Hello Stranger - Lisa Kleypas (Ravenels #4)

For some reason I keep going back to Lisa Kleypas, even though none of her recent works have really intrigued me.  The Ravenels series hasn't been strong, and I've found myself let down time and time again.  That was also the case here, with the fourth book Hello Stranger.  However, I do think this was stronger than the preceding three books.

Our heroine here is Garrett Gibson, the female doctor who has been a side character in the previous Ravenel books.  The hero is Ethan Ransom, who we've also seen briefly in passing.  How is this a Ravenel book, you might ask, when neither character is a Ravenel?  Ah.  Well, there's a clear answer there, but if you haven't figured it out yet, I'll let it come out in the reading.

Garrett is wrapped up in her career doctoring those less fortunate than she when she finds herself in a spot of trouble with some sailors while returning home one night.  Armed with a trusty cane, she's pretty confident that she can handle things--but Ethan, who's been following her (creepy much?) steps in and helps out.  He offers to teach her some self defense, after which he says he'll never see her again, but he just keeps coming back, and the pair's attraction only grows.

My big issue with this book is the pacing.  What seems like it really should have been the climactic event happens about halfway through the book, and then the part where they bop around in the country really seems to drag on and on and on.  Garrett is of course a woman ahead of her time--working with sterilization of medical supplies and practitioners and early blood transfusions--but even watching her wield her abilities can't help the struggling pace.  And as the romance is kind of on hold at that point, too, due to Ethan's condition...well.  It's slow.  Very slow.  There's a slight uptake in pace when they return to London, but it's not enough to save the long and dragging part.

Garrett and Ethan's attraction is definitely of the instant, or at least close to instant, variety.  And yet their relationship takes time progress, indicating some issues with pacing consistency here, as well.  That said, I liked Garrett and Ransom, individually and together, more than I liked the main characters of previous books.  Garrett has all the ambition of Pandora but none of the flightiness.  She is smart and steadying but doesn't decry love in favor of her career, and instead embraces that she can have both--after all, she's already broken barriers professionally, so why not personally?  And then there's Ethan.  I kind of feel like I shouldn't like Ethan, and yet I did.  He has a shady background, to be sure, but there's never even the slightest indication that he would hurt Garrett, even through attempting to shield her, which is important.  Additionally, Ethan's profession means that, for once, Kleypas' subplot makes sense.  She continues to have a spy/murder plot shoved into a romance book, something that very rarely works and hasn't worked in her past books, but at least with Ethan being so involved in it, it fits and builds throughout the book without being shoehorned in at the last minute as a way to reconcile the lovers.

Oh, and it was nice to see a historical romance in which neither of the two main characters is wielding a title as part of their attraction.  (No, that does not count.)

Is this Kleypas' most dazzling work?  No.  And honestly, at this point I don't have super high hopes for the last two books in this series.  However, this was stronger than the previous books in the series, having better main characters, a decent romance, and a subplot that, while not the strongest, at least made sense.  It did suffer from pacing issues on both the relationship and subplot sides, however, and so it's not escalating up into favorite romances of the year any time soon.

3 stars out of 5.

Dream Lake - Lisa Kleypas (Friday Harbor #3)

Dream Lake continues my rather lackluster reading of Lisa Kleypas' contemporary Friday Harbor romance series.  I keep wanting something more from these, but they continue to be...okay.  Not great.  This one, like the second book, follows character introduced earlier in the series.  In this case, the book's hero is the final Nolan brother, Alex, and Zoe, one of the best friends of the previous book's heroine.

It's hard to place this one with where it falls chronologically, because as with the second book, the timeline seems jumbled in relation to the two books that came before.  The events of the second book, Rainshadow Road, are woven very closely throughout this book as the second Nolan brother, Sam, gets it on with Zoe's friend Lucy.  Meanwhile, Zoe and Alex end up together when Alex starts renovating a cottage for Zoe and her grandmother, who has to come live with her because she's started to be affected by dementia.  And it is, I have to say, probably the easiest case of dementia to ever be featured in a work of fiction; while Kleypas mentions some of the difficulties of dealing with a family member with dementia, and Zoe encounters them, it's mostly off-page, and Kleypas neatly ends the whole thing before it can actually get too bad and have Zoe have to really struggle.  Now, I understand, this is primarily supposed to be a romance novel.  However...if you're going to be so half-hearted about part of your plot, why include it at all?  I'm sure there could have been other reasons for Zoe to need the cottage renovated--even ones involving her grandmother!  Maybe there could have been a fire at her grandmother's house or something.  So, Zoe's struggles come from her grandmother.  Alex's, on the other hand, come from a few things--a messy divorce with his ex-wife, his rampant alcoholism, and oh yeah, the ghost that has randomly decided to haunt him.

