contemporary romance roots.  And while there are romances here (everybody ends up paired off in the end), it's not the series' strong suit.  Also, Ward doesn't follow an individual sibling with each new installment (there isn't a Lane book, then an Edward book, then a Gin book etc.).  This is straight-up family drama for the Dallas and Dynasty set. It's 1980s-like glamour reading the likes we haven't seen since Judith Krantz.

Folks, this is whole series is beach reading.  I mean, truly - beach reading.  Not like when those sad sacks who, when you ask them to recommend you a beach read, suggest you pick up Jane Austen (seriously, who does that?!  I'm sorry, when I go to the beach I want Jackie Collins.  Darcy can go hang.)

And that's where publishing missed the boat.  Because I am not the only one.  I am not the only one who grew up at my mother's knee watching soaps and got through college on a wing, a prayer, and a healthy heaping helping of Melrose Place.  That's who this series is speaking too.  Yes, it's got issues. Frankly, it's got a whole host of them.  But if you're going to ask me if I care?  Yeah, I don't.  I'm going to sit over here and hope that Ward decides to write The Bourbon Kings: The Next Generation.

Final Grade = B

Retro Review: Diary of a Domestic Goddess

This review for Diary of a Domestic Goddess by Elizabeth Haribson was originally posted at The Romance Reader in 2005.  Back then, I gave it 4 Hearts (B grade) with an MPAA content rating of PG-13

+++++

Elizabeth Harbison’s latest for Silhouette Special Edition succeeds where other romances have failed. She sells her story by writing about real people – or at least characters who could easily be real people. In fact, Kit Macy is likely one of the most “real” characters I’ve come across in recent memory. Diary Of A Domestic Goddess ultimately wins because the heroine is a winner.

For the last several years, Kit Macy has been managing editor and columnist at Home Life magazine, an outdated homemaker publication that Donna Reed would have read back in the 1950s. Still, it comes as a shock when the magazine is taken over by the powerful Monahan Group and the staff is given pink slips. Kit needs her job. Not only is she a single mom to four-year-old Johnny, she’s a millimeter away from closing on her dream house. She needs to be gainfully employed, and now she’s desperate. Therefore, she resorts to begging.

Breck Monahan puts Cal Panagos in charge of Home Life hoping he’ll fail miserably. In order to salvage a shred of his once sterling reputation, Cal has to make the reinvention of the magazine work – and the first order of business is unloading a staff full of antiquated ideas. However, Kit Macy won’t go away. In fact, she confronts him and tells him that he cannot turn the magazine around without her. And because he’s a sucker for a beautiful, determined woman, Cal agrees to keep her on for two months. Secretly he knows he can do without her on the job, but dang if her feistiness doesn’t intrigue the heck out of him. Banter, libidos and double entendres are soon flying, with Kit giving tit for tat.

Office romances tend to be a hard sell to the more cynical of readers, but Harbison makes this fantasy work because Kit is very much a real person. At the beginning of the novel she’s trying to juggle her career, getting approved for a mortgage, writing her latest column, and solving Johnny’s bully problems in preschool. All stuff that women deal with every day, and like real women, Kit keeps running up against obstacles that make it all the more hairy. When Cal shows up and fires everyone a little piece of her snaps. She figures this is one instance where she has to stand up to her own bully or she will lose everything.

Cal remains a bit of a mystery for a while, but he soon shapes up into hero material. He’s a handsome, ambitious man with lady-killing charm. He’s also determined to succeed at all costs, which makes him wonder exactly what he was thinking with when he agreed to keep Kit on. He figures it’s because she reminds him of a schoolboy crush, or that it’s because he’s been neglecting his libido, but he soon realizes that in order to succeed he truly needs her.

The focus of the story is always on the birth of the new magazine and the romance. Monahan serves marginally as a villain, although he remains firmly off stage. Johnny is precocious and sweet, but not so annoying cutesy that he’ll give readers a toothache. I also enjoyed the change of pace of The Ex Husband here, as for once he’s not The Bad Guy. Kit actually has a healthy relationship with Rick, and while their marriage failed, one gets the impression that they’re civil not just for Johnny but because they do still genuinely care about each other.

Diary Of A Domestic Goddess is a quick, charming read that succeeds thanks to well-drawn, realistic characters and witty dialogue. Frankly, the state of romance would certainly get a shot in the arm if there were more heroines out there like Kit Macy. She’s the woman you see in the grocery store, at PTA meetings, or at your son’s soccer games. She is Every Woman, and because she is, you really want her to have her happily ever after. Because if it can happen to Kit, it just might happen to that PTA mom you know.

+++++

Wendy Remembers: The cover.  Honestly.  The heroine's face is so tight and shiny it's like a combination of Botox and facelift that went horribly wrong.  And what's with hero dude leering at her?  Although nice touch having the kid's school picture on the desk.  Anyway, superficial nonsense aside, since I just read another Harbison romance for the last TBR Challenge, I thought it would be fun to pull this old review out from the depths.