2012 book log

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Nora Roberts, my main go-to author for formulaic but nonetheless entertaining romance and romantic suspense, holds that position for a few strong reasons. And among the strongest is that every so often, she does actually try to break out of formula. With Midnight Bayou, she delivers a rare oddity in my reading experience: a romance novel from the point of view of the male lead rather than the female.

Our hero, Declan Fitzgerald, has moved down to Louisiana to renovate an old house–and this being Louisiana, the house is of course full of secrets and ghosts with a bloody history, one that smacks Declan hard as he starts having disturbing dreams, hallucinations, and bouts of sleepwalking. There is of course his love interest, Lena, the beautiful owner of a local bar. As is generally the case with Ms. Roberts, the chemistry between these two is strong. And as is also generally the case with Ms. Roberts, we have the obligatory set of side characters with whom our hero has generally amusing interactions, especially the heroine’s grandmother, Miss Odette.

The book falls over for me in two ways, though. The first of these is that while I do appreciate her trying a story with the male lead as the primary POV character, it didn’t quite ring true enough for me to work. I usually find Roberts’ portrayal of male characters to be more “what the typical romance reader idealizes as a male character” rather than truly well-rounded characters, and that’s still the case here. Don’t get me wrong, Declan does have some great lines, especially in several scenes with his best friend Remy. But he still frequently comes across to me as acting in given ways because That’s How Boys Are Supposed To Act.

The second way the book falls down for me is the same way other Roberts paranormals have done for me so far: good buildup, but with a fizzle at the end where I was expecting way more of a punch than I actually got. It doesn’t help, either, that a certain plot thread with Declan (about which I cannot go into details, for fear of spoilers) doesn’t play at all well in the last couple of chapters.

So yeah. Not awful, but still not one of Roberts’ better works. I’d recommend this one only if you’re a completist, or if you’d like some very light reading. Two stars.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first book of 2012 is a good strong start: Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

Much has been made over this novel being the “fantasy novel Jane Austen would have written”, and to an extent, I do agree with that. I could certainly see Austen, had she thought to use magic in the stories she wrote, using it the way Kowal does–as a womanly art, employed to enhance the illusion of beauty on a painting, in a room, in an entire house, or even upon a person. Yet at the same time, a comparison to Austen is inevitably going to be a burden against which many books, worthy in their own right, are going to struggle. For my money, Kowal’s prose didn’t quite resonate the same way Austen’s did. Yet this is not to say it’s bad, for it is most assuredly not. I very much enjoyed the read.

I’ve seen Shades of Milk and Honey called out for not having enough of substance going on, that it focuses upon the relationships between the characters and lacks Austen’s social commentary. For me, this charge is unfair; I certainly noted multiple points throughout the book that read as social commentary, such as our heroine’s disdain for the notion of using her talents at glamour to make her nose smaller. Moreover, while most of these characters did not come across to me with the same force as oh, say, the cast of Pride and Prejudice–though yet again, many otherwise worthy novels would suffer in comparison to that particular book–I am honorbound to point out that that very novel focuses quite a bit on the relationships between the characters. And the ultimate main plot does, indeed, come out of that. So too is the case with Shades of Milk and Honey. The eventual unmasking of a callous rogue in the cast livens up the end of the book considerably.

All in all my only lament about this novel is that the relationship between our heroine Jane and her eventual love lacks a certain force, at least at first. So to some readers, it may come across as completely out of the blue. Still, I did quite like this and am looking forward to the next one in the series. Three stars.