#TBRChallenge 2021: The Petrov Proposal

The Book: The Petrov Proposal by Maisey Yates

The Particulars: Contemporary romance, Harlequin Presents #3046, 2012, Out of print, available in digital, Book 2 in Forrester Siblings duet

Why Was It in Wendy's TBR?: As is wont to happen, Wendy falls for category romance author and then goes scurrying off to snap up an entire backlist. Inevitably it always seems to be an author with eleventy billion books, like Yates. However at this point I've read enough of a sample size to discover that Presents Yates is my favorite Yates.  So for Favorite Author month this was a natural pick from the depths of the print TBR.

The Review: When Yates is firing on all cylinders nobody spins the Presents brand of glitzy, glamorous fairy tale better.  Also, this is a rare boss/secretary romance where the characters actually stop to think about how messy, unwise and inconvenient their mutual attraction/lust is because of power dynamics and their working relationship.

Maddy Forrester is more event planner than secretary, taking orders from her boss, famous and obscenely talented jewelry designer Aleksei Petrov. Happily they conduct most of their business over the phone and through emails, because she recognizes she's very attracted to him - and throwing herself at her boss is so not an option.  See, Maddy spent her formative years as an afterthought, dismissed and neglected by her socialite parents until she finally ends up living with her much other brother.  She craves love and affection - which means she's ripe pickins' when she takes an internship out of college and falls for her boss.  A boss that turns out is married.  To a semi-famous model/actress so Maddy is splashed all over the tabloids once the model/actress files for divorce.  Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt - not sleeping with Aleksei.

For his part Aleksei is your standard Presents hero who will NEVER LOVE AGAIN, having loved and lost once.  No, our guy instead takes a series of mistresses, never promising them more than mutual sexual gratification and occasional business-related nights out.  It's all so very Presents, and frankly annoying.  As is typical, every other woman not Maddy gets dismissed out of hand.  Seriously, I kind of feel sorry for Mistress Olivia who we never meet, but who is name dropped early on for effect.

Anyway, what happens happens.  These two can't stay away from each other, they have a fair amount of steamy sex, messy feelings get involved, and Maddy finds her voice:

“You’re right, Aleksei. I…I am selling myself short. I deserve to be loved, not to just give it. I’ve given it all of my life, and the only person who ever really gave it back was my brother. Everyone else just took what I would offer and used it against me. And I always thought that meant there was something wrong with me. I never thought I deserved more. I do now.”

Honestly, this is the pay-off.  For the first half of the story I feel like the author was spinning her wheels, covering the same ground over and over again. Once she gets Aleksei and Maddy out of the office, out of the bedroom and doing "couple things" (I mean, other than the sex....), things pick up. Because as the reader you're seeing it happen - the falling in the love.  These two dumb bunnies, they have no idea what's about to hit them upside their foolish, silly heads.

Yates has been magic in Presents format, and while this is pretty good, it's not magic (IMHO).  Honestly, it was kind of ho-hum for me early on with the second half showing up in time to save the day.  Good, not great - but now I'm curious about Maddy's brother's book which is, of course, in my TBR.  Because, of course.

Final Grade = B-

Mini-Reviews: A DNF, A What-Might-Have-Been, and Comfort Reading

I was bound and determined to continue my Maisey Yates glom but terrible timing and realizing too late I was full-up on sexually inexperienced heroines led me to DNF'ing Seduce Me, Cowboy at the 30% mark.  The heroine is a good-girl preacher's daughter who has finally realized that being good has gotten her nowhere in life - so she moves out of her parents' house, quits her secretarial job at Daddy's church, and goes to work for our hero, who is a gruff wrong-side-of-the-tracks sort who has built a construction empire.  She's Never-Been-Kissed Rose-Colored-Glasses, and he's Mr. Grumpy Jaded Cynic.  I just couldn't with this child.  In the wake of everything currently going on in the US (posterity for my blog archives: COVID-19, George Floyd's murder, civil unrest) I just...couldn't with this child.  Plus this was the third sexually inexperienced Yates heroine in a row I'd read and y'all...I just couldn't with this child. Certainly I've read and enjoyed plenty of books featuring Sunshine-y Heroines and Grumpy Heroes, but now is not the time. Her Sunshine-y privilege just made me want to smack her into next Tuesday.

Final Grade = DNF

The Ghosts of Eden Park: the Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America by Karen Abbott was an audiobook listen I picked up at The Day Job because I like Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction nonfiction books and this is another one of those "Trials of the Century" that have largely faded from American consciousness.  George Remus was a morally bankrupt pharmacist-turned-lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio who turned Prohibition bootlegger.  He dumped his first wife, married Imogene (who worked in his office - because of course) and ultimately caught the attention of Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who was appointed Assistant US Attorney General under the less than squeaky clean Harding administration. Willebrandt, charged with enforcing Prohibition, had a real problem finding field agents who weren't corrupt, and she thought she'd found her man in Franklin Dodge.  Turns out? Not so much.  Dodge and Imogene entered into an affair while Remus was in prison.  When Remus got out of prison? That's when all hell broke loose.

Abbott had access to extensive court documents - which, fine.  The problem is she focuses on the least interesting guy in the room.  Remus is just like every other megalomaniac sociopath criminal gangster that came before him, and since.  Imogene and Dodge are the story here.  How exactly did these two really hook up? Did Imogene set her sights on Remus from the word go in order to take everything out from under him - or was she pushed into it, either by Dodge or with her just being completely fed up with Remus's abuse?  We'll never know.  I get that Abbott is working with the historical record available to her, which means my final impression is that what I really wanted was a historical fiction account of these characters - not so much nonfiction.

