Monthly Key Word Challenge 2015 Wrap-Up

The monthly key word challenge was once again hosted by Bookmark to Blog and I enjoyed it as much this year as I did in 2014. My goal was to try to read at least a couple of books each month, and I've succeeded in that goal. Total read: 43

The key words for 2015 were:

January: Girl, Bird, Ever, Silence, Bad, Truth, End
Owl and the Japanese Circus - Kristi Charish
Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen

February: Key, Water, Lie, Chase, Heir, And, Once
Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell - Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham
Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Once Upon a Rose - Laura Florand
Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo

March: Kind, Face, Power, City, Blue, Night, To
Dear Mr. Knightley - Katherine Reay
Tarnished Knight - Bec McMaster
Twelfth Night - Deanna Raybourn 
Night of a Thousand Stars - Deanna Raybourn
City of Jasmine - Deanna Raybourn
Honor's Knight - Rachel Bach

April: Dream, Prince, Long, Wind, Rose, The, Rock
Four Nights with the Duke - Eloisa James
Against the Dark - Carolyn Crane
Along Came Trouble - Ruthie Knox
The Lost Hero - Rick Riordan
They Came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie
The Royal We - Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

May: Ash, Rose, Thief, Bend, In, Far
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
Into the Shadows - Carolyn Crane
The Duke and the Lady in Red - Lorraine Heath

June: My, Together, Whisper, Win, Soul, Sleep
Whispers Under Ground - Ben Aaronovitch
Heroes Are My Weakness - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

July: Sun, Unto, Energy, Fate, High, Look
Looking for Alaska - John Green
I'll Give You the Sun - Jandy Nelson

August: Fall, Boy, Glass, Heart, Lost, Now
The Heart of Betrayal - Mary E. Pearson
If I Fall - Kate Noble
Also Known As - Robin Benway
Sweet Filthy Boy - Christina Lauren

September: Colour, Touch, Life, Day, How, Sweet
A Red-Rose Chain - Seanan McGuire
White Cat - Holly Black
Red Glove - Holly Black
Black Heart - Holly Black 
My Lady Quicksilver - Bec McMaster

October: Ghost, Home, Beach, Away, Test, Number
Darlah - 172 Hours on the Moon - Johan Harstad
4:50 from Paddington - Agatha Christie
Six Impossible Things - Fiona Wood

November: Rise, Holiday, And, Little, Call, Dark
A Kiss in the Dark - Kimberly Logan
The Game and the Governess - Kate Noble

December: Space, Mirror, Over, Flower, Trap, Cold
Winning the Wallflower - Eloisa James
Wallflower Gone Wild - Maya Rodale
What a Wallflower Wants - Maya Rodale
Diary of an Accidental Wallflower - Jennifer McQuiston

#CBR7 Book 140: "Diary of an Accidental Wallflower" by Jennifer McQuiston

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Lady Clare Westmore is pretty certain that she's well on her way of securing the affection of Mr. Charles Alban, the next Duke of Harrington. Every sign seems to suggest that with just a bit more time with him, he will propose marriage by the end of the season. When she manages to sprain her ankle violently, she still insists on going to the evening's ball, as passing up a chance to dance with Mr. Alban is unthinkable. However, the pain is such that she can barely stand, and she ends up in the corner with the wallflowers, shocked to discover that her so- called best friend dances and flirts with the duke's heir instead. She's rather rude to the young man who approaches her, assuring her that he is a physician, wanting to treat her injured leg. Dr Daniel Merial nonetheless manages to persuade her that he can help her, so Clare limps to the library in search of her mother, who's there as her chaperone. She receives her second shock of the evening when she finds her mother in the arms of a young man.

Mortified, Clare mainly allows Dr. Merial to examine her ankle, hoping that his doctor-patient confidentiality will prevent him from gossipping about her mother to anyone. She's extremely upset when he concludes that she will need to stay at home, resting her ankle for the next six weeks. That will completely ruin her chances with Mr. Alban! One of the most popular girls of the season is suddenly taken completely out of the running, and with the time she's left to spend at home, Clare is also forced to consider the many things that are clearly disastrously wrong in her parents' marriage.

While she's actually a very intelligent and well-informed young lady, Clare has created the perfect image for society of a carefree, slightly flighty beauty, perfectly behaved, dressed and with friends who have all the right connections. She despairs of the wild manners of her young brother and unconventional and spirited sister, who is due to debut in society soon. Once she's home bound, her siblings admit that they strongly dislike the persona she's created and she is forced to acknowledge the duplicity and fickleness of her so-called society friends.

Dr Daniel Merial came to London to perfect a device to administer anaesthesia, and when he's not working in the hospital or attending the dying Lady Austerly, he works on experiments at night, trying to make it work. He is in desperate need of other rich clients as his pay at the hospital isn't enough to fund his invention. So he's quite glad to be asked back to treat the cranky Miss Westmore, as he really does need the money. The more time they spend together, the harder it becomes for him to keep a professional distance. That her younger siblings both adore him as well and are eager for him to visit, makes it even harder for him to stay away.

The longer Clare is away from the cut-throat world of the season, the more confused she becomes about what she really wants. Mr. Alban comes to visit her, but they have none of the chemistry that sizzles between her and Dr. Merial. Yet Clare is the daughter of a viscount and though Daniel is a very promising young physician, whose invention, if he manages to complete it, could make him substantial amounts of money, there is no denying that there is a big social divide between them. As Clare discovers more of her parents' marital troubles, she understands that there are several secrets being kept, that if they were to be revealed, could mean complete social ruin for not only herself, but her siblings. Securing a marriage with a future duke could be the best solution to all their problems.

This is the first book I've ever read by Jennifer McQuiston, and I really liked her take on a high born heroine and commoner hero. Daniel Merial is a great hero, and he's determined to revolutionise medicine not out of desire to make himself wealthy, but to save as many lives as possible. He's an idealist, but also realises the necessity to make enough money to make ends meet. Although Lady Austerly pays well, he's also genuinely concerned about her, considering her a friend and he despairs at her continuing insistence on throwing social events, even at the risk of her already ailing health. He initially tries to keep a professional distance from Clare, but when she keeps going on about her wishes of a future match with Mr. Alban, he gets irrationally jealous and realises his feelings for her.

