Entwined - Heather Dixon

Azalea is oldest of elven princesses, and she feels the weight.  She is Princess Royale, which means her future husband is picked out by Parliament because he will one day be king.  Her mother is ailing, and has been for a long time, so Azalea acts as a mother figure to her ten younger sisters.  And her father...well, he's not really interested in them.  And then, on the night of the Yuletide Ball, Azalea's mother dies while giving birth to a twelfth and final princess, and the girls are left basically alone as their father first retreats into himself, and then leaves for war with a neighboring kingdom.  The girls are left alone, with instructions to follow the strict rules of morning: all black clothing, they can't be seen in public except on Royal Business, the windows must remain covered at all times, and--worst of all--absolutely no dancing.  But Azalea and her sister's can't resist dancing, an activity their mother loved, and after the ballroom is locked against them, they're left looking for somewhere else to go.  They find a sanctuary at the bottom of a hidden passage in their bedroom--a garden of silver, with a pavilion at its center that is watched over by a man named Keeper, who conjures magical dances night after night for the princesses...and eventually asks them to free him.

This was an interesting take on The Twelve Dancing Princesses.  While it takes a while for the main plot to get going, it's ultimately much darker than the original, which is a good thing; there's an air of menace about the dances that only strengthens with time, until Azalea is desperate to make it all stop but isn't sure how to do so without bringing down serious consequences on all of them.  And while the original fairytale is very much a man's story--a king who wants control over his daughters and their actions so badly that he offers to give one of them, any of them, away to the first man who can help him--this one is much more a story of family.  Azalea is both sister and mother to many of her sisters, and tries to do what is best for all of them while balancing their father's complicated role in their lives.  In this way, Entwined is very much a Frozen-esque story: family takes precedence over romance, though there is a light dusting of romance here and there.  To me, the romantic story lines weren't really strong enough to be entirely believable, and I kept hoping they would become more prominent, but if they had, the family story might have fallen by the wayside, and I do think that, ultimately, the family story was the one that had to remain central.

There is a danger in writing a story about twelve princesses, of course, and that is that it can be very easy to simply have too many main characters running about.  I think Dixon handled this nicely.  Azalea is very obviously the main character--she is the only main character, really, as the book is written entirely in third-person limited, from Azalea's view.  And by making Azalea young (sixteen or seventeen-ish), Dixon manages to make the youngest of the princesses so young that they're not really characters at all; they're bodies with names and sometimes actions, like chewing on someone, who are mostly toted around by the older girls.  While most of the girls have personalities and dialogue and purpose, the only one who comes close to being a main character like Azalea is Bramble, the second-eldest, and I think that was as it should be; it gave a good supporting cast without cluttering the pages, and overall made Azalea a stronger character because the sheer youth of some of the girls emphasized how much Azalea had to do to keep them all together.

As for the writing itself--it's charming, utterly charming.  It definitely has a fairytale feel to it, while still being just a little bit more grown up.  This is distinctly a young adult piece, not an adult one, but it's also not all sugar-coated with sunshine and rainbows like some adaptations can be.  Things go very, very wrong, and Azalea is left struggling to fix them with the little knowledge she has, and there's no absolute certainty that she'll manage to do so.  The Twelve Dancing Princesses is a story that, in the original, lacks in many things, like character development, a strong central villain, and even a strong plot, and I thought Dixon managed to immensely improve upon all of these aspects.  This is the second adaptation of TDP that I've read this year, the first being Girls at the Kingfisher Club, and while I really liked Girls, in my opinion, Entwined is how the story is meant to be.

4 stars out of 5.

Gates of Thread and Stone - Lori Lee (Gates of Thread and Stone #1)

"Death lived in a glass tower at the center of the white court.  I could see the tower from anywhere in the city.  It cut the skyline like a blade.  Death--she probably had a real name--was Kahl Ninu's right hand and his personal executioner.  Or, at least, that's what the rumors said.  I didn't really care if they were true so long as it wasn't my head on the chopping block."

