Romance February wrap-up (plus a brief announcement).

All three of these books deserve their own review, because I loved them all; but that's not going to happen for Reasons, so rather than let them slip by unmentioned, I'm giving 'em short shrift here.

The Ruin of a Rogue, Miranda Neville: Miranda's one my faves (I allow myself the presumption of her first name, as we've met briefly in person and exchanged tabby pics on Twitter), and there's more great stuff here, as the titular scoundrel, Marcus Lithgow, woos the wealthy, reserved Anne Brotherton. At first it's a con: he's angling for a payoff from her guardian to remove his unsuitable presence...but when he starts to actually enjoy her company, he finds himself considering the unthinkable: becoming an honest man. Charming, witty, sweet, and hot.

The Luckiest Lady in London, Sherry Thomas: Ms. Thomas can wrench my gut like no one else (with the exception of Joss Whedon), and this one's no exception, although here the queasiness comes more from dark eroticism than pathos. Felix Rivendale, having seen the havoc love wreaked on his parents' marriage, has walled up his heart, plastered over the hollow at his core with perfect politeness. What he feels for Louisa Cantwell--in London for one desperate Season, needing to marry rich to support her family--brings out something fierce and possessive in him. And she finds herself in unwelcome lust at first sight; he makes her want to do things well-bred young ladies do not do, even as she finds his charming facade repugnant. It's messed up, you guys, and it's a testament to Ms. Thomas's awe-inspiring talent that she coaxes an actual love story out of them, and earns a happy ending.

To Charm a Naughty Countess, Theresa Romain: This one's not out till May, but I got an advance copy cause we're besties! (Also, she lent me the previous two books, because my book-buyin' budget is currently nil. Thank you, sweetie.) Her writing just keeps getting better, and her Matchmaker Trilogy for Sourcebooks (of which this is the second) does some unique and important things for the genre. Here, most notably, we have a hero with an anxiety disorder: Michael, the Duke of Wyverne, isn't just shy and awkward, but overwhelmed by crowds, helpless before the niceties of social interaction. He gets headaches, suffers panic attacks, and the heroine, Caroline, can only help, not fix him. Theresa also sets this in 1816, the Year Without a Summer, which seriously needs to show up in novels more often. Good show, m'dear!

ALSO: I've decide to shutter this blog for the time being. I've been writing for five years, and have never been willing to do what's required to build an actual audience; my posts average a couple dozen views, and it's simply not worth the stress. I want to read what I want and then not have it staring at me waiting to be blogged about. I still plan to write the occasional review for F5, and gush about books on my Tumblr. Join me there if you'd like!

A Little Bit Wild (Victoria Dahl)

Oh, Ms. Dahl, thank you so much for writing a sexually aggressive heroine.

We meet Marissa York in the process of losing her virginity and finding it...not quite all she'd hoped. In fact, she'd be perfectly content to pretend it never happened were it not for two things: first, the lover in question, Peter White, apparently deflowered her with an eye towards marriage rather than amusement; and second, her brother Edward walks in on them, making what she'd hoped would be a pleasurable encounter into a family crisis. She must marry immediately, Edward declares, in case she's pregnant. But she flat-out refuses to marry Peter: he "failed to meet even the lowest expectations of performance."

Into the breach steps her brother Aidan's friend Jude Bertrand. Natural son of a duke (his mother a French courtesan), he hovers on the edge of noble society, not enough part of it to worry overmuch about scandal, but with just enough respectability to be a proper match for Marissa. Especially since she's caught his eye every time he's visited the Yorks; he's attracted to her wild streak, the wanton liveliness he can glimpse beneath her polite exterior.

Marissa, on the other hand, remembers him not at all. And he's hardly her type, muscular and coarse-featured, where she prefers pretty boys in tight breeches. She's a leg woman through and through: "Men's legs were just so lovely. Slim and strong and exposed in a way that ladies' legs never were. How could they expect that girls should not be affected by the sight? Gentlemen obviously intended to be admired, the way they flashed their thighs about, hardly covered at all in the tight cloth of their trousers." AUGH I LOVE HER SO MUCH.

I don't recall having read a romance heroine who's this outright horny, and it makes for a very different narrative arc: while Marissa quickly realizes Jude's got the goods when it comes to pleasing a lady, it takes her quite a while to see Jude as more than a piece of meat (strong thighs, talented hands, delicious mouth), and he suffers for it. It's a rare treat to read a gal with such a strong libido, and have her be the one who learns to love someone for more than their body. But Dahl doesn't fudge history either: Marissa's initial dalliance wouldn't be a problem in a perfect world, but in 1847 England, it is--not just for her, either. Her actions affect her whole family, and she accepts her responsibility.