It's not actually all that common that marital problems are addressed in romance, even among secondary characters. I therefore felt that the growing rift and distress suffered by Clare's parents was an interesting addition to an already slightly unusual book. Add to that her younger siblings, who were both socially unprepared for their future duties, without getting too annoyingly quirky (although the tomboy sister occasionally comes close), who make a fun and believable supporting cast. Clare is a good heroine, initially blinded as to what she needs to make her truly happy by what she has been raised to believe she should aim for.

I got this book in an e-book sale after seeing it recommended on some romance blog or other. I will absolutely be seeking out more of her books.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 139: "What a Wallflower Wants" by Maya Rodale

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Miss Prudence Merriweather Payton has been dubbed "London's Least Likely to Be Caught in a Compromising Position" and after four seasons, she may be the only woman to go unmarried for so long after graduation her finishing school. No one, not even the loving aunt who raised her or her two best friends, knows that Prudence was raped at a ball early in her first season and has made very sure she's never alone with a man or considered marriage material. After all, her entire worth on the marriage market has been forcibly stripped from her. Yet now, with the upcoming anniversary ball of her finishing school, where even her two former wallflower friends have found happy marriages, she can't bear to be the only graduate left unmarried.

Taking matters into her own hands, Prudence travels to Bath and arranges a marriage of convenience to a gentleman who she knows will never expect or demand conjugal rights, as he's rather more interested in his best friend. However, on the way to his estate, where they are to be married by special licence, their stagecoach is attacked by a highwayman, and her intended pushes her out of the carriage to distract their attacker. She manages to escape, no thanks to her fiancee, without attracting the robber's attention and is left to make her way to civilisation alone.

Trudging through uncomfortable heat at first and later pouring rain, Prudence vows never to trust another man again. When she's offered a ride by a dashing and handsome man who introduces himself as John Roark, Viscount Castleton, she refuses even though she's cold, wet and tired. They nevertheless meet again at the country inn where she seeks refuge. As the torrential downpour continues for days on end, the two are trapped, along with a number of other guests, until the weather settles down. John and Prudence spend quite a lot of time in each other's company, and it doesn't take long for John to realise that someone badly hurt Prudence at some point in the past.

Roark is on his way to London with a grand business proposition which will secure not only his own future, but that of his mother and sister. He has secrets he cannot divulge and certainly isn't looking for or able to support a wife in his current situation. Yet he gets more and more smitten with the wary Miss Merriweather (she doesn't give him her full name) and when her dark past shows up unexpectedly at the inn, and she nearly suffers a repeat performance of her former attack, he doesn't even think before jumping in to defend her and pummelling her attacker.

After John beats up her rapist, saving Prudence from another nightmare scenario, she breaks down and finally tells someone about the (to her) deeply shameful secret about what happened years ago, and he comforts her, confessing that his sister once suffered the same fate as her. He is therefore fully aware of how scared and distrustful of men she must be. Even knowing that she may be scared, he proposes that they travel to London together, leaving the inn in case her attacker returns. They pose as man and wife on the road, and John's gentle treatment, understanding and patience gives Prudence hope that she may in time be able to trust another man again and possibly not recoil at being touched. But John's past is about to catch up with him too, and what will happen when Prudence discovers the secrets he's been hiding and the reasons he's in such a hurry to make it to London?

This romance deals with the aftermath of rape, and it doesn't in any way gloss over what happened to Prudence. The scene where she is attacked is graphically described, in a horrible inversion of the usual love scenes in such a book and there is no doubt that something terrible and irrevocable is done to a helpless young woman, whose life is never the same afterwards. Even now, rape is a horrible crime, but in a time when a woman's chief commodity was her virtue and she was seen as tainted goods and worthless if she lost it, rape took away any chance a woman had to make a good marriage. Prudence spends four years carefully making herself as unattractive and unobtrusive as possible, happily embracing her wallflower role, simply so she won't ever have to confess the truth about her tragic fate. When she meets a kind man who not only treats her gently but understands her pain, that is just as attractive to her as his physical beauty. Having kept her secret for so long, she's desperate to confide in someone.

John, absolutely furious about the trauma she's been through, not only beats her attacker within an inch of his life and drives him and his friend out of the inn, but insists on being allowed to show Prudence how to defend herself, as it's not fair that she go through life seeing herself only as a victim. She needs to reclaim her self worth, and his self defence lessons and the way he refuses to see her or treat her as ruined is a great help in making her start to blossom again.

The third and final of Maya Rodale's Bad Boys and Wallflowers, even with some rather melodramatic turns in the last third of the book and some pretty huge coincidences furthering the plot, this is by far the best in the series. Prudence is a lovely heroine, so strong and admirable for refusing to let her ordeal break her. John is a sensitive and understanding hero, who because of his unusual background is able to accept Prue's disgrace in a way most men in her peer group would not. I'm also not entirely sure if the ways in which the villain gets his comeuppance is historically accurate, but it felt very satisfying.

I read romances as a means of entertainment and escapism. In historical romances, I like being diverted by historical locations, pretty dresses, fancy titles and couples finding love, often across societal boundaries that are somewhat anachronistic. This book made me cry, more than once, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't just because I was pumped full of fertility hormones. Reading about a young woman having her entire future stolen from her in a savage attack is upsetting, and as Rodale points out in the afterword, many women of the past were driven to depression or suicide by such events. While other aspects of the book weren't perfect, I thought the main issue of the story and the love story between Prudence and John was very effective. Well worth checking out, as long as you're not sensitive about the darker side of the plot.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 138: "Wallflower Gone Wild" by Maya Rodale

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Lady Olivia Archer is unmarried after four seasons on the marriage market, known as "London's Least Likely to Cause a Scandal". Everywhere she goes, her mother forces her to recount her ladylike accomplishments, such as embroidery, playing the piano, painting water colours and other deathly dull things. Olivia isn't surprised people have taken to calling her "Prissy Missy" and that at one memorable garden party, a gentleman jumped into a hedge rather than speak to her (or her mother).