What I did like here was how Kleypas handled Alex's alcoholism--for the most part.  No one romanticizes it, not even Alex himself, which is a good thing.  And when Alex ultimately decides to quit drinking, he does it because he realizes he doesn't like what he's become.  Is it partially because of Zoe?  Yes, but in a second-hand sort of way, and when it looks like Zoe may no longer be in the picture, Alex still doesn't go back to drinking, even though he wants to.  His family is also skeptical of his quitting, though they're as supportive as they probably can be, given the circumstances and his history.  Of course, just like with Zoe's grandmother's dementia, Kleypas kind of takes the easy way out of some of the aspects of Alex's withdrawal here.  How?  Well, Zoe can cook magic food that helps Alex through it, of course!

There's also the plot involving the ghost who doesn't remember who he was here.  I liked him in relation to Alex--the ghost is kind of Alex's only real "human" contact for much of the book--but adding this on to Alex's struggles and Zoe's as well, even though Kleypas tries to weave it all in, means that the romance really gets pushed to the side.  Zoe and Alex don't get together until pretty far into the book, and then Kleypas really time-skips to the big crisis of "maybe we can't be together" and it all feels very rushed and superficial.  Again, I think it comes back to the jumbled timeline.  Because she chose to overlay this timeline with a lot of the events of the previous book, which didn't make any mention of this going on, it really feels like Kleypas didn't know what she wanted to do and so couldn't weave it all together as tightly as she does in her historicals, which seem to be much more cleanly laid out.

At this point, I'm not sure I'll continue reading this series.  There's only one more book, so maybe I'll just finish it off...but I haven't been very impressed with Kleypas' contemporary romances, at least not these ones.  I know she has another series set in contemporary times, so maybe I'll check that one out instead.

2 stars out of 5.

Rainshadow Road - Lisa Kleypas (Friday Harbor #2)

What a baffling book.  Lisa Kleypas does this, all the time, where she takes a perfectly good story and then just adds in some element that doesn't fit and turns a cohesive whole into something that's just a little...off.  She did it in her most recent release, Devil in Spring, by turning a historical romance into something involving a half-baked plot involving Fenian assassins in the last few chapters.  In her Hathaways series, some weird spirit popped up at least a couple of times--and I'm told the ghost trope makes a reappearance (though with a different ghost) in the third book of this series, Dream Lake.  In Rainshadow Road, she takes what looked like it was going to be a good contemporary romance series and randomly--yes, randomly, because the first book in this series didn't hint at this happening at all--decided to add magic.

Lucy was seven when she discovered that she had magic that could turn glass into living creatures.  Though apparently only flying living creatures--fireflies, butterflies, hummingbirds, bats.  Plagued by a younger sister who was relentlessly spoiled after nearly dying of meningitis, Lucy has always loved her glass and the vitality she feels within it.  As an adult in Friday Harbor, she owns a glass studio and is in a relationship with a good guy...until he breaks up with her for none other than that same spoiled younger sister.  Who's now moving in with him, meaning that Lucy has to move out.  Baffled and broken-hearted, she packs up and moves in with two friends who run a bed and breakfast.  And she also happens to run into Sam Nolan along the way, the middle Nolan brother who owns a Victorian house and accompanying vineyard on Rainshadow Road.  The two have an immediate connection but Lucy doesn't want to date anyone and Sam is completely against commitment--but he's open to a friends-with-benefits relationship, if Lucy decides she's interested.  And when he ends up taking care of her after she's in a bicycle accident, their connection and attraction begins to grow...

One thing that I did like here was that Kleypas avoided a conflict that revolved entirely around a simple miscommunication or silly secret; when Lucy's ex tries to get Sam to take her out to benefit himself, Sam immediately tells Lucy that he was asked to do it, and they move past it.  I also liked Holly's continuing inclusion in this book.  She seemed like a normal, silly kid and, while she wasn't exactly necessary to the story, I didn't feel she dragged it down unnecessarily, either.  Friday Harbor itself continues to have a great atmosphere that makes me want to go on vacation there.  And of course, as in all Kleypas books, the banter between the characters is good, the side characters are clearly set up to become main characters in future (or past!) books and are therefore a bit more three-dimensional than side characters tend to be, and the kissing and sex scenes were deliciously steamy.