Super duper awesome. Also, a Twitter exchange with the author led to some choice Jensen Ackles gifs, so there's that too.

Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell)

Eleanor and Park is yet another example of a book party to which I'm too late for a substantive review. I mean, it came out a year ago, and every young-adult-reading-adult I know who's read it has RAVED, quite rightly. And if you, dear reader, are a YA-reading-adult, you've already heard of it. And I've nothing new to add to the accolades: it's wonderful. Beautifully written, heartbreaking, heart-lifting, yes-this-is-exactly-what-it's-like-falling-in-love-ing.

What I have instead of a review, then, is a question, one that makes me wish I'd done more blog promotion and whatnot so that I had an actual community of commenting readers, because I am likely just asking to the ether: Why is this a young adult novel?
Genre, and delineations thereof, are tricky--especially those based on the assumed age of the audience. And the YA Crossover phenomenon is well-documented: Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Book Thief, and so forth. Indeed, these days some "young adult" titles are picked up by publishers specifically to become crossovers. I don't think Eleanor and Park is one of the latter, and it falls under the vague general definition of YA in that the main characters are teenagers. But to me, speaking only to myself, it feels like a retrospective adult novel--that the third-person voice is that of an older person looking back on first love and adolescent trauma, not that of a teenager experiencing it firsthand. This isn't an insult, or even a quibble: I loved this book, I'm so sad I have to give it back to the library at the end of the month. I just want someone to sit me down and explain. Please?

Pieces of Sky (Kaki Warner)

I really thought I'd enjoy Pieces of Sky. It came recommended: heck, it won the RITA for Best First Book the year it came out! Warner's writing is lovely, especially her descriptions, and the setting (New Mexico Territory in 1869) is the good kind of unusual; but while I did finish it; I ultimately couldn't like it.

I should've listened to my gut and put this aside on page 8, when I found out that the heroine, Jessica Thornton, was pregnant after being raped by her brother-in-law. Her situation is certainly unique among the romances I've read, and could be properly dealt with--after all, rape victims obviously deserve happy endings and loving relationships. But, augh, Warner comes sooooo close to writing a hero (New Mexico Territory rancher Brady Wilkins) who provides Jessica with the patience and gentleness and lack of judgment she needs...and then, less than a year after the attack, he gets mad at her when she tenses up at the prospect of sex, because he's been nothing but kind to her. DUDE. YOU DO NOT GET TO DECIDE WHEN SHE'S READY, AND KINDNESS WILL NOT FIX TRAUMA. They do eventually sleep together, of course, after she decides he's right, and OH LOOK AT THAT SHE'S FINE NOW. Gross.

Brady also has a streak of bloodthirstiness to him that's unsettling. There's a whole revenge plot wherein Sancho Ramirez, the madman responsible for Brady's father's death--the culmination of a long-standing feud begun when the RosaRoja ranch, originally owned by the Spanish-descended Ramirez family, was given to Jacob Wilkins after the Mexican War. Sancho is cartoonishly, over-the-top evil: he sets fire to things! he fantasizes about raping his sister! And while the usual revenge narrative goes something like "character wants revenge, character gets revenge, character discovers revenge is kinda hollow," here Brady gets revenge and the narrative is essentially "WOO-HOO GREAT JOB BUDDY" while he leaves Sancho's corpse to rot where he fell.

So, yeah. Despite glimmers of promise--I like that Brady has a mustache, and that he's actually got legit reasons for being super buff, unlike the usual "duke who's never done manual labor has a six-pack" trope--I couldn't embrace the hero as a character. And without that, there's just no fulfillment to the romance.

Bet Me (Jennifer Crusie)

Been meaning to read Bet Me for years: it's one of Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell's veryvery favorites ("not having read this book is in violation of many international treaties"), and former colleague Bookavore provided the VITAL information that it features a donut makeout scene, which should just be on the cover, right? Somehow, despite that last fact, I didn't figure out it was a farce until the last scene--so I kept thinking "I love this, but I don't buy it" until light dawned. So I'm telling you up front: go into it as farce! Let silly bits slide! Because oh, it is so rewarding.

Min(erva) Dobbs is a zaftig actuary, just dumped by the odious David (srsly, he's the worst)--she's hanging out at a bar with her BFFs, drowning her sorrows and fretting about fitting into her maid of honor's dress at her sister's wedding three weeks hence. Enter Calvin Morrissey, commitment-shy and the hottest thing on four wheels (YES I CAST JENSEN ACKLES IN MY HEAD I'M SORRY IT'S A SICKNESS), who never loses a bet. And David (the WORST) tries to bet him ten grand that he can't sleep with Min in a month. Cal, who is not a horrifying misogynist asshole, refuses outright--but he does wager $10 that he can take her out to dinner that night. They go on the grumpiest first date ever, as Min has no patience with Cal's practiced charm--and she also believes he agreed to David's first (WORST) bet.

