Archive for June, 2012
Interview — Rosemary Edghill
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Interview on June 28, 2012
Before we get into the interview, here’s a quick introduction to Rosemary Edghill and her work. She has written many books, including the acclaimed Hellflower trilogy of science fiction novels (as eluki bes shahar), the Bast series of present-day Wiccan detective novels, four fantasy novels (including the Twelve Treasures series), four Regency romances, a couple of X-men tie-ins, one time-travel romance, and now the dark SF/fantasy hybrid VENGEANCE OF MASKS (reviewed here). She’s collaborated extensively with Mercedes Lackey, most recently with DEAD RECKONING (SBR review is here; the SBR review for books 1 and 2 of the Shadow Grail series is available here), and has also collaborated with science fiction and fantasy grandmasters André Norton (THE SHADOW OF ALBION and LEOPARD IN EXILE) and Marion Zimmer Bradley (WITCHLIGHT, GHOSTLIGHT, GRAVELIGHT and HEARTLIGHT).
Shiny Book Review: Ms. Edghill, thank you for coming to Shiny Book Review for an interview. We’re very glad you’ve stopped by.
Rosemary Edghill: Thank you for inviting me! I’ve just finished what Bloomsbury calls a “virtual book tour” for my latest, a Steampunk Western With Zombies called DEAD RECKONING, and while I’ve never actually been book toured, I have to say that the virtual tour is a lot of fun. It’s great to meet readers from the comfort of my own keyboard . . . .
Shiny Book Review: DEAD RECKONING was a lot of fun to read. What prompted you and Mercedes Lackey to write a steampunk Western?
Rosemary Edghill: When we made up our mind to do a Western (I’d already had the character of Jett Gallatin in mind for some time) it would clearly, given our track records, have to be a fantasy. And we were both huge fans of the ORIGINAL Wild Wild West (just . . . don’t mention that horrible movie. Please.), which was really the very first steampunk. So since we both really love SF, going steampunk was really a way to incorporate SFnal elements into what most people would see as a straight-up historical fantasy.
Shiny Book Review: Speaking of that, does that mean DEAD RECKONING happened in “our” United States of America? Or is this an alternate history/fantasy?
Rosemary Edghill: DEAD RECKONING is a “secret history” as opposed to an “alternate history” — ie, no matter what bizarre elements surface in the course of the books, they will always be taking place in our own recognizable past.
Shiny Book Review: Which character in DEAD RECKONING did you enjoy writing the most, and why? And which one (or ones) did you enjoy writing the least?
Rosemary Edghill: I love all of them when I’m writing them (even Brother Raymond!) but the ones I really felt sorry for were the women of the commune, who were being terribly exploited.
Shiny Book Review: The way religion was subverted by Brother Shepherd in DEAD RECKONING gives an excellent “period feel” to the novel. What types of religious movements (or counter-movements) did you study/read about that gave you the idea for Brother Shepherd and his cult?
Rosemary Edghill: The Western Expansion period was a time of enormous religious experimentation in the United States. This actually began fifty years earlier, with the rise of the Mormon faith in the 1820s. In the period directly following the end of the Civil War, thousands of “Christian Primitive” and millenialist cults sprang up, many taking advantage of the looser social rules and legal strictures of the Western territories. These cult/communes really haven’t changed much since the Anabaptists kicked things off in the 1400s, and were still going strong in the California of the 1930s — Raymond Chandler uses them as backdrop for a couple of his Philip Marlowe novels.
Shiny Book Review: You’ve collaborated often with Mercedes Lackey; what’s it like to write with her?
Rosemary Edghill: It’s a lot of fun! You’re never alone with a co-author!
Shiny Book Review: Tell me about VENGEANCE OF MASKS. What prompted this specific, dark-tinged plotline?
Shiny Book Review: That’s one of the reasons VENGEANCE is such an interesting book. But speaking of your hero, Childeric, what is it that torments him so?
Rosemary Edghill: He destroyed his entire world by being manipulated by the Dead God Malvisage into freeing him. That can leave a guy with a real complex.
Shiny Book Review: What about your heroine, Arcadia? What in her responds so strongly to Childeric?
Rosemary Edghill: She wrote the books about him. I wanted to put her in the context of the early Sixties Sword and Sorcery revival — the Conan books were being reprinted everywhere, and they had billions of imitators. I used to own quite a number of those: Brak and Blade and oh, every possible one-syllable grunt you can imagine. And there were a lot of what we would consider today fly by night publishing houses out there, to which you might sell a book if you needed a quick few hundred bucks, and then find you’d signed away all rights forever.
Shiny Book Review: What made you come up with such a unique and interesting plot, as this reads half like a fantasy, and half like science fiction (a la Sheri S. Tepper)?
Rosemary Edghill: As for the plot, it really isn’t unique. It’s a variation on an old fannish trope: “fan finds themselves in sourcetext universe of their choice”. I’ve seen it done for Star Wars, Star Trek, and Blake’s 7 — the only change I made was to have Cady create the sourcetext she fell into. And I don’t think that idea is unique either. But as I’ve always said: if you find an original idea anywhere in my work, I will eat it. Good stories aren’t about showing us something we’ve never seen before. Good stories are about showing us things we’ve seen all over the place in a way we’ve never quite seen them.
Shiny Book Review: Cross-genre books seem to be one of your specialties, going back to the Twelve Treasures series — what is it about books like VENGEANCE OF MASKS or DEAD RECKONING that first makes you want to write them, then makes you perfect them to the point the reader has a hard time putting them down?
Rosemary Edghill: ::laughs:: Well, I HOPE the reader has a hard time putting them down! The answer to that is another one of those bizarrely-simple-only-not ones: write what you want to read. A writer’s first audience is themself: you tell yourself the story. As for *why* this is the kind of story that attracts me, I can’t really say. Maybe I’m just always hoping for magic to show up in my world — the fantasy kind, with swords and unicorns and heroes. Especially heroes.
Shiny Book Review: Nothing wrong with that. At any rate, I’d like to shift the focus now and ask some questions about your writing career. For starters, when did you first realize that you enjoyed writing and that you weren’t about to give it up?
Rosemary Edghill: I started writing back in the 1980s, and I sold my first two books (one SF, one Regency) very quickly, and both on multi-book contracts. So I had commitments to write several books from the very beginning, and like a good do-bee, I kept right on typing. Later, of course, things got hard, and the market changed, and a lot of other things happened. But I pretty much committed as a writer long before I evaluated the question of whether or not I wanted a career as a writer. Hey. Sometimes that happens.
Shiny Book Review: What drove you to write your first novel, TURKISH DELIGHT?
