Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #2)

Sarah MacLean is an author whose back catalog I am now working through.  After reading Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, I got another of her books, The Rogue Not Taken, from the library.  However, I quickly discovered that the heroine of that book was a side character in the third book of the series that Nine Rules started, so I set to reading through those first.  Ten Ways is the second book there.

Our heroine here is Isabel, the daughter of an earl who has barely kept the estate together in the face of his wasteful behavior--and has run a house for women looking to escape terrible situations to boot.  All of that seems to be in danger when her father dies, the estate is left to a mysterious guardian until her ten-year-old brother can come of age, and there's not a penny to be found.  Oh, and the daughter of a duke shows up on her doorstep looking for help, which Isabel knows is going to cause trouble.

Trouble comes calling indeed, though Isabel doesn't know it right away.  It arrives in the form of Nicholas St. John, the brother of the hero from the first book, who has been asked by the aforementioned duke to find the missing sister, a task he gladly takes up to escape the slavering women of London, who are eager to nab him as one of London's most landable lords.  But when he and Isabel first run into each other, she sees Nick's value in his knowledge of antiquities, particularly marble statues--a bunch of which she owns and is eager to sell to fund the ongoing existence of Minerva House.  With an invitation into Isabel's abode, things are set for the two worlds to collide.

This book relies much more heavily on instalove than the first book did.  While the pacing in the first book was somewhat whacky, it still took place over at least a few weeks.  This book takes place over a number of days, and suddenly Isabel, who has always been leery of men because of the behavior of her father and the plights of women--mostly done over by men--who she shelters at Minerva house, is suddenly gaga over the first cute guy who shows up.  (Note how I said "cute"; other guys showed up at Isabel's house, claiming she had to marry them because her father gambled her away, but none of them seemed remarkably attractive.)  Honestly, Georgianna was a more interesting plot line here.  I wanted to know about her failed romance, what was going to happen to her.  She has her own book later down the line, in another of MacLean's series, but she definitely overshadowed Isabel, who didn't seem nearly as steady and levelheaded as we're supposed to think.  Her instant gaga-ing, but how she refuses to accept help she so desperately needs, just didn't seem to fit, and it didn't work well as a coherent whole.

But this book was mercifully lacking in mentions of "sweet rain," so at least there's that.

Overall, this was enjoyable, but I didn't like it as much as the first one.  I probably wouldn't read it again, and honestly couldn't remember much about it--even Isabel's name--by the time I went to read the third book only a few days later, which doesn't really speak highly of it.  I think there was a lot of cool concepts here, such as Minerva House.  Women helping women is so great to see!  However, as nothing every really happened to threaten this in any serious way, it was underdone and didn't have enough impact to carry the rest of the book.

2 stars out of 5.

Salt & Storm - Kendall Kulper

This is a book that I eagerly waited for before its release, then didn't purchase because it was too expensive--seriously publishers, what's up with the ridiculous prices for Kindle books?  If authors were getting more of it I'd understand more, but that doesn't appear to be the industry standard--and I was hedging on the library to purchase it, and then finally got when it was on sale...and then proceeded to not read for ages because something was always more pressing.  But I finally queued it up for my 2018 reading challenge for "a book with alliteration in the title."

Salt & Storm is the story of Avery Roe, the youngest in a line of woman who possess magical powers on the fictional Prince Island, which is based on Nantucket.  The island's industry is whaling, and the women of Avery's family have a tradition of supporting the industry through their magic, one at a time.  But Avery's mother forswore magic and her heritage and left her mother, and eventually took Avery away, as well.  But Avery wants nothing more than to claim her birthright and become the Roe witch, taking over the position from her aging and ailing grandmother.  Cursed by her mother and unable to find a way to use her own magic, she turns to a young sailor from the South Pacific, Tane, for help in exchange for reading his dreams which he hopes will help him gain revenge for the murder of his family.

This book got off to a slow start, but things started building when Tane entered the picture and he and Avery began working together.  I had high hopes for this book at that point.  Tane's magic conflicting with Avery's was an interesting aspect, and while I knew Avery's mother couldn't be quite the raging bitch she appeared, I was unsure of how she was really going to enter the narrative.  I wanted Avery to reclaim her magic and become everything she wanted--maybe even save the island from some disaster!  Cliched?  Yes.  Satisfying?  Also yes.  But when Avery came under fire for being a witch, rather than being lauded for it, I was good with that, too.  After all, it was the logical course of things based on how the story had happened up until that point.  And things were finally building, obviously coming up to some big, climactic finish...

But let's talk about Tane, shall we?  An interracial romance set in New England?  Yes.  Please.  More.  He possesses his own magic and is looking to reclaim it, and his heritage, in a similar way to Avery, making them an ideal pair.  But then there's that Roe curse in play...but it could have played out so much better.  I can think of a billion ways that this could have ended rather than the way it actually did, which is Tane fulfilling the Magical Negro trope.  Unfamiliar with this?  It's a trope in which a character of color, usually from a much less privileged background than the white protagonist, enters the story only to help the privileged white protagonist achieve her goals, rather than existing as a character with his own path and journey.  Tane seemed to have so much more going on at first, but ultimately, no, he was tossed to the side so Avery could go off and ~be free~.  Utter garbage.  I expected more of Kulper than this.

What Kulper does really well here is, ultimately, the atmosphere.  I listened to In the Heart of the Sea as an audiobook last year, and Salt & Storm really nailed the way that I expected a Nantucket-based fictional island to feel.  The way that the Roe magic had changed the island, and eventually turned on it, made perfect sense.  Despite the slow pace, all of these things really had me rooting for this book.  If only Kulper hadn't gone and fucked it all up.  And don't get me wrong--I can really go for a good bittersweet ending, one that has me thinking for days, wondering and wishing, "What if...?"  But this was not good.  Characters of color deserve to be characters in their own right, just as white characters are, rather than just tools for white characters to find fulfillment and then toss by the wayside.

2 stars out of 5.

The Unimaginable - Dina Silver

A beautiful cover and convenient timing left me in the mindset that The Unimaginable was going to be something like Station Eleven--not in topic, because the book summary made it very clear that this was nothing like Station Eleven, but for some reason I had it in my mind that this would have the same beautiful writing, construction, and love of life that Station Eleven contained.  Unfortunately, this was not the case.

The story is about Jessica Gregory, who moves to Thailand in the wake of her mother, who she never really got along with.  She has a job teaching English and gets another job at a bar.  After a few months of this she has three weeks of vacation and decides to look for an adventure by crewing on a boat for a long distance sail, despite having no sailing experience or really any sense in her head at all.  She also falls immediately and conveniently in love with a man almost twice her age who really doesn't want anything to do with her, but of course as soon as she bats her eyelashes at him he falls in love with her, too, despite being in mourning for his deceased wife, and takes her on as crew essentially so he can get around to boning her.  And then, of course, come the pirates.

The writing here is sloppy and the romance is eyeroll- and gag-worthy.  I am an avid reader of romance, but this is not good.  The chemistry is nonexistent, the sex scenes sloppy and deserving of nothing more than cringing.  Despite going into detail, it's ultimate unclear whether Jessica--our narrator--even gets to have a decent orgasm.  Poor thing.  The danger, despite being very real, is completely overblown.  And though the entire book builds up to it from a brief--very brief--prologue, it only lasts about fifteen pages and then is over, and the focus of the book is back to Jessica mooning over Grant, in a relationship that seemed more than a little skeevy to me, mainly because Grant just kept putting Jessica off and wouldn't emotionally commit to her, even for a little bit, but was perfectly willing to fuck her all the way across the Indian Ocean.  Ew.