Final Grade = C

Back in late summer 2017 I decided to revisit Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone series. I made great progress in 2018, kept going in 2019, but stalled out when it was time to read While Other People Sleep, the 18th book in the series. Frankly, I got distracted by other books, and I recalled being meh about this one when I first read it.  Turns out my memory isn't completely shot.

Sharon, now with her own agency, finds out through her grapevine that a woman was impersonating her at a cocktail party.  What Sharon hopes was a harmless prank turns out to be much more sinister - this woman is handing out her business cards, having one-night-stands, stealing from said one-night-stands, committing credit card fraud, calling her friends and family, and even is audacious enough to break into Sharon's house.  

This book feels like Muller just didn't have enough to oomph-up the main mystery.  There's other threads here - namely efficient office manager Ted is acting completely out of character, and some added bits about various other cases the firm is working (one is a guy hiding financial assets ahead of a divorce, the other a guy who thinks his girlfriend is cheating on him).  Then there's Sharon's relationship drama - Hy is off to South America, not in contact just as Sharon's life is unraveling, and he's likely in danger.  It gives the book a very scattershot feel for the first half.  It's not until the second half, when Sharon loops in all her colleagues about the woman who is ruining her life and the focus lands firmly there that things smooth out.  Then it turns out to be a decent cat-and-mouse style read.

Not a favorite in this series but I desperately needed Competent Female Porn - and smart, female private detectives are my jam. They're 100% comfort reads for me.  Smart woman solves the mystery, saves the day and justice is served - I mean, what's not to love about that?

Final Grade = C+

Review: Hold Me, Cowboy

Because he was the kind of man a woman could make a mistake with. And she had thought she was done making mistakes.

Hold Me, Cowboy by Maisey Yates gives readers the romance of Sam McCormack, the hermit-like, grumpy older brother of Chase, who got his romance in Take Me, Cowboy.  Chase is the business guy.  Sam is the artist. His iron sculptures of typical western motifs (horses, longhorns, you get the idea....) dot the town of Copper Ridge and are bringing in a nice income for the family business thanks to tourists happy to throw around some cash.  But Sam is in the midst of an artistic crisis - inspiration has fled the building.  I mean how many horses and cows can one guy sculpt?  So he heads to a mountain retreat only to find himself face to face with a woman who drives him to distraction.

Madison West, daughter of the town's most prominent family has an ice queen reputation. Sam still swings by her family's estate to make sure her horses stay in shoes and she's always staring down at him with a haughty attitude - like she's supervising "the help."  Truth is Madison has baggage - the kind of baggage that has kept her celibate for 10 years.  Ten. Years. Well, she's over it. She's rented a cabin up in the mountains for a weekend get-away with a guy named Christopher.  Except snow arrives, Christopher can't get up the mountain, and the electricity goes out in her cabin. So she heads next door for help and runs smack dab into Sam.  These two are like oil and water but they're snowed in, they're both horny - what happens up on the mountain stays up on the mountain AMIRITE?!?

But eventually they head back home and naturally they both still have an itch that needs scratching.  It's 12 days until Christmas - so they agree on a 12 day fling.  Have some fun, scratch the itch, they're totally wrong for each other so it's not like they're going to fall in love or anything.  Ha ha ha ha!  Silly romance couples.  Will they never learn?

I've been reading category romance a long time, and Desire is one of the shorter lines - typically clocking in a smidge over 200 pages.  I've been reading this line for close to 20 years, I know the rhythms.  What Yates does here is kind of fiddle with that rhythm - which didn't entirely work for me at first and it took a little time for me to find my footing.  Basically this book opens with chapter one then boom! Smoking hot sex scene.  Character development, what makes them tick, their baggage, the internal conflicts - Yates eventually gets the reader there but it all comes after the characters decide to hit the sheets.  And of course what happens is that these two people who think they're oil and water, actually have a lot in common - and that's when the story gets interesting.

Yates has a way of sucker-punching the reader with emotional heft in what you think is going to be a quick, sexy beach read.  The reason why Madison has been celibate for 10 years? She was a naive "in love" 17-year-old taken advantage of by a much older man, in a position of power. And when she went looking for a safe haven?  She didn't find one.  On the other foot, Sam has been celibate for 5 years after a tragedy nobody, not even his brother, is aware of.  When all this comes bubbling to the surface in the final half the book, Madison bravely stands in front of Sam and just lets it all out. The anger, the guilt, the blame, and ultimately the realization that she's fallen in love with him.  The question is - will our self-pitying hero pull his head out of his butt in time to realize it.

As great as the emotional stuff was, the pacing on this book didn't work quite as well.  I "get" why the early sex scene but it threw me off my stride for half a minute.  Also, I was confused where this book fit in the Copper Ridge series timeline for a while.  It seems like it's much later after Take Me, Cowboy but then it turns out it's only a few months?  And there's a lot of West family stuff here that I wasn't lost or confused about - but it's kind of dropped into the story, and I think it will work better for those readers who have read the single titles about Madison's various siblings first.  I'm admittedly reading out of chronological order.

But, typical Yates, this was a quick, steamy read that kept me engaged in flipping the pages.  Sexy with a heavy dollop of emotional angst.  The glom continues....

