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All I Want for Christmas is a Duke by Maire Claremont and Delilah Marvelle

1/29/2015

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This is actually two separate novellas, "Merry Christmas, Mrs. Robinson" by Delilah Marvelle and "The Twelve Days of Seduction" by Maire Claremont. I'm a fan of Marvelle's work but haven't read Claremont's before. Normally I try to get multi-author collections from the library, but none of my libraries bought this, and at 99 cents I figured paying for something I might only read half of was better than missing a Marvelle book.

"Merry Christmas, Mrs. Robinson" was a very good story that may have suffered just slightly from the amount of space it had as a novella. It's a friends to lovers story, in which after several years of separation, the widowed Mrs. Robinson reconnects with her old friend Martin, whom she never knew was actually, as a teenager, the mysterious Mr. X with whom she fell in love via letters. (She believed that her late husband was Mr. X when they married, but found out he wasn't before he died.) Over the course of the story she discovers how the two sides of the man that she knew fit together. He's a little older and more confident. She's a little wiser. My one complaint was that Mrs. Robinson's issues seem a little under explored, to the point where some of them maybe could have been skipped. From the beginning, I expected her issues to stem from the circumstances of her first husband's death, but near the end she brings up problems in their sex life that appear to have come out of nowhere to take care of the rule of romance that says that if the heroine is not a virgin, she can't have had a good sexual relationship before the one with the hero. Delilah Marvelle can do better than that. Still, overall, this was a lovely story.

Overall: A-


I was less sold on "The Twelve Days of Seduction," because I had trouble understanding Adrianna's motivations. At the beginning, she appears to be attempting to live a respectable life. She has secured a position as a governess, probably the most respectable employment to which she can aspire. She publishes her novels under a different name. (It appears that her pen name is her original name and she's going by a false one, but it' still not the name she's currently using otherwise.) But when Alexander discovers her and says she may stay if she stays as his mistress, she doesn't appear to consider the reputation she has built for herself at all. Her only concern is for whether, as his mistress instead of his ward's governess, she will still be able to associate with the girl or if she will be kept away in London, and not at all for what might happen to her if she becomes his mistress and *then* gets tossed out. And although she says she wants him to seduce her for twelve days first, she doesn't actively do anything to try to persuade him not to separate her and his daughter/ward, or object to the eventual separation (she asks in that first conversation, he says it would be cruel to separate them too quickly, that's that), and her agreement to be his mistress doesn't seem to be contingent on how well he does in the twelve days. The three of them were charming together in all combinations but I had trouble seeing what the point of the whole exercise was supposed to be.

Overall: C


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Bred to Kill by Franck Thilliez

1/26/2015

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A year has passed since Syndrome E and Franck Sharko and Lucie Hennebelle have been separated since the murder of one of her twin daughters. But a death that initially appears to have been an animal attack turns out to have had a human perpetrator. The victim was apparently researching something far beyond what her thesis advisor knew, with possible connections to the murderer of Hennebelle's daughter. Although she has left the police, Sharko brings her in to the investigation, which turns out to involve the human genome, Cro Magnon man, and an isolated tribe in the Amazon rain forest.

This series isn't for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach, but if you can handle a certain amount of gore and disturbing content, you will be well rewarded. The mystery and the scientific intrigue are well constructed. The protagonists are damaged but worth rooting for, and there's always a surprising twist around the corner, although there is an apparent moment of danger near the end that seemed too easily dismissed. I look forward to the next in the series (which is obviously coming), and if any of his earlier books should be translated into English I expect I'd be pretty happy with them, too.

Overall: A
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The Only Words that are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter

1/24/2015

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This review is based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.

I have a theory that you can determine the degree to which a book has pretensions to literary quality by the extent to which it unnecessarily discusses the more banal aspects of bodily functions. Not its actual literary quality, note, but its pretensions to literary quality. Because I've read my share of genre fiction that was most definitely literary and which featured beautiful prose that made me want to curl up inside of it, even if it was describing horrifying things, but it always seems to be the books that are trying to be Important and Serious where the authors decide to demonstrate how real they are by talking about how somebody had diarrhea for no apparent reason.

The publisher described this book as set in a not-too-distant future where the Copernican model of the universe has been forgotten, "but when a cache of ancient machinery is discovered beneath the ruins of Cape Canaveral, it has the power to turn this retrograde world inside out." The narrator and his family are given the choice to test pilot the rocket or to be separated and sent to prison.

