TBR Challenge - Holiday Romance

'Tis the season, so this month's TBR challenge theme is Holiday Reads.

I chose This Wicked Gift, Courtney Milan's debut release and part of the 2009 HQN holiday anthology The Heart of Christmas. I bought it shortly after release because I'd heard so many wonderful things about Milan--including raves from a friend who finished second to her in an unpublished contest, then judged her entry in another contest and said she no longer had the slightest regrets about coming in second because Milan's writing was just that awesome.

And yet somehow I didn't get around to reading the novella until this year despite having read others of her books and completely agreeing that she is Just That Awesome. I'm not sure why, except that every time I looked at the anthology on my Kindle, it didn't happen to be the holiday season and I decided to save it for later.

Well, "later" finally came. I read the novella during a quiet evening on our Thanksgiving trip to Oklahoma (yes, I read my December TBR challenge book in November--I had lots of reading time for a change that week, and I knew my first half of December would be insane). It's brilliant. The anthology is worth the purchase price for that story alone, IMHO. It's such a rare treat to read a Regency with non-aristocratic characters, for one thing, and the writing and characterization are a pleasure for readers like me who live for smooth, skilled prose and characters who feel human and three-dimensional. Strong, strong recommend.

Much as I've enjoyed doing the TBR Challenge this year, I've decided not to join again for 2014. Looking back over my reading journal for this year, I decided I want 2014 to be more spontaneous. Somehow the instant I need to read a book, whether for a challenge like this, judging the Ritas, or for research, it becomes homework. And I'm enough of a Muggle version of Hermione Granger that I like homework in moderation, but for the past couple years I feel like I've been missing the joy of grabbing a book just because it's what happens to strike my fancy at that moment.

TBR Challenge Fail!

My attempt to meet this month's theme of an inescapably hyped book met with failure as I discovered, yet again, that even well-written and well-regarded small-town contemporaries rarely work for me. (I won't name the hyped book in question because I'm absolutely convinced it's a good book that just slammed into a severe case of book-reader mismatch with me. I think I've finally learned to stop even attempting this subgenre.) I then tried a few other books from the TBR pile that didn't meet the theme and finally settled on one that I'm enjoying, More Than a Governess by Sarah Mallory, but due to a packed schedule I haven't had time to finish it yet.

I did, however, come up with an idea for a contemporary romance! Girl grows up in small town, then moves to a big city for college--probably Philadelphia or Seattle, in the interests of Writing What I Know--and sticks around after graduation. Her career is off to a good start, in a field that satisfies her wallet, mind, and soul. She doesn't give much thought to her high school sweetheart until he contacts her on Facebook--he's going to be in Philly/Seattle soon. In the serious version of the story, his mom is sick and needs treatment at one of the world-class medical centers these major cities have to offer. In the lighter version, he's there for a conference or something. Either way, he wants to see her. She's curious enough to agree to meet, and turns out the chemistry is still there. She introduces him to the wonders the big city has to offer--food! culture! diversity! big time sports! freedom from busybodies! plenty of community if you know how to find it! He's tempted to ask her to come back to the small town with him, but he ultimately realizes she's made the right choice for her, and that he can and will find a way to make his career work in the city so they can be together. With, you know, more plot and conflict, but you get the picture.

I know, it'd probably never sell, and my writer's heart is with historical and historical fantasy anyway. But if anyone knows of a book that follows this pattern, please please tell me what it is so I can read it right away.

2013 TBR Challenge - Scoundrel

I read Warrior, the first book in this series, ages and ages ago, and bought the whole series as a "boxed" set when it was on sale for Kindle, again quite awhile back. And I've been hoarding it ever since, as I often do with books I know I'll enjoy, but where the author didn't leave me with a strong enough cliffhanger that I have to read the newest book the nanosecond it comes out. (I'm looking at you, Diana Gabaldon, for leaving poor Jem Mackenzie literally in the dark! And you too, George RR Martin, not to name any names lest I spoil TV viewers, but that last major character maybe-death!) Having a few hoarded books gives me a sense of security that I'll never be trapped on a long flight or, worse, holed up in an airport under a weather delay and lack for something entertaining to read.

