Frederica ("Free") Marshall publishes a newspaper by, for, and about women. She's an investigative reporter in the mold of Nellie Bly, and she has her share of enemies. One of them, James Delacey, is currently behind a scheme to ruin her paper by making it appear that it is plagiarizing from other papers.

Edward Clark was born Edward Delacey, James's older brother, but has been out of the country and unheard from in so long that he's about to be legally presumed dead and his title passed to his younger brother. Edward is fine with that. What he's not fine with is that James's scheme would also ruin Stephen Shaughnessy, the little brother of his childhood best friend. When he initially approaches Free with part of his story (leaving out that James is his brother and that his motive is protecting Stephen) he attempts to blackmail her into working with him. She blackmails him right back, and accepts.

This is quite possibly my new favorite romance, period. Free is a force of nature. She knows every bit of how ugly the world can be; she frequently subjects herself to it deliberately for the sake of a story. But she sees that ugliness and then finds bits of it that she can fix. And I love how Edward was utterly bowled over by her from the beginning. The author's note says that Milan's original intent was for Free to meet some guy who was opposed to women's rights, and I'd probably be writing a very different review if that hadn't changed. My favorite thing about Edward is that, even if he isn't always sure that there's much hope for Free to succeed, he never for a second thinks that she's wrong or needs to change.

There's also a secondary romance that was quite sweet, although not as integrated into the main plot as the one in The Heiress Effect. And as always with Milan's books, the dialogue was wonderful. I can hardly wait for the concluding novella in the series. For that matter, I can hardly wait for the next series after this.

Overall: A

This review is based on an ARC received from the publisher.

Prototype is the second part of Archetype, which I reviewed here:

http://unreachableshelf.weebly.com/on-the-shelf/archetype-by-md-waters

Because I can't talk about it without talking about things from the first book, I will not hold back spoilers. Although spoiler is perhaps the wrong word. There are very few things that could make this book worse.

When I reviewed Archetype, I was having trouble deciding what I should think of it because I wasn't sure if I was unfairly comparing it to The Handmaid's Tale. Now, I'm even more concerned that I'm hating this book unfairly because it's the book it is and not the book I wanted to read. I am a librarian, and I believe in every book to its reader. But I'm not sure there's such a thing as a case in which a book can take place in a future in which women are property while completely avoiding the seriousness of that issue to focus solely on the romance and in which that book is OK.

I couldn't figure out if Archetype was aiming for The Handmaid's Tale or The Stepford Wives. Now I know. It's neither. It's a romance that uses the oppression of women as a plot device. Slavery was only a red herring. Or a MacGuffin, maybe, but I'd rather be thinking about Clue than thinking about this book. In these books, men own women as a justification for how Emma wound up in Declan's control at the beginning of Archetype. That having been accomplished, Waters completely fails to consider the possible impact on society. There's the occasional reference to corporal punishment in the Wife Training Centers, but she doesn't seem to have put any thought into how a woman's life is different after being bought. For example, there's this statement, of one of Declan's assets:

"'Who's name is it under? Travista's?'

'Mine,' I say. 'I never gave it any thought, but Declan once had me sign a bunch of paperwork. Financial in nature. He said he wanted to protect me if anything happened to him. He was making sure I was set up and would not have to remarry or work.'" [Emphasis mine.]

Think about that last bit there. Women are property in these books. Fertile women, at least. The legal status of infertile women is explored even less, aside from the fact that they aren't allowed to marry and have to work in specific women's-work type jobs. Having her own money or not isn't supposed to have any impact on whether or not Emma would have to remarry if Declan died. So long as she's fertile she's supposed to be forced to marry and reproduce, and not be allowed to work. Granted, Declan lied some in the first book. In retrospect, the more I think about it, the more he lied about really stupid things. He lied about how he met Emma and that she was bought for him. Not that it doesn't make sense that he might not want her to know that, except that that's how their society works, and since he doesn't plan to keep her isolated forever eventually she'll find out that's how their society works. Obviously he put this asset in her name to hide it, and maybe he's lying about the fact that there's a possibility she could have the option to avoid remarrying, or have the choice to work if she wanted to, in the event of his death. Apparently the property is legally in her name, which makes no sense because if women are an asset that can be bought and sold, how are they allowed to own things?