Except, we never actually see the world turned inside out. Although the people of this time seem to be aware that there were Astronomers in the past, they treat the idea of space travel as akin to an ancient religion (they talk about the space race as a fight over whether the USA or USSR loved the Moon more). There's no indication of how the people behind this proposed rocket launch came to the conclusion that it could actually work. It's unclear how much they do know; the "night glass" of the sky, as something the rocket might actually hit, is discussed as a potential problem throughout the process of their preparations. Nor do we feel any impact on the worldview of the main characters as they learn that their model of the universe is wrong. The references to clearly misunderstood elements of our present time (such as their attempts to explain zoos) and changed names ("Cape Cannibal") don't feel as if they have any kind of satirical purpose to them so much as they seem to be just an attempt at humor, ha ha, look at these people who don't actually exist and see how wrong they are.

Early on I thought that this was going to be something like a Heinlein-juvie with literary pretensions. I've read a lot of Heinlein but don't actually like the juvies. I read SF for the social commentary, not for the adventure. As it turned out, I should have been so lucky for this to fall into that category, for spoilery reasons I'll explain in a paragraph after the release date at the end.

There are occasionally some nice turns of phrases, such as when the other family being trained for the expedition is described as "less like a family than a conspiracy." But the prose quality is just not enough to make up for how much this book lacks in both plot and point.

Overall: C

The Only Words that are Worth Remembering will be available April 7.

*Our narrator never actually leaves the planet. He goes on the lam and wanders around doing not much in particular except growing up and going through withdrawl. Time moves so quickly through most of the book that there's no immediacy to any of his experiences. He certainly doesn't turn the world inside out. Although he does eventually wind up at an observatory with other "astronomers," the way some self identified Astronomers talk about the universe sounds more like a cross between astrology and religion than like science, so it's unclear what they actually know, and they certainly don't seem to be having any impact on their society as a whole.
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Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

1/22/2015

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This review is based on an e-galley received from the publisher. It did not include "Black Dog," the new American Gods story.

It's difficult to come up with anything to say about a Neil Gaiman collection other than "Go read this right now. No, really, right now. Why are you still reading this? Oh, yes, because it isn't out for another week." In his introduction, Gaiman talks about the influences of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, which is appropriate, since those three authors are in my mind the best demonstration that fantasy/speculative fiction absolutely can simultaneously be literary fiction.

I don't remember having read any of these pieces before, but I had heard a couple of them read on "Selected Shorts." One of these, "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury," had been read on the program by Denis O'Hare, one of my favorite actors. I'm happy to say that it is equally beautiful in both the reading and the listening.

The collection also includes "The Spindle and the Sleeper," which has been released on its own in an illustrated edition in the UK and which attracted its share of attention. It is not the story that you might be expecting if all you know of it is the picture that most recently accompanied those discussions, but it is a fine adventure story on its own.

On a whole this collection is often beautiful, often startling, and always engrossing.

Overall: A

Trigger Warning will be available Feb. 3.
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2014 in Books in Review

1/1/2015

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How many books read in 2013?

121

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?

Fiction: 112
Nonfiction:9

Male/Female authors?

Male: 55
Female: 62
Multi-author: 3

Favorite books read?

Leaving rereads out of it because otherwise the answer would be Les Miserables or Don Quixote every few years: The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan, Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch, Mind of Winter by Laura Kasische, The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey, Precious Thing by Colette McBeth

Least favorite?

The unit of Archetype and Prototype by M.D. Waters, which I hated with the fiery passion of a thousand blazing suns, especially Prototype because when Archetype ended I thought it might still be salvageable depending on where it went next. Just read my review: http://unreachableshelf.weebly.com/on-the-shelf/prototype-by-md-waters

Oldest book read?

Frankenstein

Classical Greece/Rome 0
Early Christianity: 0
Medieval: 0
Renaissance: 0
18th century: 0
19th century: 4
20th century: 16
21st century:  101

Newest?

As of right now, Foxglove Summer since its release date isn't even officially until Tuesday, but relative to when I read them, nearly all of the non-rereads either had just come out or were ARCs.

How many re-reads?

Twenty-five

Most books read by one author this year?

Probably the eight by Robert A. Heinlein

Any in translation?

Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez and three by Victor Hugo

How many of this year's books were from the library?

Forty-four if I'm remembering correctly.

Book that most changed my perspective:

I don't think anything qualifies for this.

Favorite character:

The combination of Aziraphale and Crowley.

Favorite scene:

I still cry when I read the climax of Notre Dame de Paris

Most inspirational in terms of your own writing?

More than anything I read all the way through in the past year, various books on Mary Wollstonecraft that I've skimmed

How many you'd actually read again?

About sixty-six of them I either own with the intention of reading again or theoretically would, but I got them from the library and haven't bothered to get my own copy so it's less likely that I would.

Favorite quote:

Although there are a million problems with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the reason why I still reread it is that it gave us one of my favorite quotes ever, "But it's the truth, even if it never happened."
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