Anyway, Archer's Blades of the Rose series is fantasy romance with steampunk elements, set in an alternate late 19th century where magic exists and the Blades of the Rose fight to ensure that each nation gets to keep their own magical legacy against the Heirs of Albion, who want to control all the world's magic so the sun will really REALLY never set on the British Empire. They're sort of Indiana Jones with lots of sexytimes--rollicking swashbucklers where good is good, evil is evil, and the characters hurtle from one death-defying adventure to the next.

I picked up Scoundrel now because the October theme for the 2013 Romance TBR Challenge is Paranormal Romance. I didn't like it quite so much as Warrior because of the different hero archetypes involved--Warrior's hero is a rough-around-the-edges soldier who falls for a highborn woman, which I love. (Mmm, Sharpe!) Bennett Day in Scoundrel is more your typical romance novel womanizing rogue, which is much less a fantasy of mine. That said, I loved the heroine, and the swashbuckling was dandy. And speaking of dandies, I'm looking forward to Catullus Graves' story in Stranger. He's the inventor of all the handy gadgets the Blades team uses, and he's a black Briton, which draws my interest since two of my own most recent manuscripts have featured black British characters.

2013 TBR Challenge - Sunrise Over Texas

September's theme for the 2013 TBR Challenge was Westerns, a romance subgenre that I rarely read. Much like with small-town contemporary romances, I have trouble connecting to the central fantasy. Being a city slicker is just too close to the core of my identity, I guess. (Mind you, I read plenty of rural, small-town, or otherwise isolated stories set outside of America. My baggage is strictly related to the urban-rural divide as it plays out in my own country. Which sounds odd, but I've met a British reader, currently living in London, who can enjoy small town settings in America, Australia, etc. but not villages in the British Isles, so I'm not completely unique.)

I do, however, have several Westerns on my Kindle, picked up as bargains or on a recommendation, so I didn't lack for choices for this month's theme. I picked Sunrise Over Texas, by MJ Fredrick. This historical romance set in the earliest days of American settlement in Texas was an emotional, compelling read in which both the hero and heroine have to overcome grief and past mistakes to move on with their lives, and I liked the fact that the heroine was in many ways the more dominant of the pair. Really, the hero was a beta type--the heroine was even a better shot than he was--which was unexpected and refreshing in any historical, and I suspect is even rarer in Westerns than, say, Regencies.

The story was gripping and gritty, especially the early sections where the hero and heroine are fighting to survive in an isolated environment. I don't know how accurate it was, since I'm far from being an expert on 1820's Texas. Recommended for readers looking for off-the-beaten-path historicals.

Full disclosure: This book was published by my publisher, Carina Press.

Back from RWA (and July TBR Challenge post)

Yesterday I finally got back into town after my combined RWA National and family reunion trip to Atlanta, so I've got a lot of blogging to catch up on. I also need to post about my RWA experiences at some point. Suffice it to say it was a good conference, and I came out of it with a few new ideas and new connections.

For now, well, I'll start by catching up on July for the 2013 TBR Challenge.

Sprig Muslin, by Georgette Heyer.

This month's theme was the Classics--a classic author, book, trope, or however you choose to interpret it. I ended up going with Georgette Heyer, since the Regency genre as we know it certainly wouldn't exist without her. I read most of her books in high school, since my library had a good collection, but I don't remember this one.

I have a confession to make. Despite her genre pioneer status, I only like Heyer's books--I don't love them. I feel the same way about Tolkien and high fantasy, incidentally, albeit for different reasons. The fact that many of my favorite books wouldn't exist without them doesn't make their books my favorites. With Tolkien, the issue is that I always feel like I'm watching his characters from a distance, that I'm observing the stories rather than connecting to and participating in them. With Heyer...well, ever since I read A Civil Contract I haven't been able to forgive her for what she did to Jenny Chawleigh. Jenny wasn't of the gentry or the aristocracy, therefore she didn't deserve a truly happy ending--at least, that's the subtext of the book as I read it. Ot She didn't get love and devotion; she got respect and contentment. And as someone whose own ancestry is FAR from genteel, I got angry about that.