One of her best friends, Lady Emma, another former wallflower, recently married a duke after a series of unusual events and is now determined to match her two besties with suitable men.  Before she has time to introduce them to anyone, however, Olivia meets a handsome stranger at a ball and has a moment of true chemistry with him after their eyes meet across the room. The morning after, she is told her parents have accepted the proposal of Sir Phinneas Cole for her hand in marriage. A genius and reclusive inventor, Phin is in London to work on completing a machine with Lady Emma's husband. He wants a pretty, quiet and polite wife to help him manage his vast Yorkshire estate. He is also popularly known as "the Mad Baron".

Some years ago, all the newspapers ran stories about the tragic fire in his lab and how his first wife died under mysterious circumstances. While in finishing school, all three wallflowers read the scandalous accounts of how "the Mad Baron" stole his brother's fiancee and later likely murdered her. Because he lives in Yorkshire and never goes into society, Phin was of the naive belief that the rumours had died down. He was very wrong. It's clear that the woman he wants to marry is both afraid of him and behaving very strangely.

Olivia has concocted a plan with her friends to make Phin break off the engagement. If he wants a proper and ladylike bride, then Olivia must be everything but. She's been brought up knowing all the rules that mustn't be broken and has never stepped a toe out of line before. This has brought her nothing but scorn, ugly nicknames and now a very unwanted, possibly murderous fiancee. She starts behaving as scandalously as she can - wearing excessive amounts of makeup, getting drunk in public, dancing with rakes and scoundrels and generally trying to cause scenes (she's not very good at it).

Phin (who of course is the handsome man she met that magical night) is puzzled by the erratic behaviour of Lady Olivia. He can't deny the attraction he felt for her that first night, and even at her worst, Olivia can't come close to causing the sort of scandals his first wife inspired. The more outrageously Olivia acts, the more determined he is to go through with the marriage.

While Olivia doesn't know that Phin isn't a crazy murderer, the readers are of course privy to his POV and fully aware that he's not as dangerous as the rumours would have it. A big old science nerd, he's actually quite dreadfully clueless around women, and tries to take courtship advice from his more wordly (but moronic) friend, with the results that Olivia isn't just afraid of him, but thinks he's a dolt as well. The only thing their relationship has going for it is that first brief meeting when their glances caught across a crowded room and they shared a brief moment, until some of the catty ladies of the ton came to interrupt before anything significant could happen. The undeniable chemistry between them then is what makes Phin determined to win Olivia, and makes her unsure of whether he can be as bad as his reputation suggests.

Brought up to do only what is right and proper for a young lady, Olivia has never been given the opportunity to actually decide what she likes or wants from life, and her attempts at acting out go rather badly, because there is a reason she and her friends are dubbed "London's Least Likely". In one last-ditch attempt to rebel, Olivia goes to a masquerade, where she is rescued from a near-assault by none other than her (obviously masked) fiancee. Overwhelmed by everything that's happened since she became engaged against her will, she breaks down in his arms, and speaks honestly of her hopes and fears. Phin, to his credit, realises how dumb he has been and determines to treat his bride better, encouraging her to forge her own way and make her own choices once they are married.

He does not, however, tell her the truth behind the lurid gossip surrounding his first wife's death for quite some time, creating one of those frustrating misunderstandings that seems to be so common in romance. Of course things improve immensely between the couple once the full story is out, just in time for Olivia to injure herself badly, making Phin realise his feelings for her now that he might suddenly lose her.

Which brings me to my biggest gripe with this book. In addition to the "let's act all mad-cap and crazy to put off my fiancee" section that goes on a bit too long, this book has one of the most unbelievable deflowering scenes I've ever come across. Now, I may be extra critical, reading this book shortly after I myself fell on the ice and broke my left wrist quite badly. Nonetheless, I'm literally painfully aware of how much this hurts, and how sore and unwieldy a broken limb is, for up to a week after the injury. Even with the benefit of modern painkillers, I really didn't want to use my left arm for much of anything. Olivia breaks her ankle in an accident, yet seems perfectly able to consummate her marriage only a day or two afterwards. I don't care what superhuman erotic abilities "the Mad Baron" possesses, there is NO way that she would happily be spreading her legs and engaging in carnal acts so shortly after breaking a limb. As far as I'm aware, the most common painkiller in the Regency era would have been laudanum. Olivia would therefore either be more or less passed out in a morphine haze or in absolute agony if someone tried to move make her "open her legs".

Now, if you don't have the painful real life experience of breaking a limb fresh in your mind, this might not be a deal breaker for you. This book had a lot of potential, and I liked it better than the first book in the series, but there still wasn't anything out of the ordinary to make me consider Maya Rodale as an essential romance writer whose books I'll be looking out for or pre-ordering.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 137: "Winning the Wallflower" by Eloisa James

Page count: 100 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Miss Lucy Towerton is very tall and until she inherited a fortune from a distant aunt, she was a wallflower without many promising prospects. So when Cyrus Ravensthorpe - handsome, rich, yet with some unfortunate family connections (his mother, the daughter of a duke, ran away to marry his father, the family solicitor) proposed marriage to her, she could hardly believe her luck. Now her mother wants her to break off their betrothal so she can catch herself a more suitable husband, possibly even Mr. Raventhorpe's cousin, the Duke of Pole. Lucy doesn't actually want to marry anyone else, and contrives a plan to be caught in a compromising position with her intended.

Cyrus Ravensthorpe is a man with a plan, a very carefully detailed plan that will ensure that his family regain the position in society they lost when his mother created a scandal by running off to Gretna Green after falling in love with his father. He has worked extremely hard to make himself a fortune, and proposed to Miss Lucy Towerton because 1) She was the daughter of a baronet, 2) Had a spotless reputation and 3) As a wallflower of several seasons, it wasn't like her family were going to turn down the offer. Now he arrives at a ball to discover that his fiancee is likely to throw him over, as she's come into a fortune of her own. She no longer needs the money he can offer her. Being so scrupulously careful to avoid anything that smacks of unseemly passion or inappropriate desires, Cyrus made sure he arranged the betrothal with Lucy's father and paid her the expected calls, but hasn't actually really paid any attention to the lady, until he may be losing her.