Rosemary Edghill: When I wrote TURKISH DELIGHT, I’d read through all of Georgette Heyer and was totally in love with the whole “comedy of manners” idea, but the books I was seeing on the stands fell somewhat short of the standard set by the Divine Georgette. So I wrote my own.
I would be happy to still be writing them, but the overall market collapsed, including the St. Martin’s Press program that had been doing them in hardcover. My editor, Lincoln Child, had moved on (to his own career as a best-selling novelist, as a matter of fact), and it was pretty much a case of my corner of the market having dried up. At the same time, I’d just finished the last of the SF trilogy I sold the same week that I sold the first of the Regencies, and while my editor (Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books) liked my writing style, science fiction wasn’t 
selling. So I ended up over in Urban Fantasy, with the Twelve Treasures series. While I was selling multi-genre-ally from the beginning, it has to be acknowledged that there’s a certain cachet to hardcover publication, and while my sales figures weren’t terribly impressive on any of my first six books, the critical reviews were, and that helped a lot.
Shiny Book Review: You’ve worked with two acknowledged Grandmasters, Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley. What was that like? And what did you learn from them that you’ve taken into other writing projects (solo and/or collaborative)?
Rosemary Edghill: What I learned from each of them was to find out where the story was and tell it. Both of them were really straightforward as writers, and focused most of all on the story. I loved working with each of them: the two experiences were very different (with Marion I got notes at the end of each draft, and I was working from a lot of material; with Andre it was weekly phone calls as we went over the project just about scene by scene), both in the nuts and bolts of the method, and just in how the whole project was influenced by their personalities.
Shiny Book Review: Tell me about your Bast series. What was it like to write that?
Rosemary Edghill: One of the reasons I wrote it was that I’d just moved Upstate and was terribly homesick for New York, so writing a story set in Manhattan was a way of going back there. For another, I just wasn’t seeing a lot of Wiccan character fiction that wasn’t outright fantasy (full of spells and fantasy creatures) or that concentrated on the Wicca part of stuff. Also, as I think I mentioned once to somebody else, the first in the series SPEAK DAGGERS TO HER, was my attempt to come up with (at least in a fictional setting) the answer to a question I’d had for a long time. Because, you see, a friend of mine knew someone very much like Miriam Seabrook, who died in the way the one in the story does. Who she got mixed up with, and how she died, and why, are questions that remain unanswered in the real world. But it is the province of fiction to make a completed story out of a handful of unfinished facts . . .
Shiny Book Review: Tell me about WARSLAYER.
Rosemary Edghill: The Warslayer is one of my favorite books to have written (it has much the same plot as VENGEANCE OF MASKS, actually, only from a slightly different angle) but my very favorite parts of it are the ones I didn’t write. The Forward and the First Season Episode Guide to “The Incredibly True Adventures of Vixen the Slayer” were written by noted author, my former editor, and all around nice guy Greg Cox. He’d done guides for Xena and Hercules, so it was really a no-brainer to come and ask him to play.
As for the book itself, one of my favorite stories is that of The Accidental Hero — the ordinary person who stands up at a moment of crisis and peril and just goes for it. And while Glory McArdle — ex-Olympic athelete, current cable TV sensation — isn’t entirely ordinary, she’s far from being the character she plays. So that was totally a romp for me.
My one regret is that the book didn’t generate a sequel, since I would really have liked to tell more stories set in Erchanen. There’s this Sister Bernadette cosplayer from our world, you see, and . . .
Shiny Book Review: You’ve written in many genres in the past; which genre, overall, would you like to work more in down the road?
Rosemary Edghill: My forlorn dream is to write more space opera, since I started there, and I really love it. And maybe someday I can figure out a way to get back there. I just finished a short story for a small press anthology called GALACTIC CREATURES, where I experimented with the idea of a hard-science space opera: using the space-opera tropes that could be mapped onto a science-based future that does not contain things like handwavy FTL and miraculous fake gravity. It involved many long nights on Wikipedia, but it was a lot of fun.
Shiny Book Review: It sounds like it. I’ll have to remember to look that one up.
Anyway, since you’ve written in a great many genres, you must have had to research all sorts of things. Which genre is the most demanding to research?
Rosemary Edghill: The most demanding genre to research is near-past historical, fifty to a hundred years before your now. Farther back, the period has been studied and written about, and most of all, there’s nobody still alive from then. If you make a mistake, so long as it is imbedded in a plausible matrix of period work, you’ll probably get away with it. With the near-past stuff, somebody’s always going to call you on it.
That being said, my favorite book of all I’ve written is still HEARTLIGHT, when I had to do huge huge huge amounts of research about the 60s through the 80s. I wrote it in the late 1990s, and I was still having to chase down and nail landmark 80s fashions, fads, and news stories from the point of view of an outsider. I hadn’t been taking notes!
Shiny Book Review: Since you’ve written some X-men tie-ins and are familiar with the superhero genre, what do you think it is about superheroes that’s brought them into the mainstream?
Rosemary Edghill: Oh, that one’s easy: Money. ComicCon got “big” when television and movie publicity machines started using it as their main venue to premier and pump up genre releases and programming. Hollywood has crazy amounts of money compared to every other entertainment field, and it’s really the eight thousand pound gorilla. So once it had monetized ComicCon, everybody looked around and saw all those superheroes just standing around. But getting them onto the screen in a way the audience could buy in was still a long way off. It was a question of “selling the sizzle” carried to its ultimate expression. And it wasn’t the subject matter. The *idea* of the superhero has been with us since the dawn of tale-telling. Achilles and Beowulf both fill the social niche of the superhero. But once you start dealing with people who can fly, or burst into flames, if you want to *film* them, you need to wait for your SFX to catch up.
The other thing the Hollywood Superhero Renaissance was waiting for was smart scripts, and those really couldn’t be written by superhero outsiders. Unless you’ve bought into the whole superhero mythos at the visceral level, the barrier to entry (i.e., to writing a script that takes the tropes of the comic book superhero seriously) is just too high. And passing that sort of barrier on to moviegoing audiences has never been what the movies are about: their gig is to make you an instant insider. And for that, the movies had to be put out there by people who already were. As Chris Sarandon’s character says in the 1985 FRIGHT NIGHT: “You gotta believe.”
Shiny Book Review: You’ve written short stories, novellas, novels, take your pick. What is different about the process of writing from the shorter stories to the longer ones? And which type of story (short story, novella, novel) do you enjoy writing the most?
Rosemary Edghill: Novels, the longer the better. I used to hate long form, now I’ve discovered I love the elbow room (had to cut my last manuscript down from 1600 pages to 600 for publication: ouch). The difference between a short story and a novel is that the short story, classically, deals with the single defining incident in the protagonist’s life: boom, you’re in. Boom, you’re out. Story done! The novel, on the other hand, wants to show us how they got there, and where they’re going next. It’s more about the journey than about the goal.