I know a lot of people love Heyer and love A Civil Contract in particular for its realism. And I can totally understand and respect that. But for whatever reason, that book's ending triggered something personal for me that changed how I look at her work as a whole. And, yes, I realize I'm not being wholly consistent. I read books with aristocratic characters all the time. Two of my favorite fictional crushes are Lord Peter Wimsey and Count Aral Vorkosigan (not that either of them had any trouble conjuring up romantic feelings for a commoner, come to think). The fact that the Duke of Wellington was as elitist as can be doesn't make me admire him any the less--though there are a few quotes of his where I always shake my head in exasperation that anyone that smart could say something that stupid.

But when I'm reading fiction and I feel like the author is endorsing the idea that I ought to regard anyone as superior or inferior because of an accident of birth, I end up, shall we say, in an argument with the text. And, yes, I know, Heyer is a product of her times...but she's a contemporary of Dorothy Sayers, and while the class issues are certainly there in Sayers, they're not on anything like the level of A Civil Contract. And maybe throwing in an American author is apples to oranges, but Louisa May Alcott is decades earlier and has the Phebe-Archie secondary romance in the Rose books, where Phebe is an almost literal nobody. She started out as a servant in the family, and IIRC came from a workhouse and didn't know who her parents were. Mind you, most of Archie's family disapproved of the match just as much as you'd expect of a family with generations of money and status behind it, but you never feel like the text is telling you they're right.

Anyway...all that said, I enjoyed Sprig Muslin. It's a classic Heyer romp--frothy, madcap, and fun. I read it in less than a day, and enjoyed every word. However, I would've liked to see more interaction between the hero and heroine, and I got to arguing with the text again at the end when it was made clear that the secondary heroine, a young, headstrong beauty, belonged with her future husband because he'd keep her in check, which her doting guardians had never managed to do. I got the sense he'd be a benevolent husband/guardian, but it still gave me a bit of a squick.

2013 TBR Challenge - Sweet Awakening

The May theme for the 2013 TBR Challenge was More Than One--i.e. books by an author with more than one work in your TBR pile. I had many choices, especially after my discovery last month of a box in the basement, unopened since we moved into this house back in 2010, containing most of my old, pre-Kindle TBR shelf.

As a result, this month's book, Sweet Awakening, is the first book I've read for this challenge that isn't available as an e-book, though if it sounds like your kind of thing, it looks like there are plenty of affordable used copies out there.

I've read 2 or 3 of Farrell's books already, and I always enjoy them as a change of pace. They tend to cover a longer time period than today's historical romances, and though the central love story is important to the plot, they often have saga or adventure elements that might get them tagged as "mainstream with strong romantic elements" in today's hyper-niched market.

This book was a harrowing read, but I found it hard to put down. The heroine, Clare, was always expected to marry her childhood friend, Giles--and she expected the same until she was swept off her feet by a dashing, mysterious, intense, and darkly handsome aristocrat. The new man, Justin, has all the usual romance hero markers, until after Clare marries him. Even then all is wonderful at first, but soon he shows his true colors as a jealous abuser, especially while drunk. Eventually Clare kills him in self-defense, and Giles is there for her to help her pick up the pieces. But after all she's been through, it isn't easy for her to learn how to function in a healthy relationship, or for him to accept that he can't make it as if her years with Justin never happened.

It was painful to watch Clare keep forgiving Justin and letting him back into her bed and her life. I know she had fewer options than a modern woman in her situation, but she still could've returned to her parents, gone into hiding, etc. But I also know her behavior isn't uncommon, even now, and Farrell made me understand the combination of hope and despair that might make a woman forgive the unforgivable better than I ever have before.

Though I definitely enjoyed the book, it would be remiss of me not to include two caveats, one serious, one less so:

1. The abuse is graphically described enough that I expect it would be very triggering to some readers.

2. I forgave certain anachronisms and errors (e.g. incorrect titles and forms of address) I'd normally have very little patience for because the story and characters worked so well for me.