Final Grade = B-

Review: Take Me, Cowboy

I fell for Maisey Yates thanks to her work with Harlequin Presents.  Nobody writes an unapologetic fairy tale as good as Yates and she positively sings in the short contemporary format.  When I pick up one of her category romances, regardless if it entirely works for me or not, I know I'm in the hands of a pro.  My Kindle is positively stuffed with her books for this reason so I've decided a Yates mini-glom was in order.

Take Me, Cowboy is part of her Copper Ridge series and the first book in a spin-off trilogy she set in that world for Harlequin Desire.  There were a few bumpy patches but ultimately the second half of this book hit me right in the solar plexus.

Anna Brown is a tomboy.  She's got two older brothers who essentially raised her after Mom took off and in a bid to get her father to pay attention to her, hell to SEE her, she got very good working on engines.  She's now a heavy machinery mechanic with her own shop on Chase McCormack's land in Copper Ridge, Oregon.  The problem is she's been invited to a chichi party at the estate of the town's most prominent family and her brothers, ass-hats that they are, tease her that she couldn't possibly land a date.  Anna, never one to back down from a challenge and frankly, looking for a change, takes that bet.  She just didn't plan on her BFF, Chase, picking up the mantle.

Chase's parents died in an accident, leaving him and his hermit-like brother Sam running the family ranch, which includes their iron works business.  Chase, haunted by the last words he spoke to his father, is determined to turn the family ranch around and for that? He needs an invite to that fancy party.  Anna is his ticket in.  He just, you know, needs to be her Henry Higgins. Naturally, they both get more than they bargained for.

Friends-to-Lovers with Pygmalion tossed in for extra seasoning - this is basically Wendy Crack.  Anna's hormones have been tripping over Chase for a while now, but he's such a man-whore with "a type," plus Anna has no desire to potentially wreck the one true friendship she has to her name.  Chase is a love 'em and leave 'em type - having his pick of women, enjoying some fun times, but never-ever staying the night or frankly going out on second date.  So yeah, a real prince.  This was the first bumpy patch for me.  The references to Chase's "type" and how he treated those other women. I mean, I get it. Chances are very good those other women knew what they were signing up for, but my tolerance for this sort of hero behavior has ebbed considerably over the years.

The other bump was Anna's lack of experience.  She's slept with one guy, exactly one time.  She doesn't see what all the fuss is about when it comes to sex.  Look, I get it.  Anna's emotional baggage is such that I understood why she wasn't running through men like Kleenex but Chase, inevitably, goes all gooey thinking about her lack of experience once they start "doing it" and ugh - can we set this trope on fire already?  On the bright side, Anna isn't dead below the waist and has experienced plenty of orgasms on her own prior to Chase and his magic doodle arriving on the scene.

So what did I like?  Everything else.  Anna is a straight shooter with an underlying vulnerability that I find very appealing in a romance heroine.  The world isn't kind to plain-speaking women and underneath all that Anna has her insecurities like we all do.  I also loved how brave she was.  OMG, The Black Moment in this book is amaze-balls.  Anna, straight shooter that she is, just lays it all out there.  Opens herself up, pours out all her vulnerabilities, plainly tells Chase how and what she feels and naturally he's a thundering, scaredy-pants jackass about it.  Anna is an effin' rockstar.

That's what makes this book for me.  Yates can write a jackass hero with the best of 'em (hey, she writes Presents after all!) but it's her heroines that keep me coming back for more. Because her heroines give as good as they get and don't back down.  Anna, will you marry me?

Final Grade = B

#TBRChallenge 2020: The Greek's Nine-Month Redemption

The Book: The Greek's Nine-Month Redemption by Maisey Yates

The Particulars: Contemporary romance, Harlequin Presents, 2016, out of print, available digitally

Why Was It In Wendy's TBR?:  Yates is an autobuy.  My print copy is autographed which means I picked this up at an RWA conference, although my cataloging notes are incomplete (my guess, probably the 2016 conference - which would have been San Diego).

The Review: Yates is such a pro at writing short contemporary that even when her books don't hit all the right buttons for me they're still highly readable.  I hadn't even picked out a TBR Challenge book until Sunday afternoon, grabbed this one because it was near the top of the Harlequin print pile, and proceeded to inhale it in one sitting.

Elle St. James is a poor little rich girl whose father has installed her as CEO of the family business.  Not because he believes in her. Perish the thought! Because her step-brother, Apollo Savas, is dismantling her father's empire brick by brick.  When the old man's empire faltered, Apollo swooped in like a savior, only to reveal his true identity - that of avenging angel.  Daddy St. James done him wrong, done his mother wrong, and now the man must pay.  Their parents married when Elle and Apollo were teenagers, and the sexual tension between them has always been thick.  Instead of acting on it, it has taken the form of sarcasm and back-biting - which honestly is half the fun of this story.  Apollo is a proto-typical Presents ass, but gods bless Elle - this girl can certainly dish it out.

What tends to happen in Presents stories happens here.  Apollo wants his revenge, Elle is conveniently standing right in front of him, there's all this delicious Enemies to Lovers tension clinging to the pages - well of course his pants are going to fall off and oopsie doodle...over and over again.  But will Apollo be able to set aside his blind quest for revenge, especially when Elle ends up pregnant?

This is pretty standard Presents fair.  Apollo is an ass and frankly needed to crawl over broken glass and grovel - which makes it highly annoying that there's no grovel to speak of in this book.  What kept this book from flying across the room, and what tends to make Yates' Presents highly addictive, is that the heroines tend to have just as much fire as the heroes.  Elle has underlying vulnerabilities, but this kitten has claws and draws blood even when Apollo is painting her into a corner.  She's got gumption and I love gumption.