Despite their both feeling utterly incompatible, the two find themselves stuck in the same circles, and keep finding themselves on more and more serious dates. She's got massive body image issues courtesy of her awful mother, and he's all "Whatevs, you're hot, allow me to hand-feed you carbs." And he's got an awful family too, and she sticks up for him, and AUGH there's just so much else here, there's a cat, and snow globes, and her sister's wedding, and parallel relationships, and Little League, and Cal's terrible ex Cynthie...it's all marvelously plotted, the dialogue is witty, and the way these two people learn to see themselves through each other's accepting eyes is the BEST. Fun but not inconsequential, frothy without being shallow, Bet Me is indeed a romance must-read.

The Duke is Mine (Eloisa James)

So I'm finishing up Eloisa James's "Princess and the Pea" riff, The Duke is Mine, and our orange tabby kitten (Brains is her name! Middle name Amelia, after fellow ginger Pond) starts chomping on the back cover! "NO," I admonish. "Books are not for eating. Undaunted, she takes another bite, leaving delicate little fang marks on the last few pages. The thing is, Little Miss Feisty has never chewed on a book before. Can't blame her, though--I sort of wanted to eat it up myself. This book is yummy.

The ingredients:

• Olivia Lytton, reciter of dirty limericks, overindulger in meat pies, betrothed from her childhood to the son of her father's friend, the Duke of Canterwick. She's rebelled at every step by her parents' lifelong quest to make a perfect duchess out of her.
• Said betrothed, Rupert, brain-damaged by lack of oxygen at his birth and hence not exactly the mate Olivia dreams of. (Rupert is a really risky character, especially for the genre, and especially during an early scene where the two's respective parents more or less force them to attempt intercourse to cement their engagement. It's a sign of James's talent that he's ultimately a nuanced and sympathetic character, though he's not the official hero.)
• Olivia's twin sister, Georgiana, who took to heart the "duchification" lessons of their youth, and is sweet, polite, and struggling to make men notice her. Her lack of family and fortune will be remedied by Olivia's marriage--at least that's the plan.
• Tarquin, Duke of Sconce (sconce sconce sconce! I wonder if there's a Duke of Wainscoting or an Earl of Crown Molding lurking about), wounded by his first wife's infidelity and the death of their son. He's allowing his formidable mother (ah, the formidable mother trope! I loves 'em. Not in real life) to choose his next spouse--she believes Georgiana will fit the bill, but Quin has immediate hot pants for Olivia, who shows up on his doorstep in a rainstorm.

And those hot pants just get hotter. There's a scene in a treehouse that I started reading over lunch at work--I was interrupted by back-to-the-salt-mines duties and was ever so distracted at the register that afternoon! The passion is paired with a lot of torment, of course, as Olivia risks her engagement and her sister's love, and Quin worries that her tempestuous nature and unwillingness to toe the lines of polite society warn that she'll be a repeat of his disastrous first marriage. These obstacles have satisfying conclusions . . . and there's a scene in a meadow of bluebells that makes the treehouse look positively prim.

Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

Astute observers will remember that Diana Gabaldon's Outlander was part of Romance February Part Deux. Astute observers will also note that it is now March. Ehn, I read it anyway. It was pretty great

This was my first time-travel romance: heroine Claire Beauchamp Duncan, on a belated post-WWII honeymoon with her husband Frank, walks through a split standing stone in the Scottish countryside and finds herself in 1743. So it's also my first Highlander romance! (I mean, not counting the movie Highlander, which I also just watched recently, and which was also pretty great.) And oh, what a hero! Jamie Fraser is red-headed and brave and sweet and virginal and seriously, I'm all swoon-y, I'm gonna stop with the adjectives. I love his relationship with Claire--she's trained as a combat nurse and keeps patching him up; with her sexual experience, this gives her a physical dominance of him that's very novel and very erotic. They have adventures and English-Scottish-intrigue and whatnot, but really, it's about their Love That Transcends Time *shiver*. And no, Claire doesn't forget about Frank. Her emotional turmoil at being trapped away from him and outside of her own time is very real. In fact, all the emotion is very well-drawn, and the sprawling cast of characters is smoothly handled. Even at 845 pages in mass-market format, it's a quick and enjoyable read.

Two things I didn't care for, though--but they are so very, very spoilery I'm gonna hide them in white text. You should read the book anyway.