So begins Gates of Thread and Stone.  Just look at that cover.  Isn't it gorgeous?  Absolutely beautiful.  And the title.  There's something very poetic about it, don't you think?  And really, the cover sums up the book very well: a very gray world with a little bit of light in it, just waiting to shine through.  Let's get down to it.

Kai doesn't have any memories before she was eight, when her adoptive brother Reeve found her by the river of the city of Ninurta and took her in.  They've been pretty much inseparable ever since, and both work to earn enough credits to buy their way out of the Labyrinth, the slum-like neighborhood where they live.  Kai works as a mail carrier, and Reeve works as a bouncer at a brother.  One day, Kai is nearly killed by a strange young woman in an alley--but uses her abilities to control time to severely injure her attacker instead.  Just a few days later, Reeve is missing.  Desperate to find him, Kai seeks out answers from anyone who could possibly help, and she and her friend/love interest Avan eventually find themselves fugitives from Ninurta, seeking out the Black Rider, who is rumored to have been kidnapping Ninurtans for years.

This book has a very strong start, and a very strong finish.  It does not have such a strong middle.  There's a lot of momentum at the beginning, with one event leading into the other with just enough breathing space in between.  The initial attack on Kai, her use of the strings, Reeve's disappearance, the escape from Ninurta--it's all very dramatic.  And then the plot...stalls.  Kai and Avan end up in a sort of limbo, just waiting for the next thing to happen.  They do some talking.  They find out some plot points.  They train.  But nothing of real impact happens.  There is some cool stuff that they find out, and the setting where they do all of this talking/learning/training is neat, but there's not a ton of action, and this action-less time continues for a big part of the book.  Once they leave and move on to the next phase of the adventure, the pace picks up a little bit, and then barrels back up to full speed for the climax, and a denouement that is just long enough.

The settings in this book were, I thought, very well done.  Ninurta is a city, supposedly the last one left in the world after an apocalyptic event called the "Rebirth," and it is very...gray.  Everything in it seems to be gray, except the White Court, where the king and Death, his executioner, live.  The sun comes out for exactly one week a year, and those who aren't lucky enough to be connected to the White Court live their lives in various forms of poverty.  Despite that, the people of Ninurta are still people.  They're not just some ground-down populace on the edge of revolution; in fact, they're not on the edge of revolution at all.  They're living their lives, with some trials and tribulations, to be sure, but they're still living.  Ninurta is not District 12, which was good, because it was different.  There's a tournament setting inside the White Court where kids fight other kids--but it doesn't appear to be to the death, and the kids do it voluntarily, because coming out on top gives them a great career path.  All of this is really important, because it means that, despite the fact that Gates is a post-apocalyptic novel, it doesn't really feel like one; the apocalypse was a long time ago, and contributes more to mood than to the structure of the plot.  And then there's the castle in the Void, protected by gargoyles, that sprouts up different rooms and wings whenever it feels like, and is composed of lost and forgotten things.  There's a real beauty to some of these settings, and they definitely contributed to the mood of the book, as a good setting does.  The Outlands and the forest, not so much.

And then there's Kai.  Overall, I really liked Kai as a character.  She finds herself struggling to make her own choices in situations where the ability to choose really isn't hers, all while wielding a power that no one seems to understand, least of all her.  I thought her decisions and motives were believable, and I rarely felt a deep desire to smack her across the face for sheer stupidity, which is a common emotion with me when it comes to YA heroines.  While she is a #specialsnowflake, I'm hard-pressed to think of a YA heroine who isn't, and Kai doesn't let it rule her entire existence or spend all of her time fighting it or anything like that; she works it in, and that worked in the story.

And the Infinite...that was some Gaiman stuff, right there, though there are apparently many more Infinite than there are Endless.  But I liked it, and I want to see more.

Overall, I really liked this, despite the slow middle, and I think it has a lot of potential for the future books.