Lucy, emboldened by her new prospects, has been thinking about her fiancee's strange and restrained behaviour and confronts him (pretending to all others that she intends to break it off with him, so they'll be left alone). Discovering that she's only one of many steps in his plan to secure respectability and position, and doesn't know the faintest thing about her, she jilts him, not to please her ambitious mama, but because she's come to the realisation that she can do better. Finally seeing Lucy properly for the first time since they met, Cyrus realises that she's completely right to break the betrothal, but becomes determined to her back, with a proper courtship this time.

This novella is part of Eloisa James' Fairy Tales series, where the author takes famous fairy tales and writes historical romance versions of them. I don't actually think this novella fits with a specific tale and mostly serves as a fun interlude. It introduces Olivia Lytton, the heroine of The Duke is Mine, which Goodreads assures me I read back in August of 2012, but which I never reviewed and can barely remember. Olivia is Lucy's best friend, and the one who convinces her that she needs to fight to keep Cyrus if she actually likes him.

Eloisa James' writing can be a bit hit and miss, but she's got a clever way with words, and this little story is a fun take on the woman who learns to stand up for herself and demand what she deserves, plus the stuffy, proper hero with hidden passionate depths who is completely taken aback when he's suddenly overwhelmed by unexpected feelings. While Cyrus' motivations were very understandable, he was clearly a screaming bore before Lucy snogged the cravat off him and he realised he was going to do some pretty impressive grovelling to get back into her good graces.

Romance is usually written by women, for women about women and it's stories like this, about women taking control of their lives and destinies, speaking up about what they want, no matter what the conventions and consequences that are part of what makes the genre so enjoyable. Because it's novella length, it's a quick and fun read. There are some developments mentioned in the epilogue which I'm unsure of are historically accurate, but I really didn't care enough to bother checking whether Ms. James was taking anachronistic liberties or not. Despite that, this novella is absolutely recommended.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 134: "The Game and the Governess" by Kate Noble

Page count: 424 pages
Rating: 3 stars

At seventeen, Miss Sophie Baker is looking forward to her debut in society. She's only a few months away from graduating from a prestigious ladies' academy and her future looks bright. Then her father dies suddenly, destitute after having been swindled by a con man. Sophie's whole world changes and instead of a season and balls and pretty dresses, she's left to fend for herself, making a living as a governess. She blames the Earl of Ashby for her change in circumstance, as it was his former business manager who swindled her father. Had the Earl publicly denounced the man instead of just firing him, Sophie's father would never have lost everything they owned.

Five years later, having successfully saved up nearly enough to achieve her dreams of going to America to join her cousins, Sophie comes face to face with the Earl of Ashby. She just doesn't realise that he's not the man she thinks he is. Lord Edward Granville, the aforementioned Earl of Ashby, known to his friends as "Lucky Ned" has entered into a wager with his secretary, John Turner. For a period of two weeks, Ned has agreed to switch places with his secretary, to prove that his overall luck, popularity and success with the ladies, especially, has nothing to do with his wealth and title, but just his looks, charm and the luck that always seems to make him come out on top.

Turner proposed the wager both because he wanted to cut his pompous and oblivious employer down to size a bit. If he wins, he gets five thousand pounds to save his family's failing mill. If he loses, Ned will not only be even more insufferable, as he'll have been proven right, but he'll lose the mill once and for all. Trading places, Ned has to make a woman of gentle birth (no low-born and easily coerced servants allowed) fall in love with him and present him with a clear token of her affection. Ned thinks it's going to be a piece of cake and is also looking forward to showing the stuffy Turner that life as the Earl isn't always as care free and easy as it looks to be.

Despite the house they're staying in being full of eligible women, Ned is chagrined to realise that when people think he's a mere secretary, the same affable behaviour that normally has him welcomed with opened arms, is seen as overly familiar and inappropriate. While he may have spent his first twelve years in genteel poverty before becoming the former Earl's heir, he's gotten very used to his easy life of privilege. The only woman who will even give him a second glance is the governess, Miss Turner, and even with her, he has to work much harder than he ever has before to impress her. He has no idea that she blames him for her downfall in life, and by the time he discovers the truth, he's already fallen in love with her. Can the Earl of Ashby become a decent and likable human being over the course of two weeks and also convince a woman who has every right to hate him that she should spend the rest of her life with him?

While there was a lot of potential in this book, the romance feels more like a secondary plot than the main event. So much time is spent establishing the relationship between John Turner and Ned Granville and setting up the wager. Ned and Sophie don't even really speak until nearly halfway through the book. Then there's the fact that Ned, initially, really is a bit of an ass. He clearly needs to walk a mile or two in someone less fortunate's shoes and wake up and smell his privilege, and to be fair to Ms. Noble, he goes through a lot of changes over the course of the book. By the end, he's a pretty decent romance hero and has a lot more understanding for the position he put his friend Turner in.

While Ned is a bit of a douche-canoe initially, and Turner is frankly a bit of a bore, who spends quite some time trying to sabotage things for his friend, because he so desperately needs to win the wager to get the money to save his mill, Sophie is great and I am upset that so much of the book focuses on the friendly frenemy relationship of the dudes, when there is a lovely, strong, clever heroine, who despite the misfortunes she's suffered, has retained the ability to keep positive and choosing to see the silver lining rather than the clouds. While she was deeply upset with Ashby initially, five years later she has proved to herself that she's a resilient, self-sufficient woman. She's good with children, she's managed to make nearly enough money to achieve her dreams and she's really not looking for a man to complete her or "take her away" from her life of drudgery. She delivers a righteous slap to Ned when he kisses her the first time, having just presumes she wants him, and verbally berates him in the strongest terms.

