Truth or Beard - Penny Reid (Winston Brothers #1)

I've really liked Penny Reid's books so far--I've been following her Knitting in the City series, though I think I actually have a few to catch up on there.  When I saw that this one, Truth or Beard, was on sale a while ago, and the start of a new series (and one that ties in with Knitting in the City!) I snatched it up...and then it languished on my Kindle.  But over the weekend, after reading Danielle Steel's Magic, I found myself wanting something, uhm...better.  So I went for this one.

Unlike the Knitting books, which take place in Chicago, Truth or Beard takes place in a small town in rural Tennessee.  Our heroine, Jessica, has returned there after getting her college degree so that she can work as a teacher and pay off her student debt while living with her parents and older brother, and save some money so that she can travel the world like she's always dreamed.  At a town Halloween party, where she happens to be dressed as Sexy Gandalf (beard and all) she runs into her long-time crush, Beau Winston, and the two end up having a hot-and-heavy make-out session...which comes to an abrupt end when "Beau" reveals that he's actually Duane, Beau's twin.  Who Jessica has not liked for a long time.  But he's liked her.  And this revelation makes Jessica start to look at their former interactions in a new light.  Duane really wants to have a relationship with Jessica, settle down, have kids, the whole nine yards.  But Jessica isn't planning on hanging around.

Like Reid's other books, this is light and fun but also sincere.  It was nice to see a heroine who really goes after what she wants, but is also willing to compromise.  While Jessica isn't willing to just throw away her dreams of travel for a guy, she does recognize that, ultimately, she doesn't have to travel for years at a time to see the world, especially because she's a teacher and could travel during the summers.  Duane is actually the one who doesn't really want to compromise, but it's more due to a sense of duty to his family than any desire to be "in control" of the relationship.  And like her other books, Reid puts in a little dramatic sub-plot, this one having to do with a biker gang, a chop shop, and one of Duane's brothers.  But she doesn't make this too far-fetched and it wraps up pretty neatly without any extraneous suspension of disbelief.

Another of Reid's strengths has historically been her supporting characters, and there's no exception to that here, either.  Jessica has a great female friend, Claire, who was great.  It's always so nice to see female friendships in books, rather than women just sniping at each other over a guy.  And of course Duane's brothers are present here, too, to various degrees.  My favorite was 100% Cletus, who is kind of, well, weird.  I'm really looking forward to reading his book, which is the third one, and I immediately bought it and the second after finishing this because I just liked him so much.  He's the brainy brother, who has a sense of logic and a strange omniscience.  This played really well as a supporting character and I'm hoping it plays well with him as a main, too.

Overall, this was a fun, light read.  I really like Reid and will definitely continue to read her.

4 stars out of 5.  

Magic - Danielle Steel

So, Danielle Steel is evidently one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.  Up there with, you know, William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie.  She's the best-selling living author.  She's written like a hundred and fifty books.  All I have to say for this is...I guess it's the sheer volume of book she's written that's selling, because the quality certainly isn't there.

The premise of this book--a group of people meets in Paris every year, has a pop-up dinner at a famous monument, and then departs, with the story following a group of friends over the course of a year between one dinner and the next--sounded interesting.  Action heavy, no, but with plenty of room for character-driven drama.  And I remember my mom having so many Danielle Steel books on her shelves when I was little...surely there must be a reason for that!  So I was expecting a decent amount here.  Not the world, but a decent story with good characters and solid writing.

