Musings on Romance
I’m over at AudioGals today with a review of Try Me, Tempt Me, Take Me by Olivia Cunning, narrated by Justine O.Keef. It’s an anthology of three novellas – they’re very hot and explicit, so definitely NSFW. I think they’re best sampled in sections rather than all at once.
The following might be considered spoilerish, so be ye warned. Personally, I don’t think it is all that spoilerish because even though it comes late in the book, it’s not really connected to the main storyline – something that makes me even more annoyed because it just didn’t really need to be there at all and it could have been changed in one very small (but significant) way and it would have been okay.
On with the rant.
First off, I’m an Outlander fan. I love the series. It’s not perfect, but overall, I find the Outlander vortex sucks me in every time. I gave the last book, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, a B+. I liked it very very much.
But.
There was one thing which bothered me when I was consuming the book. Claire operates on a very young slave girl (she’s around 13) with a gynaecological injury. The girl, Sophronia, was non-violently repeatedly raped (she’s so young and also a slave, it cannot be called seduction as consent here was so far absent it may have been on the moon) by her owner. She became pregnant. There was a problem during a long labour and the baby died. Sophronia was left with two fistulae – so both urine and fecal matter was escaping her body via her vagina (this is still an issue today, especially in poor communities where very young girls give birth without appropriate medical care, but that’s another story). Continue reading
I make a return to the Speaking of Audiobooks column at All About Romance today with a review of Written in My Own Heart’s Blood by Diana Gabaldon, narrated by the magnificent Davina Porter. I found this instalment to be generally much happier in tone than some of the other books and less violent too. Plus: JAMIE FRASER.
Why I read it: I had this one pre-ordered from Amazon and a few of my Twitter pals and I did a buddy read. (Except I was late starting so I played catch-up most of the time.)
What it’s about: (from Goodreads) Since his brother’s death, Benny Bianchi has been nursing his grudge against the woman he thinks led to his brother’s downfall. He does this to bury the feelings he has for Francesca Concetti, his brother’s girl. But when Frankie takes a bullet while on the run with Benny’s cousin’s woman, Benny has to face those feelings.
The problem is Frankie has decided she’s paid her penance. Penance she didn’t deserve to pay. She’s done with Benny and the Bianchi family. She’s starting a new life away from Chicago and her heartbreaking history.
Benny has decided differently.
But Frankie has more demons she’s battling. Demons Benny wants to help her face. But life has landed so many hard knocks on Frankie she’s terrified of believing in the promise of Benny Bianchi and the good life he’s offering.
Frankie’s new life leads her to The ‘Burg, where Benny has ties, and she finds she not only hasn’t succeeded in getting away, she doesn’t want to.
What worked for me (and what didn’t): Ordinarily, I’d expect I’d have some difficulty with the concept of a guy dating his dead brother’s ex-girlfriend – as a concept it doesn’t appeal to me much. But, I was sold on Frankie and Ben (I refuse to call him Benny – sorry, can’t do it) by the end of At Peace and Vinnie (the dead brother/ex) was kind of vague and amorphous but also not good for Frankie in many ways. So it didn’t faze me when that wasn’t an issue for most of the characters in this book. Frankie struggled with it for a while at the start of the story but no-one else did. Frankie and Ben so clearly belonged together, everyone was just happy it looked like it was happening.
Whisper Falls by Toni Blake – C I borrowed this book from the library after a recent DBSA podcast which mentioned that the heroine has Crohn’s Disease. Tessa Sheridan moved home to Destiny, Ohio some years earlier because she needed help due to her illness. Her mother lives close by and she has a part time job in a friend’s bookshop which allows her to work when she feels well but is very flexible if she’s unwell. She was an interior designer with a big Cincinnati firm but couldn’t keep up with the demands of her job. She has her own interior design business in Destiny but there’s little demand and she’s had no actual customers. Lucky Romo moves back home to Destiny after he took over at age 18. He didn’t plan to come back but he recently found out he has a son – the result of a one night stand some ten years earlier when he’d been (very briefly) in the area. There is little angst about the son and actually that was kind of refreshing. The big deal about Lucky is that he’s had a rough past. He was in an outlaw motorcycle gang for four years shortly after he left town and did some bad things. Part of the reason he stayed away was the potential for risk to his family.
It has all the ingredients of a cracking story but it was just okay for me. I admit I was kind of bored and I skimmed a lot of it. Tessa’s love for The Ellen Show was over the top and kind of nauseating. I liked a lot of the interaction between Lucky and Tessa and those were the bits where I read more closely. I did like that the book didn’t shy away from making the things Lucky did very bad things (they could still have been worse) and I liked that he had to work some things out with his family rather than being completely embraced as the prodigal son (though there was a bit of that). Crohn’s Disease wasn’t a huge focus in the story. Tessa has basically learned to manage it. She doesn’t want to be a burden and she doesn’t want people to define her by her disease so she prefers not to think about it. I liked how Lucky was happy to take care of her when she was ill and he had to push a bit to get her to allow that. I felt like she had a bit more balance by the end but I also think she had a relatively mild form of the disease. Some of the things which would have possibly changed my impression in that regard were glossed over – for instance, she had a limited diet but the story never disclosed what that actually looked like day to day.
I’m at Dear Author today with a review of Between the Sheets by Molly O’Keefe. The bad news is that I’m sad I haven’t read this author before (even though I have some of her books on Mt. TBR). The good news is that I can read all of her backlist now. I sense a glom coming on.
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