Shiny Book Review: If there was anything you could change about publishing, what would it be and why?
Rosemary Edghill: The IRS’s “Thor Power Tools” decision, which required that inventory be taxed as income. It destroyed the backlist and the midlist in Publishing, and crippled a lot of writers’ careers. Things are changing with PoD becoming more sophisticated and flexible, but that drives its own rights-grab problems, as it means the publisher controls the copyright of the book essentially in perpetuity, since with PoD, the book never goes out of print. There’s a lot of grabbyhands going on in Publishing right now — our editors may believe we’re artists, but nobody else does. All the upper echelons see, most places, is interchangeable Book Food Product units.
If I could change one other thing, I would wave my hand and institute Point of Sale Inventory everywhere in Bookdom as of tomorrow. It would take me much too long to even scratch the surface of orders, inventory control, and returns in the Publishing business, but the bottom line is: Publishing really isn’t sure about what sold, or where, or when. And it only develops some faint idea about a year and a half later. When Point of Sale Inventory Control was instituted for CDs, Country became an 800-pound-gorilla OVERNIGHT. (Okay, the third thing I would do is get rid of Amazon. Because it is the Wal-Mart of the Internet, and its insistence on deep discounts for books is killing Publishing.)
Shiny Book Review: Shifting gears, what is your writing process like every day?
Rosemary Edghill: It’s pretty simple: get up, go to the computer, sit down, type. I start by re-reading the previous day’s pages, then I start the new day’s work. I have a set word-count minimum that I have to meet each day [in my head] but sometimes I’ll do a time-thing too, and set my stint for X hours.
Shiny Book Review: What advice would you like to give to new and/or aspiring writers?
Rosemary Edghill: Be honest with yourself. Do you want to write and tell stories? There are a lot of venues to getting them out there without going the Big Six published route. Do you want to be a published author and make money from your writing? The advice here is “don’t quit your day job”, because 95% of all published and publishing writers don’t make a living from their writing. What do you really want?
To hone your craft, write. To hone the related skills that are just as important, finish what you write. To develop discipline, write every day. There really isn’t other advice. All the rest is frosting.
Shiny Book Review: One final question: if you could be the Galactic Overlord for a day, what would you change about the world, and why?
Rosemary Edghill: I don’t think I could change everything I wanted to change in just one day, and I would not want to make sweeping changes that controlled people’s thoughts, like “stop being stupid” or “be pro-equality and women’s and gay rights”. For one thing, anybody who reads fairy tales knows that always boomerangs badly. For another, it just seems to me it would be wrong to take away anyone’s freedom that way, even if they’re abusing it enormously. So if I only have 24 hours, I think I would have Incredibly Advanced Aliens come to Earth and give us FTL travel. I think the major psychological problem we’re facing today comes from the dual sense of not having an available frontier, and the knowledge (without the wisdom to deal with it) that our planetary resources are finite and dwindling. Having a whole galaxy full of colonizable planets would change that. For the better, I’d hope.
Shiny Book Review: And that concludes today’s interview with author Rosemary Edghill. Thank you very much again for coming to SBR.
Rosemary Edghill: Thank you for having me! I love to hear from readers (no matter what they read, because I’m always on the lookout for a new favorite author!) and I can usually be found either at: http://rosemary-edghill.dreamwidth.org/ or http://www.facebook.com/rosemary.edghill My home page has a lot of bibliography and links, and it’s at: http://www.sff.net/people/eluki Feel free to come by and chat about my books and anybody else’s. Really!
2-for-1 SBR Special: Lauren Oliver’s YA Dystopian Romances
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Book Review on June 24, 2012
Tonight, Lauren Oliver’s two YA dystopian romances are on the table. These, of course, are the critically-acclaimed DELIRIUM and its immediate sequel, PANDEMONIUM. Both feature Lena Haloway, a teenage girl from a troubled background who lives with her aunt and uncle in Portland, Maine, as her mother is unavailable. (At first, Lena believes her mother is dead, but later finds out that isn’t so.) And both feature a world that’s nearly entirely unrecognizable due to one thing: love has been outlawed, and anyone who dares to love despite societal prohibitions ends up shunned at best, incarcerated or killed at worst. This is because love is now called a disease, and goes by the name of amor deliria nervosa; it is not considered to be a benign ailment, which is why society continues to incarcerate and kill people who dare to love.
Worse yet, the world, or at least the United States, has become extremely regimented. Your mate is picked for you (obviously, if you try to pick your own mate instead, you’ve shown that you’ve contracted the “disease” and must be removed from society). Your choice of career is picked for you. Your behavior is monitored, your associations (friends, family members, etc.) are not always freely chosen, either (though friendship still exists, true, deep, lasting friendships are quite rare), and everyone in polite society wishes for one thing: the Cure, otherwise known as unnecessary brain surgery that’s equivalent to a lobotomy. A whole religion has grown up around this, and no one questions it because the older religions have all been swept away. (This is a bit of a plot problem, but I’ll get into it later.)
So, for nearly seventy years, the U.S. has existed in a twilight state. Anyone who loves is declared a criminal; the lucky ones manage to get away into “the Wilds,” areas around big cities that have been cleared of permanent habitation, while the unlucky ones get placed into mental institutions or are killed outright in the attempt to escape their terrible fate of an unnecessary lobotomy.
All of this is necessary in order to understand Lena’s problems in DELIRIUM, as she starts out knowing that her mother was not able to be Cured despite several procedures. At first, Lena doesn’t question authority or orthodoxy, which made me want to scream and throw things; ultimately, she falls in love with a guy named Alex, who tells her many things she needs, but doesn’t want, to hear. (Such as the fact that there are a number of resistance fighters out in the woods — excuse me, the Wilds — and that there are many people who disagree with the government’s official stance that everyone needs a lobotomy to protect them from themselves. At this point, I muttered, “Thank God,” and kept turning the pages.)
One of the highlights of DELIRIUM is Lena’s true and strong friendship with a young woman named Hana. These two met because they’re both runners; because their social standings are wildly different (Hana’s family is wealthy, which in this society means her TV actually gets seven channels), once they’re both Cured, they probably won’t have anything to do with one another. Yet as they’re still in high school at the beginning of this book — and as neither of them has been Cured — they still care deeply about one another and want each other to be happy.
Hana, you see, is one of those people who rebel, but only within limits. She will have a comfortable life if she submits to it, which she knows. But she still doesn’t like the idea of that comfortable life; she just doesn’t have the inner fortitude to escape considering the massive problems escaping from their dystopian society will engender.