One, the villain of the piece--Frank's ancestor, Captain Jonathan Randall, didn't really have to be from the *Depraved Homosexual school of character, did he? (Warning: that asterisk leads to a TV Tropes link. Which, as they say, will ruin your life.) I mean, I understand that sadistic, villainous gay men exist--but it makes me uncomfortable when a fictional character's violence and cruelty is so inextricably linked to his same-sex desires. (Although it's kind of a nice change of pace that the hero gets raped. I mean, not "nice," but interesting from a "consumer of narrative" viewpoint. Also, that TV Tropes link claims it's averted in later books in the series. Hmmmm.)

Also, it's LAME that the book ends with Claire pregnant, when she was having trouble conceiving in the 20th century. Babies are boring in sexytimes books, so there.

Not Quite a Husband (Sherry Thomas)

I think Sherry Thomas is my favorite.

Not to say a word against Eloisa or Miranda or Gail or Meljean, of course! I heart those ladies with muchness of the heart. But Ms. Thomas's Delicious was one of the highlights of last year's February romanceathon, and after reading Not Quite a Husband, I'm just in awe of her originality and her ability to work the Angst and Misunderstandings without being manipulative.

I love the premise and the principals of NQtH so, so much. Bryony Asquith is a freakin' lady doctor, guys! In 1897! On the northwest frontier of British India! (It's now Pakistan; she's tending Muslim women who can't see male doctors.) Oh, it's delicious. (And yes, she did do her research.) What is an English gentleman's daughter doing so far off the beaten path? Fleeing the memories of her unhappy marriage, annulled three years previously. But her former husband, Leo Marsden (four years younger! and a mathematician! I loves him so moishe) tracks her down after a frantic message from Bryony's sister that their father (whose relationship with Bryony isn't great either) is deathly ill. And the thing is, he doesn't know why their marriage failed. And it broke his heart. And he's still crazy in love with her. Then they get swept up in a local anti-British uprising!

Gosh, I'm being exclamatory. It's just that it's such a great setup, and it's inhabited by such well-drawn, relatable lovers. I was rooting for them from page 1, and as their story developed and their backstory was filled in, I really felt the emotional weight of how they'd hurt each other, the real, human psychological work that they both had to do to repair themselves and their relationship. Leo's got the most amazing lines towards the end, saying "Trust is a choice. I choose to trust your love and your stalwartness. I trust that should there be a day when either the past or the present overwhelms me, you will be there to guide me past that dark moment." How . . . mature.

Oh, yeah, and the sex is great too. ;)

(P.S. Before this, I'd attempted Maggie Robinson's Mistress by Marriage, but just could not deal with it, as the protagonists, another unhappily married couple, seemed to actually hate each other, but kept bangin' anyway. I mean, the heroine thinks in the first chapter something about how she doesn't miss him at all, but she does miss his penis. Gross.)

The Dangerous Viscount (Miranda Neville)

Thank you, thank you, Ms. Neville, for answering my plea for a nerd hero! AND he's a virgin, who learns how to please a lady by reading 19th-century sex guides! The Dangerous Viscount is, in fact, the second book in a series centered on a bunch of literary collectors (the author once worked for Sotheby's rare book department). And in the first one, The Wild Marquis, the heroine is a bookseller!!!!! AIEEE!!!! I don't even care that the eponymous hero is another incorrigible rake.

OK, deep breaths. Let's see if I can eke out a plot summary through my excitement: we have Lady Diana Fanshawe, widow, member of an inconveniently unconventional family--inventor father, hunting-dog-breeding mother, little sister determined to become a diplomat. She's decided to marry again, and settled on handsome and titled Lord Blakeney, eventual duke (even though he's the Regency version of a dumb jock). Then she meets his bespectacled, socially awkward cousin, Sebastian Iverley. Seriously, dude is almost Asperger-y, prone to grunting in lieu of conversation, except when he's holding forth on bindings and folios and the like. She bets Blakeney she can get Iverley to kiss her . . . and we're off!

There's a throw-our-lovers-together twist I'm not crazy about, but I found this one almost entirely delightful. Neville is the funniest romance novelist I've read, and Sebastian is a dork girl's dreamboat. Thumbs up!

A Night to Surrender (Tessa Dare)

Liked but didn't love Tessa Dare's A Night to Surrender. Fantastic first chapters, and I really dig the setting for the series of which this is the beginning: Spindle Cove, a tiny seaside town that local gentlewoman Susanna Finch has turned into a haven for oddball ladies from all over England. Some are too smart for gentlemens' social comfort, some are sickly and made sicker by Regency medicine (bleeding and leeches and mercury, oh my!), some are fleeing bad relationships; all are thrilled to find this enclave, nearly all female, and dedicated to just letting them be themselves, whoever that should be.