So if there's no grovel, and Apollo is an ass - what saves this book?  Yates can write.  And she writes stuff about forgiveness and love and sacrifice over the course of the final chapters that are...well, there's depth here.  The kind of depth that naysayers of "those trashy Harlequins" think the format lacks because it merely exists and people like to read them (readers like Harlequins ergo they must have absolutely no merit at all).

Is it perfect? Well, no. Apollo, his need for revenge, and him using Elle to get said revenge are nothing if not problematic  But the epilogue is perfection - showing the couple 10 years later, with Elle living her best damn life and they're still blissfully in love - even despite the complicated baggage.  Yes, Apollo is an ass.  And yes, Elle plays the role of the good woman who thaws his frosty heart, but it sings from page one to the last sentence and I don't feel the least bit guilty inhaling this in one sitting.

Final Grade = B-

Spoiler-y Review: Claim Me, Cowboy

My Kindle is chock full of Maisey Yates. Having enjoyed many of her Harlequin Presents, when she made the move to single title and Harlequin Desire I kept buying.  But she's prolific and I'm a slow reader and here we are.  So I decided it was high time to try one of the Desires and randomly landed on Claim Me, Cowboy because 1) I've had an ARC languishing forever and 2) it just finaled for a RITA, so why not this one? It's smack dab in the middle of the Copper Ridge series, but it stands alone very well and Yates keeps the series-itis to the bare minimum.

The plot is patently absurd, but it tweaks the nose of patently absurd category romance plots that have come before, so I bought it hook, line and sinker. Joshua Grayson is a successful PR guy with a loving family and a big fancy house in Copper Ridge, Oregon.  What he doesn't have is a wife and his father thinks that's just no good - so the old man puts an ad in the newspaper.  Yes, an ad. To find his son a wife.  Joshua is highly annoyed with his old man so places another ad, this one looking for a woman who will play the role of highly unsuitable potential wife and just maybe his father will get the message to butt out.  Who Joshua gets is Danielle Kelly and a baby.

Danielle is all of 22, Joshua assumes the baby is hers, and she doesn't correct him.  Life hasn't been easy for Danielle, raised by a single mother (who had her at 14) who was always looking for love in all the wrong places. Finally away from Mom, working as a grocery store cashier in Portland, life is pretty OK - until the day Mom shows up pregnant.  Danielle takes her in, baby Riley is born, and while Mom says she's going to change her ways...she naturally does not.  Danielle ends up losing her job thanks to unreliable child care, and social services expects her to have a steady life and income if she's to keep custody.  She's desperate. So desperate she answers Joshua's ad and we're off to the races.

I've been reading romance a long time, meddling parents are pretty much a staple, and frankly Joshua's father is one of those guys who thinks the little woman should make a happy home, and squeeze out a passel of kids while the man of the house brings home the bacon.  So if Joshua thinks he can tweak the old man by bringing home a much younger fiance with a baby - more power to him I say.  Frankly the old guy has it coming to him.

No, what doesn't really work with this story is the romance.  I just never believed in it because I never felt like Joshua grew as a person.  He starts off the story as a jerk. The kind of jerk who uses woman but that's OK because they know the score:

He was happy enough now to be alone. And when he didn't want to be alone, he called a woman, had her come spend a few hours in his bed - or in the back of his truck, he wasn't particular. Love was not on the agenda.

My. Hero.

Not.

And then there's the matter that, while they're overstepping, his family ultimately cares about him.  Deceiving them sticks in Danielle's craw for a good chunk of this story, but our girl is desperate - a desperation that Joshua is ultimately counting on:

She was prickly and difficult, but at least she had an excuse. Her family was the worst. As far as she could tell, his family was guilty of caring too much. And she just couldn't feel that sorry for a rich dude whose parents loved him and were involved in his life more than he wanted them to be.

And there's the rub.  To counteract this, Yates gives Joshua a tragic backstory - a former fiance, a late miscarriage, and a spiral into drug addiction, which I think was supposed to make him sympathetic to the reader, but instead he comes off as even more self-absorbed and narcissistic. He doesn't seem to care all that much what became of the former fiance (he assumes she's living on the streets now) - he's more concerned that "he failed her."  Um.  Well, what did you do to, oh I don't know - get her some help?  Look, people who turn to drugs ultimately have to help themselves break the cycle - but from what I could tell Joshua pretty much leaves her to wallow in her depression and drug addiction until she cheats on him with one of his coworkers - and then he walks away to live in seclusion back in his home town and wallow in "his failure."

Which leads us through to the end of the book with Joshua and Danielle ultimately deciding to get married for real.  He proposes out of a sense of guilt.  She accepts because it means financial security for her and Riley.  Naturally Danielle falls in love with him, but knowing his baggage we get The Black Moment:

He didn't love her.  He wanted to fix her. And somehow, through fixing her, he believed he would fix himself.

I never felt convinced that Joshua moves past this. That he's only with Danielle out of a sense of guilt and atonement.  I never felt like he loved her for her.  He loved her because he could provide for her and "save" her.  As for Danielle?  Well, naturally, she's a virgin.  So is she falling head over heels for the rich dude because he can make her life easier and he gives her incredible orgasms?  Look, marriages have been built on less, but I spent a good chunk of this story feeling like she deserved better - especially since her sassy, spunky smart mouth is kind of what saves this story for me.