This is also one of those books where the heroine, despite wanting adventure in the great wide somewhere a la Belle, promptly gives up everything when she meets the hero.  This bothers me in any context, but in contemporary books more than in historical ones, because in times like the Regency era women were taught not to have expectations or dreams and, if they did, to give them up to men.  A modern woman should know better than this.  If what Jessica had wanted was to be a wife and nothing else, then fine--that's a woman's prerogative.  But to claim she wanted adventure and to teach and see the world and not be one of the women from her hometown who just got married and gave up on life, and then to immediately abandon everything in favor of mooning over a guy who has literally said three sentences to her.

The pacing is also awful, and the writing itself is terrible.  It's full of sentences like, "And the, on the Imagine, came...the unimaginable.  You can just tell that Silver wants us to gasp and clutch our pearls and be so dismayed by the drama, but I really didn't care about any of the characters and so this ploy was completely unsuccessful.  There is only one remotely dismaying thing that happens in the book, and it has nothing to do with Jessica or Grant.

There is an author's note at the end of the book about where the story--and all of the character names--came from.  While the origins are remarkable, tragic, and worthy of their own story, this particular story did not do them justice, not in any way.  I would not recommend this, nor will I be picking up anything else by this author in the future.

1.5 stars out of 5, and that's only for the setting.

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #1)

For those who aren't avidly watching the romance community, there is currently a trash fire going on in which an author trademarked the word "cocky" for use in titles of books and series.  This is a bitch move, and it's not going particularly well for her, but it's brought up a lot of interesting conversations about titling and tropes in the romance genre as a whole.  We romance readers love our tropes--and why not, as long as they're done well?  And titles tie in very closely with them, because it lets you know exactly what you're going to get, in a way that other genres don't practice that same variety of branding.  For example, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake implies that a heroine is going to behave badly while falling in love with a man who is known to be a womanizer in high society.  In contrast, here are a few other books I'm currently reading: The Sparrow, In the Garden of Beasts, The Unimaginable, Salt & Storm.  None of these titles really tell you what the book is about--and let me tell you, The Sparrow is definitely not about small birds.  But these romance titling conventions mean that, while you're never guaranteed to like a book, for a variety of reasons, you know if the book you pick up is going to trend in a direction you'll like.  And for that reason, romance can be an extremely comforting genre to browse, because you know exactly what to look for in order to get what you want.

I've been having reading difficulties recently.  While I've liked a lot of books, I haven't loved very many yet this year, and I've found a lot that ended up being just okay.  In the middle of several other books that weren't impressing me very much, I turned away to a good-old standby, the historical romance.  And luckily, I had just gotten off the waitlist for this book.  Sarah MacLean's name has crossed my field of vision many times--due to friends reading her books, due to her books being recommended for people who like other books I've read, due to her writing a romance column for the Washington Post.  Somehow, despite all of this, I had not read any of hers.  But NRTBWRAR (geeze) seemed like as good a place to start as any.

The book starts with an encounter between our heroine, Calpurnia "Callie" Hartwell, who is curvy and plainer than is fashionable and who languishes for ever finding a husband during a terrible Season when she eighteen, and our hero, Gabriel, a marquess with a bit of a womanizing reputation who never wants to marry due to how his mother acted when he was young.  Then we skip ahead ten years--Callie is on the shelf, sitting in "Spinster Seating" at balls, and watching her dazzling younger sister getting ready to marry a duke.  Gabriel, in the meantime, has found a previously-unknown half-sister dumped on his doorstep, and is determined to do right by her and bring her out in society, but he'll need the help of a respectable woman to do so.  When Callie turns up at his house in the middle of the night, looking for an adventure of her own, Gabriel decides she's perfect for the task, as her reputation has never been objectionable at all--though if Callie completes her adventure list, she'll be ruined for sure...

The banter here is good.  Callie is taking charge of her own life, even if only one or two other people know it.  She is determined to live, and to take hold of the experiences she wants even if she isn't supposed to want them--like learning to fence or attending a duel, things that ladies are not supposed to do.  Her sister is also lovely and charming and supportive, to the degree that she knows what Callie is doing, and Gabriel's sister, Juliana, is definitely set up for a good book of her own at the end of the trilogy--I presume the second book will focus on Gabriel's twin brother.  Even Gabriel's former mistress ended up being surprisingly nice, and I was pleased that MacLean didn't go for cattiness between the old lover and the new in order to drive the plot.  Women don't have to be nasty to each other, guys!  It's possible!

I liked Gabriel overall, though I didn't always find him to be the most interesting.  I also found him a bit more...absent, I guess, than I thought a proper romance hero should have been--both emotionally and physically.  He popped in and out, mostly when Callie was having one of her adventures, but I would have liked to see a bit more reaction between them.  Additionally, oh dear stars above, someone please erase the phrase "sweet rain" from the English language.  Like, what?  Ew.  Stop.  Also, Gabriel is kind of a jerk for most of the book.  This is pretty common in the genre, but even when Gabriel blundered quite badly, he was very, very slow to make apologies or amends for it, more so than he should have been.

Overall, I liked this quite a bit.  Not a raving, "must have it again and again" book, but something that definitely leavened my reading slump somewhat.  I'm looking forward to reading some of MacLean's other books and seeing what else she has to offer.

4 stars out of 5.

Marriage of Inconvenience - Penny Reid (Knitting in the City #7)

Finally, finally, the end of the Knitting in the City series is upon us.  And I have to wonder: why do I keep reading Penny Reid?  The thing is, I think I liked a couple of her books that I read early on, and then I just kept reading, hoping I'd like them as much, or that the issues I found in each would be resolved in the next...and they just never are.  Hmmm...

In Marriage of Inconvenience, we finally come to the book of Kat and Dan the Security Man, who have been making eyes at each other since the very first book in the series.  It has been ages.  Kat has to face up to her evil family who want to control her life as a billionaire pharmaceutical heiress, and she has to do so by not letting her cousin commit her to a mental hospital, and she has to do that by getting married.  Oh, and she has to learn to orgasm again.

This plot is paper-thin.  Basically, what I have noticed in Reid's writing is that she wants to be hip and current, and so in this book, she decided to write a romance with pharma bro Martin Shkreli as a villain.

Yes.

This is not the train wreck that Happily Ever Ninja was, but it also didn't have the slow-burn and sex appeal of Dating-ish.  Reid brings back having both leads as point of view narrators, which was lacking in the previous book, which is good...except they are both completely boring.  Dan has exactly two personality characteristics: he says "fuck" a lot and he has the hots for Kat.  Oh, you say those don't constitute a personality?  How odd.  Well, there's still Kat.  She has three personality characteristics: she was a Bad Girl in her youth, she is the heir to a pharmaceutical company, and she has the hots for Dan.  Oh, wait, that's not a personality either...?  Hm...