3.5 stars out of 5.

How To Start a Fire - Lisa Lutz

Whelp, this book inadvertently ended up fulfilling one of my Popsugar Reading Challenge categories - "A book that makes you cry."  Not that I knew this going into it, of course, but it did make me cry and put me in a mopey mood for the rest of the day.  Still, overall I really liked the book, even though I didn't really like any of the characters in it, which is a strange situation but one that I think illustrates Lutz's skill as an author.

This is a very character-driven book, with no real central "plot" to speak of other than the growth of the characters over time.  These books can be kind of boring at times--illustrated by how much people dislike J. K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, which was a character-driven book.  Lutz balances this out by using a non-linear style to follow the characters.  This, however, also has a downfall--it can be a little confusing about what happens when.  At a few points, I did have to flip back and forth to look at the chapter headings, which include the year, just to make sure I was ordering things correctly in my head.  Overall, however, it's not too hard to put together a general timeline by the end of the book and come away with an understanding of the order of events.

There are three main characters in this book: Anna, Kate, and George, which is short for Georgianna.  Anna and Kate are roommates in college, and after they find George passed out in someone's yard one night, she is adopted into their group.  Over the years, the three separate and reunite at various times, and all of them have crises that pretty much link back to one fateful night when a door to their house is left unlocked and George is almost killed as a result.  All of the characters have different problems and neuroses, though George is the most normal of the bunch.  Kate jumps from obsession to obsession, ranging from giant redwoods to the plague to mushrooms and all topics in between, and feels a need to share everything she knows about these topics with anyone within hearing distance.  Anna is an addict, who starts with alcohol and moves on to various other substances as time goes by, facing a permanent struggle to get clean.  George...is mostly George, although she has marriage problems later that she links back to the night of the unlocked door.  As time goes on (or back and forth) the characters face various crises, heartbreaks, and dilemmas, sometimes among themselves and sometimes with other characters like parents, lovers, siblings, etc.  Sometimes they have to face these problems alone, because they've alienated the other members of the group; sometimes they have each other to fall back on.  In the end, however, they have a strong friendship that survives the trials of time, a few scars notwithstanding.

Lutz's writing is absolutely beautiful, and she made me care about the characters in this book even though I only liked one of them--and he wasn't even a main character.  She knows how to jerk at people's heartstrings without coming across as too "purple" or outright sentimental; she makes it easy to see why these people are the way they are--with one exception.  I didn't really understand why Anna blamed herself so much for one of the tragedies (there are many) that occurred in this book, and why so many other people blamed her when it clearly wasn't her fault.  Many other bad things that happen in this book were Anna's fault, and I think they would have left her fucked-up enough without including self-blame for this other one.  I toyed with the idea that she felt she was culpable for the event because she was responsible for so many other bad things, but that just didn't fit, especially because other characters were blaming her, too...  That really rubbed me the wrong way, and was one of the very few things that I disliked about the book.

There's also a repetition of a "fire" theme in this book, which you could probably guess from the title.  However, there is no fire-building instruction here, and while I'm sure the fire theme was supposed to be symbolic, I'm not sure that I really understood what it stood for.  Baptism by flames?  Burning away the sins of the past?  That's my main guess, but I'm just not sure.  Apparently I'm not very good at recognizing things like that.

Overall, not a perfect book, but a really lovely one that has some big emotional impact and left me sniffling a little at work.  And you know whose fault that is?  Teddy fucking Roosevelt.

4 stars out of 5.