There's an audience for this story, no doubt.  The joy I've found in Yates' work with Presents is that she can flat-out write The Fairy Tale.  But, to be honest, Cinderella is one of the harder fairy tales for me to swallow in the modern romance genre.  Too much Rescue Fantasy for me.  But there's an appeal there for a lot of readers.  The idea that the handsome rich dude will swoop in, fix everything, and give the woman a damn break for a change.  Look, I get it.  It's appealing. Just not to me.  And Joshua never really grows as a character enough to convince me that he's past his need to assuage his guilt.  Plus, he's kind of a jackass.

Final Grade = C-

#DeckTheHarlequin: The Queen's New Year Secret

I read category romance for a variety of reasons, but when it comes to Harlequin Presents, there's really only one reason.  I'm in it for the fairy tale.  Presents work best for me when they're a blatant, hit you upside the head with a sledgehammer, fairy tale.  And really, nobody writes an unapologetic fairy tale quite like Maisey Yates.  She's a master of it.

The Queen's New Year Secret is the second book in a duology featuring princely brothers for a made-up Mediterranean-sounding country.  I read the first book, A Christmas Vow of Seduction, last year during the holidays and it was....OK.  It had moments, but I never warmed to the hero and frankly, Yates has written better.  But she did a good job of setting up this book, which features King Kairos kidnapping his Queen, Tabitha, in the hopes of convincing her to not divorce him.

Five years ago Kairos was set to marry another woman.  Until said woman slept with his brother.  Which would be bad enough, but to make it truly a bridge too far the whole sordid affair was caught on camera and sold to the tabloids.  The wedding is literally weeks away and Kairos is bound by his misguided sense of duty.  So what does he do?  He convinces his PA, a poor white trash girl from Iowa who clawed her way through with single-minded determination and education, to marry him.  He lays it out as your classic marriage of convenience, Tabitha accepts, and they get down to the business of making an heir and a spare.  Except, you guessed it, barren desert.  No babies.  And the strain is taking a toll.

Tabitha agreed to the marriage for "reasons."  Kairos' proposal certainly wasn't one full of passion and devotion, so it's not like she was harboring illusions.  But five years of...nothing?  There's literally nothing there.  Kairos looks at her like he looks at a potted plant or a piece of furniture.  She's coming to the realization that while the idea of "passion" scares her (for "reasons") - she also can't stay in this loveless marriage slowly withering away.  So she confronts him with divorce papers on New Year's Eve and whoa boy - passion shows up.  Along with anger.  Before you can say hatefu-- "angry sex" that's what ends up happening on Kairos' office desk.  And wouldn't you know it?  Tabitha finally ends up pregnant.

BECAUSE OF COURSE SHE DOES!

But she's not about to call off the divorce.  Her marriage is a dumpster fire, and she knows it.  Unfortunately Kairos didn't get the memo.  He whisks his wife out of the doctor's office, takes her to his private, secluded island (because, of course) and tells her that they will remain there for two weeks.  He's hoping to convince her to stay.

What follows are a lot of angry, hurt words, a lot of communication that should have happened five years ago, and a hero who holds on to his secrets for entirely too long.  Tabitha bares her soul pretty early on and Kairos makes overtures, but it's always one step forward, two steps back with this guy.  The minute Tabitha gets close to exposing his vulnerabilities, he completely shuts down.  It's so intense with this guy it doesn't just take one secondary character to smack him upside the head....it takes TWO!

For her part, I thought Tabitha had interesting baggage (albeit slightly unrealistic given today's tabloid "news" culture - her secrets should have been unearthed EONS ago!) and she's the brand of HP heroine who gives as good as she gets.  The hero says some awful things to her in anger and she says awful things right back.  This isn't some mouse who slinks off to a corner when the hero is mean to her.  She's at the stage where she's well and truly done.  She doesn't know how she's going to leave, what she's going to do, where she's going to go - but she's leaving thankyouverymuch.

This is a talky book and the characters are both feisty in their anger - so it all does get rather exhausting after a while.  But it's a solid read in a soap opera sort of way, a slightly different feel from what I usually expect from a Yates HP (which would be, say it with me, the fairy tale).  Still, I don't regret that this was my last read of 2017.

Final Grade = B-

Review: A Christmas Vow of Seduction

It's interesting how reading tastes can change over time.  Harlequin Presents were not my jam when I first discovered romance.  I liked my romances to feature more of a "quiet intensity" and Presents, while intense as all get-out, are not quiet.  But these days I find that what Presents delivers is what I want to buy.  That intensity with just the right amount of angst and the older I get the more comforting I find fairy tales.  Maisey Yates is one of my go-to authors in this line precisely because she writes fairy tales.  But this one?  Yeah, this fairy tale was a little frayed around the edges.

Warning: Spoilers Ahoy!

A Christmas Vow of Seduction is the first book in a duet featuring two princes (brothers, naturally) of the fictional country Petras (vaguely Mediterranean).   Prince Andres is the spare and a notorious playboy.  He's rarely at the palace, choosing instead to reside in various penthouses around the globe.  He gambles.  He beds beautiful women. He leaves the pesky business of ruling and being respectable to his uptight brother, Kairos.