I wanted so, so much to like this book.  It was so long in coming!  They had been wanting each other for so long.  But ultimately, there is no romance here.  The characters already adore each other and are together within the first few chapters, and the conflicts that arise throughout the course of the book never seriously threaten their relationship.  The conflicts themselves are half-baked.  I never had a single ounce of worry for Kat because the premise of "sending the perfectly-well-functioning woman to a mental hospital on the premise that she did drugs years ago when she was a teenager" was so flimsy.  Reid tries to put in a little relationship tension with the characters not being "allowed" to have sex with each other so that Kat can work on not being able to have an orgasm, but of course they just throw that out and she's suddenly orgasming like crazy.  This happens fairly late in the book...but it's really only a handful of days after this edict comes down from her therapist.

Overall, this book was a lot eye-rolling and sighing in disappointment for me.  Not a great conclusion to the series, and not worthy of a build-up it got throughout the other books.  There are two more Winston Brothers books coming out in the future, but at this point I'm torn on if I read those and give up on Reid, or if I should just cut the cord and do it now.

Sigh.

2 stars out of 5.

The Iron Duke - Meljean Brook (The Iron Seas #1)

I hadn't taken part in the Unapologetic Romance Readers' monthly reads for several months, just because there was nothing coming up that particularly interested me--or, even if they interested me, they weren't available from the library and were too expensive for me to buy.  I spent a lot of money last year buying book club books that I ended up not particularly liking, and so I've tried to dial it back some this year.  But, the monthly theme for May was "steampunk," a genre I really like, and the club choice of The Iron Duke was available from the library, and so I rejoined the fold. 

This is a book that I liked, but not because of the hero.  The world and the heroine are wonderful, and they carried the weight of the book for a hero who at first seemed like he was going to be okay, but really didn't know how to take "no" for an answer.

Our heroine here is Mina, a biracial young woman in an England that lived under the rule of the Mongol Horde for two centuries (I think).  While under Horde rule, those who lived in England were infested with nanotechnology that allowed the Horde to control them, mainly by freezing them or forcing them into breeding frenzies.  The "hero" of the book, Rhys, ended Horde rule by taking down the tower that broadcasted the signals used to control the populace.  Now, about a decade later, Rhys is known as the Iron Duke and ends up in Mina's sights when a body shows up on his doorstep and a conspiracy begins to unfold around them.  Oh, and Mina doesn't really want much to do with him, and so he is determined to own her.

This is such an interesting world.  While I'm not a huge fan of the "Asian Other" theme that's going on, the concepts in general are interesting.  It's a fusing of nanotechnology and steampunk and genetic modification.  Krakens and megalodons, genetically engineered by the Horde, threaten sea ships and airships trawl the skies.  The European continent is infested by zombies.  Mina and her fellow countrymen might be infested with nanotechnology that can let the Horde control them, but that same technology protects their lungs from the smoke and smog of London, gives them superhuman strength, and lets them heal at a supernatural rate.  And while the Horde kept a death grip on England, there are hints that this might be developed further and shown nuance in other books, though I'm not a hundred percent sure--but Mina tells about an incident when the Horde was fleeing after the downfall of their tower, and some of the Horde tried to take Mina with them, and she believes it was to protect her from a wrathful English populace who hate her because of her Mongol blood.

Mina herself is also a great heroine.  She is committed and willful, but loves her family, wants to do best by her position as an inspector, and is a true Englishwoman despite how she is looked down upon because of her racial background.  She wants to live in peace but knows it might not happen, and doesn't let it destroy her life.  She's traumatized by her own life under the Horde, which has scarred her in regards of sexual intimacy, but is not scared of connection.

But then there's Rhys.  At first, I thought it was just going to be a typical "alpha male pursues woman who rebuffs him" story, but with the awesome world thrown in.  In reality, though, Rhys is a total creep.  This became increasingly apparent as he insisted on manhandling her against her express wishes, culminating in a scene in which he sexually assaults her despite her repeatedly telling him no, and that the experience is triggering harmful memories for her--the word "trigger" isn't used at all, but that is definitely what is happening and what Mina expresses.  But Rhys ignores that and carries on anyway, leaving Mina in a position where she literally has to shoot him to eventually get him off of her.  Then, of course, the book tastes a distasteful turn to "woman falls in love with rapist."  While this is somewhat of a trope in historical period romances--not as much anymore, but you still find it--it seemed particularly egregious here because so much about this world was more progressive than the historical period is takes place in (albeit in an alternate universe) was, and this made it feel even more out of place than it normally would.

This Rhys plot really left a bad taste in my mouth.  I liked the rest of the book a lot--the consensual encounters would have been awesome, had they not been tainted by the earlier one, the world was cool, and I really liked Mina and so, so many of the side characters.  I'm one hundred percent interested in other books in this series.  But this one...I just can't get over the Rhys thing, and so despite my overall liking of the book, I'm going to have to give it...

2 stars out of 5.

Wildfire - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #3)

I have fabulous news for those following this series: we're getting three more books.  But not about Nevada--no no, instead the new ones will take place a few years down the road, and will feature Nevada's younger sister Carolina as the main character.  This is excellent news, not just for fans of the series but for Wildfire itself, because by far the weakest part of the book was the ending, which was wildly incomplete.

This book picks up where the last one left off.  Nevada has to face down that her grandmother, the most powerful truth-oriented mage, Victoria Tremaine, who wants to bring Nevada to heel as a member of House Tremaine.  To ward her off, Nevada could declare her own House Baylor, but it means putting not only herself but her relatives in the spotlight and revealing all of the secrets they've kept so carefully hidden.  And then there's what declaring herself as a House could potentially do to Nevada's relationship with Rogan.  Oh, and you know, the whole thing where people are still trying to bring down the government.  You know, the day to day stuff.

Overall, this book was well-constructed.  The main and subplots tied together well.  Nevada and Rogan's relationship wasn't in the spotlight, but the strain placed on it by their circumstances were evident, and despite a few snafus, they handled things as adults.  There's nothing worse than a romantic conflict that could be resolved by the characters literally talking to each other for five minutes, and that's what Nevada and Rogan did when necessary--talked it out.

Some awesome new aspects of the Hidden Legacy came to light here, too--the history behind siren powers, the people who keep the House records and how they keep people from interfering with trials, a look at how these powers can be applied in the practical world.  For example, the applications of having powers over fungi.  It sounds lame, but when you factor in making them rapidly mutate in the search for new antibiotics, that's suddenly a lot more practical and a lot more profitable.  All of these things play in very well.  But as I mentioned above, this book had a big flaw at the end, and that's that it felt drastically in complete.  The main overarching plot of the series is not resolved at all--which is great now that we're getting three more books, but remember, this was put forth as the last book in a trilogy and those three extra books weren't planned when this was released, which makes a sloppy ending a huge flaw.  There's also an annoying thing with a past love interest (well, not really love interest, but kind of?) of Rogan's coming back up--he's not pursuing her, but she's pursuing him, hard core, and he definitely doesn't shut it down as much as he should have.  You can still care for and support someone while explicitly saying, "There never was and never will be anything romantic between us."

Overall, I did really enjoy this.  I'm glad to see there will be three books about Carolina, because she was definitely my favorite character in these books, and where the authors left her was ripe for development.  But those books are going to be a long time coming, so for now...

4 stars out of 5.