But the magic elements... Why?  I just don't understand.  They're just not necessary, and they were entirely absent in the first book of the series, so I'm not sure why Kleypas decided to integrate them now with a clear path for more to show up in the rest of the books.  I think she was trying to add in a bit of magical realism, but it didn't work in that sense.  Additionally, Lucy insists throughout the book that she doesn't really know how to control her ability, that things just happen when she gets emotional, and yet at the end she just suddenly knows how to exactly control it.  And somehow her glass magic suddenly manages to change Sam's house and vineyard?  What?  Where did that come from?

The writing here also isn't Kleypas' best.  While she excels at building atmosphere and background in her historicals, it seems like in her contemporaries she tends to tell rather than show and info-dump in an attempt to get allllll the info out there when it seems like most of it could have just been integrated a bit more gracefully throughout the book.  And her hero, Sam, is mostly good, but had some controlling tendencies.  Lucy did some glass work for a biker church, and the bikers are eager to help her throughout the book--they take her car to get it fixed after it breaks down, seem inclined to give her rides, help her out in a bar, etc., and yet Sam is adamant that he doesn't want her involved with them.  And instead of insisting that her friends are her friends, Lucy just goes along with it, which was somewhat disappointing.  The bikers seemed like decent guys, and even if they weren't, Lucy was a grown woman who could make her own decisions.

And then there are Lucy's parents, the king and queen of flip-flopping.  After apparently putting Lucy down for most of her life in order to give her sister Alice whatever she wanted, they abruptly jump ship to Lucy's side when Alice steals Lucy's boyfriend.  They make it seem like it was the last straw for them, but honestly I found that unrealistic; it seemed more to me like they would have just gone along with it, since this didn't seem that much more extreme than some of the other things Alice had done.  Alice herself also had no appeal to me; Kleypas tries to include some redeeming sister time near the end, but honestly I don't think that Alice could really change.  Lucy spent so much time saying how you shouldn't date someone with the expectation that you could or would change them, but then suddenly Alice was able to be changed?  I doubt it.

Overall, this is not as good as Kleypas' historicals, for the most part.  But...it's still weirdly appealing.  The characters and atmosphere are charming and the romance still sizzles, and that seems to override some of the many other weaknesses.  And they're quick reads, as well, so I guess I don't mind too much.

3 stars out of 5, but I'm not really expecting the future books to improve--though I'll likely still read them!

Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor - Lisa Kleypas (Friday Harbor #1)

I picked this up in another attempt to fulfill the "Christmas romance" category for a reading challenge I'm doing.  It didn't work.  This was a much better book than my first attempt for that category, Debbie Macomber's Starry Night, but that didn't come as a surprise; I knew going into it that Lisa Kleypas was guaranteed to have a better offering.  However, there were only about 500 words in this book that actually contributed to the Christmas season at all, with the rest of the book taking place from around March through Thanksgiving.

The story follows Mark Nolan, who gains custody of his six-year-old niece Holly when her mother dies in a car accident.  Mark and his brother do their best with Holly but she refuses to speak, until one day when Maggie, the owner of a new toy store in town, coaxes words out of her once again.  Maggie and Mark are immediately attracted to each other, but hold back from entering into anything more than a tentative friendship.  Mark is also involved in a relationship with a girlfriend who lives in Seattle (I think), which is one of the reasons they hold back.  Good for them; cheaters are terrible.

Though this is a short book, it's also a slow burn because of the long span of time the story takes place over.  As with her historical romances, Kleypas does a wonderful job of building the relationship between the two characters.  Their every meeting has a spark that just builds and builds, and it's delicious to watch.  Friday Harbor is also a wonderful setting, and Kleypas does an amazing job of bringing the Pacific Northwest to life to someone like myself who has never been there.  Friday Harbor is a small town on a small island, where everyone knows everyone, and Kleypas shows both the downfalls to this--like how everyone knows everyone else's business--and the up sides--like how supportive the people can be of each other.