Yet Hana has lit a fire under Lena, and that fire can only be quenched by two things: freedom, and Alex. And for the most part, I bought it, as Ms. Oliver’s storytelling ability is quite good.
But one thing really bothered me: because this is a young adult dystopia, much emphasis is placed on Lena getting to know Alex body to body, even though they do not, technically speaking, have sex. (In this society, touching one another and kissing deeply seems more illicit than merely having sex, which is something all of these societally approved couples must get around to now and again even considering they’ve all been effectively lobotomized for their own protection.) Lena, of course, goes into raptures at Alex’s physical attributes (the broadness of his manly chest, how his muscles catch the light of the sun, even musings about Alex’s shoulder blades, for pity’s sake), and of course Alex is also stricken dumb by Lena’s physical beauty even though she’s 5′ 2″ and from her own musings isn’t considered to be a raving beauty by any standard.
All of that lavish bodily description was excessive. It detracted and distracted from the main plotline, which of course is this: how do these two young lovers successfully escape their dreadful society? Or is that even possible?
Yet the road into the Wilds is perilous; will they make it out alive? (Hint, hint: at least one of them does, otherwise the second novel under review, PANDEMONIUM, wouldn’t have been written.) Even if they do, will their relationship grow, change, or . . . die?
Next, we move on to PANDEMONIUM, where Lena is now in the Wilds. Alex is not with her, so Lena has to endure the Wilds on her own. She meets up with a resistance group led by a tough young woman, Raven, and several tough young men, including Tack, who seems to be Raven’s boyfriend though this is never really explored.
After a number of travails (mostly having to do with the lack of electricity, food, and medical supplies), Lena ends up relocated to a different city and becomes involved with the influential DFA group — DFA standing for “Deliria Free America” — as Raven and Tack have come along to pretend that they’re Lena’s relations. (There’s no way Raven and Tack would be old enough to be Lena’s parents, so they’re posing instead as her Aunt and Uncle.)
Of course, there’s yet another handsome young man in Lena’s future, with this young man being the son of the head of the DFA, Julian Fineman. Julian has had seizures his entire life, and believes that if he’s allowed to have the Cure (he’s had many operations, as he’s also been stricken with some form of brain cancer), he may truly end up medically cured. Or he’ll end up dead, which to him is an acceptable risk — and because he’s a politician’s son, Julian’s been groomed to tell everyone in this overly polite society that he’s willing to die for the Cure, which of course is a strong societal message.
Then, as the plot progresses, Lena and Julian end up getting kidnapped by a hostile bunch of thugs called the Scavengers. These aren’t like the freedom fighters, who just want to live in peace and love whomever they want; instead, the Scavengers are anarchists, who glorify violence in the name of upsetting the current “natural order of things” in the U.S. Lena ends up confessing to Julian that she’s not really Cured as he thinks she is; instead, she’s part of the resistance, what Julian thinks of as “Invalids” (this concept, of course, has been done before by movies such as Gattaca), with the normal run of zombie-like sheep — er, Cured human beings — being the Valid citizens. And eventually, she manages to get the two of them free of their nasty captors, oddly enough without a single seizure from Julian to gum up the works.
But of course that’s not the end; along the way, Julian falls in love with Lena, while Lena slowly grows to like touching Julian the same way she touched Alex in the past. (Once again, there is no sex going on; the closest these two get to intimacy is when they kiss, or one of them sees the other half-naked.) Lena convinces herself that she must be in love with Julian — after all, he’s a good guy, has stood by her throughout all their trials and tribulations, so what’s not to like about that? — because she does, after all, like touching him. That she doesn’t seem to realize that touching someone and truly loving someone are not the same seems oddly naïve.
Anyway, just as Lena and Julian think they’ve gotten away scot-free into the Wilds, they end up getting recaptured. But Lena doesn’t end up incarcerated; instead, a member of the resistance gets Lena away. This member of the resistance acts oddly, too, in a way reminiscent of Lena’s long-lost mother (hint, hint), but Lena has no time for it as she must get Julian free as he’s about to be put to death. The fact that he’s a politician’s son doesn’t save him under the circumstances, nor does the fact that he and Lena nearly died several times in their escape from the brutal thugs because this is an extremely inflexible, unforgiving society. Because Lena knows that, her focus shifts toward getting Julian away; anything else will just have to wait.
So, the cliffhanger here is, does Lena save Julian, or not? And if she does, will she realize that she doesn’t really love Julian (instead, she just likes him and likes how it feels when he touches her)? And note, while one of these two questions is resolved by the end of PANDEMONIUM, there’s still a great deal left outstanding — which probably is why the third book of this trilogy, REQUIEM, is due out in 2013.
While there are many things to like about both of Oliver’s books, there are some major problems here.
- First, the “new,” zombie-like society that the DFA-types have created has only been in existence for about seventy years, which isn’t long enough to have expunged every trace of any other religion besides the state-sponsored one.
- Second, there’s way too much time spent on how gorgeous these people are; even when Lena characterizes herself in a deprecating fashion, somehow it comes off a bit overdone.
- Third, while I believed Alex was truly in love with Lena, I was never sure if Lena loved Alex or loved the idea of being in love with him; this went double for Lena’s odd relationship with Julian.
- Fourth, I do not buy that a young man like Julian, who’s had seizures all his life, can be beaten and nearly killed yet not have one, single seizure while doing his level best to escape. (Or afterward.)
- And fifth, it’s nearly impossible to imagine how any form of a society could function when everyone in polite society, effectively, has been lobotomized in order to “take the Cure for their own protection.”
So despite Oliver’s excellent storytelling abilities, the foundation on which these stories stands is a bit rocky. That’s why despite two decent YA romances set amidst a convincingly grim milieu (the back story is weaker than I’d prefer, but the ambience is superb), the better of these novels rated a B.
Bottom line: the ambience is excellent. The milieu is distasteful, appropriately dystopian. The romances work to a degree, at least considering very young, untried people are involved. But the back story did not convince.
Because of this, while I’ll still do my best to read REQUIEM when it comes out next year, it’s not likely to be at the top of my list. (Sorry.)
Grades: DELIRIUM — B, mostly because of the Lena-Hana relationship, along with the convincing Alex-Lena romance.
PANDEMONIUM — C-plus, mostly because Lena doesn’t seem to realize Julian’s just a guy — albeit a hot-looking one — and that being willing to touch someone does not necessarily mean that you love him. Not even in this society.