I didn't get it.  While there is character-driven drama, it's petty and superficial and the writing is that of a first draft.  Clearly, when you're putting out three or four books a year, you don't have much time to polish them, and I guess people just let this awful writing go by with the excuse of, "Oh well, it's Danielle Steel, it's fine!"  It is not fine.  Comma splices abound here, sentences are redundant, and the story is all tell and no show.  None of the characters have any depth to them at all.  The whole thing has a very superficial feel to it despite what could have been some very heart-wrenching or uplifting story lines.  As it was, I couldn't really bring myself to care about any of the six main characters.  This is, at its heart, a book about Rich People Problems, but its not a good one.  Stories about Rich People Problems can actually be very funny, or very humanizing.  This wasn't any of it.  While some characters here were in really awful situations--one woman's husband leaves her for his twenty-four-year-old model girlfriend, and the woman is left trying to juggle their huge business with the dissolution of their marriage; another couple faces upheaval in their marriage when an amazing job offer threatens to pull the husband halfway around the world for three years--the writing made them come off as more whiny than genuinely troubled or torn, and that's rather disappointing to me.

I read this book for a reading challenge category (a best-seller from 2016) and honestly I can't see myself reading anything else by Steel based on the experience here.  It has a startlingly high rating (3.9/5) on Goodreads, given the extremely poor quality...but then, people went crazy for Fifty Shades of Gray too, didn't they?  Reviews seem to largely consist of "Oh, it's a fun summer/beach/weekend read, very light!" but being light, or a summer or beach read, and being good are not mutually exclusive, nor should they be.

2 star out of 5.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1)

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love.

It did not end well. 

Wow.  Why did I not read this book before now?  It's so cliche, so trope-y, and yet Taylor has a way of writing and bringing everything together that turns what could have very easily been trite into something truly beautiful.

The story here is about Karou, a teenage girl living in Prague and attending art school when she's not running errands collecting teeth for a chimera named Brimstone, who pays her in wishes.  Raised by Brimstone and a band of compatriots, Karou has always felt out of place both in their presence and in the human world.  But one day, while on an errand in Marrakesh, Karou is attacked by an honest-to-goodness angel--and while she escapes, she soon finds herself cut off from Brimstone and the only family she's ever known.

Overall, I found this to be an amazing book.  The magic doors that can open to different locations, Karou's background, the art, the lush descriptions of Prague, her apartment, all of it.  The sizzling chemistry between Karou and Akiva, with a dynamic of "meant to be" that I love to see in books--yes, it's basically love at first sight, but there's a reason behind it.  And I adore the idea of wishes as payment, with the different denominations and such.  For the first two-thirds of the book, I adored this story.  And then Karou found out who she really was, and...the plot just sloooowed.

The last third of the book completely changes tone and pace from the first two-thirds because Taylor suddenly jumps back in time to a "how we got to this point" perspective with Madrigal.  While the insight into chimera society was fascinating, but it just didn't seem to fit with this point in the story and read like a very well-written and rich info-dump rather than as something to propel the plot forward, which is what really should have been at this point in the book structure-wise.  I wouldn't have minded this story line about Madrigal, but I feel like it might have been better peppered throughout the rest of the book rather than dropped in a lump at the end.  It goes back to the "present day" story for the very last bit, of course, and while you can see what's coming, it's kind of this dread sense of hoping it's not what you think it is...but it is, of course.  A terrible ending but also a magnificent one because it sets up the rest of the series for plots of redemption and vengeance and romance, all of which are perfectly delicious in conjunction with each other.

So, yes.  Some pacing problems with how it was structured, but overall a wonderful book.  I can't wait to read the other two.

4 stars out of 5.

The Six-Gun Tarot - R. S. Belcher (Golgotha #1)

For my Popsugar 2017 Reading Challenge, I needed to read a book from a genre I'd never heard of before.  So I started searching for obscure book genres, and something called "weird west" popped up, so I searched for that and The Six-Gun Tarot came up.  Luckily the public library system had a copy of it, so off I went.

It turns out, I have read a weird western before, I just didn't know what it was.  Basically, weird westerns appear to be paranormal fantasy books set in the west, old or modern.  The first one I read, without really knowing this was a genre of its own, was Welcome to Nightvale, which takes place in modern times.  The Six-Gun Tarot follows a similar bend but its set in the years following the Civil War.