There is a lot of good stuff in the book, and I'm sad that I can't rate it higher, but in a romance, I really do want the interaction between the hero and heroine to be the most prominent story line and it just didn't feel like that was the case here. So far, Kate Noble hasn't done anything that I actively hate, and I'm willing to give her a lot of slack for being a co-writer on my beloved Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I still have quite a few of her books from various book sales, but am not going to buy any more until I've found one that I can really fully recommend without several reservations.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 119: "Six Impossible Things" by Fiona Wood

Page count: 304 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Dan Cereill (pronounced "surreal", NOT "cereal") is not having an easy time of it. He and his mother are left shocked, abandoned and nearly penniless after Dan's father simultaneously announces that his business has gone bankrupt and that he's gay. Dan's great-aunt Adelaide recently passed away, the terms of her will stating that Dan and his mother could live in her house (although the house and it's contents were left to the National Trust). The house is ancient, drafty, cold as hell and reeks overwhelmingly of urine, but Dan can cope because it's also next door to his dream girl, Estelle. By accident, he discovers that the two houses have connecting attics, and Estelle has made herself a sort of refuge up on her side. Lonely, miserable and conflicted, Dan can help himself from snooping through Estelle's private things, including her notebooks and diaries, seeing how much they have in common.

He makes a list of six impossible things he hopes to achieve, the most important of which is that he wants to kiss Estelle. Of course, he gets completely tongue-tied and awkward talking to ANY girl. Estelle is so far out of his league it's not even funny, and he's deeply ashamed about the fact that he snooped through her diary, betraying her trust before they'd even properly met. His parents' sudden financial difficulties means his mother is trying to make money by starting a wedding cake business. She doesn't really sell any wedding cakes, instead more often than not breaking the couples up after their consultations with her. Dan therefore needs to get a job, in an attempt to help out with bills.

He also has to leave his fancy prep school and get used to going to public school, where he manages to make himself a target for bullies on his very first day. He struggles to make friends, admiring Estelle and her friends from afar, cursing his bad luck and painful lack of cool or social skills.

While Dan reading Estelle's diaries early on is a very bad thing to do, he clearly feels extremely bad about it, and he's in a very bad place emotionally when he succumbs to the temptation. So while it can seem a bit stalkery and inappropriate, he is very sorry and tries not to do it again (too much). He's adorably clueless about girls, and extremely annoyed that his reputation as a prep school kid marks him out as some sort of sad nerd. When he befriends Lou, who seems to be the female flipside of his best friend Fred, it's clear that his penchant for saying exactly the wrong thing to Estelle has more to do with nerves and anxiety than anything else.

Dan feels very betrayed about his father's revelations and feels abandoned by him. He stubbornly refuses to speak to his dad at all, or open the birthday present his dad sends him. He tries as best he can to help his mother, who is very effective at breaking up affianced couples, but not really in securing a single client for her baking business. When she's not making brides reconsider marriage, she mainly mopes around, obsessing about Radiohead. Money is clearly very tight, which becomes more of a problem when Howard, the elderly dog Adelaide left them needs some serious vet's attention. Dan manages to get a part-time job, but discovers that a 15-year-old waiter doesn't exactly make a fortune.

Going for runs with Howard and lifting weights in his room, not to mention some advice from Oliver, the cool market analyst who lives in the mansion's carriage house, means Dan slowly builds both muscle and confidence and as the school year progresses, he starts fitting in better at school. The bullies mainly leave him alone, and as he works in the same café as Janie, Estelle's best friend, he is eventually roped in to help in a harebrained scheme to get Janie to Sydney without their parents discovering. While their parents discover their deception and Estelle and Janie end up grounded for ages, it means he's finally earned the trust of the girl he adores. She uses their shared access to sneak into Dan's house and they spend a lot more time together.

By the time the big dance comes around, Dan is going mad with jealousy because he knows Estelle is taking someone else. When he discovers she's going with a girl from a different school, he finally summons up the courage to show her how he really feels. His guilty conscience about killing her diaries is nearly killing him, though. Will he ruin all his chances with Estelle just as he's finally managed to get her to really see him as a romantic prospect?

Some aspects of this book reminded me of Rainbow Rowell's Attachments, mainly the fact that Dan gets to know Estelle and falls for her by reading something very private to her, the way Lincoln falls for Beth by reading her e-mail correspondence with her best friend. The way Dan works hard to make himself fit and healthy and tries to improve himself looks wise also reminded me of Lincoln. The similarities certainly don't make me like this book any less.

Dan's by no means a perfect guy, and in many ways a very typical teenager. He goes far too long before talking to and forgiving his father and gives his mother a hard time occasionally, feeling very sorry for himself (not entirely without reason). The sixth goal on his list of impossible things is to be good, however, and most of the time, while he doesn't think so himself, he manages very well.

I first heard of this book years ago (not entirely sure where), but it wasn't available in print or e-book outside Australia. Recently, it was released in both print and e-book in the US, though and I finally got my hands on it. I'm glad to see it was worth the wait.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 106: "Darlah - 172 timer på månen" (172 hours on the Moon) by Johan Harstad

Page count: 376 pages
Rating: 3 stars

NASA announces a historic lottery to help fund their new lunar expedition. Teens of between the ages 14 to 18 can sign up, and three lucky someones will be selected to train with the astronauts and come along on for a trip to the Moon. There is already a moon base they can stay at, DARLAH 2, established in the early 1970s for research and observation, but never actually used, for reasons the higher ups with the right security clearance would prefer not to answer. The same goes for questions about what the fate of DARLAH 1 was. There is an old, senile man in a quiet nursing home, who used to be a maintenence worker at Area 51. He sees the news broadcasts about the lottery and the upcoming lunar expedition and something inside him is screaming in terror. No one must return to the Moon, the lunar expedition is a terrible idea! Unfortunately, his illness is far enough advanced that he can't actually voice his thoughts and fears to anyone, and explain why another mission to the Moon may be disastrous.

The three teens who are selected are Mia from Norway, who plays in an all-girl post punk rock band, mainly acts stroppy towards her well-meaning parents. The only one she seems patient and nice to is her mentally disabled younger brother. She doesn't actually want to join the lottery, and is incredibly upset when she discovers that her parents signed her up. When it turns out that she's been picked out of the millions who signed up, her band mates are the ones to persuade her to finally go.