Dating-ish - Penny Reid (Knitting in the City #6)

Wanting a good jolt of solid romance after a series of books that didn't skew so much in the "romantic tendencies" direction, I turned to Dating-ish, mainly because I already had it on my Kindle and I didn't have to go looking for it.  It was also the next in Penny Reid's Knitting in the City series; the former book in this series, Happily Ever Ninja, was a total dud for me, but I've liked a lot of what Reid has written, and so I was determined to forge onward and give the series another chance.

Oh, and the hero, Matt, had intrigued me in the previous book.

So here's the story: Journalist Marie hasn't had a lot of luck in the dating world, and so she's disappointed but not terribly surprised when she meets up with a guy she met online, finds him to look nothing like she thought--still cute, but completely different from his description and picture--and kind of a total weirdo who asks her invasive questions, part of which was brought on by the book she was reading, but still.  The weirdo is Matt, a scientist who's working on developing a robot that can give love and affection place of actual human connections; he's also the neighbor and long-time acquaintance of Marie's friend Fiona, and the two cross paths again when Matt shows up with Fiona's husband while Marie is present.  Matt was asking the weird questions as part of the research he's conducting for his robot, and he still wants Marie's data.  And Marie needs a story.  So she strikes a deal: in exchange for her data, Matt will have to let her have access to his research.  And if he doesn't?  She'll write a different story, about this creepy guy presumably taking women on dates only to do research on them. And so the two fall into an uneasy partnership, and then a friendship, and then...more?  Maybe, but Marie wants a relationship, and Matt doesn't, so they put the brakes on that, but there's still that more lingering there in the background.

This is a slow-burn romance, far more than Reid's other works.  Neanderthal Seeks Human, the first book in the series, was billed as a slow burn, but it definitely was not.  This fits the slow burn profile far more.  Marie and Matt don't like each other, and then they do, but they don't act on it.  And it's not a friends-with-benefits relationship, either, which is also sometimes billed as a slow burn.  It's a real friendship.  Maybe a bit more affectionate than many, sure, but there is no making out, so no sex, not even any real cuddling.  It's just a friendship, until--of course--that critical moment when it's not.

Marie, the heroine and only point of view character--except for the epilogue, but at the point, it doesn't really count--had not really interested me in previous books.  She was just kind of there.  Reid clearly made a bid for Marie to be more intriguing in HEN, but I wasn't convinced.  And I'm still not entirely convinced, honestly.  Does the book work as a whole?  Yes.  But Marie on her own is just not that fascinating, and if the rest of the series hadn't been propping this volume up, I might not have liked it as much.  Marie just doesn't have much going on.  She likes to learn things, but we don't really see this.  She's a reporter, but we don't really ever see the evolution of that or her skills put to the test.  She had a happy childhood and happy friends and her only real character quirk is that hey, she had one serious relationship that didn't work out, but seriously?  That's it?  Her story is far more interesting than she is, which isn't a good thing.  Though she works at a magazine that's not a fashion one, so at least she's not completely stereotypical, I guess?

Matt interested me far more, and I was quite disappointed that we didn't get any point-of-view chapters from him.  Most of Reid's books have some perspective flipping, and this one didn't, and it's one of the ones that I think could most have used it.  We only get snippets of him through other people's eyes, and it's not enough.  His experience and perspectives are more interesting than Marie, so it's quite a pity that he got sidelined on the perspective front.

Overall, this was a great step up from Happily Ever Ninja, far more in line with the early books of the series in terms of feel and general not awfulness of the her.  (Greg was awful.  I hated him.)  I was pretty pleased by this, and I'm looking forward to the final book in the series, when we finally get to Kat and Dan!

4 stars out of 5.

The Bollywood Bride - Sonali Dev (Bollywood #2)

This is another one of those books that I've had for ages but, despite being intrigued by it, just never got it.  When you own a book, sometimes reading it doesn't seem as pressing as reading all of your library books that have due dates attached to them!  But the Popsugar Reading Challenge for 2018 has a category for "A book by an author of a different ethnicity than you," and since this was hovering so close to the top of my to-read list anyway, it was an easy one to slot in for that category.

Given the title of the book, with the emphasis on the word "Bride," I thought that this was going to be a romance.  While there is a romantic plot, perhaps one that is really the central driving force of the book, what this really felt like was a book about family, particularly family you choose over family you're born to.  Heroine Ria was mostly raised by her aunt and uncle following a terrible encounter with her mentally-ill mother, and while she and her father loved each other, their relationship was strained by that encounter and everything that followed it.  But Ria is now somewhat estranged from her aunt and uncle, who she kind of sees as her real parents, stemming from a secret relationship with her not-cousin (seriously, not her cousin, but around a lot, and the cousin of her cousin) that ended poorly on several fronts.  Ria has spent the last decade in India as a Bollywood star, and returns to Chicago and her family in order to attend the wedding of her actual, blood cousin who is more like a brother to her than anything.

Ria is perhaps not the ideal heroine.  She's kind of mean, and deliberately does things that hurt people.  Ostensibly she does these things to protect them, but it seems like what would really be better would be letting people make informed decisions for themselves.  Vikram is also kind of terrible.  He holds grudges and does spiteful things, and while he might be entitled to do so, he doesn't just hurt Ria, he hurts everyone else around him in the process.  However, they are surrounded by absolutely wonderful people who love and support each other and welcome misfits into their fold and make everyone around them feel wanted.  They keep each others' secrets, but to actually protect each other, rather than out of some misguided sense of righteousness.  Ria's aunt and uncle are both wonderful, her cousin is wonderful, his fiancee is wonderful, the aunties are wonderful, everyone is wonderful except our main characters.  Luckily this isn't a book that depended totally on romance between the heroine and hero to propel it; the supporting characters were so important in building the feeling in the story.

The writing itself is decent; Dev an write a good romantic scene, but I think her true strength was in those wonderful family scenes, and even more so in descriptions of food!  Oh geeze, I got so hungry reading this book.  I wanted to eat so much Indian food, it wasn't even funny.  Except Indian food is like a million dollars in the United States, and so I didn't.

Overall, a good book, and I might be interested in readings others by Dev--but not the sequel to this one, because it sounds depressing af.

3.5 stars out of 5.

The Darkest Part of the Forest - Holly Black

Holly Black never fails to please.  After reading Cruel Prince earlier this year, I realized that I was missing a chunk of her faerie stories--I had the Tithe background, as well as its sequels, but there were characters in CP whom I was clearly supposed to recognize, and did not.  Obviously, I had missed The Darkest Part of the Forest.  Or, not missed it, exactly--I knew it existed.  However, I thought it was completely unconnected to the other books and had a story significantly different from what it actually is (I have no idea where I got that sense) and so I hadn't sought it out.  Which is kind of a good thing, because I got to enjoy it now!

The story takes place in the strange Pennsylvania town of Fairfold, where humans live not with the Folk, but alongside them.  Every now and then, a tourist will go missing--tourists who come to the town to get a thrill from interacting with faeries and make mistakes that "locals" would never make, except when they do.  Changeling Jack lives alongside his human "brother," whom he was supposed to replace; a jump-rope line stops one line short of drawing a monster out of the woods; and a boy sleeping in a glass coffin is the centerpiece of many a high school party.