Of course, this can't last--there wouldn't be a story otherwise! And so Lieutenant Colonel Victor Bramwell, still limping from a knee shattered by a French bullet, comes to town with his corporal and his ne'er-do-well cousin, Lord Payne, hoping Susanna's father, gunsmith Sir Lewis Finch, can use his influence to get him back commanding in the field--the only life he's ever known, and the only life he's ever loved. They meet with a literal explosion--Payne's novel idea for scaring a flock of sheep blocking their path--as Bram tackles Susanna out of harm's way, and then can't resist stealing a kiss.

Both main characters are strong and opinionated--so of course there's some good verbal sparring in between the smoochin'--and Susanna's unconventional and fiercely protective attitude towards her bevy of misfit maidens makes her immediately likeable. Oh, and Bram acquires a pet lamb named Dinner, which is obviously awesome. There were just a few things that kept me from being completely swept up: first [SLIGHT SPOILER], I didn't care for Susanna's father's feet of clay; second, I know there's no romantic way of describing coitus interruptus, but "[i]n some primitive way, it satisfied him to mark her"? EW. And I'm grumpy about the couple being set up for the next in the series, A Week to be Wicked (out in March!), because the lady is an impetuous, bespectacled geologist prone to carrying around a reticule full of interesting rocks, whereas the dude is . . . an incorrigible rake. HE DOES NOT DESERVE HER. MORE NERD HEROES PLZ!!!!

Romance February II: The Quickening Boogalo: This Time It's Personal. IN SPACE

For all those waiting breathlessly for the second annual installment of Romance February--in which I read more romance novels than usual, and also your regularly scheduled bunch of stuff--herewith, The List!

• Gold Rush Bride, Debra Lee Brown
• Untouched, Anna Campbell
• Lord of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase
• A Night to Surrender, Tessa Dare
• The Duke Is Mine, Eloisa James
• To Wed a Wild Lord, Sabrina Jeffries
• Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
• The Dangerous Viscount, Miranda Neville
• Mistress By Marriage, Maggie Robinson
• Not Quite a Husband, Sherry Thomas

That's ten, for those keeping score. I reserve the right to carry over into March, because ARCs and book clubs and wedding planning and YEESH. Books, man. There are just so dang many of them sometimes.

Adieu to romance (in book form).

Eight books later, I've brought Romance February to a close with Sarah MacLean's Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake--which I liked but didn't love. It is perhaps the inevitable weariness of immersion in a single genre? I will say that this had the BEST sex scenes of what I've read. In a omigoodness-I-hope-the-person-next-to-me-on-the-subway-isn't-reading-over-my-shoulder kind of way. Howevs, I found the premise--spinster decides to throw caution to the winds and indulge in the harmless vices the men around her take for granted (fence, drink Scotch, smoke a cheroot), winning the heart of a hopeless libertine along the way--historically implausible. I know, I know, the anachronistically feminist heroine is a tried-and-true romance trope, but I felt like Callie would have suffered some kind of consequences risking her reputation, whether major or minor; I mean, she goes alone to a public house and no one hits on her but the hero?!? And again, the reformed-rake hero is par for the course, but I didn't really like this guy, and I don't think that, even today, most gentlemen are attracted to uppity women. (Except for my boyfriend, of course--but it took ages to find him.) I'm also kinda tired of the lady-virgin dude-slut pairing: I liked that in Proof by Seduction and Delicious the women had some experience. I get that in historicals it's more accurate to have an unmarried man have slept around, but it's still infuriating. Are there romances, I wonder, where the heroine has been around the block a few times, and the hero is the blushing man-maiden? Contemporaries, maybe? Or, ooh, like a medieval one where he's a former monk? That would be hot.

Meanwhile, the bf, who loves reading aloud, has taken up a paranormal thriller romance called Captive Heart, about the world's only water Sybil and a tough no-nonsense cop. It is goofy shit, I have to say--every sentence sounds like a tagline, which lends itself well to Chris's reading style. It's not good, but it's fun to share.

I'm now moving on to some other TBRs, but will leave romance in the mix. Next up is Cynthia Leitich Smith's Blessed, third in the trilogy that started with Tantalize--YA vamp fic with just an edge of sexiness and malice. Then I start Anna Karenina! And finish it in a week! I have total faith in myself.

Delicious (Sherry Thomas)

Another winner--is romance just awesome, or are my friends awesome recommenders? Little from Column A...

Delicious is a story about hunger, figurative and literal. Verity Durant becomes cook to Liberal MP Stuart Somerset after the unexpected death of his half-brother (and her former lover), Bertie; what he doesn't know is that she was the nameless woman he thinks of as Cinderella from a single ardent night ten years before. She remembers, though, and from the shadows cooks him meals full of passion and memory--his early childhood in the slums of Manchester, his friendship with Bertie that turned sour as they aged. He's got an inconvenient fiancée, she has a son she won't acknowledge and a hidden past. It's a lovely story of rediscovery and forgiveness...and omigoodness, the food! Anyone know where I can get a cheap madeleine mold?