Antoine from Paris signs up for the lottery after his girlfriend dumps him and he wants to be anywhere else. He's very interested in historical planes, and develops worrying stalkerish tendencies where he goes up to the Eiffel Tower to use the binoculars there to spy into his ex-girlfriend's bedroom window. By the time the kids have completed their NASA training, he and Mia seem to have fallen for each other.

Japanese Midori doesn't feel like she fits in with most of her peers, and spends most of her free time making costumes, hanging out with other social outcasts in the Harajuku area of Tokyo. Her biggest dream is to leave Japan, like her older sister who moved to London. When she's picked for the lottery, she hopes to be able to persuade her parents to let her stay in the US after the lunar mission.

All three teens experience mysterious and ominous events before the arrive for their training with NASA. Antoine sees a plane apparently crashing into the ocean; Midori and her parents can't seem to find the correct gate at the airport and a ghostly voice in a rest room tells Midori not to leave Japan; Mia meets a strange homeless man in Central Park with strange writing on the back on his hoodie.

Darlah, or 172 Hours on the Moon was awarded several literary prizes in 2008, when it was first published and in 2014 it was voted the best Norwegian young adult of all time by a panel of teenage readers and book journalists. The book certainly seems to appeal to a lot of the teens I teach, especially the girls (because sadly, most of the teenage boys in our school don't read unless they're forced to). One of the girls in my current class said it "made me look at reading in a completely new way" and I couldn't really refuse to read the book after an endorsement like that.

What I liked:
- The actual premise of the book
- Midori seemed like a perfectly nice character
- The NASA astronauts were cool
- Mia's family were nice (the other two teen's parents may as well not have existed for all the time the book spends on them)
- The slowly increasing tension and growing feeling of unease in the book
- The clever ways in which the book plays with genre conventions. There are a lot of fun pop culture references. 

What I disliked:
- The book has a very slow start. Far too much time is spent with the teenagers before the results of the lottery are revealed, mostly dwelling on details that have nothing to do with events that become relevant later. The book would have been more engaging if it got to the point faster.
- Mia really isn't a very likable character. She appears like a spoiled, ungrateful brat and I didn't really see why her friends wanted to spend time with her or why her parents didn't just tell her to snap out of her sulk. The slow beginning of the book just emphasises these negative qualities.
- Antoine's stalker tendencies. This is another way in which the lengthy unneccessary exposition at the beginning was more detrimental than beneficial. If so much time hadn't been spent on showing Antoine and Mia as dislikable, I would have been more engaged with their budding relationship later in the book as well.
- The horror aspect of the book. I had not realised that this book was both a sci-fi AND a horror novel. The horror was very well done, but I'm a big ol' wuss and it just made me uncomfortable.

I don't want to reveal too much more about the book, because that would spoil the story and it's best to go into the book without knowing too much. I can absolutely see why this is extremely appealing to young readers, but for someone who is as easily creeped out as I am, this is just not for me.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 99: "My Lady Quicksilver" by Bec McMaster

Page count: 448 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is book 3 in an ongoing series. While it can be read as a stand alone, the world building and the overarching story line will make a lot more sense if you start at the beginning, with Kiss of Steel.

Sir Jasper Lynch is the head of the Nighthawks, basically the mostly nocturnal police force of the Steampunk London that Bec McMaster has invented here. All of the nearly four hundred Nighthawks are rogue bluebloods, people who have caught the craving virus by accident in some way (become vampires) and who are not of the Echelon, the nobility who rule the country. After an assassination attempt on the Prince Regent, Lynch is tasked with finding the notorious human revolutionary, Mercury. If Mercury is not brought to justice within a short space of time, Lynch's life is forfeit instead.

Using his enhanced senses and his decades of experience with detective work, Lynch manages to track down Mercury, and is shocked to discover that the revolutionary is a woman. Not only that, she manages to get the better of him by using her feminine wiles to distract him, then she escapes. Now the reason he wants to find her is as much professional as it's personal. Little does he realise that she's much closer than he is expecting.

Rosalind Fairchild needs to find her missing brother, who was involved with the rogue group of revolutionaries who tried to blow up a large part of the Echelon and visiting dignitaries from Scandinavia. She needs to infiltrate the Nighthawks, and gets herself hired as Sir Jasper Lynch's personal secretary. She knows that if he discovers that she is also Mercury, he will arrest her and hand her to the Echelon to be executed, but Rosalind has been trained for subterfuge by the very best, and has no intention of getting caught. She needs to locate her brother, rescue him and then she can go back to ridding the world of all bluebloods.

Rosalind is a humanist, one of the disenfranchised humans who believe revolution is necessary, as the Prince Regent and the Echelon keeps making further demands for blood taxes and humans and mechs (humans who have had to get mechanical prosthetics after injuries) are being treated worse and worse. Few know that Mercury, the infamous revolutionary, is in fact a woman. Recently, a small band of her former followers went rogue, clearly sick of waiting for results. Not content with trying to kill a large group of people with an explosion, they are now working on some sort of weapon that turns bluebloods crazy with bloodlust, slaughtering everyone near them. Rosalind is as determined to stop these rogue revolutionaries as Lynch.

Lynch is the nephew of one of the ruling Dukes on the Echelon council, but was cast off by his family when he refused to fight his cousin in a duel for the rights to be the Duke's heir. Instead he founded the Nighthawks, non-noble bluebloods trained to police the city, solve crimes and bring criminals to justice. What Lynch fears most of all is losing control, and he keeps himself in check, never drinking more than the minimum required amount of blood, never letting himself get emotionally involved. So when Mercury gets under his skin so very quickly, it awakens needs in him he'd almost let himself believe he didn't have. He knows he can never have Mercury, but his newly awakened emotions draw him towards his impudent new secretary, a lovely widow who seems determined to drive him to distraction, even as she tidies up his private life.

Less involved in the larger politics of this world, and more on investigation and police work, My Lady Quicksilver may be my favourite book in the series so far. By now, all the pieces of the world building are firmly in place and McMaster can just let her characters play. The opposites attract story at the centre of this book is delightful. Rosalind is an outlaw, Lynch an officer of the law. She's all about temptation, sensuality and fun, he's all about control, order and work. Neither wants to fall for the other, but they are helpless to control their emotions.