There's generally a really strange sense in spite of the fact that girls are forced into Wife Training Centers and then forced to marry and reproduce, or to not marry if they're infertile, that women still have just as much agency as they do now in every matter except whom/if they marry and reproduce. The fact that Dr. Travista is making women fertile through a process that involves cloning them has apparently gone public in between the books. This is being handled really strangely, too. It sounds like women are voluntarily signing up to be cloned. If this world has such a shortage of fertile women and if women are nothing more than a commodity, then why are the women the ones deciding to be cloned? Why isn't the government or whoever forces the young girls into the Wife Training Centers rounding up all the infertile women and forcing the procedure on them? (Apparently girls in some of the WTCs are being cloned, and this is apparently the only scandalous thing, but you'd think that a system based on forcing all fertile women into slavery because of a shortage of fertile women would go gather up ALL of the women given this opportunity.) There's also a reference to how a woman gave her daughter to a WTC and "stayed home to raise her son" in language that sounds like she had a choice in the matter. As if fertile women are allowed to do anything besides stay home and raise children in the world of this book.

And on multiple occasions, during love scenes, Emma tells Noah that she is "his." We're following characters in the resistance, and she calls herself "his" in the same way that people might in our contemporary U.S., in which legally two people enter into a partnership of equals. Calling herself "his" would mean something entirely different in a setting in which a man could buy a wife. By contrast I'm thinking of The Handmaid's Tale, how when the first laws keeping women from having their own bank accounts came into effect and the woman we know as Offred knows that her husband doesn't understand that it doesn't matter that he will take care of her, what matters is that she's not allowed to take care of herself. Meanwhile Emma lives in a world in which she literally belongs to her husband, not in an "I am my beloved's and he is mine" kind of way, but in a men can literally buy her kind of way, and yet she seems to be perfectly happy to belong to a man as long as it's the right man.

There are all other kinds of things that don't seem to be thought out. The plot thread about Emma wanting to find her parents seems underdeveloped, just an excuse to get her away from the resistance at the beginning of the book long enough for Noah and Sonya to start a relationship. It's mentioned in passing that Noah's father has been married five times because he sells each wife after he impregnates her a time or two. With such a shortage of fertile women, why would a man sell a wife who'd proven herself? Wouldn't he be afraid he couldn't purchase another one, or that the new one would turn out to be infertile after all? Does he wait until he knows he'll be able to buy a new wife before he sells the old one? Does he actually make a profit because the women he's had children with have been proven to be fertile? Is this encouraged for reasons of diversifying the gene pool, since there aren't enough women to go around for all the men, or is it just an old fashioned case of a rich guy who wants variety? And is he really rich and powerful that he can apparently always buy a new wife in spite of them being a rare commodity?

And at the end, the wife training centers are sold but still intact, as if that's supposed to make us happy. Because it's fine that women are being sold as long as they aren't cloning them and then killing the originals any more.

Look, I know that dystopias aren't really supposed to have happy endings. More often than not, they don't. The happiest ending of one of the classics I can think of off the top of my head is Fahrenheit 451, in which case it's clear that people are preserving lost literature waiting for the current regime to fall to its own wars. If this were a "He loved big brother" ending, that would be one thing. But this is supposed to be a living happily ever after ending.

This is obviously supposed to be a romance novel more than it's supposed to be social SF. I don't dislike it because it's a romance novel. I like romance novels but, like every other book, I expect them to commit to their characters and their setting, whether we're talking about historical, SF or fantasy, or a slightly quirkier version of the real contemporary world. If you don't want your romance hero and heroine to have to deal realistically with horrific dystopian things, then don't write a book with a horrific dystopian premise.