— reviewed by Barb
Exciting News for SBR: Rosemary Edghill Consents to Interview
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Interview on June 23, 2012
Shiny Book Review is proud to announce that author Rosemary Edghill has consented to do a wide-ranging interview, which will run next Thursday, June 28, 2012. Edghill, co-author of DEAD RECKONING along with Mercedes Lackey (previously reviewed here at SBR) and author of VENGEANCE OF MASKS (soon to be reviewed), will discuss her career, including the highlights of working with science fiction and fantasy Grandmasters Marion Zimmer Bradley and André Norton and her long-standing collaboration with renowned fantasist Lackey. She’ll also give some helpful tips for writers, discuss her writing process, and talk about what she finds to be the most distressing aspects of publishing.
So be sure to come back next Thursday, as Ms. Edghill has many interesting ideas to impart due to her lengthy and wide-ranging career. (You’ll be glad you did.)
Ash Krafton’s “Bleeding Hearts” — Meet the Demi-Vamps. You’ll Like Them.
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Book Review on June 17, 2012
Ash Krafton’s BLEEDING HEARTS (Book One of the Demimonde) is about Sophie Galen, a human advice columnist, and Marek Thurzo, a Demi-Vampire. Sophie meets Marek at the local museum, where they bond over the Egyptian exhibit; Sophie takes to Marek right away even though he’s dark, dangerous, and brooding. (Or perhaps because he is all those things; it depends on Sophie’s mood.)
But Sophie isn’t your average human being, as she has the gift of empathy. Perhaps this is why she guesses that Marek isn’t exactly what he seems, though it doesn’t stop her from getting to know him. Of course, it does take Marek a while to admit to Sophie what he is (a Demi-Vampire, or “D-V” for short; the D-V have souls, are long-lived, and have to drink blood for sustenance. But they also can eat regular food, at least some of the time.), and as you’d expect, Sophie is floored. But she quickly adjusts because she knows Marek is telling the truth; he is a D-V, but he wants to get to know her better.
By this point, Sophie likes Marek way too much to give him up just because he’s not human. But as Marek isn’t an empath — none of the D-V are — he has the same emotional worries as a fully human male, which helps to balance the romance nicely.
During the course of BLEEDING HEARTS, Marek punctures many myths about the other paranormal species (for example, it is not pleasant to have a vampire or even a D-V drink your blood, and the D-V absolutely, positively will not drink from anyone they care about as they view it to be unutterably wrong). He also does his best to encourage Sophie to believe in herself — not just her gift, which will be of enormous benefit to the D-V if she can learn how to use it effectively, but in her complete self. (Which is yet another reason to want to root for the guy.)
Sophie’s gift of empathy is essential to the plotline, because the D-V need someone with Sophie’s talents to help them. They are desperate to avoid “evolving” into full Vampire (no -s in Krafton’s vision; “vampire” works for both singular and plural), because the regular Vampire are nasty, brutal thugs without any vestige of a soul. (The D-V believe the Vampire to be eternally damned.) Someone like Sophie may be able to keep them from this terrible “evolution,” as she can both feel their pain and project her own caring back due to her gift as an empath. And so long as the D-V can still feel and/or still care, their souls remain intact.
Of course, Sophie’s gift is quite rare. It, and she, must be protected at all costs. But Sophie doesn’t truly understand this, which makes for some harrowing complications toward the end of BLEEDING HEARTS (to avoid spoilers, I’ll stop there with regards to a plot summary).
BLEEDING HEARTS has much to recommend it. There’s a good woman who makes wisecracks in her spare time (Sophie), a brooding leading man who’s on the edge of eternal damnation (Marek), and a truly nasty villain (Still-heart the Vampire). There’s a believable romance between Sophie and the much-older Marek. There’s excellent atmosphere. And there’s a good backstory that fits the D-V into the more common mythos of vampire and werewolf without a hitch.
But perhaps the best reason to read BLEEDING HEARTS is because of how well Krafton depicts Sophie’s various struggles. Even though Sophie is past thirty, it’s obvious that there’s a lot about herself that Sophie simply doesn’t know. Sophie’s “coming of age” adds an enormous amount of emotional depth and feeling to what could’ve easily become a clichéd and/or stilted narrative, but thankfully didn’t.
Bottom line: BLEEDING HEARTS, despite its superficial similarities to both Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books and Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, has something to offer that isn’t done very often — humor mixed with emotional depth and heart. If you have a fondness for urban fantasy in general, vampires in particular, or anything in between, BLEEDING HEARTS will fill the bill.
Grade: A-minus
— reviewed by Barb
Graeme Maxton’s “The End of Progress:” Depressing, Yet Necessary Look at World Economics
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Book Review on June 13, 2012
Graeme Maxton’s THE END OF PROGRESS: How Modern Economics Has Failed Us is a trenchant and often extremely depressing look at world economics. Maxton starts with the unbridled “free” market of much of the Western industrialized world, and points out that philosopher and economist Adam Smith (author of THE WEALTH OF NATIONS) would not like much of what he sees. Too many monopolies, says Maxton; too much money and power in the hands of too few, and too little taxation in countries like the United States of the wealthy and upper middle class (who can afford to pay) means that the world economy, in effect, is upside down: the things that should be expensive aren’t (such as televisions, calculators, and computers), and the things that aren’t expensive should be (oil, which is a finite resource; food, especially red meat which isn’t cost-effective to grow and/or sustain without a substantial price increase; water, which once again is a finite resource).
Maxton lays out many, many facts and even more opinions about why he believes the world has reached an end to any sort of substantial, sustainable technological progress to lift most of humanity up out of poverty. Maxton believes instead that in many countries, such as the U.S., we are going backward (he is particularly censorious when it comes to the U.S.’s broken health care system, and how it leaves millions without good access — or perhaps any access at all — to health care), and that the way the world economy has gone in the past thirty years, we’re only going to accelerate this trend.
Now, the main reason this has anything to do with economics is due to how Maxton ties in his premise (that being, of course, “The End of Progress”) to the 2007 stock market/worldwide banking crisis. Maxton points out that after the 1929 stock market crash, the world actually hit bottom some time in 1932; the world, as a whole, took nearly 25 years to recover from the damage of that stock market crash. Yet the 2007 crash, with the worldwide banking crisis added to it, was actually worse than the 1929 crash — and Maxton believes that the 2007 crash, rather than being an end in itself as the worst-possible recent economic event, is actually a harbinger of even harder times to come.
Maxton’s prescription for economic improvement mostly depends on two things: raising taxes substantially on those who can afford to pay, and worldwide belt-tightening as there just aren’t the resources available to improve the economy overnight (or in his view, perhaps at all). He believes that attitudes need to change, especially among the wealthy; he points out that in Smith’s time, the wealthy believed they should pay more in taxes because they could afford to do so, yet now the wealthy pay as little as they can get away with because it appears they’ve bought most of the politicians/power brokers. This leaves everyone else with a far lesser share of the economic “pie” than we should have, and yet the wealthy do not believe they’re doing anything wrong as they believe free-market, unbridled capitalism is what Smith was talking about in 1776.