The book features an ensemble cast and is centered around the town of Golgotha, which rose up around Argent Mountain, home of both a silver mine and a sinister dark presence.  The town has always been plagued by weird happenings--a bat-thing that snatched people off the street, something that drained animals and people of all the moisture in their bodies, little rat-people.  The people of Golgotha are pretty much used to it, and things are mostly kept in check by the sheriff, Jonathan Highfather, and his deputy, known only as Mutt.  Mutt is half-coyote and Highfather is apparently a dead man whose time hasn't yet come and survived not one, not two, but three hangings and who evidently can't be killed.  Also on the page are Maude, a trained killer who's put aside her training to be the wife of a banker; Augustus, a shopkeeper who's keeping his dead wife's talking head in a jar of liquid in his apartment; and Jim, a young man fleeing the East where he's wanted for murder and who carries his dead father's magical stone eye in his pocket.  All of these people are drawn together around a string of madness, murders, and disappearances that don't bode well for Golgotha, or the world at large.

I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would!  I think Belcher did a great job of weaving together the many characters' stories and building the town of Golgotha.  Totally weird, but with a good explanation behind it.  I'm not sure that the whole God storyline really needed to be included, but eh, it was okay.  Honestly, that seemed to be the least woven-in story, even though it was the background around which the rest of the book revolved.  One thing I do think happened is that Belcher might have tried to incorporate a few too many main characters here.  I like an ensemble cast, but this is a book series and so I think it could have been used to introduce some characters for future books while keeping the core cast smaller.  Not all of the cast ended up being integral to the plot of this book, so I think their dedicated chapters could have been cut and small details about them instead sprinkled throughout the chapters dedicated to the characters who actually were central to this story; then the others could have been further expanded upon in future books.  Because the non-central characters here had a lot of page time, it seemed like they were pushing aside the characters who actually had a bearing on the central plot.

But still, this was a very atmospheric book, and I really liked it.  Unfortunately the library doesn't have the second book in the series and it looks like the third isn't actually out yet, but I'm interested in reading them if it ever comes my way.

4 stars out of 5.

Dream Lake - Lisa Kleypas (Friday Harbor #3)

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

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

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

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

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

2 stars out of 5.

Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo (Grisha #1)

Set in a Russian-inspired fantasy world, Shadow and Bone is the story of Alina, a young woman working as a cartographer in the army until, on a journey through the magically-dark-and-dangerous Fold (aka the Unsea) she shows off previously-unknown light powers and is swept off to be trained as a Sun Summoner and a savior of the people...falling into the grasp of the intriguing Darkling and leaving behind her best friend from childhood, Mal, in the process.  One of my friends loves this series, and Bardugo's associated duet that happens after these books (Six of Crows and its sequel) so I had this slated for one of my reading challenge categories for the year in order to finally get around to it.  Aaaaaand...?

Rage.  Ugh.  This started off with such promise.  "Who is the love interest here?" I demanded of said friend.  "I don't want to get my hopes up over nothing."  She refused to tell me.  "This book is going to crush me, isn't it?" I asked.  She liked my comment.  Because here's the thing...the Darkling is freakin' awesome and Mal is totally lame.

Yes.  I said it.  And coming off the high that was Uprooted just a little while ago, I was so looking forward to another magical-tutor-romance thing.  And for a while, it looked like I was going to get it!  I was intrigued.  The Darkling has, guess what, dark powers that compliment Alina's sun-summoning ones.  A light-mage/dark-mage pairing?  Okay, not the most original, but I thought there was promise there.  But as I read on, I started to get suspicious.  Mal wasn't responded to Alina's letters, for no apparent reason.  This clearly meant he wasn't getting them--they were being intercepted somewhere along the way.  And honestly, it just couldn't be that easy.  After all, there are three books in this series, and this is just the first.  I started to have a sneaking feeling that the Darkling was going to turn out to be a Big Bad and Mal was going to sweep back in and become the childhood-friend-turned-love-interest, which is a dynamic that I actually don't really like.  And if the Darkling became the Big Bad, it would mean that Bardugo was seemingly falling back on the tired, tired, tired trope of "light=good, dark=bad."  Which I really, really hoped wasn't going to happen, because I had such hopes here.