Overall: F

Prototype will be available July 24

I've long been unsure of if Vicki Lewis Thompson's books are as good as those by other romance authors that I follow; in fact I relegated her to the borrow-from-the-library-first list long ago. I usually at least find the books that I read by her funny, though.

Luke's sister, Cynthia, and Giselle's brother, Bryce, have both run off. Cynthia has dropped out of college and wants to be a showgirl at the family's casino. Bryce is shirking his responsibilities as the future alpha of the werewolf pack. Luke and Giselle team up to look for their siblings.

What struck me about this book was how absolutely unnecessary the werewolf aspects were. Obviously somebody has to be a werewolf in order for the book to be in this series, but most of the plot has absolutely nothing to do with the secret of Giselle's species. All it does is provide a little additional justification for Giselle's reluctance to continue the relationship after she goes home, but distaste for long distance relationships and a belief that Luke wouldn't want to leave Vegas would have been just as reasonable considering how easily she ultimately gives up her stance against werewolf/human mating. The werewolf playground under a bar has no role apart from providing a pretty setting. And Luke and Giselle have very little reason to be believable as soul mates apart from sex so good and states of arousal so constant that it must be A Sign. At least nobody thought about having "had a great sexual experience"?

I was particularly disappointed because I really wanted to love this book when I realized that Giselle was the werewolf and Luke was the human. All of the other stories in the series either featured male werewolves with human women or couples that were both werewolves, and I thought it would be a wonderful subversion of the stereotypical alpha male werewolf dynamic for the heroine to be the dominant wolf-type. VLT hinted in this direction a bit with the short story "A Werewolf in Greenwich Village," in which both protagonists were werewolves but the heroine eventually challenged her brother for the alpha-ship of the pack and the hero was more of the supportive beta-wolf type, but I was hoping to see it explored more in a full length book and with a "mixed" couple. Sadly, this wasn't to be either, since Luke in spite of being human showed as many alpha stereotypes as was possible without descending into total alph-hole status.

Let's just say this was one I was happy I borrowed from the library, because I won't be needing my own copy.

Overall Grade: C

Tom has been Conrad's servant and friend for ten years. So far neither of them has admitted that their desires go beyond that, but when the Captain begins to suspect, they decide that if they are going to be condemned anyway, there's no point in refraining from the crime. And that's only the beginning....

This is my favorite of Alex Beecroft's shorter works that I've read so far. It packs a lot of action into a story that I read in under forty-five minutes. Although our heroes each have some doubts about making the first move, neither do they dither until the end about confessing their feelings. And there are pirates. The pirates are lots of fun.

Overall grade: A

Blessed Isle is framed as a joint diary by Harry, a captain with his first command, and Garnet, a lieutenant, in which they recount the story of how the loss of the ship and their being stranded finally gave them the opportunity to stop hiding their love.

I'm normally a big fan of Alex Beecroft, but I felt comparatively cool about this book, and I think it was the diary format. First, it meant it was told in alternating first person perspectives, and Harry in particular has something of a florid prose style. In a way it shows Beecroft's talent in making the first person narrators of this story not sound like the third person narrators of the others, but practically, I didn't enjoy the narrative voices of this one as much. Secondly, it may be silly considering that this is a romance and obviously our heroes are going to find happiness somewhere, but the knowledge that they were writing this diary somewhere after the fact, and apparently not from jail since they make references to going outside to write, made the rest of their travails a bit less immediate.

I don't regret having read this book, but I don't love it the way I love False Colors, either.

Overall grade: B

It's Alex Beecroft week here, because I put a lot of requests in through Overdrive at my library, and I read three novellas this weekend. Also, I'm currently working my way through a massive ARC hoping I can finish it just before the release date.