Overall, this is a short book, but it was really well-done; I just wish it had been a bit more on point with the whole "Christmas Eve" thing it promised.  If you've read Kleypas' historical romances before but haven't ventured into her contemporary offerings, I think this would a good place to start because of its length--long enough to develop, but not too long of a commitment if it doesn't work out.

4 stars out of 5.

Devil in Spring - Lisa Kleypas (Ravenels #3)

Devil in Spring was an easy pick for us Unapologetic Romance Readers to take on for our March group read.  (We'll also be reading These Broken Stars for our theme read, a sci-fi romance.)  Despite it being a series, many of us have read the preceding two, and for those of us who hadn't, historical romance series typically don't require that you read all the books to get the gist of what's going on.

Continuing on with the saga of the Ravenel family, Devil in Winter finally turns to the twin, namely Pandora.  And for the hero, we have Gabriel, who is the son of the main couple from Kleypas' earlier work Devil in Winter (hence the title).  Though Gabriel isn't much of a devil at all.  In fact, he's not much of anything at all, except boring as a brick and very occasionally controlling, which goes away in about five pages.

Gabriel and Pandora are thrown together when Pandora gets stuck in a settee in a secluded guest house at a ball, during an attempt to retrieve an earring a friend lost during a rendezvous.  Gabriel helps her get out of the settee's evil scrolls, but they're found together and Pandora is, of course, instantly compromised.  She doesn't want to marry him, though, because she wants to remain single so that she can retain full control of her burgeoning board game company, which she hopes to get going in the very near future.  Though her family says they'll support her in whatever decision she makes, they also encourage her to consider Gabriel's offer, and to that end the whole family decamps to the Challon (what a terrible last name!) family residence on the ocean, where our former couple Sebastian and Evie are also in residence.

Sebastian and Evie remain far more interesting than Pandora and Gabriel were.  Pandora was okay on her own, but Gabriel was bland, bland, bland.  There's a dance scene in which "love magic" may or may not have magically solved some balance problems Pandora has--I'm not entirely convinced it did, because Pandora seems to be able to largely compensate for her inner ear issues with sight (hence why they bother her most at night, when she can't see clearly) but some group members insist it was love magic, and it might have been; it's a bit ambiguous but either way it was pretty eye-roll worthy.  Of course one dance instantly persuades Pandora that yes, she can get married, even if it means losing her legal rights (which she would!) and so off she goes to the altar.  The plot then devolves into sex (elevated from making out) and a harebrained plot involving Pandora being targeted for assassination by a branch of the Fenian Brotherhood.  Yes.  That really happens.

Overall, this series isn't doing it for me.  I usually love Kleypas, but the first two books here were lackluster at best and boring at worst, and while I was hoping for improvement with one of the twins as a main character, that just didn't happen.  Luckily there's only one more book in this series until Kleypas can hopefully move on to something that will recapture her old magic from the Wallflowers days.

2 stars out of 5.

Marrying Winterborne - Lisa Kleypas (Ravenels #2)

It took me forever to get this book because there were no fewer than twenty-six people ahead of me on the hold list at the library.  I've eagerly awaited it for months...and I'm disappointed.  Marrying Winterborne is not Kleypas' finest work, and there's basically one reason for this: it's not really a romance in the sense we typically think of.  The actual romance took place in the previous book, Cold-Hearted Rake, and wraps up very early in this book, leaving a typical romance subplot (family drama) to carry the rest of the book on its own.  But the thing is... I'm not sure how else to really do it for this particular one.

Here's the problem.  Our hero, Rhys Winterborne, ended Cold-Hearted Rake as a real ass.  Like, a real bastard.  And then he's pretty manipulative in the beginning of this volume, too, which means that, once he and Helen actually reconcile, he can't put a single toe out of the line before straying dangerously in the territory of "might not be redeemable in the readers' eyes."  But since this reconciliation takes place so early, Rhys actually ends up staying off the page for far more of the book than Kleypas' heroes typically do, mainly only appearing so he and Helen can have sex and so he can rant about his arch nemesis, something Vance.  The rest of the time, Helen pines, deals with the twins (Pandora and Cassandra, who are awesome.  I want their books to be written, STAT.) and finds out a Secret about herself that could jeopardize everything she wants!  GASP!