2013 TBR Challenge - The Midwife

The April theme for the 2013 TBR Challenge was New-to-You Author. I had many choices on my Kindle, given that when I first got one, I went on sort of a mini-binge scooping up romance bargains that I never actually got around to reading. Given how indiscriminate this buying binge was, I had several false starts the first week of April. For the first three books, I made myself read a chapter or two to give the stories a fair chance, but ended up rejecting them for, in order, an overly florid writing style, a hero who struck me as not just needing reform but inherently shallow and misogynistic, and having every single character feel more like a stereotype than a person.

Next I tried a more recent acquisition, The Midwife, by Carolyn Davidson. It's a 1999 release, but newish as an ebook, part of the Harlequin Treasury collection.

Although the book didn't bowl me over, I enjoyed it, in large part because it's a quiet, subtle story with an unusual setting. There's nothing splashy or over-the-top about it, with the possible exception of some secrets in the heroine's past, but they were handled deftly. The hero was a fairly prosperous farmer, not a duke or a cowboy with a past. Aside from a fistfight or two, there wasn't any violence to be found. Rather than the Wild Wild West or the Highlands (Home of the Kilted!) or Glamorous London, it was set in Minnesota in the 1890s, with hardworking Scandinavians everywhere you look. And I liked that. Not that there's anything wrong with big stories or the standard settings (says the Regency author), but it's just so nice to settle in with a book that doesn't fit the mold.

Really, I do wish there was more variety in historical romance settings. Maybe I'm an unusually omnivorous reader--I certainly meet readers online who never read outside the romance genre, never tire of Regencies and Victorians, and can never have too many dukes. And, let me stress, everyone should read what they like without any guilt, and without me or anyone else telling them they should make different choices. Most of us are super-busy people who read to relax, and if what relaxes you is a steady diet of two 19th century dukes per week, that's absolutely what you should choose. Maybe one of these days I might even write a duke myself, and I do have a wealthy, handsome viscount you might enjoy. But one of the things that gives me pleasure as a reader is getting mental vacations to a variety of times and places. In romance, I like the balance of knowing I'm getting a love story with a happy ending while seeing that played out across a variety of times, places, and character types, and I wish that variety was easier to find.

Incidentally, I've also challenged myself to read at least one finalist from each category of the 2013 Ritas. If you're interested, I blogged about Best First Book here.

2013 TBR Challenge - Hot Under Pressure

March's theme for the 2013 TBR Challenge was Series Catch-Up, an appealing one for me because I do tend to hoard books in romance series I enjoy against reading droughts, long flights, etc.--any situation where I know I'll want a reliably good book. So I wasn't lacking for choices for this one.

(In other genres, I'm a lot more likely to inhale a new book in a series within days or even hours of its release because the previous volume probably ended on a cliffhanger, or at least with tons of unanswered questions that have been bugging me for months or YEARS. Since romances have to at least feature a happy ending for that book's central characters, there's less of that "FINALLY a new book, must read NOW!" stress.)

Anyway, this month my selection was...

23) Hot Under Pressure, by Louisa Edwards.

This book is the third in a trilogy about restaurant teams competing in a Rising Star Chef competition.

I don't read a lot of contemporary romance, in large part because so much of the subgenre runs to hymns to the glories of small town life. I grew up in a small town. I went to college in Philadelphia and have settled down to live my adult life in Seattle. Never, in all the times I've gone back to my hometown, have I felt the slightest hunger to hook up with an old flame or to turn my back on my empty urban existence for the authentic community of people I'm probably some kind of distant cousin to, what with Great-Great-Granddaddy Stone's 17 children who married into practically every family in the southeast corner of our county. I can relate to Barrayar and Narnia and Terre d'Ange and any number of invented fantastical worlds. To small town romances, not so much.