It's 1752, and Robert Hughes is a lieutenant in the British Navy. He's in love with fellow lieutenant Hal Morgan, who suffers from unrequited love for Captain Hamilton. Robert decides to declare his love for Hal just when Hal, in the depths of despair, is about to confess to Robert about his love for the Captain. But Robert is known as a bit of a rogue and a clown, his university education and lack of sea experience making it hard for him to fit in, and Hal doesn't believe that Robert's feelings for him can possibly match the purity of his love for the Captain. He refuses to believe it without proof.

In the past, I've only read Alex Beecroft's full length novels. I love them, but while False Colors, for example is a wider ranging seafaring novel centered on a romance but with both heroes also having various adventures apart, this novella is much more focused as a romance. As always, there's a balance between realism and idealism. Beecroft doesn't shy away from the fact that these men are living in a time when the Royal Navy punished sodomy with death, but after Hal comes to realize that Hamilton will never return his love, we are left able to believe that he and Robert will be able to find happiness together.


Overall grade: A

A Case of Possession is the second book in the A Charm of Magpies series, the first of which I reviewed here last fall.

As the book opens, Crane is being blackmailed over his relationship with Day. Crane could easily run back to China, but he won't leave Day behind. Day, meanwhile, is on a watchlist under suspicion of having turned warlock because the other justicars don't know that his sudden increase in magical power has been caused by his sexual bond with Crane. If that wasn't enough, London is being invaded by giant rats of Sumatra.

"Giant rats of Sumatra" is actually in the "product warnings" for this book. If I hadn't been awaiting the sequel to The Magpie Lord already, K.J. Charles would have had me at "giant rats of Sumatra." I love references to outside things and I love things that are mentioned but never explained, so I could only have been more excited if there was a warning for The Noodle Incident.

Generally, I love this book almost as much as I love the first one. Almost. I'll get the things that I didn't love as much out of the way first, since ultimately they're less important. First of all, in the first book I thought the time it took for Crane and Day to have sex and the various near-misses along the way made sense in the course of the story and for the characters. This book starts with them in an established relationship, so in the abstract it would make sense for there to be more sex throughout the book... but the first "sex" scene in the book is a dream sequence that takes place before we actually get our heroes into the same room, and the pacing didn't seem quite as natural. To me it felt a bit like somebody suggested that we needed to get to the sex faster, but since there wasn't a place for it to actually happen yet, Day had a dream. Secondly, Day doesn't get to sling around magic and kick butt quite as much in this book; given the emphasis on how much smaller he is than Crane, I thought it was important to the balance of power between them in the first book that above his being talented and brave, he is specifically able to throw somebody across a room using magic if he so chooses. Crane can say that Day's always in charge even if he's chained to the bed as much as he wants, but it's also true that Crane really couldn't physically overpower Day if he honestly resisted, or at least not without a serious fight, since Crane does have some ability to resist magic. The big magic showdowns in this book always include Day's other associates, so I'm not sure it's as clear just how dangerous he is in his own right this time around.

However. All of that pales next to how much I love all the things I love in this book. The story of the giant rats and the blackmail plot would be a great way to spend an afternoon even in the absence of the romance. And the tensions and anxieties in the relationship are quite believable ones; these are both men with considerable determination to protect the people who matter to them, and as a result neither are all that comfortable being taken care of. They have to find a balance of when to ask for help from each other. The big declaration of love scene is brilliant and so perfectly suited to both of them. We also get to come to know Day's associates a bit more, whom I hope we get to spend more time with in the third book, especially Esther.

I have a shelf full of ARCs I need to read and I'm debating if I can justify going back to read the short story that takes place in between The Magpie Lord and A Case of Possession next. I can't wait for bo

This review is based on a free promotional copy received from the publisher.

Archetype is set in a world in which fertility rates have dropped so low that fertile women are treated as property and sold as wives. Teenage girls are raised in wife training centers and the ones judged capable of bearing children are sold at age eighteen. It's into this world that Emma reawakes after an alleged accident with no memory, but with a mysterious voice in her head and vague dreams of another life. Her husband is there when she wakes and clearly loves her, but there's another man in her dreams, and she knows that one of them must be the man she loves and the other is her bitter enemy. She doesn't know which is which.