[P.S. Nobody remembers the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar-Sean Patrick Flannery vehicle Simply Irresistible, a romantic comedy about a gal whose cooking is literally magical, right? No? Uhm, me neither.]

Silent in the Grave (Deanna Raybourn)

One thing I'm learning for myself about the romance genre--which any frequent reader will greet with DERR--is that it's huge, encompassing many historical and alternate-historical periods and settings, levels of explicitness from hand-holding to threesomes and moresomes, divergent writing styles. The throughline, as far as I can see? People fall in love. In other words, the romance "genre" is really most of the stories ever told, filmed, or written. (The others? Probably war stories.)

I started thinking about this whilst reading Deanna Raybourn's compelling and well-written Silent in the Grave--recc'd to me on Twitter by the lovely Sarah Rettger--and wondering, "OK, why is this a romance?" It has the trappings I've grown to love about historicals: faithfully detailed fashions, vocab, and manners (down to uncomfortable class and ethnic distinctions); a heroine who doesn't fit into her society, and a plausible explanation for same (Lady Julia Grey was raised by her crazy family and a succession of Radical tutors); a broody, prickly hero for verbal sparring and unbidden sparks. Lady Julia is certainly attracted to Nicholas Brisbane, a private inquiry agent hired by her late husband, and there's a good ol' Crushing Kiss 2/3rds of the way through; as the first in a series, I think the romantic arc will play out over multiple books, which could be very gratifying (and again, as a measure of how much I enjoyed the book, I am TOTES reading the rest...at...some...point...TOO MANY BOOKS). Still, the driving plot of the novel is not the attraction but a mystery, a very good one. The library I got it from emblazoned "MYSTERY" on the spine...so which is it? Mysterious romance or romantic mystery? While I'm tempted to just say, "Ehn, who cares? Good book," in the reality of publishing and bookselling, what "genre" a book is relegated to is vitally important for reviews, audience, sales, even cover art. (Read Lionel Shriver's wonderful essay on the ladylike covers for her brutal novels.) Romance is an almost exclusively female genre, making it easy to dismiss; mystery, on the other hand, is in my selling experience fairly equally split, though as another huge genre, there are pockets that are more stereotypically feminine or masculine (series set in yarn shops--yes, there's more than one--vs. geopolitical thrillers, e.g.). Then again, a depressing number of men aren't that interested in reading anything with a female protagonist, so shelving this particular title in mystery might not widen its gender audience. Then again again, plenty of women turn up their noses at romance, and I'd hate for them to miss books like this.

Great first lines: "To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor."

Following her husband's death, ostensibly the result of a heart complaint that's prematurely killed men in his family for generations, Lady Julia is appalled by Brisbane's revelation that he'd been hired by a terrified Edward over poison-pen letters, and his suggestion that the death might not have been natural. She throws him out. Then, a year later, while clearing out Edward's study, she finds one of the notes...and the two embark upon an investigation frustrated by the length of time that's passed. It's wonderfully full of danger and dark secrets, as well as Lady Julia's gradual embrace of her widowhood as freeing--an excuse to explore the unconventional and forge her own path--and a satisfying, surprising ending. (For me, the #1 test of a mystery's success.)

Inspired by this reading, I'm thinking of doing a Mystery March to follow my Romance February. Recommendations, of course, accepted!

The Iron Duke (Meljean Brook)

This is the romance novel China Mieville would write, body horror and all.

It's set in a steampunk alternate England, nine years after the fall of the two-century regime of the Horde--yup, the Mongolians have nanotech in this world, and they were ruthless about using it, infecting and controlling the population of Britain with radio-operated "bugs" that suppress the emotions (except when whipped up into an occasional mating frenzy, the issue of which were taken from their parents and raised in centralized crèches). They also cyborged (not that that's a verb) thousands of laborers: pneumatic hammers for miners' legs, arms modified into sewing machines--reminiscent of Mieville's Remade, though less Dantesque. 

After the former pirate Rhys Trahaearn destroyed the Horde's control tower, acquiring the titular dukedom for his trouble, the slowly reconstituting society finds itself divided between "buggers," the nanoagent-carrying former subjects, and "bounders"--those with ancestors wealthy or lucky enough to have escaped to the New World before the occupation, now returned to a country they still consider their own (yes, I love that these terms are repurposed insults!). Relations between the two groups are strained at best--bounders are obviously resented by those who suffered under Horde control, and they in their turn distrust buggers who can be controlled by technology. And bounders and buggers alike often view our heroine, police inspector Mina Wentworth, with disgust or hostility: she is half-Horde, the product of a Frenzy at which her mother was raped. (Her mother, in fact, gouged out her own eyes upon seeing her daughter's telltale features. Though she seems to have come to terms with it over the 30 years of Mina's life, and has awesome new prosthetic eyes.)