Kairos is trying to restore relations with Tirimia, a neighboring country that overthrew their monarchy in a coup.  The royal family was murdered - all except for Princess Zara.  She was six when rebels murdered her family, and a maid spirited her into the forest to be raised by gypsies (hey, I did say this was a fairy tale!).  Anyway, the rebels, now trying to be all "respectable government" find her and present her to Kairos as a "gift."  He's already married, he needs to open talks with Tirimia, and he can't send Zara back to her country.  So he figures it's high time his brother gets married.  Kairos is having no luck impregnating his wife (marriage in trouble alert!) and it's high time for Andres to grow up.

Andres doesn't want to marry Zara, no matter how beautiful or feisty she is - but he can't say no to Kairos.  Not this time.  Why?  Oh, there's the small matter that Andres got rip-roaring drunk, slept with Kairos' fiancee, thereby necessitating Kairos finding a new bride, the woman he's now locked in an unhappy marriage with.  So....yeah.  It's like that.

I will say one thing for this book, when Yates set her mind to writing a playboy ne'er-do-well hero, she didn't hold back.  However while I appreciated that, it also made Andres the most problematic aspect of this romance.  Naturally there are reasons why Andres is a manwhore.  Mommy didn't love him.  His father thought he was a screw-up.  He could never do anything right and finally when his mother finally concedes to bring Andres to an important event - he louses it up and Mommy leaves.  The only relationship he hadn't screwed up was with Kairos, but sick of waiting for the other shoe to drop, Andres decides to self-sabotage and sleep with his brother's fiancee.  Andres is a walking Poor Little Rich Boy wrapped up in First World Problems, and naturally his self-sabotaging ways come into play with Zara.

Zara is the truly interesting party in this romance, although the parts of her characterization never fully add up to a satisfying whole.

"I was born into royalty, in a position more vulnerable than I could ever have imagined when surrounded by stone walls of the palace.  Then I lost everyone and was taken away to the middle of the forest.  Then I was taken captive.  And now I have been delivered to you, to be your wife, and I have no choice, yet again.  Who am I? What am I to be? The pawn of whoever holds me in their hand at any given time?  I must be more than that, Andres.  I should like a chance to find out."

This is a heroine who won't go quietly.  She's very adversarial with Andres in the beginning (I should think! She's basically presented to Kairos like she is a fruit basket!) until, of course, she isn't.  There's an episode at an official function that ends with a frenzied sexual encounter and after that?  The sex temporarily declaws Zara. She's also one of those Romancelandia virgins who warrants acceptance into the Sexual Chapter of Mensa.

This would be where I started to get bored - until Andres falls back on bad habits.  Which would have been highly annoying if not for the fact that it allows Zara to open fire and not hold anything back.  The whole Boo Hoo Mommy Didn't Love Me nonsense?  Oh yeah, she totally calls him out. She calls him out on it all.  Andres isn't spared from any of Zara's wrath and it was glorious to read.  Simply, wonderfully, glorious.  Zara finds a backbone, makes a decision, and walks away.  She actually, truly, walks away.  And that's where I kind of wanted this to end.  Because Andres?  He's an emotional infant.  He's a child.  Zara honey, you can do better.

But alas, this is a romance.  So of course Andres has to win her back and of course he doesn't have to do too much other than show up and say "I love you" because Zara loves him and she's miserable without him and yada yada yada.

Other than a few stand-out moments, this one just never came together for me.  Andres is too problematic and the power dynamic between the couple is really (really) skewered (and frankly pretty icky for most of the story).   On the bright side, the author sets up a barn burner of a marriage in trouble story for brother Kairos that I really need to read soon given it's a New Year's Eve story.

Final Grade = C-

Review: Bound to the Warrior King

Harlequin Presents were ALL ABOUT THE FEELS before New Adult was a gleam in it's self-published mama's eye.  That's the appeal of the Presents line.  At less than 200 pages a Presents can't waste time flailing about looking for emotional purchase.  The line, at it's best, means high intensity, strong attraction, and enough chemistry to burn off your fingerprints.  And because of this the line has a tendency to feature a strong "fairy tale" component.  Not in all of the books, but in a decent amount of them.  Bound to the Warrior King by Maisey Yates is a very, very good book - but the reader has to be willing to check reality in and collect it after the final destination.

Tarek al-Khalij (yes, we have a sheikh book) was never meant to rule Tahar (yes, we have a made-up country/royalty book).  The former sheikh was his brother, a monster who ordered the murder of their parents and then tortured Tarek.  At the hands of his brother's "tutelage," Tarek became a fierce warrior - living as a nomad, protecting his country's borders - while his brother debauched his way through women and drugs until the latter killed him.  Now Tarek is the sheikh and to put it bluntly?  He's barely housebroken.

Dowager Queen Olivia of Alansund is a young widow desperate to find her place in the world.  With her husband, the King, dead and her brother-in-law now ruler, Olivia is at a loss.  She desperately wants a home.  She wants to be useful.  And to her way of thinking that's another royal marriage.  Tarek seems like a good candidate....until she actually meets him.  But before he can throw her out on her butt, she suggests that he give her 30 days.  30 days to show him that he needs her.  She can housebreak him in the ways of being royal.  She can polish him up.  And she has 30 days to show him just how invaluable she can be to him and maybe, just maybe, convince him that a permanent partnership between the two of them would not be the worst thing in the whole world.

I've read category romances in recent memory where the author went a little crazy at The Trope Smorgasbord and the book reads like a hot mess.  Somehow Yates does the exact same thing and manages to pull it off.  I think because she doesn't overdo it on any of her ingredients.  This story features everything from subtle Pygmalion and Beauty and the Beast themes to Ye Olde Fake Royalty and Virgin Hero Ahoy! tropes.  She pulls all her ingredients together beautifully and not one overpowers any of the others.