Flight - Alyssa Rose Ivy (Crescent City Chronicles #1)

Young adult paranormal romances have this thing about having "heros" who are really bad bad bad news and who girls with any sense should not get involved with.  This one is no different.  Combined with the myriad of other problems in this book, I'm glad I didn't pay for it (it's currently free on Amazon) because I would have been very, very disappointed if I had.  The main character is the only one with any semblance of dimension; the supporting characters might as well not even be there, because their interactions with the heroine only serve as filler; the plot is nonexistent until 70% of the book is already done; the worldbuilding is seriously lacking in believability; and then there's the aforementioned problem with the hero, who is a lying, manipulative sonofabitch but who we're supposed to like anyway???  Why does this always happen?!  I think it's an example of something I read about recently called "the likeable misogynist," who is a male prototype in which misogyny is used to make him "not perfect" because wink-wink, nudge-nudge, he loves the girl, he's just kind of a jerk about it, but it's no big deal, amiright?  WRONG.

So, the hot mess starts when Allie and her best friend Jess go to New Orleans to work at Allie's Dad's hotel for the summer.  Of course, later the hotel turns out to be the center of a ton of paranormal activity, which of course Allie's dad doesn't seem to know about at all, and yet the giant, rich conglomerate that runs all of the paranormal activity in New Orleans just let this random guy from New York buy it anyway... Sure.  Yeah.  That makes sense.  Totally.  (I'm being sarcastic.  It doesn't.  None of this makes sense.)  Allie has sworn of men but immediately lays eyes on a Total Hottie and that's it for that vow.  Now, Allie is allowed to be attracted to people--of course she is.  Everyone is.  But she kind of sets herself up as all "high and might, I'm not into men, blahblahblah" and then loses her resolve in about two seconds.  It's called willpower, girl!  Jess, the friend, stays around for about two seconds before leaving and is never seen again.  No character development.  No purpose.  Nada.  Why was she there in the first place?  Allie could have literally gone to New Orleans on her own and the story would not have been any different.  This goes for most of the side characters who show up.  They have no purpose and the narrative would have been exactly the same if they had never appeared.  Every single piece of your book needs to have a purpose that all build up to the main plot and enrich it; that is not the case here.  At all.

The Hottie in question, Levi, of course turns out to have wings, which he reveals after about two days of knowing Allie because...reasons.  (He likes her, but that seems like a terrible reason to reveal your secret species to someone you just met who could bring the freakin' X Files down on your head if she were so inclined.)  Allie thinks this is cool.  Allie insists she likes biology and is good at it, and she's going to Princeton in the fall, but all things considered, I think Allie thinking this is cool and not finding it all very creepy speak to her lack of intelligence or at least lack of self-preservation.  A human getting mixed up with non-humans...there cannot possibly be any problems there, right?

Wrong.  Obviously.  Though you wouldn't know it for a long time because Allie spends all of her days shopping or eating ice cream or clubbing (apparently there is no minimum drinking age in this version of New Orleans; I understand that underage kids do get alcohol, but Allie is drinking at every single meal, including out with her parents) doing exactly two things before she goes back to bed, and doing remarkably little work into the bargain considering that's the reason she was in New Orleans to begin with.  This could very easily be just a "slice of life" book about a girl about to go to college, because the plot for the vast majority is completely lacking.  People keep popping up knowing things that they shouldn't know (one character assumes that Allie is Pteron, the same "species" as Levi and his friends, and then 2.5 seconds later knows she's human without anything changing to indicate that) and people not telling Allie things that she should know even though she demands answers more than once.

And then, of course, everything goes into hell in a handbasket, 70% of the way through; the action here lasts about 15 pages and then ends, going back to just a lot of talking, though at least now we know that something is going on in the larger scope.

Levi is, of course, an asshole.  He is the main person who will not give her answers even though he apparently thinks he wants to spend the rest of his life with her.  He does not tell her things that will have a huge impact on her life.  He will not leave her alone even though she tells him no, repeatedly and very loudly.  He pretty much stalks her, terrifies her, humiliates her in front of her coworkers and parents.  When he puts her life in danger, he says it's her fault--because obviously she shouldn't have had any objections to the way he was treating her and should have acted the way he wanted her to even though she had no logical basis to do so.  Does Allie stand for all of this?  Well...yes and no.  She gets pretty pissed off at him on a regular basis, so the girl has some expectation of respect, but she also forgives him super easily, so apparently that expectation isn't a very large one.