Yet the meaning of words change over time, so when Maxton points out that this isn’t what Smith believed at all — Smith believed that capitalism within moral limits was the right move, and that businesses should look at long-term gain rather than the short-term profits that may look enticing, but will ultimately hurt everyone including the business at hand — he is on to something. And he’s also right when he points out that many of the world’s resources are finite and must be conserved as much as possible, which is something Smith would also approve of; Smith would definitely not approve of how oil company executives behave (how they get tax write-offs and economic benefits when they’re the wealthiest companies the world has ever known, for example), nor about how many economists fail to talk about the morality and ethics of how wealth changes hands while instead talking only about money as if there are no morals and ethical consequences attached.
Overall, Maxton’s premise here is that of a worst-case scenario. But it’s a necessary point of view to take, considering much of what is heard from economists these days is only about the money rather than the ethical considerations behind the actions of those who have the money and/or power.
This is a “. . . if this goes on” polemic that should be acknowledged, widely read, and debated, especially considering Maxton’s main premise that our attitudes need to change when it comes to dealing with worldwide, finite resources. After attitudes change, maybe then politics and policies will finally also change to reflect a greater awareness that the world we live on is a precious resource — not to mention the only one we have — and needs to be husbanded carefully.
My recommendation is that everyone needs to read THE END OF PROGRESS, most especially writers and politicians, in order to understand the magnitude of the choices we’re making. Yes, it’s an often depressing book that sometimes conflates opinion with fact. But the case Maxton’s making is sound, especially when you consider it as a worst-case scenario that it’s obvious Maxton really hopes we as a species will avoid.
Grade: B-plus.
— reviewed by Barb
Monster Hunter Legion — Monster Hunting At Its Finest
Posted by Jason Cordova in Book Review on June 11, 2012
I opened the file for Monster Hunter Legion
…and immediately found myself on Chapter Ten, deeply engrossed in the book, wondering just how this had happened. Somehow I had lost track of two hours and countless pages in my “refresher reading”.
Yeah, that’s a sign of a great book.
Fans of Larry Correia (Monster Hunter International, Dead Six ,Hard Magic) are probably rejoicing at the latest Monster Hunter book. Owen Pitt, slayer of gods and combat accountant, returns after a brief hiatus from the Monster Hunter series (his boss, Earl Harbinger, was the star in Monster Hunter Alpha) and is in Las Vegas meeting with other professional monster hunters from around the world at the first-ever expo of its kind. Naturally, things are supposed to be top secret, so the “convention” is being held in the yet-unopened Last Dragon Hotel. Owen and other members of MHI (Monster Hunter International) are enjoying the buffet when a competing group of montser hunters arrive. Sparks fly when Owne accidentally bumps a Newbie who was a late arrival and recognized him from his last illegal pit fight — Jason Lacoco, the brooding giant who assisted Earl Harbinger in Monster Hunter Alpha. They fights, they break stuff, they end up in jail… a good time for all to be had.
After he gets bailed out of jail by his boss, Owen is forced to attend the conferences and panels the following day, wishing the entire time that he could be at another convention in town. However, things get interesting as the professional monster hunter community begins to chat one another up and realize that something very big seems to be happening all over the world. Contacts are made, maps are drawn, and a pattern begins to emerge. However, before the pieces can be put fully together, they are called in by Special Task Force Unicorn (which I absolutely cracked up over when I made it into an acronym, STFU… the author likes his jokes, as do his readers) and offered a bounty: the first monster hunter organization which kills a mysterious creature in northern Nevada gets $10 million, as well as first dibs on standing protective contracts, which translates to a lot of money. Owen and the rest of MHI are roped in when Stricken, who leads STFU (heh), lets Harbinger in on the little fact that his girlfriend Heather is missing in the region as well. MHI mobilizes and arrive on the scene soon after a German company, who kill… a giant spider. Both teams are confused but the Germans aren’t about to turn down $10 million for an easier-than-expected kill.
Owen, meanwhile, tags along with Agent Franks as they drive out into the wild wastes of the Nevada desert. Owen and Franks arrive at a top secret government storage facility where Franks guides Owen down to a small, formerly sealed off hole in the ground which looks as though it could have been a tomb. Owen is shocked: this is the exact same door and tunnel he saw in a dreams of his the night before. After a brief encounter with a monster, Owen and Franks return to Vegas, with many unanswered questions in the back of our protagonist’s mind.
Meanwhile the other monster hunters have packed it up, so everyone heads back to Vegas, where much celebrating and drinking occurs. However, once they arrive back, some very strange things begin to go down within the confines of the Last Dragon Hotel. As in “end of the world” things.
I’ll admit, I’m a little biased towards this series, because the first book was simply brilliant. The author hasn’t lost his touch while writing about Owen and his adventures, keeping the humor, action and plot all tightly together as he takes the reader for one hell of a ride. It’s exciting, thrilling, and the mystery behind the monster which continuously comes to chew them up and spit ’em out keeps the entire novel engrossing. As always, Correia forces you to care more about the characters and story than anything else, something I find a lot of writers tend to forget.
One of the best parts is how the author also connects each of the characters to novels past, instead of blowing them off as though they don’t matter. For example, in the first book of the series Albert Lee mentions his dreadful fear of spiders and how he was forced to pretty much torch a library to kill a bunch of oversized ones out to devour him whole. Fast forward to MHL and someone mentions that Albert, despite his past history with spiders, should know what type it is exactly and what makes it so special. Small things, but for a fan of the series, very important, because it keeps a cohesive approach to every story and novel in the Monster Hunter series.
This is a fun, fun book, filled with lots of clever rejoinders, massive explosions and B-movie horror monsters that will both terrify and entertain the reader. The author really knocked it out of the park with this one, and once again leaves the reader salivating for more. Definite must-buy for all the monster lovers and hunters out there.
—Reviewed by Jason
Gini Koch’s “Alien in the Family” Equals Light, Witty, Amusing SF/Romance
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Book Review on June 9, 2012
Gini Koch’s ALIEN IN THE FAMILY is the third book in her series about Katherine “Kitty” Katt, an “alien exterminator” who works with both the CIA and the Centaurion Division. Kitty is engaged to Jeff Martini, who looks like any old (extremely good-looking) human, but is actually an “A-C” — that is, he’s from Alpha Centauri originally but ended up settling on Earth, along with many others, due to a religious dispute. Jeff has two hearts and can move at hyperspeed; otherwise, he’s the same as any other male in existence — that is, he’s jealous, frequently for no reason whatsoever, and really likes to have sex. (A lot.)