Heroine Hazel grew up in Fairfold, with a short stint in Philadelphia while her older brother, Ben, was in music school.  Ben has music magic, a gift (or curse) from a faerie when he was a baby.  Hazel has no such gifts, but she wishes she did; she supports Ben in his magic and takes on the role of his loyal knight, the two of them hunting bad faeries as pre-teenagers in the woods.  But all that ends with the time in Philadelphia, and upon returning to Fairfold, Hazel makes a stupid mistake that puts her off hunting even longer.  But when the glass coffin is broken and Hazel has reason to suspect that she did it--even if she doesn't know why or even remember doing it--and the boy inside it is gone, a world of trouble is unleashed from the darkest part of the forest.  Hazel has to fight for her family, friends, and Fairfold itself, even though she is woefully unprepared to do so.

This was slow to get going, I will admit, and there's not a lot of real tension or action until fairly late in the book.  I also wasn't a huge fan of Ben as a main character--perhaps because he seemed to enter the role of main character fairly late in the book, where Hazel had occupied that role by herself for much of the early parts.  Ben himself was okay, but I liked him more in a supporting role; while his motivations were clear, I never felt he got the character development that a main character really needs to shine in a starring role.  Hazel, on the other hand, had much more page time; we were in her head much more, saw more of what she did and why she did it.  It just worked better for Hazel.  (Though I liked how things ended up for Ben!)

This is a different setting and a different faerie Court from Black's other books, and that aspect of this wasn't felt out as well.  However, I liked Fairfold itself.  The way that Folk and humans twined together, but with humans walking the razor's edge of danger all the time, really appealed to me.  The humans of Fairfold felt safe, until they weren't, justifying that "only tourists" were in danger, but doing some "tourist"-like things themselves.  And the way they seemed so okay with things, but quickly turned on Jack--the only faerie among them--as soon as things went wrong seemed exactly like what would happen in real life to me.

These faerie tales are Black's definite strength.  I'm so glad that she's returned to them with Cruel Prince, and I can't wait to read the next installment in that series--and luckily, I think reading this in the meantime will help bulk out my understanding of that series, too.

4 stars out of 5.

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.

Pairing Off - Elizabeth Harmon (Red Hot Russians #1)

Once again, can I just state that figure skating romances are da bomb?  Okay, now that that's out of the way, let me get to the actual book...

This came to me as I was perusing lists of figure skating books in the wake of absolutely loving From Lukov with Love.  I picked up Pairing Off and a couple of other titles off the list hoping for good things, and overall I feel that Pairing Off delivered.

Our main characters are Anton and Carrie, Russian and American pairs figure skaters, respectively.  The two met and had a, erm, romantic encounter when they were teenagers competing in junior games, and then completely lost touch.  Years later, Carrie has been banned from US figure skating after her partner initiates a sex scandal by sleeping with a judge in exchange for high scores.  Hoping for a new start in Russia--not in high competition, but at least in something that can keep skating in her life--she finds herself paired up with Anton, who doesn't recognize her from their encounter years before, and whose partner ditched him for another skater, though the two of them remain romantically involved.  But while Anton doesn't remember Carrie, Carrie certainly remembers Anton, and the two find themselves drawing closer both to each other and to Olympic dreams.

This was a solid sports romance novel.  The setting--modern Moscow--is unusual for an American romance novel, and I quite liked it.  The figure skating aspect is wonderful.  Carrie and Anton are a pair that don't immediately click, and they have to work to get to know each other.  It's not a hate-to-love relationship, but it's certainly one that has a rocky start, partially due to their past and partially because of Anton's more reserved character.  There are some good side characters here, too.  Initially Carrie seems to be hated by the entire figure skating community, American, Russian, and otherwise, but she slowly finds friends in Russia, though not everyone falls over themselves to get to know her--which is good, because I didn't want this to turn into Everyone Loves Carrie.  Olga, of course, is a Class A bitch and you have to wonder about why Anton stays with her for so much of the book despite their long connection, but she's not the only one who doesn't fawn over Carrie (though no one else is perhaps quite so venomous).

What I didn't like was Carrie's Tortured Past and her dynamics with her father.  I think one or the other would have been more than adequate here.  But Carrie blames herself for the suicide of her mother, and takes responsibility for her father's political career almost entirely on her own shoulders, which was ridiculous.  I know that people get survivor's guilt, or blame themselves for things they can't control, but the length of time that this was drawn out for and the melodrama that surrounded it was completely out of proportion and took away from some of the better aspects of the book.  And what was up with the sudden paparazzi storm?  That seemed larger than life, as well...

Overall, I liked this one.  It was a solid start to a series.  The second book (Turning It On) involves reality TV and I'm not sure that's really up my alley, so I might skip to the third book (Getting It Back) since there's not an overarching plot, but I'm definitely interested in more books in this vein!

4 stars out of 5.

A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness (All Souls #1)

A Discovery of Witches had been on my to-read list for a while, in a sort of vague, "That sounds interesting, maybe someday" way.  It bumped its way up towards the top when I needed a book involving Halloween for my reading challenge--while books that take place entirely on Halloween seem to be few and far between, books that have a climax or conclusion involving Halloween seem to be more common, and this book is one of them.

Diana is witch in a world where there are basically four types of humaoids: humans, and then three types of "creatures," witches/wizards, vampires, and daemons.  But Diana has scorned her witchy ancestry and tries to use magic as little as possible.  This changes when, in the course of conducting research for a conference, she stumbles across an enchanted manuscript that no one else has been able to get for hundreds of years.  Diana doesn't really care for it, and sends it back to the stacks, where it vanishes again--and finds herself being stalked by all kinds of creatures who want her to get it back for them, including vampire Matthew, with whom Diana quickly develops a romantic attachment.

This is a long book for its type.  The pacing is decidedly better in the first part, when Diana is in Oxford and is being increasingly stalked by creatures and little bits of her magic occasionally pop up.  Once she and Matthew decamp for France, however, things slow down.  There's meals and horseback riding and dancing in a castle he built.  Yes, there's a little bit of drama while they're there, but overall the pace is much slower, and the slow pace continues--again with one anomaly--once they move on from France to the US.  And while I normally like a strong romantic plot in my novels, no matter what their primary genre falls into, this one just didn't seem to hit the right points.  There's no sizzling chemistry or attraction between Diana and Matthew; in fact, the repeated reminders of how cold he is seems like a complete turn-off.  There aren't any good kissing scenes, or any sort of other scenes, if you know what I mean.  (Which, you know, aren't necessary, but if you're going to write a 600-page book relying heavily on romance...)

Diana herself is also a Special Snowflake Supreme.  She has All the Powers, which of course no one else has, and is the only witch--literally the only one--to be stronger than her parents were.  Now, I am not entirely against Special Snowflakes.  In some cases, I actually quite like them.  Diana was obnoxious, though.  Not as a person, but as a concept.  There's no sign of her magic her entire life, and then suddenly she views a report of her DNA and they start popping out all over the place, stronger than anyone has ever seen.  This seemed a bit odd, honestly.  Apparently the use of her magic is tied to "need," but that didn't seem to be the case in most of the instances in which her magic made its appearance.

Overall, this was an okay one.  It was one I found myself picking at rather than just reading, which is generally an indication that I'm not enjoying it very much.  There were some interesting concepts here, but the pacing and romance were off, and Diana's Special Snowflake status was annoying.  I also have absolutely no interest in where Diana and Matthew are going next, so I think I'm probably unlikely to read the second book.