Mina meets the Iron Duke (to what extent that moniker is literal I shall leave as an exercise for the reader) investigating a dead body found on his estate--a man who seems to have dropped from the sky. They have the expected Sudden Overwhelming Hot Pants for each other, but their mystery-solving airship-voyaging ass-kicking boot-knocking journey to Happily Ever After is fraught with some really dark and complex issues: not only is Mina the product of rape, she was forced into a Frenzy shortly before the fall of the Horde and equates her own sexual desire with loss of identity and control, leading to a really excruciating scene where Rhys mistakes her struggling during oral sex as arousal, and essentially assaults her by accident. I KNOW, RIGHT?!?! And it's a believable scene, too, not the now-squick-inducing "forced orgasm" trope found in 70s romance novels (ever so pithily summed up by the Smart Bitches as "rapetastic"); his shock and horror at realizing what he's done are backed up by his own history, sold into prostitution at the age of eight.

Again: I KNOW, RIGHT? This is not a fluffy book, and I have to applaud its audacity.

(Also? I am pretty sure there's some kind of 9/11 allegory going on, though I can't really tease out direct equivalents. But it takes place nine years after the fall of a tower, and sometimes the buggers are referenced as being sleeper agents for a foreign power, echoing some anti-Muslim rhetoric...I might be COMPLETELY reading too much into it, though.)

Soulless (Gail Carriger)

I am ever so pleased to announce that I did, in fact, re-finish Anathem, in a week even! And I liked it again, even without the #mindblown of the first go-round. A nice chat with the Freebird book club, as well--I may have been too shy to stick around and introduce myself, but I can yammer about books anytime.

Still, fun as nerdatron me found it, Anathem is Heavy, and thus Gail Carriger's almost impossibly breezy Soulless, a hybrid steampunk-Victorian-comedy-mystery-romance--with werewolves'n'vampires!--was a most welcome digestif, perfect for reading in McGolrick Park on a teasing taste-of-spring day (a balmy 67 degrees). It features a plucky, acid-tongued, too-smart-for-her-own-good heroine, Miss Alexia Tarabotti, who cannot forgive her father for having the poor taste to be both Italian and dead; in addition to an unfashionable olive complexion and a formidable figure, he bequeathed a most peculiar genetic defect (OK, I can't stop talking like that, because the whole book is written in the elaborate deadpan of Austen crossed with Wodehouse. Also I need to stop comparing folks to Wodehouse until I've read some, jeepers). Miss Tarabotti was born without a soul. This gives her an advantage over London's supernatural population, as any vampire or werewolf she touches loses their powers during contact. And one particular werewolf, Lord Maccon, Alpha of the capital's pack? Well, they do a lot of touching. It's a funny and silly little confection of a book, and I liked it well enough I plan to suss out the rest of the series at the first opportunity.

The week in romance. (And an unavoidable hiatus.)

I flew through THREE books last week--which is great, because I've got some other must-reads clogging up the ol' spare time, on which more later. Some thoughts on each:

When Beauty Tamed the Beast, Eloisa James: Gosh, this was just great. A heroine with her rep in ruins because of an unfortunately pleated dress, a hero based on Gregory House (muscle infarction, "everybody lies," and all, though it's his father who was the opium addict), a castle in Wales!! Followed it up with An Affair Before Christmas, another James with an altogether different trope: it's about an already-married couple made miserable by her awful, awful mother's having taught her that sex was horrible and disgusting and not be enjoyed at any cost, and their gradually getting to know each other as people, leaving aside the physical aspect until their love is based on a firmer foundation. So sweet.

A thorough James convert I; not as blown away by the central romance in Courtney Milan's debut,Proof by Seduction, but still liked the book's exploration of the pathetic economic options available to women of "uncertain birth" in early Victorian England. The heroine has supported herself as a fortune-teller for 12 years; the hero's the cousin of one of her clients and a reluctant marquess who'd rather be studying macaws in Brazil. Their cross-class attraction strains her wishes for independence--how to be his lover without becoming his mistress?--and makes her ashamed of a profession based on lies. What I liked best about the book was the dynamism of the characters, all of whom are troubled and unhappy--Jenny's ambivalence, Lord Blakely's social awkwardness and passion subsumed to duty, and especially the cousin-client, Ned Carhart, a painfully sweet naif prone to depression and self-loathing. For their happy ending, all of these people have to create different visions of themselves, and Milan doesn't pretend it's easy.