...except it can't, because plainly she and Rhys can't really have a falling out of over this Secret, because, uhm, they already had a falling out, and Rhys blowing up at Helen over something that's so clearly not her fault really would push him into the Land of Irredeemable Heroes.  (This is totally a real place.)  I am all for suspension of disbelief in books, and Kleypas really usually does well in this area, but I just could not find it in me to believe that real conflict was going to arise from this.  And part of the problem is because Helen is just so...so...blah.  She's all sweetness and light and despite apparently liking shocking people (which she doesn't actually seem to other than one moment) there's really not all that much to her.  She's thought of by her family and friends as a delicate wallflower who hangs out in the background, and she's exactly that, and doesn't really have any hidden qualities that elevate her to the status of "interesting main character."  Wallflowers totally can be interesting main characters, and Kleypas has done it before.  I just don't think she's done it here.  There are just so many other interesting characters (Pandora, Cassandra, West, Severin! and even Charity/Carys) flitting about that making Helen the star is difficult, and I don't think it was really successful.

I have really high hopes for the rest of this series, because now Kleypas has burned through the two boring heroines and should have the more interesting ones coming up.  The next book, Devil in Spring, is going to tie in her Wallflowers series to this one, which is great, because that was my favorite series of hers.  But this particular installment wasn't a strong one, and it's not one I anticipate going back to time and time again to read the juicy bits.  (Come on, you do it too.)

2 stars out of 5.

When Strangers Marry - Lisa Kleypas (Vallerands #1)

I'm a big Lisa Kleypas fan.  She's one of my favorite authors, and The Devil in Winter, one of her Wallflowers books, is one of my favorite historical romance books in general.  She has a very extensive back catalog that I haven't read a ton of, and when I saw that When Strangers Marry is actually the first book she wrote for Avon, published way back in 1992.  In 1992 I was still a couple of years away from being able to read at all, and probably a decade and a half from having an appreciation for historical romance novels!  Kleypas has written a lot since then, and is still going strong, so I thought this would be a fun one to read and see how her style has changed over the years.

Let me put it this way: this book is one of Kleypas' first, and it was published in 1992, and it shows.  This was a book that I ended up skimming a lot of because the writing just wasn't engaging.  I ended up putting it down for large chunks of time because I was--gasp!--bored.  The story is about Lysette, a young woman from France who is engaged to a man in New Orleans who she doesn't want to marry.  She runs away to avoid the marriage and gets lost in the bayou.  Two boys, Justin and Philippe, find her and bring her to their father, Max, who has a grudge against Lysette's fiance.  To get back at the fiance, Max decides to compromise Lysette and steal her for himself.  The two like each other well enough and there you have it.

That's like the first third of the book.

The rest of the book is filled up with sex (and not particularly engaging sex; I Kleypas' writing has really evolved since this book came out in all areas, but particularly in the "steamy scenes" area), a flimsy mystery plot surrounding the death of Max's first wife, and a weird political side plot about the Burr Conspiracy.  I have no idea why that last one was included at all.

Lysette and Max liked each other for the majority of the book, which is something that you don't see a ton of in romance.  There's a reason for that: it eliminates a huge source of conflict, and makes the romantic plot easy to wrap up early.  Which leaves you with a couple of hundred pages to fill after that.  And while they liked each other, I didn't really feel any chemistry between them.  Their dynamics were very weird, with Max loving how outspoken Lysette was and how she challenged him, but still being extremely dismissive of her opinions and feelings.

And then there were the twins, Justin and Philippe.  They're apparently fifteen, and when the book starts Lysette is described as being their age, but apparently she's actually about five years older.  Lysette wasn't very involved with them, but was surprisingly open to Justin considering how it was heavily implied he was okay with raping her at the beginning of the book when he and Philippe find Lysette in the bayou.  I really couldn't get over that rocky start, and it bothered me all the way through the book, especially when Lysette and Justin were so buddy-buddy in the later parts.  The "forced seduction" is a big trope in romance, especially in romances from the 80s and early 90s, but this wasn't a case of that because Justin wasn't the love interest, which made it seem extra strange and out of place.

Overall, I'm glad this wasn't my first experience with Kleypas' work.  I really love her more recent books and try to snap them up as soon as they're out (though I'm still on the library's waiting list for Marrying Winterbourne) but this was not a book that would encourage me to read more.  It's nice to see that Kleypas has grown so much as a writer in the years since this came out, but honestly this was a hard one to read in general.