Other issues with this book: Ivy uses the threat of rape as a plot device just for the shock factor of it; there is not actual "plot" worth to it and no character dimension.  Shame.  Rape is a serious, serious thing and shouldn't be used so lightly.  The book doesn't read like a first draft, but it does read like a draft that has been edited for typos and major grammar errors and then put up without any plot or character refinements.  The hierarchy of the paranormal world doesn't really make sense; you seriously want me to believe that crows are at the top of the food chain?  Not so much.  Oh, and the cover looks like the characters don't have legs, but that's minor in the grand scheme of things.

I will absolutely not be reading the sequel to Flight.  This book was enough of a train wreck; I feel no need to see how Ivy can make it worse.

1.5 stars, mainly because the book is set in New Orleans, which is cool.  The rest is not.

American Catch - Paul Greenberg

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I love food.  And of all the foods I love, seafood is at the very top of that list.  When I was in high school, if I got straight As, my dad would take me out for all-you-can-eat snow crab legs at one of our favorite restaurants.  In more recent times, I've dragged my boyfriend out on a quest for fried clams because I decided I had to have them right now, and then spent a week in Maine eating sea food at literally every meal.  Fish and chips (cod), fish tacos with a cilantro-lime crema (tilapia), lobster pots, crab cakes, steamed mussels, grilled trout, spicy crunchy yellowtail rolls, broiled scallops, blackened catfish...the list goes on and on.  If it dwells in water, I'll eat it.  I trace much of this back to growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, which was once the largest fresh-water fishing port in the world, mainly for one item: Lake Erie perch.  When I visit home these days, I make a point of ordering up some fried perch, one of the most delectable fried fish you can ever consume and one that came right out of the waters I grew up by.  Until now, it never occurred to me that eating Lake Erie perch--a fish that was caught within miles of where I ate it--was unusual.  But guess what?  It is.  It's very unusual.  And that's a very, very bad thing.

Greenberg uses American Catch to dig into all the problems with how Americans use and view seafood.  The US controls more fishing grounds than any other country, and we have an extremely long coast line, and yet the vast majority of our seafood is shipped off to countries like China--and most of the seafood we eat is imported from those same countries, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.  Using three examples--New York oysters, Gulf shrimp, and Alaskan sockeye salmon--Greenberg illustrates how this came about and what the implications for it are.  We constantly decimate our coastlines and the salt marshes that comprise them in order to create more land for agriculture and more desirable places for the rich to vacation, all the while destroying the habitats and breeding grounds of local sea food; we did this to such a degree in New York City that it's actually illegal to eat the New York oysters that survive there, because the water is so polluted that eating said oysters can make people sick.  And we do this even though creating an environment that can sustain oysters is good for the city: oysters filter water and create reefs that can help lessen the effects of of storm surges, like the one that decimated so much of the city in Hurricane Sandy.  On the shrimp front, we allow industry, such as big oil, to pollute the Gulf of Mexico and destroy our coast and the shrimp that live and breed there, and mess with the Mississippi River until it's basically just shooting washed-off fertilizers from big agriculture into the Gulf and creating a deoxygenated dead zone where nothing can live.  And in Alaska, on Bristol Bay, the largest salmon run in the world with some of the best salmon there is, we ponder letting a huge mine destroy the area because it offers a faster payout than fishing does.  And for some reason, we don't see most of this as a problem.