I have mixed feelings about this book, possibly because it invites comparison with The Handmaid's Tale. (Waters acknowledges that a scene she remembers of the handmaids in training in the movie version was an influence on this book, but that she only recently read the book after having written Archetype.) If I try to forget every other dystopia I've read, this book satisfies. Emma's development as she recovers her memory also lets the reader slowly into the light about how her world works, and her love for the husband who takes care of her while she also remembers a life with another man is believable and well executed.

In comparison with other dystopias, and especially The Handmaid's Tale, however, it falls short on the social commentary scale. It may be because of Emma's abridged memory, but although we are told that wives are the property of their husbands and must be branded because they are at risk of being stolen, we are shown very little oppression. Other than a couple of brief mentions about how pregnancy is not a choice and how birth control and abortion are both illegal, the day to day lives of the women we see doesn't seem to involve many negative ramifications. There is, of course, a secret horror to be revealed, but it appears to be a reasonably unimportant part of the system as a whole. It doesn't give the sense that Emma's daily life would be restricted at all if she weren't a patient. It's clear that she could not hold a job, but she paints and sells her paintings. Is the money they bring hers? Could she conduct business on her own? Does she even care if she has any control over money of her own? Would she want to hold a job if she were allowed to do so? Are there rules about where she can or can't go without her husband? Presumably adultery is illegal since men who buy wives to reproduce will want to be sure the children are their own, but are there any other rules about interaction between wives and men not their husbands?

Although the reproduction oriented rules of society immediately made my mind go to The Handmaid's Tale, I'm not sure that Archetype is about reproductive choice, or at least about the threat of increased legal restrictions on women exercising that choice. If that's the story Waters is trying to tell, then this result would be equivalent to writing a story about slavery and only showing slaves who worked skilled trades and had the opportunity to earn money and buy their freedom. The system would still be abhorrent, but the story would stop short of depicting the full horrors possible under it. But maybe Archetype is actually a social satire in the vein of The Stepford Wives, only with the SF elements visible all the way through, less about a systematic threat to take away women's control over their own bodies and more about how women can  lose themselves to the interests of their husbands and their children, often while being complicit in it. If that's the case, then the fact that the premise is so close to The Handmaid's Tale is unfortunate in that it invites what can only be an extremely unfair comparison, but the story as it advances from there is much more effective.

I'm not sure I will really know how I feel about Archetype until after I read the second book, Prototype, which I have an ARC of but am going to try to read some books coming out sooner first to make sure I get to them before the release date. (Prototype is due out in July.) For now, the Overall Grade is B.

Archetype will be released on February 6.

From earlier books in the Brothers Sinister series, we know that Sebastian Malheur is both a rake and a scientist. His theories of inheritance alone are considered too sexual to discuss in public. Except that the theories he presents were actually developed by Violet, the widowed Countess of Canterbury, his lifelong friend and the honorary fourth Brother Sinister, along with Sebastian and his cousins, Robert and his half-brother Oliver. Nobody would read her first paper submitted under her own name, so Sebastian has learned everything necessary to discuss the work as his own and been her public face for five years. But Sebastian, at heart, wants to make people happy. He can't take the public hatred any more, and his brother, who is not expected to live long, won't make him his nephew's guardian.

This is not entirely the book that I expected it to be. From the cover text, I thought the conflict was going to rest on Sebastian's desire to give up presenting Violet's work as his own and Violet's need for somebody to be the face of her work in a time when she could not present it for herself. In fact, Violet does not particularly fight Sebastian when he says he can't do it any more, although it takes a while before they come up with a plan for her to present it for herself. The conflict is more about Violet's belief that she doesn't have any qualities that make her worthy of love. This is not my favorite trope of a romance novel, probably because I've seen it done too many times unconvincingly. If it has ever been done right, what Violet went through with her late husband is it, but that can't entirely undo how tired I am of it.

