#CBR10 Book 41: "After the Wedding" by Courtney Milan

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4 stars

I was very kindly granted an ARC of this book in return for an unbiased review. I had already pre-ordered the book when I was given the ARC. The book is on sale now, and I recommend that you buy it.

This is the second novel in The Worth Saga. While it might work fine as a stand alone book, I would recommend beginning with the first book in the series, Once Upon a Marquess, to get a better idea of whom all the various supporting characters from Camilla's family are.

Lady Camilla Worth was twelve when her father and oldest brother were convicted of treason and her family lost their money and social standing. Her father committed suicide in prison, her brother Anthony was transported to Australia, but there was a big storm and a shipwreck on the way and he is believed to have died on the journey. A family friend offered to take in the remaining Worth siblings, with the exception of Camilla's younger sister, Theresa (who could most kindly be described as difficult). Judith, the eldest remaining Worth, promptly refused, and when Camilla wanted to stay, because she wanted "pretty dresses and lemon cakes", very harsh words were had, then Judith took her other two siblings and left. Camilla has never been able to forget Judith's angry words, and sadly didn't get to stay with their "uncle" for many weeks before he shipped her off to some friends, unable to care for a moody young girl. Camilla never gets to stay in one place for very long, getting sent on whenever she is deemed too difficult or whomever she ended up serving (usually unpaid) died and after eight years, believes she is being punished for having chosen material comfort over love all those years ago. Now she's working for a pittance for a minister who claims he's saving her soul. This is where she meets, and is married at gunpoint to Adrian.

Adrian Hunter is the grandson of a duke. His mother married a black abolitionist, and as a result, some of her family don't really want to acknowledge her or her family. Three of Adrian's brothers died fighting in the American Civil War, so now he's desperate to prove himself in some way and one of the ways in which he tries to do that is by getting his uncle, Bishop Denmore, to publicly support Adrian and his remaining brother. His uncle just needs a teeny tiny little favour first - which involves Adrian posing as a valet for a rival bishop, and finding proof of said man's corruption. Once he obtains this proof, Denmore promises to openly acknowledge his nephews and sister. Adrian is not a very good valet and before he has any chance of finding anything incriminating, he finds himself married at gunpoint to Camilla, a flirtatious housemaid in the house Bishop Lassiter is visiting.

Camilla just wants someone, anyone, to love her or even like her. She hasn't had anywhere to call home for so long and never had any responses to the letters she sent her family, so she assumes they still want nothing to do with her. While she is rather taken aback by being forced to marry a near-stranger, she's also briefly hopeful that at least she'll finally have someone - a hope that dies when Adrian insists they need to get an annulment. Ms Milan is really good at writing characters whose suffering break your heart, and Camilla's loneliness and hopes for belonging are truly heart-wrenching. Unbeknownst to Camilla, however, her family haven't actually given up on her. Her sister Judith and her new husband have spent massive resources trying to track her down, only to fail, and her younger siblings, Benedict and Theresa, are determined to find Camilla, as a gift for Judith. While Theresa may have annoyed the crap out of me in Once Upon a Marquess, she's so much better written in this book, and I am very much looking forward to seeing where her story goes in future books.

I felt a lot more for Camilla than for Adrian in this book, but that's probably also because of my anxiety and being left without anyone is literally one of the biggest fears I have, so our poor heroine having suffered abandonment after abandonment, without ever giving up that last sliver of hope really got to me. The main theme of this book is the importance of consent and choice and how no one should have to settle, but be allowed to choose who they spend their lives with. Adrian wants their marriage annulled because he wants what his parents had, a slow falling in love and a mutual choosing of each other. As the story progresses, Camilla comes to realise that even though she loves Adrian, she also deserves someone who chose HER, whose fondest wish is to share their life with hers. It's not her fault that she's been abandoned so many times and it's simply bad luck and a series of unfortunate circumstances that's caused her to be so harshly punished for a moment of youthful bad judgement.

There is a need for added diversity in romance and Ms Milan has proven before that historical England really wasn't as white-washed as a lot of books would like you to think it is. In this book, we get a bisexual heroine marrying a biracial hero, while there is a large cast of diverse supporting characters from a number of countries and cultures making a difference, without it ever seeming forced or like she's trying to prove some sort of point. Adrian's brother is going to be the hero of the next book, if I'm to believe Ms. Milan's website and this will be the last book in the Worth Saga set in England. She's moving the action into the big wider world instead.