Greenberg really digs into why this is; why we're blind to the problem of seafood because it doesn't present itself as a problem.  After all, I can still grab as many pounds of shrimp as I want from the grocery store, so why should the problem of the Gulf come to my mind?  Does it really matter that the shrimp I'm buying come from farms that are wreaking similar havoc in Asia, and that the shrimp are likely heavily dosed with antibiotics to avoid the diseases that can decimate harvests?  Well...it probably does.  And if it doesn't, it should.  I can very easily see this book being painted as a tool of the "liberal media" by conservatives, who, as Greenberg points out, tend to see any attempt at regulation as an interference with their god-given rights to do whatever the hell they want, and screw anyone who disagrees.  But the fact of the matter is, the way that we treat seafood isn't sustainable, and if I want to be able to enjoy a big piece of salmon years down the road, our attitudes toward it have to change.  This isn't really a new idea, but it is an important one that nonetheless seems to get lost in the shuffle, and the more it's brought up, the more potential there is for people to listen and enact change.

This is a great book, one that uses a few solid examples in conjunction to make a much larger and powerful point, and one that brings in a lot of the people who are actually, personally affected in order to illustrate how the issues in the industry can drag us down.  It doesn't focus on just one geographic area, instead showing that our abuse of seafood truly is a national problem, from New York to Louisiana to Alaska, and that we need to consider the bigger picture of how we view seafood if we're going to fix it.  Because of the subject matter, it's a book that can come across a little preachy at times, which is typical for books like this and somewhat unavoidable, and Greenberg gets all cheery at the end in what I think was an attempt to avoid blatant fearmongering.  Still, after reading this one, I know one thing: I'll probably be looking into where my seafood comes from a little more closely from now on.

4 stars out of 5.

The Zhivago Affair - Peter Finn and Petra Couvee

If this book were a web article, I'd call the title clickbait, because it's pretty misleading.  After taking a class about Soviet and CIA operations during the Cold War a few years ago, I've been drawn to true spy stories, and thought this would be another one.  It's really not.  In fact, The Zhivago Affair isn't really about the Kremlin, the Cia, or the battle over a forbidden book.  It's more about the book itself and the reaction to it, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, and the trouble that it caused the author, Pasternak.  While there is some involvement of the Kremlin (who banned the book, without having ever read it) and the CIA (who printed copies to give to people traveling to the Soviet Union as part of a campaign to introduce a wider variety of viewpoints behind the Iron Curtain) it's mostly about Pasternak and those directly involved with him, and his struggle to stand by his work while facing derision from many officials in the USSR.

This isn't a very long book--less than 300 pages, which is fairly short for a nonfiction book regarding the Cold War, but it wasn't a particularly riveting read.  Maybe I would have been more interested if I'd known what the book was really about going into it; as it was, I found myself putting it down often to read other things that were more interesting.  Knowing about how history has treated people it views as dissenters, either rightly or wrongly (when Krushchev, one of the Soviet leaders who was eventually ousted by his compatriots, eventually read the book, he said there was "nothing Soviet" about it) is important, but at the same time I'm not quite sure there was 266 pages of things worth knowing in this.  It was interesting reading about how Pasternak reacted to his persecution, and how others both inside and outside of the Soviet Union reacted to Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak's treatment, but it was...pretty much all the same?  There wasn't a lot of repetition, but once you realize that Pasternak was being persecuted by the Soviet administration, there's not really that much more to it.  It never really stops, right up until Pasternak dies, and if you know anything about the USSR, you wouldn't really expect it to.

The bits about the CIA are very short--maybe a chapter and a half total, focusing on the CIA publishing copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and getting them into the hands of Soviet citizens both at home and abroad, at the World's Fair and at a youth festival.  The bits about the Kremlin are very short, too; a few parts about different people being followed or interrogated about the novel, royalties coming in from abroad, stuff like that.  There really is no "battle" over the book, at least not between the Kremlin and CIA; if there's any sort of battle, it's in the press and with the Nobel Prize Committee.  Overall, the story, while interesting and historically important, wasn't what it was made out to be, and that's worth keeping in mind when going into this book.  It was okay, but not particularly riveting, and it's not a nonfiction book I would pick up again.

2 stars out of 5.