Olivia is a complicated heroine and I suspect if readers will have issues with this story it may be with her.  She's an American who met her royal husband at university.  She's the sort of heroine who has a lot of polish on the outside but is secretly vulnerable.  In this instance, it's due to a lifetime of neglect from parents who were distracted taking care of her sickly sister.  Olivia is the sort of heroine who wants people to notice her, to value her, but when she opens her mouth to demand it, it comes back to bite her in the butt.  I could sympathize with a  teenage Olivia who just wanted her parents to acknowledge her birthday, but for some readers Olivia's baggage will likely come off as First World Problems.

Tarek's baggage is much more extreme - what with the Evil Dead Brother and the life he lived from about 15-years-old on.  His whole life is wrapped up in control and being the exact opposite of what his brother stood for.  Honor, duty, sacrifice for his country - these are all very important to Tarek.  But he's not exactly a "people person" - which is where Olivia comes in.  He's very much our Fairy Tale Beast - no polish, with rough edges, but underneath it all he's a good man, with a good heart.

What I really liked about their relationship is that from a sexual chemistry standpoint Olivia is the aggressor.  Tarek is all about restraint and control - which means denying himself his baser instincts.  Olivia is attracted to Tarek almost instantly, and having had a healthy sexual relationship with her first husband, knows exactly what she has been missing the past two years.  I don't read a ton of Presents, but Olivia making the early first moves on our sheikh hero felt very....different to me.  In a good way.  This, of course, ramps up the tension quite a bit and these two set off some serious sparks.  I found myself anticipating the consummation of their relationship and it's been a while since I've been able to say that about a romance (sad, but true).

Yates has written a straight-up Fairy Tale Fantasy.  I'm hard pressed to find much reality in this story, but the author owns it, and runs with it.  It's intense, it brings ALL THE FEELS, and I inhaled every single word of it.  Yates has quickly become my go-to author for Presents.

Final Grade = B+

Note: I actually listened this on audio.  My first ever Presents listen on audio.  I walked into the experience knowing it would either be a success or an unmitigated disaster.  The audio version definitely drew the "over the top" feel that the Presents line can have into stronger focus - especially Tarek's dialogue.  I felt his dialogue fit well with his overall character but....yeah, a little over the top.  Also it took me a little while to get used to the narrator, Arika Rapson, whose voice was a little on the "breathy" side.  I'm not sure I'd listen to an unknown-to-me Presents author on audio, but since Yates was a known quantity?  I could roll with it all.  And I did enjoy it.

#TBRChallenge 2016: Feels Like the First Time

The Book: A Royal World Apart by Maisey Yates

The Particulars: Harlequin Presents, 2012, The Call of Duty series #1, Out of print, available digitally

Why Was It In Wendy's TBR?: At the time this landed in my TBR I had just discovered Maisey Yates. So when I saw this book in a pile of library donations I was sorting through, I liberated it. (To feel less guilty about it, I donated a couple of bucks to the Friends of the Library.)

For the purpose of this month's Favorite Tropes theme: this one features a Virgin Hero.

The Review: I know the popularity of the Presents line mystifies a lot of romance readers, so let me see if I can help.  Emotionally speaking, these are high intensity stories. Angst, drama, ALL OF THE FEELS, packed into a tiny 185 page package. I started and finished this story in one Saturday afternoon.  It delivered characters who grew over the course of the story and a climactic emotional "black moment" that literally bumped my reaction of this story up by half a grade.  Frankly, I felt a little hungover after I finished reading it - but in a good way.

We've got ourselves a Presents staple here: a fake royalty story.  Evangelina Drakos is a misbehaving princess of a tiny, made-up country that smells faintly Greek/Mediterranean.  Eva is tired of living in a gilded cage, so she acts in a way most sheltered, pampered 20-year-old women would - she rebels for the sake of rebelling.  What she fails to think through is that if she acts like a child, her father (The King) will continue to treat her like one.  Which means after her latest escapade (ditching her bodyguards in a casino) he's giving her a new bodyguard.  One not so easily distracted - Makhail Nabatov.

Mak has read the princess's file and thinks he has her pegged.  Spoiled brat who wouldn't know a day's hardship if it smacked her on the ass.  Needless to say these two are verbally sparring almost from the on-set.  He's all about duty and honor and she's some Poor Little Rich Girl.  Of course it's all more complicated than that.  Mak has built his own empire (hey, this is a Presents - so OF COURSE even The Bodyguard is a Gazillionaire....), loved and lost, and carries around a serious amount of guilt over past tragedies.  Eva is a woman who doesn't know who she is, and because of that her rebellion against King and Country is petty at best.  But at the end of the day she just wants someone to see her.  To listen to her.  Hell, at the start of the story she just wants to be a person who can go out and buy her own lingerie.  On the surface, Eva may have First World Problems, but deep down it's about identity, knowing who you are, and having people who love you support who you are.

It's a good thing Presents are short (185 pages y'all) because I think this book wouldn't survive the DNF Test if it were longer.  Early on Mak comes off as cold and unfeeling, Eva as a spoiled brat trying to get Daddy's attention.  And that's what the author wants to make you think of them.  Otherwise their growth over the course of the story, their attraction to each other, wouldn't have the same weight behind it.  Mak learns to open himself up to another human being and Eva grows up.  And it's because of the personal growth of both characters, and their romance, that the Black Moment towards the end has the impact it does.  It's good stuff.