As well as Lynch and Rosalind's romance, I very much liked the supporting cast of Nighthawks in this book. Family is very important in these books, and Rosalind's relationship with her brothers and with her werwulfen friend also adds depth and complexity to the world. Teased in this book, and coming up in the next one, is the romance between two of Lynch's most trusted lieutenants, Garret Reed and one of the few blue blood women, Perry Lowell. I very much liked their banter in this one and hope their book is as satisfying as this one.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 94: "Black Heart" by Holly Black

Page count: 304 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is book 3 of a trilogy. This review, and even the book summary, is likely to contain spoilers for previous books in the series. Skip this until you're caught up.

In the third and final volume of Holly Black's Curse Worker trilogy, Cassel has forced his older brother Barron into working for the Feds, and he's loving every minute of it, as he's able to use his memory working to get a whole load of cool fringe benefits. Cassel can't be officially recruited by them yet, as he's not 18, but the deal is that once he's finished his final year of school, he'll come work for them too. Now he's mainly using his practise missions to spy on Lila, the girl he loves and who pretty much hates him after the emotion work his mother forced on her wore off. Lila Zacharov is following in her father's footsteps, having quit school and become a gangster in training.

Having not seen or heard from his mother in a while, Cassel discovers that Lila's father has her under house arrest for stealing and fencing his most prized possession, the resurrection diamond, a stone believed to have belonged to Rasputin, and whose owner can never be killed. He's been wearing a fake for years, but would like the original returned, and Cassel has no choice but to agree to try to locate it. Anything to be nearer to Lila, who lives in the same flat where his mother is now imprisoned.

The Feds need Cassel's help in neutralising a senator, who after emotion work was performed on him by a number of individuals, including Cassel's mother, has become dangerously unstable. He keeps proposing mandatory testing of all citizens, wanting those who are proven to be workers fired from their jobs, and in some extreme cases, imprisoned. As the government also employs magically gifted workers, it's very much in their interest that the sentator is taken out of the equation. They want Cassel to change him into a dog, who they can keep contained. Every instinct Cassel has says this is a trap, and his brother's snooping confirms it.

There is also a fairly boring subplot involving a school friend of Cassel's, hiring him and his roommate Sam to help her retrieve some photographs she's being blackmailed for. I thought the whole plot dragged quite a bit. It felt like it, as well as the extensive relationship drama between Sam and his girlfriend Daneca had been inserted mainly as padding, because Cassel's two main story lines - his doomed love for Lila and his moral quandary about transforming the senator, weren't enough to fill out the book.

What I really like about this whole series is that it's mostly a contemporary fiction series, with just a slight magical twist. The various worker powers are interesting to me, as are the implications of what such powers and the fear of them would do to a society. The books explore prejudice, fear and discrimination in an interesting way, and there is a tremendous range of morality in the various characters. There is very little right or wrong, just a whole lot of grey areas. Cassel isn't a very nice person, and has a lot of bad stuff in his past and present, but he keeps trying to protect the people he cares about and protect them as best he can. Sometimes he has to break the law to do that, but he doesn't want to become worse than he already is. He's killed people, but only because his brothers used him and made him forget it. He's caused a lot of pain to people he cares about, especially Lila, and so desperately wants to make up for it.

I found Barron's slight redemptive arc in this last book both promising and with the reveal of the picture on his phone, and what Cassel did with it, a bit heart-breaking. Barron has clearly been a sociopathic dick for much of the books, but you do get the sense that the brothers love each other despite all that. Their relationship with each other, and their mother, is very dysfunctional. I like their grandfather though, he's a nice guy, for all that he's been a mob assassin for much of his life.

I liked Cassel's solution to the dilemma he faced, and the tension in the aftermath, where his smart-arse ways were suddenly not enough to get him out of a bind. It was nice to see that the trust he'd learned to put in others over the course of the series paid off and that by the end of the series, things were seeming to look up for him. I said in my review for Red Glove that this would make an interesting TV show - a sort of paranormal Sopranos for young adults. Cast it with hot young things and it would probably do really well on the CW.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 93: "Red Glove" by Holly Black

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is the second book in a trilogy, and as such not the best place to start. This review will contain some spoilers for book one, because it's impossible to write about this book without talking about things that were revealed in the first one. So if you are new to these Holly Black books, go find White Cat - that's where to begin the trilogy.

Cassel Sharpe lives in a world where a select percentage of the population have certain gifts. People who, if they touch your skin with theirs, can alter your luck or prospects, manipulate or delete your memories, alter or change your emotions, break your bones or heal your illnesses. Some can even kill. In the United States, there is heavy legislation against what is known as such curse working. Everyone has to wear gloves, because you never know who might be a curse worker, manipulating you in some way. Because curse working is mainly seen as a bad thing (despite the fact that the majority of workers mainly use their powers to bring good luck or can heal the sick and injured), those who discover they are gifted with such powers keep it very secret, or go on to join organised crime, because all the major crime bosses are curse workers.

On the flip side of having a cool superpower, there is the blowback. Every time a worker uses his or her abilities, they get a reaction. Physical workers who use their powers to hurt or heal get sick themselves, emotion workers get very emotionally unstable, death workers actually lose body parts and memory workers lose their own memories. 

Cassel believed he was the only one in his family of grifters and curse workers not gifted. His mother can completely change people's emotions, his older brother Phillip could break people's bones, his middle brother Barron can completely rewrite or delete people's memories and his grandfather is a death worker. Cassel himself is one of the rarest of workers, he can transform items or people, alter their appearances or even change them into animals or inanimate objects. His mother and brothers wanted to keep him unaware of his gifts until he got older, so his brother Barron started changing his memories, making him think he was just a regular human. Over the course of the first book, Cassel discovers that his brothers kept rewriting his memories, using his transformation abilities for their own ends.