A Matter of Grave Concern - Brenda Novak

I obviously need to start reading the descriptions of books before I buy them, because for some reason I thought this was a paranormal romance.  A Victorian-era paranormal romance, to be sure, but I thought something paranormal would be involved.  That said, when I realized it wasn't (very quickly) I wasn't disappointed.  I love me a historical romance, so I dove right in.  Novak's premise was interesting, especially because it didn't seem to involve the well-born ton characters that historical romances so often feature, and I defintely have never read a historical romance (or any sort of romance) that featured body-snatching as a plot point.  This seemed to have a lot going for it.  However, in the end I was vastly disappointed.

Why was I so disappointed with this?  Well, in a nutshell, I was bored.  There are a lot of plot lines in this book, none of which are particularly hard to follow by themselves or in conjunction, but none of which were particularly interesting, either.  There's the main storyline, in which our heroine, Abby, tries to buy a corpse for her father's medical school from some resurrectionists, ends up losing a lot of money, tries to get it back, and ends up kidnapped by the handsomest man of the lot, Max.  There's the plot where Max has joined the bodysnatching gang in order to find his missing sister, Madeleine, who was last seen in the company of the gang's leader.  In yet another plot, more bodies start turning up (and people go missing) and it's a question of whether they died naturally, ran off, or were (gasp!) murdered.  And then there were a few other subplots, most of which I can't remember because they just weren't interesting. 

The characters were all very flat and one-dimensional, and I didn't really empathize with any of them.  Absolutely every single one of them was boring.  I didn't find Abby believable as a character, either; all of her actions seemed extremely unlikely for a young woman from her situation.  I didn't find it likely that she would track down grave robbers; I didn't find it likely that she would know words like cock (she lived at a medical college; her knowing the physiological terms wouldn't surprise me, but I found the slang she used very out of character); and I didn't think it likely that such a smart young woman would dive headfirst into such stupid situations without thinking.  Some would probably try to say that this was because of her feelings for Max; I say that she did this even beforehand, and that if you're going to make your character out as smart enough to become a surgeon, if only the time's gender rolls allowed, you have to remember that she's a smart character and not have every ounce of her intelligence vanish the second someone with nice eyes shows up.  Believe it or not, women are capable of thinking even when emotions are involved, though Novak apparently feels differently.

Max and Abby's relationship was a dazzling display of Stockholm Syndrome that played out over the space of about three days and was a constant chain of annoyances.  Had there been more involvement of the obstacles between them (I would have loved to have seen Max's fiancee as a real character; that would have added a lot of dimension, or maybe some example of why Max had to marry her) it might have led to some emotional involvement from my end, but as it was, I just didn't care.  Madeleine's mystery is literally impossible to solve, which is annoying; a good mystery is one that you can't figure out, but the answer is revealed, you look back and go, "Of course!"  This wasn't like that.  At the end, I was left going, "That's it?  Really?"  The build-up takes forever and the climax wasn't very climactic at all, but seemed more like an after-thought.  And then Max and Madeleine suddenly have a relationship when before they had nothing to do with each other?  I'm not buying it.

I think I lot of the reason this was so boring was the writing style.  Novak's writing style just doesn't work for a juicy historical romance.  Her sex scenes were bland (never a good thing) and overall there was just a lot of telling and not showing (such a cliched expression, but that's how it was) that left me disconnected from the world she created.  I can typically take down a good historical romance in less than six straight hours, exact time depending on page length; I rarely need more than one sitting to finish a good one.  But despite starting this on a weekend with plenty of time, I spent more than a week chipping away at this one, hoping it would get better with each chapter.  It never did.  The book was far longer than it needed to be, with the "action" climax taking place way before the "emotional" climax and not much to keep the story moving in between.  When I found that this book actually ends at 87% on the Kindle (the rest is a preview of another book), I found myself praising the heavens, because I could not have taken another 13% of this.

Novak's clever titles and beautiful covers are very intriguing, but after this book, I'd be very leery of picking up any of her other books.

1.5 stars out of 5.