I'm sorry if this review is disjointed and a bit incoherent. I'm desperately behind on my reviews as my now four month old little boy is spending more of his days awake and demanding a lot more of my attention. My brain goes a bit muddled, and this was the best I could do under the circumstances. TL, DR - this is a moving and engaging romance, well worth your time, and you should consider buying it. I'm already looking forward to seeing what the next book holds, and hope the wait for it will not be as long as for this one.

Judging a book by its cover: I keep looking at this cover and trying to understand what in the world is going on. There's the strangely yellow sky, the random field of red flowers (poppies maybe?) and our poor cover model, obviously supposed to portray Camilla, with some sort of hazy lace tablecloth stuck to her head at an implausible angle. There's the voluminous purple ballgown the woman is wearing (resembling nothing like I recall Camilla wearing at any point in the book - certainly NOT when she is being forced to marry), but it's the awful veil that gets me every time. I've seen a lot of bad book covers over the years, this is near the top.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 40: "Once Upon a Marquess" by Courtney Milan

Page count: 372 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

This is a re-read. My original review of the book can be found here.

This book was such a disappointment to me when it came out, and as I mention in my original review, it was not an easy book for Ms. Milan to write, and felt a bit cobbled together and nothing really worked all that well as a result.

With the next volume in the series just around the corner, I found myself barely remembering anything about this book and wanted to re-read it. I'm glad I did, because I had forgotten pretty much everything but the major plot-beats (and that I hated Theresa, the youngest Worth sister). One thing that changed between my first read and this re-read is that I read a short story (given away as a freebie to Courtney Milan newsletter subscribers) about Theresa, set some time after this book, and it gave me more insight into her character. With hindsight, knowing how much Ms Milan struggled to get this whole novel to work, I suspect Theresa and her neuro-atypical outlook at the world, let alone her completely different life goals from Judith got short shrift in the book and she came across as rather more insufferable than the author intended. And I had forgotten just how much I enjoyed her adventures in bread-baking in the latter part of the book.

Re-reading the book with lowered expectations absolutely helped, but I didn't find myself able to adjust the rating, as there are just too many story lines battling for space in the book and Christian and Judith's romance really gets lost. While I'm sure it was supposed to be cute and quirky, I also found myself rather annoyed by Judith's tendency to use water fowl terminology to swear. Can't really blame the woman for her love of bread and sandwiches though. The description of her gorging herself on freshly baked bread and butter when visiting Christian made me really hungry.

As part one of a long (and I suspect rather sprawling) series, I think this is probably a good book. It does a good job of introducing all the characters in the Worth family, even if Anthony and Camilla are mostly talked about, rather than appearing in person. It's just not a very satisfying romance, as too many other things and characters fight for the reader's attention throughout the book.

Judging a book by its cover: Another Courtney Milan, another photo-shopped wedding dress, this one with one of the seemingly endless skirts that can be found on so many romance covers. I'm not a big fan of the muted brown countryside in the background, although the sky is pleasant. Since Judith and her siblings live in the city, I would have much preferred an urban backdrop rather than pastoral fields.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 38: "Hurts to Love You" by Alisha Rai

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 3 stars

This is the third book in a trilogy, and it's probably best to have read at least Hate to Want You first, to fully get the most out of the story. The central romance works on its own, but there are a lot of stuff in this book that works best if you've read at least the first book in the series.

Evangeline "Eve" Chandler has quietly suffered her father's verbal abuse for much of her life, and only recently started standing up for herself and choosing to do her own thing. She's quit her job working for the family's charitable foundation and has been secretly working as a driver for a ride share company, while doing research and planning to possibly start her own business. Struggling massively with self esteem issues, she's nervous about telling her beloved older brother about the idea, as he'd prefer it if she start working in the family company with him. Another secret she's been keeping, for much longer, is her years-long crush on Gabe Hunter, the tattoo artist who's her brother's best friend. She knows Gabe still sees her as a kid, but hopes that her brother's wedding may be a chance for her to show him that she's all grown up.

Gabriel "Gabe" Hunter grew up with the Kane family's children, since his adopted mother was their housekeeper. Then the Kanes and the Chandlers had a massive falling out (see my review of book one) and as Gabe was friends with Paul Kane, he didn't really feel he could have anything to do with the Chandlers anymore. Now Livvie Kane and Nick Chandler have buried the hatchet and are getting married. Both Gabe and Eve are in the wedding party, and end up spending quite a bit of time alone together in the week leading up to the ceremony. While Gabe has been trying not to notice, it's obvious to him that little Eve is a full-grown woman now, and she's not afraid to show her interest in him. It's not just the age difference between them or that she's a rich heiress and he's the housekeeper's son that could be problematic for a possible relationship. Gabe has secrets he's been keeping for most of his life, secrets that could impact both the Kane and the Chandler family and this wedding is certainly not the time he'd want those to come out.