But I can forgive that, not only because at least this is an example of the trope done well, but because of everything else in the book. I love friends to lovers stories, mainly because I've lived one, but even though I know it's absolutely possible for two friends to fall in love, I also wonder if stories about women eventually falling in love with men who have been their friends forever are actually encouraging more angry self-dubbed Nice Guys who think that it is totally unfair that women whose friends they pretend to be don't want to have sex with them.  But if ever there were a friends to lovers story that didn't encourage the belief that it's unjust "friendzoning" for a woman only to want to be friends with a man, this is it. When Sebastian thinks that Violet wants to remain friends only, he makes it absolutely clear that he doesn't consider friendship any less valuable than love. He does tell her that he loves her, and not platonically, but he's also the one who says that they will go on as friends as they always did until she admits that she returns his feelings. I also love beta heroes, and Sebastian is the perfect beta hero, whose main ambition is making people happy and who has quite a talent for it. He lets Violet decide exactly what she wants their relationship to be, and if she's not thinking clearly he refuses to take advantage. There is a line involving her future prospects in the last chapter before the epilogue that sums up why I love Sebastian perfectly, but Courtney Milan's dialogue is so brilliant that quoting it feels like a spoiler, even though it doesn't reveal anything you wouldn't know from the back cover. And when, near the end of the book, the two come into conflict on how a crisis should be resolved, they don't fight over it in order to have a late chapter reconciliation; they each do what they need to do, and understand why the other one wanted to do what they did.

I can hardly wait for The Mistress Rebellion.

Overall Grade: A-

In high school, Nolan was a skinny, awkward nerd and Darcie ran with the in-crowd. Now, Nolan is heading up a project for a billionaire determined to colonize Mars, and Darcie appears in the audience at his lecture at Space Expo. Nolan has matured and gained confidence (as well as having gotten in shape, since he hopes to go to Mars himself), and Darcie has learned to embrace her own nerdy and offbeat tendencies in her career as a professional astrologer. Things are looking good for them to be just right for each other as adults (if Nolan can accept the astrologer part), but it looks like a member of the team working on a rival project might be threatening Nolan.
Vicki Lewis Thompson's contemporaries are among the few I read,and I particularly appreciate the later books in the series, including this one, in which both leads have at minimum some distinctly nerdy traits, and they aren't treated as things that need to be fixed. I can happily say that Nerds are from Mars continues that trend from the last of the original print series. I was a bit put off by Darcie's need for Nolan to let her put together a chart for him at first. Wouldn't nonjudgmentally listening to her discuss her work without having to participate in it have been enough? Insisting on somebody who doesn't believe in astrology taking part in it seemed on par with knowingly beginning to date somebody of a different religion and insisting on them converting, and right away at that. However, as the book went on, Darcie didn't try to convince Nolan to consult astrological charts so much as she encouraged him to trust his intuition more. And since good intuition, for a person who isn't inclined to believe in psychic phenomena, can also be explained in terms of a person drawing conclusions based on data of which they may  only be subconsciously aware, I don't think she made him abandon his scientific approach to life, there. It's acknowledged that her crystals might have more of a Dumbo-feather effect than "working" on their own, and she's not making him check to see if the stars are right before the Mars mission launches, so I had no reason to fear.
Vicki Lewis Thompson does have some writing ticks that bother me, like her habit of having characters think of having had sex (or engaged in any non-PIV sexual behavior) has having "had a sexual experience." Has anybody, ever, thinking of the great time they had the night before, thought "I had a great sexual experience with [fill in the blank]"? It's that kind of usage. No. You'd either think "had sex," or the name of the particular sexual activity involved. That said, her books are still great fun starring characters I enjoy spending time with, and this is an enjoyable, fast read.

Overall grade: B