2009 book log

If like me you’re enough of a romance fan that you enjoy a periodic romance novel, yet you like a hefty dose of snark with your lovin’, then you should absolutely pick up a copy of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels. This is the beloved child of Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, better known as Smart Bitch Candy and Smart Bitch Sarah over at Smart Bitches Trashy Books.

What do you get if you look past the heaving bosoms? A fairly decent overview of the modern romance genre, actually. Sure, there’s plenty of poking fun at the standard romance tropes, but there’s also very up-front and straightforward looks at things like how rape used to be prevalent in the genre (and glossed over as “forced seduction”), and how the arising of the No Means No movement rolled out into the books being written. (Needless to say, I’m much more a fan of modern romance novels than I am of the ones y’all are probably thinking of every time you think “bodice-rippers”.) There’s a review as well of the massive firestorm that the Smart Bitch ladies kicked up when they revealed on their site that Cassie Edwards had plagarized material for her novels.

So yeah, there’s plenty enough serious material here to make the book worth a read if you have any interest in the genre at all. But really, what makes it worth the price of admission? Five words: “Choose Your Own Man Titty”. Four stars.

It’s official: Underground, Book 3 of ‘s Greywalker series, is ten pounds of fun in a five pound jar. And I say that not just because the ‘ship I was hoping for in this series sets sail as of this installment, either.

Now, zombies are the up-and-coming thing in urban fantasy these days, it seems. So I’m seeing more and more established series spend at least a little time doing a zombie plot, and this book is the Greywalker series’ turn. That said, it’s less of a zombie plot than you might expect, since what you get is a lot more supernatural of origin than it is viral or chemical, which seems to be where most zombie plots get started. Plus, as the plot really gets its feet under it, there’s a lot involving Native American mythos of the Pacific Northwest–and this in particular helps anchor the story well and firmly in this locale. I’ve read my share of urban fantasy where the setting isn’t terribly vivid, books you could set in any American city and have them still work as plots; this one, not so much. And I love it.

And like I said above, the ‘ship I was hoping to see launch does indeed launch in this book, which fills my little heart with glee. It’s not without a bittersweet note to it, since it’s in the wake of Harper having to go through the deeply unpleasant experience of someone else she cares about being unable to deal with the life she’s chosen to lead. Yet it’s all for the good. Look for the tasty, tasty background revelations that come out about a certain mysterious hacker-type of Harper’s acquaintance, which was for me by far the best part of the book. Five stars.

After chugging through Phaedra Weldon’s Wraith, I was definitely in the mood to go right back to good ol’ Tanya Huff, so I went for Smoke and Mirrors, Book 2 of her Tony Foster series.

And really, Tanya Huff just continues to solidly entertain. It’s less rare than it used to be to have an urban fantasy series with a male protagonist, but it’s still very, very rare to have an urban fantasy series with a queer protagonist. So just being able to read one is cool.

It helps of course that the Tony Fosters are entertaining reads as well. This installment follows up some months in time to the events of Book 1, when the TV production Tony works for goes to an allegedly haunted house to shoot an episode on location–and, surprise surprise, the house is of course actually haunted. Huff delivers some decently creepy haunts in the story, and the two young children who are the most significant ghost characters bring a lot to the story. Tony’s secret magical ability also leaks to his coworkers in the progression of events, nicely advancing his arc with that and forcing him to start taking more charge of his gifts.

I won’t say much about the progression of Tony’s love life as I would run into the territory of spoilers, but I was at least simultaneously pleased and disappointed by events on that front herein. Still though it’s a refreshing change of pace to see a relationship cease between a previous book and a subsequent one, and yet have the involved parties remain on good terms. More situations like this, please! Let us cut down on the angst.

I will of course be reading Book 3, which is already on my To Read shelf. For this one, four stars.

Any book with a blurb on it that name checks Tanya Huff and the Vicky Nelson series is a book that’s going to get my immediate attention. And after reading the summary on the back cover of Phaedra Weldon’s Wraith, I was quite prepared to give this one a shot.

Turned out to be a solid read overall: Zoe Martinique is a young woman who’s developed the ability to have her spirit go out of her body. That this is the result of the traumatic experience of being raped when she was younger is handled with a surprising amount of deftness; a darker book might have lingered on that, but one of the things I appreciated about this is that Zoe was presented in a position of strength dealing with the experience. I’ve read novels wherein the heroine was raped and wherein, quite justifiably, she was shattered by the experience–but in this case, while it was certainly traumatic for Zoe, it was more of a case of being a defining moment in her life where she first developed some magnificent ability to deal.