OK, so first of all, it was super weird to be reading a romance with a hero called Gabriel when I now have an almost three month old baby with that same name. Thankfully, no one ever calls the hero anything but "Gabe", a nickname I will personally cut anyone who tries to attach to my child, so it could have been weirder. Secondly, while I really liked the first two books in this series (I know they didn't necessarily work for others amongst the CBR romance readers), this book failed to entirely work for me. I wasn't really convinced by the central romance, and towards the end, the big melodramatic family secrets that have been lurking in the background throughout the series were all revealed and overshadowed Eve and Gabe's story even further.

Nick and Eve's dad is quite clearly a class-A d*ck and I didn't care the slightest for the motivations behind his actions - there is no excuse for how he treated his children or Mrs Kane after the death of her husband and the way he kept the family feud going. He keeps trying to control his children, to the point where he comes to the rehearsal dinner and tries to get his son to break up with his fiancee - not cool.

This whole series has been a little bit too soap opera-y to my tastes, but it did put Alisha Rai on my radar, and since I'm not exactly great about reading diversely, that's not a bad thing. I will absolutely be looking into both her back catalogue, and for any new releases she has coming in the future.

Judging a book by its cover: Whomever is responsible for the cover art for this series has seriously been knocking it out of the park. On all three books, they've managed to find cover models who actually not only look more or less like the people described in the book, but they've dressed them in outfits that said people are likely to wear (or even described as wearing). While I didn't picture Eve's dress exactly like this, it's still a heck of a cover. Too bad about the man bun - can't stand those.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 134: "An Echo in the Bone" by Diana Gabaldon

Page count: 1126 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer! If you haven't read the previous six books in the series, there will be minor spoiler in this review. Proceed at your own risk. 

Having finally completed my epic re-read of the previous books in the series at a page count total that is frankly obscene, I finally got to read a new to me Diana Gabaldon. When this book first came out in 2009, I just didn't have the energy to expend on re-reading the whole series to catch up and I decided to just put it off. With book eight in the series being published earlier this year, the very entertaining TV series making me remember what I love so much about Gabaldon's writing and the excellent online company/support group I am part of over on Facebook to discuss the books with, I was a lot more motivated to get through the series now. Yet it still took me more than a month to get through this. 

There is so much I love about Gabaldon's writing. Jamie and Claire have been part of my life for a very long time, and I generally find most of the stuff involving them very interesting. But since pretty much book 3, these books aren't really just the continuing adventures of Jamie and Claire Fraser in the 18th Century. There's Brianna and Roger and their kids, now back in Scotland in the early 1980s (which I'm freaking out about a bit, because that's within MY lifetime). There is Jamie's best friend, Lord John Grey, who, when he's not trying to figure out why his niece is pretending to be madly in love with his stepson and hell bent on going to America to be reunited with him, goes about doing not much of anything obviously important or interesting for two thirds of this book. There's said stepson, Jamie's illegitimate offspring, William, the Eight Earl of Ellesmere, who is now a soldier in the British Army. He gets recruited for spy missions, but doesn't seem very good at it. He travels to Canada and back. There are letters between him and his stepfather which may be super interesting for people who are a lot more into the American War of Independence than I am, but to me, it was the literary equivalent of watching paint dry. So much boring.

Jamie and Claire have decided to go to Scotland to fetch Jamie's printing press. Jamie absolutely does not want to get involved in the war, because doing so might mean that he will face his son on the battlefield. The Frasers bring along their nephew, young Ian MacKenzie, because Jamie swore to his sister that he would bring the lad home, and while it's taken quite a long time, and Ian has both been adopted by a Native American tribe, married, divorced and experienced the loss of a child in that time, it would still be good for him to be reunited with his parents. Many many complications arise on their way. It again takes them the best end of the book to actually arrive in Scotland, but because much of their story was action packed and dramatic, I have no real complaint about their sections.

In the future, Roger and Bree have bought Lallybroch and are trying to make a home there. Bree gets a job working for the Scottish hydro-electric board, and Roger debates whether he wants to become a minister after all. They have a stash of letters written to them by Bree's parents, so they can follow along in the continuing adventures of Jamie and Claire, while worrying because they keep ending up in historically significant places and close to or in the midst of important events. Roger is trying to put down everything they know about time travel in writing and their family are settling in nicely when they have a very unexpected visitor about the same time as it is obvious that someone in the village not only knows about the gold Jamie and Claire hid way back in the 18th Century, but are willing to go to rather extreme steps to get to it.