Overall, this was a book with a lot of potential.  It's a story with a lot of potential.  I have a bit of hope for it becoming fuller and more fleshed out in the next two books, which I definitely will read, but coming to the end of this one I find myself a tiny bit disappointed.  The writing is pretty clearly on the wall here, and I was feeling so miserable about it that I even went and read the jacket blurb of the third book.  I can already tell that I don't like where it's headed.  Sigh.  So much sadness here.

Another reviewer suggested that, if you liked where you thought this book was going but were disappointed in where it actually went, you should read Sarah J. Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses and its sequels.  I'm inclined to agree; while maybe not having the awesome Russian-fantasy-dynamic that the Grisha has (which is very cool and I'm so happy to see that authors are branching out into areas other than generic-medieval-England fantasy settings) it has the feel that I was actually looking for here.  I'd also recommend Uprooted.

So, yes, I will keep reading these books...but I'm going in steeled for the worst.

3 stars out of 5.

I've Got My Duke to Keep Me Warm - Kelly Bowen (Lords of Worth #1)

One of my friends recently read this book and really liked it, so it became one of the next ones on my reading list!  Luckily the library had it available, so I was able to get to it quickly.  The story here follows Gisele, a woman who faked her own death to escape an abusive relationship and now works to spirit other women out of similar circumstances.  Deprived of one of her partners, she's on the hunt for a new one.  A man who can be a hero.  Gallant, who's up for helping a woman in distress, who can sweep her off her feet... When she finds Jaime Montcrief drunk in a tavern, he doesn't seem like the very picture of that, but after a quick test, she decides he suits.  And so off they go, to save the woman who's set to marry Gisele's former husband.

While this was a cute plot in some respects, the takedown of Gisele's former husband ultimately relies very very heavily on gaslighting him.  This is portrayed as being so clever; they're going to make him crazy so that he can't get married!  Ha!  Gisele also tries to justify it by saying he's already mad as a hatter, he just needs something to bring it out where other people can see.  But the thing is...Adam, said former husband, doesn't really come across as crazy.  Possessive as hell, yes.  Sadistic, yes.  Unsuitable for marriage, yes.  But actually mentally unstable?  No.  Gisele and Jaime actually set out to convince him he's crazy and to make him display it in public, and the entire time they were working on this, I couldn't help but think that if some roles had been reversed and they'd been gaslighting Jaime's former wife instead of Gisele's former husband, this wouldn't have slid by nearly as easily.  And when you flip the genders and you have an issue...well, that's an issue in and of itself.

What I did like here was the relationship between Jaime and Gisele.  Jaime doesn't pressure Gisele into anything even though he falls for her--and she for him--in pretty quick order, within the space of a few days.  He knows that she was abused, but he doesn't pressure her for the details.  He doesn't try to pressure her into kissing him or otherwise being intimate with him.  He doesn't try to "fix" her.  Instead, he lets her come to things on her own terms and supports her in her decisions.  Even when he disagrees with them, he hears her out and then makes suggestions for how to proceed safely, instead of taking what would be the route of some other popular romance heroes and locking her up or going off to solve things on his own without any communication.  Their dynamic was very good.

Another thing that I really liked here was the use of parallels.  There are so many instances in this book where Bowen brings back something mentioned earlier and makes a parallel scene out of it, tying together both visuals and themes to loop everything together.  This was very masterfully done, and I really appreciated it.

The writing was good and I liked the characters, and I'm definitely not writing off Bowen.  But I think the plot here needs to be looked at critically, because gaslighting anyone is not cool.  There had to have been other ways to resolve the problem here without making Adam question his own sanity.

Also, this looks like a Christmas romance, but it's not--I'm not even sure it actually takes place in winter--and has nothing to do with any dukes keeping anyone warm, so I'm not sure where the title and cover are supposed to play into this, at all.

3 stars out of 5.