She’s since learned to take advantage of her ability by hiring herself out to use her ability for private investigation, and the story starts off with a bang when she astral-projects herself right into witnessing a murder. When she tries to learn more about what happened, she starts learning very quickly about layers of the supernatural world she knows nothing about (not surprising in Book 1 of a series), and gets disturbing hints about where her ability may have come from (her mother is a witch and there are Mysterious Hints about her long-vanished father).

Other plusses in this story are that the obligatory Handsome Cop Love Interest this time around was described in such a way that I instantly thought “David Tennant with a Southern accent and blue eyes”. This was a plus. It helped as well that the actual character, Daniel Frasier, is likable, and the chemistry he has going with Zoe seems lively without going over the top like so many urban fantasies and paranormal romances do these days.

About the only weird note for me was that as a narrator, Zoe was often very chattery and a little scatterbrained, which I found distracting at first. On the other hand, as the story progressed and the situation got darker, her narration actually was a bit of a welcome contrast. Towards the end, it helped ground the story with a bit of reality for me, in a way that going over the top with the darkity darkness would not have done.

Definitely looking forward to reading Book 2. Four stars.

ETA 7/16/09 12:16pm: Adding new text and splitting the second paragraph into two to amend some deeply stupid wording on my part! Thanks to for calling that out.

It is perhaps indicative of how little impact The Ionian Mission had on me that, writing this review several weeks after I actually read the novel, I can barely remember what happened in it. Which isn’t really fair to the novel or Mr. O’Brian’s writing, to be sure, since this is after all an Aubrey-Maturin novel and by definition comes with a certain default level of Awesome. Also, a lot of the events in this book naturally inform what comes next in Treason’s Harbour.

Unfortunately, the book did indeed make little impact on me. I do recall Jack’s encounter with his old flame Mercedes (who goes clear back to Master and Commander), and his later being called on the carpet by Admiral Harte, and the general sucktitude of the Worcester as a ship when compared with Surprise. Other than that, though, the book’s primary virtue for me is serving as a lead-in to the superior Treason’s Harbour. Three stars.

The second Sebastian St. Cyr mystery is a decent episode in the series, following up on Book 1 by giving us a nice juicy politically motivated murder–and a side helping of expounding upon the background of Sebastian, revealing all sorts of intriguing secrets about his mother. It seems that the lady did not in fact die when Sebastian was eleven, as he’d been told, and that furthermore, a certain necklace that’s cropped up in the case he’s trying to solve ties back to her. Meanwhile, we learn more of why Kat, the actress Sebastian loves, steadfastly refuses to marry him: she has political intrigue in her own background, a life she’s desperately trying to abandon.

All in all the murder’s fun enough, set up intriguingly and giving an interesting portrait of Englad at the time, and in particular the popular opinion of the Prince Regent. But what really drove the plot for me here more is the background on Sebastian’s mother as well as the background with Kat. I’ll be very interested to see how this progresses with Book 3. Four stars.

Steve Alten’s The Loch was a grocery store impulse buy for me, and I have to admit I was drawn in by the promise in the blurb of a scientist guy haunted by a drowning experience in his childhood and being driven back to Loch Ness in Scotland to investigate whether the monster is really real. Sounds like fun, I said to myself.

Problem is, as grocery store impulse buys often do, the book just didn’t work for me over all. Our hero’s father is one big reason; the man’s an abusive prat, and constantly maligns his son’s manhood, calling him “lass” and randomly chosen feminine names practically every time he addresses him. And yet this is apparently all for the altruistic purpose of making Zach face his childhood fears. Um, what? Really? I gritted my teeth practically every time the character opened his mouth, and when Zach actually finally called his dad on his abusive asshattery, it really was too little too late for proper emotional satisfaction, even if it does shut dear old Daddy up.

Also, although this is less the fault of this book in particular and more the fault of being a general trope: I am generally crankier these days about romance plots that equate strong lust with actual love at first sight. I did sympathize with our hero getting dumped by his annoying fiancee after his initial accident, but wound up losing a good bit of that sympathy as his romance with his Actual Love Interest played out. Too many overused romance cliches, there.

Now, all this said, I did at least like the book well enough that I kept reading to the end, and it was doing interesting things with tying in the history of the Loch Ness monster to a centuries-old Jesuit conspiracy and a secret order. And it did have at least a bit of decent suspense. So overall, I’ll give it two stars.