As I said, far more of the book than I cared about is devoted to young William Ransom and Lord John Grey. I love Lord John, he's a great supporting character. I laugh every time I think about how Bree tried to coerce him into marriage. Reading about him in London, talking to his brother about irrelevant family matters, or travelling to France to speak to uninteresting individuals or generally just worrying about the safety of his immediate or extended family was super dull. Reading about William was even more boring, and as this was the first time I read the book, I had no idea which bits I could skim or even skip (now I know). There are seriously multiple chapters devoted to William lost in a swamp, deliriously wandering. Not cool, Diana Gabaldon, not cool. He does eventually have his life saved by young Ian in said swamp, but really, there are better ways those two characters could cross paths.

Not content with a supporting character gallery into double figures already, Gabaldon also introduces some new individuals in this book. William's cousin Dottie seems pretty spunky, for all that she's the sheltered daughter of a Duke. It's very obvious to the reader early on that her and William's story about being madly in love is a clever fiction, but it takes much of the book for the reader to discover why Dottie would go to such lengths to get herself to America. Young Ian, who loved and lost his Native American wife, falls in love again with a Quaker, Rachel Hunter. She and her brother Denzell, who is a doctor, join the Continental army as healers and I very much enjoyed everything with them.

I would have rated this book 3 stars based on the first two thirds, but then things really start coming together and becoming super exciting in the last third. It's quite telling that it took me more than a month to read the first two thirds, and about two days to get through the last third. Jamie and Claire finally make it to Scotland. We get to see Jenny and Ian again, and young Ian is reunited with his family. William and young Ian are both clearly a bit in love with Rachel Hunter. There is quite a lot of interaction between William, Ian, Claire and even Jamie. The bits having to do with the Battle of Saratoga were actually quite exciting. While they're in Scotland, Claire discovers that one of Fergus and Marsali's children desperatey needs surgery, so she returns alone to America. There are heart-breaking confirmed deaths, dramatic presumed deaths, dangerous surgeries being performed successfully, lovers reunited, terrible vengeance nearly wreaked, surprise time travellers from the past, abductions, marriages of convenience, long kept family secrets revealed - so much awesome and drama in only a few hundred pages. Why did I have to spend so much time reading about William in a swamp, Diana, when you are capable of such great things? Why not edit your books more!?!

With so many characters and storylines, Gabaldon also gets to have multiple cliffhangers towards the end of her book, making me really very excited for book 8. I'm now glad that I waited as long as I did to catch up, because (once I am done reading the books I need to complete my various reading challenges) I can go straight into Written in My Own Heart's Blood, which has been rated very highly by those Cannonballers who have already read it, and also appears to be only about 850 pages long, so the shortest book in the series for ages. Due to the excellent ending of this book, I'm now all anticipation.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR3 Book 6: "The Thorn Birds" by Colleen McCullough

Publisher: Virago Press
Page count: 592 pages
Rating: 5 stars
Date begun: January 17th, 2011
Date finished: January 24th, 2011

The Thorn Birds is one of my favourite books, a fact that was only confirmed more firmly to me when I reread it yet again. Normally I would not blog a book I had read more than once for Cannonball, but I'm going to make an exception this one time for three reasons:
1) It's been more than 5 years since I last read the book
2) It's the first time I ever read the book in English. All previous times I read the book, I read my Mum's Swedish translation. Not entirely the same thing.
3) I really wanted the challenge of blogging a book I like so much.

Mary Carson is a hugely wealthy widow who rules her enormous sheep farm Drogheda with an iron fist. She refuses to remarry, as she won't play second fiddle to any man, and she enjoys the attention and respect given to her by the men in the area, well aware that she would not have it were it not for her money and power. She enjoys matching her wits with the local priest, young and ambitious Father Ralph de Bricassart, whose been posted in the area (pretty much the back of beyond) as punishment for insulting a bishop. Ralph knows that a hefty bequest from the widow to the Catholic Church would mean his mistakes would be forgiven, end his exile and push him up the ladder of the Catholic hierarchy.