I'm going to have to take a brief break, howevs, due to two factors: first, I have a couple of library books due in three days that can't be renewed--An Evening of Long Goodbyes and Graham Greene's Haiti novel The Comedians. Second, Freebird Books' Post-Apocalyptic Book Club (yes, that is the greatest book club idea ever) is discussing Neal Stephenson's 2008 tour de force Anathem next week! I am not entirely optimistic about my being able to reread the entire 1000-page tome by the 17th, but I'd like to reread it anyway. Here's my original review from the first go-round:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“Plato, Saint Augustine, Leibniz, Kant, Mach, Husserl, and Godel make up Anathem’s metaphysical backbone,” Neal Stephenson tells us in his acknowledgments. It’s a wise assertion to make up front, warning the reader, in effect, Ideas Ahead; while he may lose some of his audience, those of us who think to ourselves “Ooh, I love Saint Augustine and Leibniz and Kant!” know right off we’re in for a treat.

Anathem is less science fiction than philosophy fiction (to coin a phrase and a genre). Set on the Earthlike planet of Arbre, it’s told in the voice of young Fraa Erasmas of the Concent of Saunt Edhar, part of a worldwide network of sequestered intellectuals called avout. These men and women have for millenia lived a cloistered existence, cut off from contact with the outside world except during certain festivals. And what do they do within their walls? They think: about numbers, geometry, astronomy, physics; they study the ideas of their forebears; they form squabbling philosophical orders; they relentlessly discuss and examine every notion they have in formal Socratic dialogue, chasing down illogic and ferreting out bits of truth. Around them, civilizations and religions rise and fall—but the avout stick to their discipline, and keep knowledge safe.

And then, something appears in the sky, and everything changes.

The high point of Stephenson’s talent, as should be obvious from all the neologisms in this review, is world creation. Fifty pages in, he can reel off a sentence that, out of context, makes no sense at all—but without resorting to clumsy exposition, he’s immersed the reader in this familiar/unfamiliar world so completely that its vocabulary becomes second nature. This is helped along by frequent entries from the avout’s most recent Dictionary, which go so far as to provide etymology. He’s also phenomenal at explaining difficult concepts, the great concepts, in fact: the nature of consciousness, the objective truth of plane geometry, the quantum possibilities of multiple universes.

If all this makes Anathem sound dry, that’s my fault entirely. In Stephenson’s hands, all of these heady concepts and hypotheses are part of a grand adventure. The novel is funny and weird and action-packed and even romantic. Just when I’d think I knew what was going on, he’d throw me a curve that upped the stakes. You’ll know, just from the acknowledgments, whether you’ll love Anathem. And if you do, I’d be happy to talk about it—because, as the avout and philosophy majors like me well know, it’s sharing ideas that make them true.

Bloject! Also, a destined-to-be-teen-classic.

First: Please Ignore Vera Dietz (A.S. King) was a Printz Honor Book this year (the YA Newbery, essentially), and WOW. The story of a girl whose best friend from childhood turns his back on her, then dies, leaving to deal with overwhelming love, hate, grief--and the duty to clear his name. It's utterly raw but somehow hilarious. I love that there are interjections from her ex-alcoholic accountant father's POV as well as Vera's (and her dead friend Charlie, and the Pagoda that looms over their town)--lesser teen fiction will paint meddling parents in a strictly negative light, but these sections let us into Ken Dietz's own struggles: we know he always wants the best for Vera, even if he's not very good at figuring out how to make that happen. Really wonderful.

I've decided February will be a romance-readin' month! (And nerts, I am not the first person to coin the portmanteau "bloject." Isn't it great?) I figure I can handle two novels a week (and maybe still have some time to read Paul Murray's first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose first few chapters are a giddy, Wodehouseian Waughist pastiche). First some more Eloisa James, obvy: When Beauty Tamed the Beast (whose hero is loosely based on Gregory House! AWESOME) and An Affair Before Christmas (second in the Duchesses series). Then whatever comes from the ol' liberry fastest--I've reserved:

• Soulless, Gail Carriger (paranormal)
• The Iron Duke, Meljean Brooks (steampunk!)
• Proof by Seduction, Courtney Milan (on the rec of Ms. Theresa)
• Delicious, Sherry Thomas (ditto)
• Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn (Twitter rec from grad student/bookseller/all-around cool lady Sarah Rettger)
• Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, Sarah MacLean (such a great title! also, I've met her, and she's lovely--really, all my experiences with romance novelists and fans have been great)

I will keep you in the loop! V. excited.