2 stars out of 5, and most of that is because of the setting.  Romances set in New Orleans are rare, in my experience, and I think it was a nice change from the ton romances that normally fill this genre--though I love those, too!

Cold-Hearted Rake - Lisa Kleypas (Ravenels #1)

Well, guys, I've done it.  I've discovered a problem with historical romance books.  (This is somewhat facetious because yes, we're all aware that there are tons of problems with historical romance books in general and many more about specific books in particular, but still.)  The problem is this: they have to be read in one go.  You have to sit your butt down and read that book from beginning to end, or else it's way too easy to be jarred out of the story and, when returning to it, find the whole thing just too...something to bear.  Too cheesy?  Maybe.  Too tasteless?  Maybe that, as well.  Anyway, they're very easy to just lose the entire feel if you have to stop reading, whether it's for work or dinner or bed, and I find that they're very difficult to get back into after you take that break.  If you have a lazy Saturday and can plow through one (or two!) then great.  That'll have to be my strategy from now on, because I was really on a roll with this one...until I had to go to sleep or face the consequences the next morning, and when I picked it up the next day, I'd totally lost it.

Sigh.

Okay, so, on to the book itself.  First, I know that authors don't really get a ton of say in their titles, but really, can we stop having titles about rakes in historical romance?  The men referred to in these titles very very rarely are rakes in any real sense of the word.  It's just a cheap stand in to make a guy seem darker than he really is.  Devon, the hero of Cold-Hearted Rake, is neither cold-hearted (well, maybe at first, but certainly not for the vast majority of the book) nor a rake.  So it's kind of silly to refer to him as such.  He even blatantly says he's not in the book.  Now that that's out of the way... This book is about Devon, the new Lord of Trenear, who came into the title after his cousin unexpectedly died in a riding accident, and Kathleen, said cousin's widow.  But not really his widow because she'd only been married to him for three days when he died and she didn't even really know him before that.  So legally, yes, widow.  Emotionally, not so much, though she does bear some guilt for the accident that killed him and goes about blaming herself for it.  Devon doesn't want the responsibility of the estate he's inherited and plans to sell it, putting Kathleen and her three sisters-in-law (Devon's cousins) out of house and home in the process.  Initially, of course, he doesn't care about this, but Kathleen, in the way of true historical romance heroines, changes his mind by winning his heart without even trying.  Devon, of course, turns out to be an excellent estate manager, the family comes into a ton of money unexpectedly, and everything works out swimmingly.

Overall, I don't think this is Kleypas' best work.  It's really setup for the rest of the books in the Ravenels series, which will focus on Kathleen's sisters-in-law, Helen, Cassandra, and Pandora--and it reads like a set-up book.  All three of the Ravenel girls were more interesting than Kathleen was, and the start of Helen's romance with Rhys Winterborne (which takes up a good part of the second half of the book) was really more intriguing than Devon and Kathleen's romance.  Granted, I'm definitely more than a little put off at how slimy Rhys acted in the end; we'll have to see how Kleypas resolves that (or doesn't) to see if he can be forgiven; various apologies will have to be given at the very least if he's to be redeemed into a likable hero for Marrying Winterborne.  Devon was also an ass at more than one point in this, and I'm not convinced that he really came back from it.  His reactions to various situations at various times were far less than heroic, and the way he talked to Kathleen at times was...creepy.  Very.  I mean, it's obvious from his POV chapters that he wouldn't actually hurt her or anything, but that doesn't meant that she knows that and it doesn't mean that it's okay for him to say stuff like how her only choice is to go to bed with him before or after they talk, not whether she has a choice to sleep with him at all.  I wish Kathleen had been a bit more strong-willed in making Devon respect her, or that Devon had come around to that himself; I'm not convinced that he ever really did respect her.

This book...wasn't that great, honestly, considering the reservations I have about the characters' actions throughout.  HOWEVER, I love Kleypas in general, and I think the other characters in the series have more potential than Kathleen and Devon did from the get-go.  I definitely want to see what happens with Pandora (and West; is West going to get a book?) and I'm interested in seeing if Kleypas manages to transform Winterborne as well, so I'll probably keep reading the series, though it's not one I'll rush out to buy the moment each book hits the shelves.

2 stars out of 5, but I think there's room for improvement in the series as a whole.