As she has no heirs, Mary sends for her younger brother Paddy, who lives with his family in New Zealand in relative poverty. Both from Ireland, Mary succeeded rather better than her brother, in marrying a wealthy man and surviving him. She knows that Paddy has numerous sons, and feels he can prove his worth by working as an overseer on Drogheda until her death. Paddy brings Fiona ("Fee"), his aristocratic, but exhausted wife, their only daughter Meghann ("Meggie"), and their five sons to Australia, where they are met by Father Ralph, who is immediately taken with the young, skinny red-headed girl who seems so neglected by most of her family.

The wife of a traditional man, and the mother of five sons, works extremely hard, taking care of the household, with hardly any help from her menfolk. She waits patiently for Meggie, her only daughter to grow old enough to help her with her many chores, but has little time or affection for the girl, focusing most of her affection on the boys, and chiefly, her eldest son, Frank - the only one who isn't red-headed like all the other Clearys. With only Frank having shown her any special attention before, Meggie becomes extremely fond of the Priest who actually sees her as her own person, and not just another mouth to feed.

As the years pass, and Fee has three more sons, Meggie helps her more around the house, but also grows lonelier. After a huge fight with Paddy, Frank learns of his true paternity and runs off to be a boxer. Fee becomes a lot more withdrawn, and the only brother who ever seemed to notice Meggie is gone. When her baby brother Hal, who Meggie pretty much raised single-handedly, dies at the age of four, Meggie is crushed. She turns more and more to the friendly and supportive Father Ralph.

The Clearys are grateful to Ralph for all his help. As well as being the parish priest, he is not above helping on the sheep station when there are floods, storms and fires. Only Mary Carson is jealous of the attention he gives the Clearys, and especially the little girl Meggie. She claims to be in love with him, and keeps trying to tempt him to break his vow of chastity. As Meggie grows older, she gets even more suspicious of their closeness, even though Ralph is eighteen years older than Meggie. Close to death, Mary gives one last huge ball, and attempts to tempt Ralph to her bed. He laughingly refuses her. The next morning, Mary is dead, and has altered her will, so that Paddy and his family no longer inherit the sheep station and her huge fortune of thirteen million pounds, but it all goes to the Catholic Church. She leaves the decision of revealing the new will to Ralph, who can choose to give Meggie and her family unimaginable wealth by destroying it, or submit it to her lawyers, and become a true golden boy of the Church.

Ralph chooses his career, and Paddy and his family are quite happy to be left as overseers of Drogheda, with salaries so high they will never want for anything. Ralph moves away, and moves up in the Church hierarchy, but is unable to forget about Meggie Cleary, who he sold for thirteen million pieces of silver. Meggie's affections for Ralph change from the devotion of a girl, to school girl crush to passionate longing. Even when she gets married, she refuses to give up her dream that one day, she will succeed where Mary Carson couldn't, and tempt Ralph away from his beloved Mother Church, if only for a brief time.

This year, The Thorn Birds is 35 years old. It's an epic family saga that tells the story of a family, from 1915-1969. It's a love letter to Australia, and the hard work of the people in that country. It's a family chronicle, a love story, a war story, a story of lost opportunities and anyone who expects it to be just one thing, will be disappointed. It features four very different, and incredibly strong women, over three generations and how they support and challenge the men in their lives.

Mary Cleary Carson, Fee Armstrong Cleary, Meggie Cleary O'Neill and later Meggie's daughter Justine, are all amazing female characters, who are strong, complex, stubborn and occasionally rather unlikeable. Mary Carson becomes a manipulative and resentful old lady, who betrays her own blood and their hard work for her mainly to score a final point against the priest who refused to give into her. Fee is hard-working and a very long-suffering wife, but pines for a lost love, favoring one child over all her others, not realizing what a wonderful thing she has in her actual husband until it is too late. Meggie is stubborn and so single-minded in her love for Ralph that she rushes into a highly unsuitable marriage just because the man looks a bit like him, and then repeats her mother's mistake of favoring one child over the other. Justine, always in the shadow of her brother, is so fiercely independent and self-sufficient that she refuses to get attached to anyone, and nearly loses out on love because of it.

I think I've now read the book 7 or 8 times. I was in my early teens the first time I read it, and that's more than 15 years ago now. It never fails to make me cry in some places, and laugh in others. I occasionally want to slap, shout at or strangle some of the characters, but I also want to experience life through their eyes. It's a book that deserves a much better adaptation than the 1983 miniseries they made of it, starring Rachel Ward and Richard Chamberlain, which focuses only on Meggie and Ralph's love story, and gets much of that wrong too. It's a book frequently compared to Gone with the Wind, but it deserves so much more praise, as it's vastly better written, much more entertaining, and features a much better cast of characters than GotW. If you haven't read it, you should really give it a try.