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.

Truly Madly Guilty - Liane Moriarty

A colleague was listening to this via audiobook and mentioned it was intriguing--she was about halfway through when this came up--albeit a bit slow.  I already had a copy on my shelf, and I like being able to discuss books with people rather than just shouting into the void of the internet (hello out there!) so I picked it up.  When I was about halfway through with the book, she was done...and when I mentioned it was super slow and probably not going to be as dramatic as it was making itself out to be, she confirmed.  I finished it anyway.  What a mistake.

I am fairly certain this was supposed to be a book of domestic suspense.  The book is divided into two parts that pretty much alternate chapters: the day of the barbecue, and a few months after.  The first half of the book is spent either building up to this barbecue, or characters talking vaguely about how it changed everything, in what was clearly a very negative way.  And there's something about sex!  So here I am going, "Orgy?  Someone gets killed at an orgy?  What is it?"

What it is, is disappointing.  All of the build up for that?  The characters' lives are so mundane.  They all spend all of their time sniping at each other, and even discovering a dead body can't liven things up in this story.  They're all so boring, so blah.  I did not care about any of them, not at all.  And when the big "reveal" happened, I cared even less, because there's no suspense!  You know everything is going to be fine!  There's no real concern about that, because Moriarty has as good as told us that before the reveal happened.  So really, this is just a bunch of adults being melodramatic and having spats and avoiding each other like they are children, instead of talking to each other like functional human beings.

But what is really wrong with this book is the pacing.  It is slower than the slowest of snails.  And this slow pace isn't filled in by character development or self-discovery or anything like that, but rather instead relating every aspect of the characters' lives.  While some of these held promise--such as Erika's mother and Erika's upbringing--most of it was children screaming, adults moaning about their sex lives or lack thereof, and other things that just weren't compelling reading.  For what started out feeling like it was going to be a page-turner, it took me weeks to finish this book.

Also, no one is guilty in this book.  Blah.

Teach your kids to swim, folks.

1.5 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 Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell (Sparrow #1)

The Sparrow was the Deliberate Reader's book club book for June, for discussion in the Facebook group, and also the sci-fi selection for the year.  It also conveniently slotted into one of my reading challenge categories, for a book set on another planet.

The Sparrow is an interesting and immensely frustrating book.  It is interesting because it is as sci-fi book with a religious bend, and it involves first contacts with another intelligent species elsewhere in the galaxy--something that put me in mind of The Three-Body Problem, though that is a much "harder" sci-fi book than this.  It is immensely frustrating because all I really wanted was to slam these characters' heads, and the heads of their superiors, against a brick wall for being so incredibly stupid and ignorant of the Fermi Paradox.  I highly recommend reading Wait But Why's Fermi Paradox article, but ultimately it boils down to, in the words of Hank Green, "If they're out there, why don't we hear 'em talk?"  That is, if there is intelligent life out there--and statistically speaking, there should be--why do we not hear anything from other, extraterrestrial species?  There are a few different possible answers to this, but the one that always always always seems to come up in sci-fi is, "Because aliens are bad news," meaning that one of the reasons we don't hear from other intelligent species is that they know better than to be broadcasting stuff out into the void, because they know something we apparently don't, like there is something big and bad and willing to hurt us out there.  There are a few other explanations, too, of course, but obviously danger is a big driver of plot in sci-fi novels, so this is the one that comes up a lot.

Well, it turns out that you don't have to be big and bad and able to travel through space to hurt humans.  You just have to sing well enough to get them (us) to come to you (aliens; hi, aliens!).

So, as you have probably figured out by now, this book's central plot revolves around an act of astounding stupidity in which a group of humans, consisting of a Jesuit-led mission, set out to make contact with a newly-discovered intelligent species in the proximity of Alpha Centurai, despite not knowing anything about said other species other than that they exist.  Most of the book takes place significantly after this mission sets out, after the sole survivor (see, we knew it was a bad idea from the beginning) has returned to Earth, and his superiors are trying to figure out what has happened, particularly since the people who rescued him have also gone missing and are, presumably, dead.  The main character is Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest and linguist who is the one to first suggest sending a Jesuit mission to this other planet (BAD EMILIO!) without, you know, anyone with any idea of what should actually be done weighing in.  As a result of the horrible events that take place on Rakhat during the mission, he suffers a crisis of faith, and the timeline of the book set after his return greatly focuses on him trying to answer that great question: if God exists and is both omnipotent and benevolent, then how is it possible that horrible things still happen?

This is a book that aims for spiritual rather than preachy, which was good.  Some of the relationships between the characters were intriguing; watching them grow and change provided the real reason to read this book, because the characters here are emotionally intelligent even if they are naive and lacking a serious dose of common sense.

This is a slow book.  Nothing happens for much of it, and then everything happens in just a handful of chapters.  When I was close to the end of the book, I couldn't believe that it was supposed to be wrapped up in under a hundred pages, because there was so clearly so much left to go.  Russell resolves this by just dumping it all in a narrative Emilio puts forth that takes a few pages; not exactly ideal.  While the dark subject matter could have made for a very heavy read if broken out separately, this particular way of relating events did nothing for the book's pace.

In other problems, the "sci" part of the "fi" is fairly soft, without a lot of technicalities to it, and with a lot of things that left me raising an eyebrow and going, "Hm..."  Sherwood Smith, an author whom I quite admire, noted in her review that the book overall lacks world building, a statement with which I would agree wholeheartedly in its applications to both her version of Earth and to Rakhat.  Much of the book is focused on other characters' fascination with Emilio's celibacy, and so it's not entirely surprising when it turns out the build-up of the entire book ends up being rape, much like in Outlander--but it also raises the question that, when you can write about literally anything in sci-fi, because you have the entire universe to play with, why turn back to rape?  Is there no way to have a crisis of faith without being raped?  Because, ultimately it's that which causes Emilio's breakdown--not any of the other horrible things to which he is witness.

Overall, a book that, while it has some interesting aspects attached to it, is immensely frustrating from conception to finish.  There is a second book that follows this, but I have no interest in reading it; from the book description, it promises to be nothing but more of the same.

2 stars out of 5.