Which is a big reason why one of my few contemporary romance autobuy authors is Louisa Edwards. Her stories of love among young, elite chefs are hymns to the glories of city life, of how found family can be even more important than the one you were born into. And, they're about food and cooking, which is close behind books and history on my personal obsessions list. Hot Under Pressure is a worthy final installment to the Rising Star Chef series. It's a second chance story about a couple who married very young, only to be driven apart by tragedy...until a decade or so later they find themselves competing against each other in the finals, representing their New York and San Francisco restaurants.

2013 TBR Challenge - Miss Jacobson's Journey

February's theme for the 2013 TBR Challenge was Recommended Read, but I only had one book that qualified--generally, if a friend I trust recommends a book, I read it quickly rather than letting it gather virtual dust on my Kindle. I tried the book (which shall remain nameless, given the delicacy of giving negative reviews when I'm an author myself), but the author's voice didn't work for me, and two chapters in I wanted to strangle both the hero and heroine.

Since I'm a firm believer that life is too short to read books that don't work for you, I gave up and went to my LONG list of possibilities for April's New-to-You Author Category. I selected Miss Jacobson's Journey, by Carola Dunn.

It's a traditional Regency, with a PG, kisses-only sensuality rating, but with a decidedly non-traditional heroine and setting. The heroine, Miriam Jacobson, is an English Jew who's been living on the Continent with her doctor uncle for nine years after having become estranged from the rest of her family by rudely rejecting the suitor the matchmaker brought for her. Now she wants to go home, but at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, journeying from France to England isn't a simple task. She and her maid/duenna are recruited by Jakob Rothschild to help two men smuggle gold to Wellington in Spain, with the promise of help getting home once she completes her mission. Naturally, one of the men in her party is the suitor she rejected all those years ago, and he's grown and matured in the intervening years into a far more attractive man than she ever would've dreamed possible...

From the time I started reading traditional Regencies in high school, I've always loved any non-traditional setting in the subgenre. (Not that I don't love a nice country house party or London Season tale, too. I just crave variety.) Following the drum in the Peninsular War? I'm there. Congress of Vienna? Fascinating. Canada? More, please. Brussels just before Waterloo? Wonderful! America, before, during, or after the War of 1812? Why not? India? Yes, though I've seen some that make me wince with cultural stereotypes.

So this book had me halfway to hooked from the beginning because of the setting, and the story delivered on its promise. I enjoyed the characters, the sweet romance worked beautifully for me, and I will definitely be buying more of Dunn's backlist.

2013 TBR Challenge - Monsoon Wedding Fever

This year I decided to take on a TBR challenge in an effort to actually READ some of the books I pick up for my Kindle thinking they sound interesting and then never get to because they keep getting buried beneath the next pile of purchases. Since the whole point is to whittle down my to-be-read pile, I'm limiting myself to books I owned as of 12/31/12.

The theme for January is We Love Short Shorts - short stories, novellas, and category romance. I selected a 2012 category romance from the Harlequin Romance line, Monsoon Wedding Fever, by Shoma Narayanan.

I bought this book because I was happy to see Harlequin bring out a book about Indian characters by an Indian author. What interested me most as I read was seeing how the conventions of a category contemporary romance played out within a different cultural milieu, one that's mostly unfamiliar to me. For example, the heroine is much more concerned about her reputation and keeping up appearances than a contemporary American or British heroine would be--though as a writer and reader primarily of historicals, I didn't have any trouble relating to her concerns. 

This is a reunion story. The hero and heroine, Dhruv and Riya, first met in college, when she was 17 and he was 20, but he broke up with her abruptly and rather coldly--which I found forgivable given his youth and the fact his own parents' marriage was in crisis. They meet again some eleven years later, when it turns out he's a cousin to her roommate who's about to get married. In the run-up to that wedding, they can't avoid each other, and they reconnect.

But their romance doesn't run smoothly. Dhruv is the richer of the pair, and Riya is super-sensitive about her independence and proving she can provide for herself. Also, she learns from family gossip that he's been seeking an arranged marriage, meeting women more suitable in the eyes of his family than she could ever be, so she's understandably concerned he sees her as nothing but a temporary fling. I got a little impatient waiting for them to actually communicate, but overall this was a satisfying romance and an interesting glimpse at another part of the world.