2 stars out of 5.

Tower of Dawn - Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass #6)

Upon reading this book, I had to immediately go back to my reviews of former Throne of Glass books.  This is a strange volume--a book that was supposed to be a novella and ended up at nearly seven hundred pages, taking place concurrently with the prior book in the series, Empire of Storms.  In this, Maas tries to fill in the Chaol-shaped hole that was left in EoS, something that I had mentioned in my review of that book, but I was looking for something else.  The sentence fragments.  Dear lord, did the other books have these sentence fragments?  I don't seem to have mentioned them in my reviews, if they did, and I know I mentioned the use of this "convention" in another book that it drove me crazy in, The Rose and the Dagger.  Either way, whether they were used so blatantly in the other books or not, it is not an excuse, this is a terrible convention and should be abandoned.  Seriously.  The sentence fragments that run amok here continuously yanked me out of the story and had me pounding my head against my Kindle.  Seriously, Maas, did sentence subjects and verbs hurt you as a child?

Now, with that out of the way...

This book dumps Chaol and his traveling companion/kind-of-girlfriend Nesryn on the southern continent of the Throne of Glass world, in Antica, the city of thirty-six gods and the capital of an empire.  If you were looking for a foil to the white, European-based Adarlan, Antica is your answer to it.  With a variety of races and cultures, it's definitely different from Adarlan, in a good way.  Chaol is hoping that the healers who live on the southern continent can fix the paralysis caused by his injuries in the fight against Adarlan's king two books ago.  The healer he is assigned apparently hails from another novella, which I have not read--Yrene Towers.  She is, of course, the most talented and most beautiful healer evah.  While we're on the topic, is Antica not allowed to have people who are the best?  Yrene, from the north, is the best healer.  Nesryn, from the north--her father is from Antica, but Nesryn herself is from the north--is the best archer.  Our absent characters, Aelin and company, are the best at assorted other things.  No one in Antica is apparently the best, and if they are, I'm sure one of those northern characters will soon become interested in that skill and master it and be the best instead.  So, yes, maybe still some subtle racist contexts here.  Hmm...

Anyway.  Chaol gets a hot healer, and Nesryn gets a hot royal who rides a giant bird and thinks she's da bomb, so there goes that relationship.  At first I was onboard with the relationship swapping in this series; after all, few people in real life spend their entire lives with their first romantic partner.  But at this point...just get on with it already.  Anyway (again) Chaol and Nesryn soon split up, Nesryn going off in search of info on the menace that might have followed them to Antica and Chaol...staying put because he's paralyzed, which is a bummer for him, though of course the gorgeous Yrene helps to ease his sorrows.

Remember how Harry Potter spent the entire book in Half Blood Prince angsting over Sirius' death?  This is that book for Chaol.  Except, whereas Harry had faced a very real loss (even if it was still a bit overblown) Chaol was angsty over all kinds of things that, really, he just needed to get over and should have been over already.  This sounds extremely callous of me, I know.  And some of the things, yes, he could feel guilty over, even if they were not directly his fault.  But when the person who is literally going to restore your ability to walk tells you, "Hey, I can do this, but you need to work through what is holding you back.  I will help you do this, but you need to make the effort," and you still refuse to make the effort, well, you lose some of the sympathy factor.  And beyond the healing, there is really not much that goes on for Chaol in this book.  Nesryn only has slightly more action.  There's not a lot of pep in these pages.

Now.  This was not necessarily a bad book.  I liked aspects of it quite a bit--I did like Antica, and the ruks, and Yrene and the Tower.  It's just that this book, and this series, is getting a bit, well, tired.  Repetitive, if I dare say so.  There are only so many times you can try to throw in the same twist before people start calling it, and I saw all of them coming from a mile away--which does not bode well for the one volume remaining.  I'm betting it's going to be pretty much a direct copy of the finale of A Court of Wings and Ruin, because Maas' bread and butter seems to be presenting the same book again and again.  They have fun aspects; they are light and fast and enjoyable to read.  And this same critique could be said of many other authors and genres (romance, anyone?).  Buuuuut you can only write the same story so many times before you lose interest, you know?  Also, there are questions raised that I'm not sure Maas can properly answer at this point, because they seem to be running contrary to what has been set up in other books--like the whole spiders thing?  Why are they not allied in all kinds of different ways with the bad forces running about?  And Maeve?  Really?  That's the route you're taking?

Whatever.  I'm over it.

I'm in this for the long haul, I guess, since there's only one book left.  But it had better be a doozy, because I'm getting kind of tired of this.

2.5 stars out of 5.

#Starstruck - Sariah Wilson (#Lovestruck #1)

I recently had a bunch of books become available from holds at the library, one of them being the somewhat heavy (but also, in retrospect, somewhat uplifting) When Breath Becomes Air, my reading challenge book for the "book about death or grief" category.  Knowing that was coming up, I knew I was going to need some pure fluff to balance a deeply introspective memoir about dying and the meaning of life.  You know, all that fun stuff.  And then up popped #Starstruck.  I haven't read any of Sariah Wilson's works before, but I've had Royal Date by her sitting on my Kindle for ages.  Still, #Starstruck caught my eye.  There's something intriguing about celebrity romances, and since I had such a great experience with Idol last year (though that celebrity was a rockstar, not an actor) I thought I'd give this a go.

Heroine and narrator Zoe adores Chase Covington, an obsession she picked up in order to bond with her now-best friend, Lexi, when they were children.  Because Zoe didn't have friends and Lexi said that if they both liked Chase Covington (and Lexi loves Chase Covington), then they could be friends.  And so when a Twitter exchange leads to Zoe eventually meeting and then becoming involved with Chase, she is starstruck indeed.

Was this the strongest celebrity romance book I've read?  No.  Something about it just seems to ring false, like how these people would ever actually meet, how fast they fell for each other, etc.  For example, this book takes insta-love to a new level, in which the two characters love each other from before they even lay eyes on each other, just from a series of 140-character Tweets over the course of like, three days.  However, there were a lot of elements I really liked here.  Let's talk about a few.

First, despite Zoe's self-proclaimed "obsession" with Chase, she is not really obsessed with him.  She's a fan, definitely, but she does not do anything crazy.  Lexi is the one who makes Chase scrapbooks, who stalks his manager to get close to him, who would reportedly do anything to be with him.  Despite Zoe saying how much she "loves" Chase even before they meet, she seems remarkably sane and her priorities always lay elsewhere.  The "obsession" is really more just going along with Lexi.  This was good, because Chase falling for a stalker would have been, uhm, weird to the extreme.

Zoe as a character is actually great in general.  Her family is important to her.  While she's attracted to Chase, she's also keenly aware of how fame can bite back, and so remains wary of their relationship.  Additionally, Zoe is abstinent, and it's not because of religion.  Whaaat?  Yes.  This is great to see--not because I'm anti-sex in romances (hey, if you can write a good sex scene, go for it) but because it suits her character and background.  But Wilson has an abstinent-by-choice character who also doesn't feel the need to bash you over the head with religion every two seconds, which is so refreshing.  While waiting for a committed relationship to have sex isn't strange at all, for some reason in fiction, it's always because of religion and not just because it's a personal choice.  Consequently, this was refreshing.  But never fear!  Wilson can write a sizzling attraction and some delicious scenes of kissing and making out without anyone's clothes coming off.  The one thing that bugged me was that, though Chase told Zoe how the media would spin things and that he'd tell her what she wanted regarding what was actually happening, she just freaked out at him whenever something happened.  I understand jealousy and insecurity, but she really seemed to take it to an extreme.