Kitty, of course, is madly in love with Jeff and finds him intensely desirable. Which is why in this third book of the “Kitty Katt” series, Kitty’s about ready to settle down with Jeff in what’s literally the wedding of the universe. But getting married obviously isn’t going to be as easy as it sounds. The A-Cs are undercover (no, humanity still doesn’t really know anything about the A-Cs, aside from agents like Kitty) and mixed-marriages between humans and A-Cs are frowned upon. Worst of all, Kitty finds out that Jeff is actually exiled Centaurion royalty (something he doesn’t care about, but the other A-Cs, both off and on Earth, do), which cause major complications all around.
As this is humorous science fiction romance, there are many laugh-out-loud moments due to the scrapes Kitty gets into (some are of her own making; most aren’t) and the people of all stripes, nationalities, and species she runs across. Kitty, you see, is against being politically correct, so when she meets a member of a lizard-like race, she calls that person an “Iguanadon.” (That person eventually gets over it.) And, this being a comedic romance, manages to make that person not only her friend, but a second “BFF” (her first BFF, a gay former international fashion model named James Reader who figures into the plot in a not-so-insignificant way, of course doesn’t mind this in the least).
The pluses of ALIEN IN THE FAMILY are the romance, the humor, the believability of Kitty’s various scrapes, and the overall characterization. It’s a fun book to read (and re-read) because of its fast pace and interesting take on interspecies politics, religious disputes, and of course the wedding and fashion design industry.
But the one, big minus that I couldn’t keep myself from noticing was this — all of these people are way too good-looking for words. I can believe it of the A-Cs — they’re aliens, so if they look much better than the average human being, I understand that. I also can believe Kitty’s quite attractive, and of course her friend James the former male model would be expected to be way, way above average. But why is it that nearly everyone in this book needed to be not just attractive, but stunningly gorgeous, to the point that Raphael would’ve rhapsodized over them had they been among his models? (Much less Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.?)
I realize that in the science fiction/romance genre, it’s the norm for both the hero and heroine to be outrageously, mind-bogglingly attractive, though the better SF/romances, such as Lois McMaster Bujold’s SHARDS OF HONOR, get away from that somewhat (Cordelia falls in love with Aral because he’s intelligent, not because he’s stunningly gorgeous; it gradually occurs to her that she’d rather look at Aral any day of the week even though others might find him ordinary because he’s the best and finest person she’s ever met). But it’s really off-putting when not one of the leads, secondary leads, or even tertiary leads is a normal looking person (or less) with stunningly good qualities in other areas, and it does, unfortunately, weaken the overall impact of the story as it’s flat-out impossible that every single person Kitty runs across is just that attractive.
That being said, ALIEN IN THE FAMILY is a fun book to spend a few hours with and is a novel you’ll enjoy if you appreciate the humorous SF/romance genre whatsoever.
Grade: B-plus.
— reviewed by Barb
Department Nineteen – Fun With Vampires!
Posted by Jason Cordova in Book Review on June 5, 2012
Okay, warning: I picked this up at the store, read the back of it and muttered “Oh God, someone wrote a YA version of Monster Hunter International…” I bought the book anyways because hey, I haven’t read any good YA lately, and I doubted that there were no similarities other than my initial gut reaction.
To kick off Department 19
*sigh*
Meanwhile, a boy nearby by the name of Matt Browning is surprised when he sees a young girl fall from the sky. He rushes outside and see his dad, an abusive jerk, standing there staring. Government agents quickly arrive and secure the scene. Matt accidently gets too close and the young girl bites him. And his story more-or-less ends for the book.
Seriously.
Why waste the pages… oh, never mind. Plot device for inevitable sequel. My bad. Let’s keep reading.
Jamie is taken by Frankenstein to a secret government base somewhere in England, where a secret organization names Department 19 resides. It becomes evident that Frankenstein broke all sorts of rules in bringing Jamie to a top-secret government facility but, instead of locking the boy up somewhere safe, they go ahead and let him wander around, unescorted, in apparently the most secure and secret base known to man.
Okay, my apologies about the continuous interruption in the review. Some things in this book continuously twigged my “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” senses, especially the government secrecy ones. It may be possible to do such a thing in England, I don’t know and I’m trying not to judge. Here in the States, if it’s a secret government project, everyone already knows about it (though details may vary). Slapping “Classified” on it with nothing else only piques American curiosity. We’re bad like that.
Ahem. Back to the story…
Well, half the time is Jamie prepping to join Department 19 so that he can go and rescue his mother, the other part is Jamie being an emo teen who has a crush on a vampire girl (oh God no!), which, given that this is a YA story, makes sense in a way. Jamie discovers that Larissa is being held by Department 19 in a secure area with other vampires as well (yes, Larissa with the red eyes is a vampire). Jamie more or less forces Dept 19 to feed her blood so that she may stay alive, then again forces Frankenstein to take her with them to a rendezvous point with other vampires. Jamie is desperate to get his mother back, though that seems to take a back seat when he gets around Larissa (again, a YA novel… I understand).
My initial thoughts were incorrect: this book is not like MHI, for which I’m glad. Department Nineteen is a pretty fast-paced action novel, with just enough elements of a love story to… well, make it interesting for teens. The plot is decent is a little rushed, and the build up of Matt Browning absolutely confused me. I kept waiting for the boy to wake up and be able to help Jamie in his quest to save his mother. Larissa also makes little sense, but then again my idea of vampires are pretty much along the lines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a soulless entity who now views humans as food and nothing more.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it was vastly entertaining. The author’s gun knowledge was impressive, considering the society he lives in, and his action sequences were very tightly woven. He could have spent more time on action scenes and less on story and I wouldn’t have minded one bit. Play to your strengths, I’ve always been told, and action sequences are Will Hill’s strength. The intermittent scenes showing London in 1892 were very well done, and probably one of the best parts of the book. The characterization of Jamie was a bit overdone, but again, I’ll pass that one off as a YA teen character instead of a “normal” one.
This book is a solid B. Good, not outstanding, but something that teenaged boys looking for a non-sparkly story about vampires will want to read. Buy it for the teens in your life.
–Reviewed by Jason
Nocturnal Serenade – Good, Solid Story
Posted by Jason Cordova in Book Review on June 4, 2012
After last week’s over-assertive venting, I was glad to dive back into a book as soothing as an Amanda Green novel. My soul (and anger management issues) needed something like this.