I picked this book up for two reasons really: 1) I've liked Yates' work in the past and 2) Virgin Hero.  I love Virgin Heroes.  That said, when it comes to contemporary romance, if the hero is a virgin it's like the author, editor, whomever, feels like there has to be some Convoluted Reason Why the Sexy Hero Still Hasn't Gotten Any.  He's still a virgin because he was kidnapped and raised by wolves.  He fell into a coma and woke up to find himself on The Planet of the Apes.  Crazy Train stuff like that.  And naturally, Yates gives us a reason - although in Mak's case it's wrapped up in bad luck, incredible tragedy, and personal sacrifice.

Here's the thing though - this genre has existed for years never making "excuses" for why heroines are virgins, so the fact we feel like we need an "excuse" for why the hero is one kind of bugs me.  OK, it bugs me a lot.  This is why, I think, it's harder to find Virgin Heroes in contemporary romances than say, historicals or paranormals.  It's easier to accept right out of the gate in 1817 or on the planet Alltran that's ruled by the oppressive Zootron alien race.  I do think we're finally getting to the point in contemporary romances where we no longer have to make "excuses" for the heroine's sexual experience (although there's still a ways to go...) - I just wish we'd start thinking about the hero with the same sort of mindset.

Despite me overthinking the Virgin Hero in a contemporary romance thing - I liked this story a lot.  It started out a little uneven for me - mostly because the heroine does come off as a spoiled brat, and the hero does come off like an emotional brick wall - but as it progresses, as the author develops her characters and the romance, I really fell into this one.  One afternoon, lying in bed reading, don't bother me unless your hair is on fire, fell into it.

Final Grade = B

Novella Round-Up: Australian Bust And Cookies

I seem to be doing better with my reading slump and in an effort to build momentum I decided it was time to stop ignoring the small mountain of novellas in my ARC pile.  First up is Jazz Baby by Tea Cooper, which takes place in Sydney during the 1920s.  Plus, you know, look at that cover!  How could I not I want to try this?  Unfortunately I ended up DNF'ing it 30% in.

Dolly Bowman has left the country to make a life for herself in Sydney.  She lands a job at a "boardinghouse" and immediately runs into WWI flying ace, and childhood crush, Jack Dalton.  He's horrified to see Dolly and she's annoyed with him for interfering with her new job by talking to her boss.  Never mind that her new boss is a madam, the "boardinghouse" is a brothel and Jack just wants to make sure pretty lil' Dolly isn't asked to give up changing sheets and mopping floors in favor of working on her back.

Oh, where to begin?  The gaudy furnishings, red wallpaper, a house full of lavishly decorated bedrooms, and single women who work through the night were apparently not enough of a clue for ol' Dolly.  Seriously, it takes her more than 24 hours to realize she's working at a bawdy house and even then she's totally fine with it.  In fact she starts befriending some of the girls - sort of the bordello equivalent to the lady of the manor being BFFs with her housekeeper.  But whatever.  Dolly was also apparently physically abused by her father, but this revelation comes out of left-field and dropped like a bomb on the reader through Jack's internal musings.  It just didn't jibe with the wide-eyed innocent brain-dead picture of Dolly that was being painted for me.  Then there's the fact that Dolly has a brother who was in the service with Jack and was declared missing-in-action when his plane crashed.  Who does Jack see in a seedy bar one night?  The long lost brother of course!  In a town the size of Sydney.  What are the odds?  I was kind of over it at that point and there wasn't anything on the Kindle screen to make me want to keep reading so.....

Final Grade = DNF

Breaking All Her Rules by Maisey Yates was short, sexy, with just the right dollop of angst.  It didn't change my life, but for a Chocolate Chip Cookie Read (which is where quite a few novellas fall for me) it was just what the doctor ordered.

Grace Song has spent her entire life overcompensating for a screwed-up junkie sister.  Which means she's been the very model of over-achievement.  However, having just gotten reprimanded by her boss for being "rude" to a client who was sexually harassing her, and mixing up her phone with the sexy cowboy she shared a NYC cab with?  Her day is not going well.  Until she goes to the posh hotel where the cowboy is staying to retrieve her phone and she finds him half-dressed.  Ooooh, la la!

Zack Camden is an artist, which is why he's in New York - on business.  It was impulsive to share a cab with Grace but now that he has?  He wants more of her.  He hasn't felt this alive in a long time.  Because, naturally, Zack has a deep, dark, sad past.  A past that means he hasn't had sex (with anyone other than his hand) in six years.  And he didn't even miss it all that much until he's trading verbal zingers with wound-tight Grace.

So let me tell you how nice it was to read a romance about a guy who wasn't a Duke of Slut.  Also I liked that Grace's sense of over-achieving is there because she doesn't want to disappoint her parents who are already dealing with her junkie sister and all the heartache that brings.  That's probably cliche, but hey - it worked for me.  Also the dialogue here is really fun.  Lots of banter early on and the sexual chemistry really cooks.

The declaration of love that spurs us towards our Black Moment was a little abrupt for me - I suspect because we're talking novella and a two week time period on the story.  But the Emotional Stuff that follows?  Is really, really strong.  Rip your heart out in places strong.

It wasn't all about the end result.  It was about all the things that had happened on the way.  It was about the fact that she was happier with the person she was now, than the person she'd been the day they met.

And at the end of the day, that's why I read romance.

Final Grade = B