Chase was harder to get a handle on.  This is probably because he's not the narrator, and consequently we can't really get inside his head.  We only have what he says, and while Zoe believes him, she also has doubts from time to time, and those spill over to the reader.  But at the end of the book, I was left with this key question: Why did Chase go out with Zoe?  Once they were together, it's easy to see and understand why they would keep it up.  I don't have any issues with that.  But I have trouble believing that, upon re-entering the dating world, Chase and everyone around him would decide that Zoe was "the one" based on literally a single Tweet, which only said that she didn't think his most recent movie was his best.

Overall, I liked this.  It was a fast read, the two characters had a lot of chemistry even if they never, ahem, got down to business, and I liked Zoe as a main character.  But I never felt like the actual meeting and initial connection rang true.  But hey, Wilson can write a really good kissing scene!

4 stars out of 5.

Beard in Mind - Penny Reid (Winston Brothers #4)

It took me a while to get back into the Winston Brothers series because I was somewhat disappointed by Beard Science, which I had really been looking forward to.  That, and Beau wasn't really a character I cared much about.  He featured in the other books but in a comparatively minor supporting role, against his brothers who, even as supporting characters, seemed a bit more prominent.  I also wasn't super interested in Shelly, who we encountered in Beard Science for the first time.  All of this together meant that this was kind of a "Yeah, sure, I guess," book, but I was still hoping it would take me by surprise and I would love it.

Ultimately, though, I left this book disappointed.  The setup is fairly uneven compared to the others in the series--while both Beau and Shelly get perspective chapters, Shelly's are greatly outnumbered by Beau's.  I don't know what Reid was thinking, but I'm willing to hazard a guess that she didn't want to get too deep "in the head" of someone with OCD and then get slammed by people who actually have OCD for "not getting it right," which would be a motivation that I understand.  The problem is, Shelly is a vastly more interesting character than Beau, and that's not even taking her condition into consideration.  Her links to Quinn, her past with her family, her interest in mechanics, her position as an extremely talented artist, her somewhat abrasive personality--all of this made Shelly seem like a really fleshed-out character, and the very low number of chapters from her perspective was a disappointment.  The imbalance made her feel more like someone Beau pursued and wanted than someone who was engaged in a mutual relationship.

Compared to Shelly, Beau was...blah.  At one point, he says that his twin brother Duane isn't just his brother, he's Beau's other half.  And that's exactly what Beau felt like: half a character.  All of this book is about his fixation on Shelly, and really nothing else.  Even the subplot with the Iron Wraiths that Reid tried to throw in didn't make him feel more complex or complete.  And because he was the point of view character for most of the book, that made it feel just "meh."  I could never really see why he liked Shelly, other than her being off-the-charts gorgeous, which doesn't get you very far in a romance novel.  Even if someone is attracted because of physical appearances at first (which, fine, cool, I get it) it has to evolve, and even though Beau kept saying he loved Shelly for other reasons, I never really saw evidence of it.  I never felt chemistry between him and Shelly, either, and a romance book with no chemistry isn't really much of a romance at all.

Overall, I think this was the weakest book in the series so far.  At times it trended more towards "chore" than "enjoyment," and that's not a good sign.  It had its moments--watching Jennifer and Cletus from another perspective was interesting, and Shelly's parts were good--but I ended up feeling like I probably could have just skipped this one and waited until Dr. Strange Beard came out to rejoin the Winston family.

2 stars out of 5.

White Hot - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #2)

The second Hidden Legacy book by the Ilona Andrews team picks up about two months after the first, and takes an abrupt turn in direction: from fire to ice.  I was super excited to read this one after tearing through Burn for Me, because I wanted to see the relationship between Nevada and Rogan evolve and come into its own as well as see more of Nevada's wonderful family.  While her family continued to be wonderful and their relationship did indeed evolve, I ultimately didn't find this one as good as the first one.

Nevada is pulled back into the ring of high-stakes investigations when Cornelius, the animal mage we briefly encountered in the first book, comes to her to ask her to take on the investigation of his wife's murder.  He wants to know who killed her, and he wants revenge.  Nevada is reluctant, but agrees, for various reasons.  She's quickly re-enmeshed with Rogan (who has ignored her since the end of the last book) when it turns out that his people were the wife's security team, who were killed along with her, and Rogan wants to avenge them.

Cornelius, while not elevated to main-character status, is definitely one of the primary supporting characters in this book, and that was excellent.  His animal mage powers are vastly different from any of the other ones we've encountered in this world, and they're put to good use in several ways here.  Also, I want a Chinese ferret-badger for a pet now.  I definitely hope he'll continue to be a presence in the third book.  In the supporting character realm, Nevada's family continues to be amazing and we get a glimpse into her origins, as well as the abilities of her two younger siblings and one of her cousins.  This was awesome, and as Nevada evolves into a Prime I hope we get to see more in-depth what her equally-powerful siblings can do.

Nevada's evolution was another interesting aspect of this book.  We knew--or could infer--that she was a Prime from the events of the first book, even if she hadn't come into her own yet.  But here, she's no longer flying under the radar, as much as she might like to be.  She's gathering attention, and it's pretty clear that it's going to come to a head in the third book.  This is a good progression, and I was pretty happy with it.

What I less happy with was the relationship between Nevada and Rogan.  When we left them at the end of the first book, Nevada was attracted to Rogan but unwilling to be just his plaything, and Rogan was attracted to Nevada and determined to have her.  When we rejoin them here, it's all, "I love you!" on both parts, even if the actual words aren't said until later in the book.  Most of Nevada's reservations seem to have just up and vanished, which was very strange, and considering that Rogan's emotional attachment seemed...there, but sparse and under-developed, it seems weird that he jumped so full-on into "I must love and protect Nevada"-mode here.

There's a third book in this series (and it seems like there might potentially be more, but nothing solid so far) and I'm still interested in it, but this was something of a come-down from the first book.  I won't say it suffered from second book syndrome, because that's a plot thing and not a relationship thing, and things definitely moved in this book.  But it wasn't as amazing as the first, and I hope the third can make a come back.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Burn for Me - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #1)

I picked up Burn for Me while it was on sale a while back because another member of the Unapologetic Romance Readers group had given it a really good rating.  And Ilona Andrews does really good paranormal fantasy with romance elements, which is right up my alley, so it was perfect.  But it sat on my Kindle, unread, until I slotted it into my reading challenge for "A book by two authors," because "Ilona Andrews" is actually a pen name for a husband-wife writing team, Ilona and Andrew Gordon.  This isn't actually hard to find--they're very open with it--but it's not apparent by just looking at the book cover.