Said book, Nocturnal Serenade
The book starts with a mysterious man stalking an unknown woman from high in a tree. Unfortunately for our stalker, he is terrified of heights and really doesn’t want to be there. He fears the person who tasked him with watching the woman more, though, so he stays in the tree, his fear of the mysterious Novacek overwhelming his fear of heights. A little slow here (hey, I wanted to read about the shape shifting police detective, not some pervert hanging in a tree…) but it does offer a nice set piece to begin the crawl through the underbelly of shape shifter society. We soon discover that Mackenzie Santos’ mother is the person being stalked and blackmailed by the mysterious Novacek, because while she knows her daughter is now a shape shifter (thanks to the blackmailer), her rocky relationship with her daughter had driven a rift between them so wide that neither can or will bridge it.
Mackenzie is busy arriving at a crime scene, investigating a supposed overdose. Immediately the police recognize that something is up and that it might not be an overdose at all but a murder. Mackenzie, sensing that her newish partner (fellow shapeshifter Pat, a cougar) is ready for a challenge, lets her take the lead in the investigation. Pat is shocked and a bit nervous but soon takes control of the scene. It’s a good thing, too, because soon Pat finds a card for Mackenzie’s mother during their search of the murder scene. Almost as though someone wanted it to be found…
One of the best parts of the series thus far is the author’s strict following of police procedure. While it may seem dull, most authors don’t go into the amount of research needed for something to really work with the story. And Mackenzie, shape shifter or no, is a fine cop. That means that she follows procedure, and the reader can almost feel Mackenzie leaning out of the pages of the book and insisting that the reader must understand why the investigating of the scene is so important. Too often do authors (like James Patterson) ignore or invent procedure which would lead to every single bit of evidence being thrown out of court (especially the stuff in the Alex Cross novels). Nocturnal Serenade doesn’t run the risk of this, instead focusing on procedure, character development and a great story.
However, if there is one complaint, it’s that the author, for consecutive novels, has made the villain out to be the ultimate bad guy, only to be thwarted because he waits too long or trusts the wrong person. It worked in the first novel, not so much in the second – because, I believe, so much was put into the bad guy being the boogeyman in the second book as compared to the first. Not spoiling the plot any, but I kind of want to see a bad guy’s plans get a little further along (like, for example, bordering on the precipice before the heroine rushes in and saves the day) before his or her plans come crashing down around them. I felt as though the ending of the second book was a bit forced, but not necessarily in a bad way. A minor quibble, I’ll admit, but it’s still a quibble.
This book, like its predecessor, is a definite must-buy. It’s a good, solid read.
–Reviewed by Jason
SBR 2-for-1 Romance Saturday Special: London’s “Hadley Green” Novels
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Book Review on June 2, 2012
Previously, I reviewed Julia London’s THE REVENGE OF LORD EBERLIN. As that novel interested me a great deal — and because I knew it was book two of a trilogy called “The Secrets of Hadley Green” — I decided to hunt up both the prequel, THE YEAR OF LIVING SCANDALOUSLY, and the sequel, THE SEDUCTION OF LADY X. This review will cover the latter two books.
THE YEAR OF LIVING SCANDALOUSLY starts in 1808 Ireland. The heroine, fun-loving and frivolous Keira Hannigan, well-born but not part of the nobility, is asked by her friend and cousin, Lily Boudine (the heroine of book two, THE REVENGE OF LORD EBERLIN), to please go to England and take care of the Ashwood estate. The reason Lily asks this is because she was about to take a trip to Italy, something she’d always wanted to do, yet Lily had just become the Countess of Ashwood in her own right. This may not sound plausible, but there’s a reason why Lily doesn’t want to go back to Hadley Green (where Ashwood is located, roughly); it seems that when she was younger, she mistakenly sent a good man to his death. Lily has always felt terrible about this, even though she was only eight years old when this happened, and just isn’t up to returning to the Ashwood estate because of this.
Keira leaves Ireland, but doesn’t tell her parents where she’s actually going (as she, too, was supposed to be going to Italy along with Lily). Instead, Keira goes to Ashwood, pretends to be the Countess because she looks like Lily and many things need to get done that require the Countess’s signature, and runs into two people who know full well that she, Keira, isn’t the Countess at all — Declan O’Connor, the Irish Earl of Donnelly, and Tobin Scott, the Danish Lord Eberlin. But neither of them unmask her for reasons of their own, though Declan urges Keira to admit who she is — a caretaker. But Keira won’t do it, of course, which is fortunate or we’d have no story.
Keira takes part in several cultural events, including a horse race for charity and a charity ball for the local orphanage, which shows that she’s not a lightweight. And as she adds depth to her fun-loving exterior, Declan falls inextricably in love with her, which is good because Keira always carried a torch for him. Yet Declan isn’t the marrying kind, to say the least . . . whatever will Keira do about this? (Much less about the fact that she’s not the Countess?) And what will happen once she realizes that she’s pregnant?
All of this is for you to read, but if you enjoy English historical romance, you will enjoy THE YEAR OF LIVING SCANDALOUSLY despite its quirks.
Now onto the third book of the “Secrets of Hadley Green” trilogy, THE SEDUCTION OF LADY X. This novel is about steward Harrison Tolly, the latest heir to the Ashwood estate as he’s the illegitimate son of the late Earl of Ashwood. (Lily Beaudine, who married Count Eberlin at the end of book two of the trilogy, has abdicated.) Yet Harrison is in big trouble, as he’s in love with Lady Olivia Carey — the wife of his employer, the nasty Marquis of Carey — and he refuses to leave Everdon Court, the seat of the Carey family.
Yet that’s not all that’s going on in THE SEDUCTION OF LADY X, as Olivia’s sister, Alexa, is pregnant and won’t say by whom. Harrison, being a decent sort at heart, has offered to marry Alexa even though he’s in love with Olivia (a well-guarded secret), which for the moment has kept the Marquis from sending Alexa to a convent. This sets up many complications, some of them seeming insurmountable, until circumstances allow for Harrison to accept the Ashwood domain as his own. Better yet — spoiler alert! — the Marquis of Carey meets his demise, which allows Harrison to finally court Olivia. (Or does it?)
THE SEDUCTION OF LADY X is a diverting read about a cruel man, how awfully he treats his wife Olivia, Harrison the loyal steward who loves Olivia and does his best to protect her, and of course the added complication of Alexa and her unborn child. As it’s a romance, a happy ending is all but assured, yet the trials and tribulations of Olivia, Alexa, and Harrison nearly eclipse that knowledge until about twenty-five pages from the end.
That being said, both books are good ones that held my interest until the very end, and had believable romances despite the unusual set-ups. I enjoyed all three books of the “Secrets of Hadley Green” trilogy, and will look forward to whatever Julia London publishes next.
Grades:
THE YEAR OF LIVING SCANDALOUSLY — A-minus.
THE SEDUCTION OF LADY X — B-plus
“Hadley Green” series — B-plus.
Shiny Book Review 