The best-known books by these two are the Kate Daniels books.  Burn for Me and the other Hidden Legacy books take place in a different world from Kate's story.  In this world, a substance called the Osiris Serum was discovered in the nineteenth century and unlocked magic in many people; the unlocked magic became genetic, and in our current time, despite the serum no longer being in use, magic is still rampant.  Heroine Nevada has magic that allows her to tell when someone is lying, though she hides it because she doesn't want to be forced to become a human lie detector for the government, military, etc.  Instead, she runs a private investigation business that brings in money for her family.  But when bad boy Adam Pierce starts burning things down in Houston, Nevada is put on the case of bringing him back to his family against her will by the man who "owns" her family for various reasons.  And to make things worse, she ends up falling with bad man Connor Rogan, aka Mad Rogan, aka the Scourge of Mexico, who can literally level cities with just the power of his mind.  Yikes.

I really, really enjoyed this.  I stayed up too late reading it, which I haven't done in a long time, and immediately bought the second volume, White Hot.  Nevada is an imminently likable character.  She is smart and gorgeous and can kick butt, which is all par for the course in this genre, but her devotion to her family is something new, because most people in this genre tend to be orphans or estranged from their families, for some reason.  Her sad and quiet mother, her kooky grandmother, and her annoying-but-helpful younger siblings and cousins were all so charming and really added a lot to this book.  I have mixed feelings about Rogan--and I actually wasn't sure if he was going to be the love interest for a while (I thought maybe something would end up happening with Adam) because he and Nevada don't meet until so far into the book.  But he's a little psycho.  Nevada is keenly aware of this herself, and purposefully keeps distance between herself and Rogan because of it.  But Rogan is the very typical paranormal romance alpha male, and he is determined to have Nevada.  Which really makes her resistance of her, her shutting him down and backtalking, even though she is definitely attracted to him, even more admirable. 

Of course, the fact that this is a three-book series and this is only the first book probably helps, too.  But what's best about this is that Rogan is fucked up and brutal, yes--and Nevada doesn't let him use that as an excuse.  It's not "Oh, he's broken, he will be so sweet and perfect once I fix him!"  Instead, it's "Yes, he's sexy, but he is dangerous and probably doesn't want me for more than sex and I really cannot deal with that now, so I'm going to nope out of here as fast as I can."  This is the type of stuff that strong heroines are made of, and I really liked it.

This is a great, fun, sexy paranormal fantasy/mystery--there's no sex here (though Nevada is interested, somewhat despite herself) and the tension is really drawn out, so don't expect a resolution in that department.  But White Hot is already shaping up pretty well, so I have hopes there!

5 stars out of 5.

Silver Borne - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #5)

Clocking in another book for my 2017 Reading Challenge, I've tackled my third Mercy Thompson novel for the year and the fifth in the series, Silver Borne.  This is a book that was a bestseller the year I graduated high school (2010).  I was actually pretty excited to see this, because books in this vein seem to rarely hit bestseller lists and so seeing it there was very refreshing.

One thing about the Mercy Thompson books is that they seem to pile one right after another.  One book picks up exactly after another one lets off, or at least within a few days of it.  Let me tell you, it must be absolutely exhausting to be Mercy, because she never seems to get a break.  Someone or something is always trying to kill her, and despite her protests that she does nothing to deserve it, she does seem to always be poking her nose in places it probably doesn't belong.  Keeping her head down is not something she excels at.  In this volume we find Mercy, just after the events of Bone Crossed.  Mercy is still settling into her role as Adam's mate in the face of a lot of opposition from the pack, dealing with an increasingly-depressed Samuel, and is also sucked into a missing persons case involving the magical book she's been toting around for several volumes.

I liked this a lot more than Bone Crossed.  BC felt like a lot of politicking and hemming and hawing without much happening.  While this one wasn't full of fight scenes, it still felt like things moved.  Mercy developed in her relationship with Adam and with the pack; there were some pack intrigues, but they didn't take over the book; Samuel started to come into his own and we found out more about his past and his potential future; and the characters overall just seemed more integrated into both the story and the world than wandering around trying to resolve events that really should have been left a few books behind.  All of this was a definite improvement over BC, which was tired in comparison.

This book breathed some fresh air into the series, which I think it really needed.  Fifth books are tricky; by this time, it's either clear that the series should have ended a few volumes ago or that it's good for the long haul.  After Bone Crossed, I wasn't very hopeful, but Silver Borne really brought it back up and gives me hope for a series that doesn't really seem to have an end in sight.

4 stars out of 5.

The Far Pavilions - M. M. Kaye

The Far Pavilions is a doorstop of a book.  Massive.  To the point that, when I got it from the library on my Kindle and saw it was going to take 20-some hours to read, I immediately returned it and got in hard copy instead. Why?  Because even though it's a whopper of a book to haul around, it feels like I'm making more progress when I read a book in hard copy and can see the pages go by and the ones waiting diminish.  Even then, it took a long while to get through this book--though that was partially because the pacing is somewhat uneven and I had to read a few other, lighter books in the meantime just to keep myself going.

The book follows its main character, Ash, from childhood into his mid-to-late twenties.  Ash, though born to two English citizens, was raised by a Hindu woman following the death of both of his parents, and doesn't know that he's actually English until early adolescence, when he has to flee to England for fear of his life.  Ultimately, he returns to India in the service of the Corps of Guides and finds himself re-enmeshed in many of the dramas that he had previously left behind, as well as some new ones.  Though there is action in this book, the crux of the conflict comes from Ash's identity crisis, feeling as if he is torn between two worlds: the Indian "Ashok" work of his childhood, and the English "Ashton" world of his adulthood.  All of the action ties into this to some degree.

Overall, I really liked this book.  Ash, though he can be hardheaded and a jerk at times, is overall a sympathetic character.  He is English by birth but was raised Indian, and has a deep-seated dislike of most of the elements of colonialism--which is kind of the opposite of what I had expected here.  He also has a strong sense of fairness and right and wrong, which makes him likable--he always tries to do the right thing--but also gets him into trouble with many other characters who think in more shades of gray.  This is a flaw that's admitted by Ash himself as well as several other characters in the book, showing that Kaye was clearly and keenly aware of it.

However, the pacing on this book is somewhat uneven.  It's divided into eight different parts; the first had a few slow spots but were overall good, with a balance of character and action that I quite liked, and ultimately revolving around Ash being drawn to his childhood friend Juli, a princess of a small Indian kingdom.  However, the last two parts, "My Brother Jonathan" and "The Land of Cain," take an abrupt turn.  Instead of focusing on Ash, Kaye (for some reason) veers into the political and military shambles that was the Second Anglo-Afghan War and the ill-fated English mission that followed it.  Though Ash is the main character of the rest of the book, in these two parts he's abruptly shoved aside in favor of a handful of other Corps of Guides officers who, while familiar, seem to rise to main character status out of pretty much nowhere.  Ash is still involved in these conflicts, but in a very secondary role, and while the climactic events are important to his ultimate character development, it just felt strange because our main character was mostly absent.

Overall, I really enjoyed this.  I think Kaye has a great sense for atmosphere and character, and clearly has a love for India of her own--though, as a quick note, this being pre-partition India, much of the action actually takes place in what we would presently think of as Pakistan.  There are definite flaws here--the pacing for certain, and while I liked Ash overall, he had a few distasteful moments that made me shy away from fawning over him.  But this is definitely an "epic" sort of book, and I'm definitely interested in reading the few other ones like this Kaye put forward.

4 stars out of 5.