After Phillip and Barrons tried to move up in the world by trying to assassinate Zacharov, the local curse worker crime boss, Cassel made a deal that saved their lives, but led to the death of Zacharov's nephew Anton. Because of all the blowback from his memory cursing, Barron's memory is a bit like Swiss cheese, and he has to surround himself with photographs, notebooks, post-it notes and note cards to remind himself of who he is and what his memories are. Cassel has used his forgery skills to make Barron believe they don't hate each other, and go for pizza every fortnight. Their mother is out of jail, and to "thank" Cassel, manipulated Lila, Zacharov's only daughter, into being madly in love with him. Now the girl Cassel has always loved and feels horrible about betraying (I don't want to reveal how, as it's very spoilery) is attending his school, watching him like a love-sick puppy and he can't touch her, as she's effectively given a really long-lasting roofie.

To add to Cassel's difficulties, he is approached by Federal agents who tell him his brother Phillip has been murdered. The security footage show a hooded woman entering his building, wearing long red gloves. They believe Phillip's death may be the last in a string of disappearances connected to the Zacharov crime family, and want Cassel's help in solving the crimes. Looking at the pictures of the missing men, Cassel is worried he knows exactly what happened to them. Cassel is pretty much stuck between a rock and a hard place. He doesn't really want to actively work for Zacharov, but can't exactly turn around and work for the government either, as that would be seen as a betrayal of everything he comes from, and could lead to the death of Barron, his mother and likely Cassel himself.

Luckily, over the course of the first book, Cassel discovered he has friends he can really confide in and trust. His roommate Sam, who is a special effects wizard and Sam's girlfriend Daneca, who is very passionate about protecting worker rights, helped him prevent his brothers' misguided assassination attempt of Zacharov. They are now his most important allies. Cassel's grandfather is also firmly on his side, with no illusions about his various family members, but as he's been part of the Zacharov crime family and lost four fingers because of death curses he's performed in the line of duty, so Cassel doesn't feel he can tell him the full truth. He needs to use all the tricks he's learned as a grifter to hold both sides off until he figures out how he can work out what is best for himself.

I first read White Cat, the first book in the series about five years ago, and it didn't really make much of an impact on me. Then one of my friends read the whole series and rated them so highly, saying he actually wanted to see a paranormal TV series based on them, and I figured I really should give them another try. When re-reading the first book, I liked it better this time and many of the problems I had with Cassel as a protagonist come from the fact that he's such a introverted loner. Once he starts opening up and making friends, he becomes a lot more relatable and I cared more about what happened to him. Which is good, because there is a more engaging plot in the first book than in this one. I was still interested in seeing where the story was going and how Cassel was going to play both sides against each other. My friend is right, this would make a very cool TV show.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 91: "A Red-Rose Chain" by Seanan McGuire

Page count: 368 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is book 9 in the October Daye series. Standard disclaimers about spoilers if you're not caught up. Book one, Rosemary and Rue, is the place to start if this series is entirely new to you. It's also the September 2015 pick for the Vaginal Fantasy book club.

Just as October "Toby" Daye, changeling knight and hero of multiple faerie kingdoms seems to be catching a break, having things go her way for a change, there are unexpected developments in the court of queen Arden Windermere and Toby is sent as an ambassador to the neighbouring kingdom of Silences (located in Portland), with only three days to prevent a war. King Rhys of the Silences was given his throne by the former Queen of the Mists, who was ousted when Toby discovered she was an impostor and located Arden Windermere to take her rightful place on the throne. It's safe to say that he's unlikely to be very receptive to Toby's entreaties of peace, especially since he is also rumoured to hate and revile changelings.

While the Toby of old might have thrown herself into danger by herself, now Toby has friends, allies and a fiancee who isn't about to let her leave his side if he can help it. Toby travels to the Silences with the King of Cats, her squire Quentin, her adopted sister May, her pet rose goblin and Walther, a former resident of the Silences. While they think they are prepared for anything, what they find when they arrive is worse than they had even imagined and it's clear that their three days are not going to simple or peaceful ones. Toby is facing an enemy from her past she was hoping never to see again, and is going to have to use all her wits and allies to get out of the Silences alive.

It wouldn't be a very exciting Toby Daye book if all Toby did was sit around, flirting with Tybalt and planning her future wedding, bantering with Quentin and May and generally just going about her daily chores. Her sudden promotion to diplomat startles her, but as the Silences' declaration of war was to shoot queen Windermere's seneschal with elf shot (meaning he will sleep for a hundred years), and the new queen is young and new to the throne, there really aren't that many people around her she can trust and Toby has already proven her worth with a number of heroic deeds. Besides, it quickly becomes clear that our favourite changeling knight isn't being sent to negotiate so much as cause a distraction and stall as much as possible, while the kingdom of the Mists can prepare for imminent attack.

It's always fun to see the world of a beloved series expanding and while the Silences is clearly a faerie kingdom where there is a whole lot of badness and wrong going on, it was also interesting to see how it was being run and had been run in the past. Walther, Toby's alchemist friend, turns out to have ties to the former royal family, who were put out of commission when King Rhys took power. He really doesn't want to return there, preferring to stay at Berkeley to teach chemistry and working towards his tenure, but he can't really refuse a direct request from his friend either.

While I found the first couple of books in this series a bit slow going (I liked them a lot better when re-reading the series a few years back), I have been pretty much hooked since I was a third into book three, and for the last four years (maybe five now), I've been counting the days from when I finish one book until the next is released. It's one of my favourite series, both because of the interesting mix of paranormal and real world ideas, combined with an excellent protagonist and a wonderful supporting cast. The previous book in the series was one of those game-changer books that finished off a lot of plot threads and revealed a whole load of things that had been hinted at for years. This book is relatively quiet in comparison, but still a very good read. As in most urban fantasy, there is a good range of diverse and complex female characters, but there McGuire is very good at representation with regards to different sexual preferences and identities, without it being made any kind of special issue of. In this, there was even a trans-gender character, which isn't something I think I've come across in paranormal fantasy before.

Since I have to wait another year for Toby Daye 10, I really should check out McGuire's InCryptid series, which I've also heard very good things about.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 89: "Sweet Filthy Boy" by Christina Lauren

Page count: 416 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Mia Holland goes to Las Vegas with her two best friends to celebrate her college graduation. Mia's dream was once to become a dancer, but a nasty car accident put a stop to that dream and now she's on track to fulfil her father's dream for her, which is fast track through a prestigious business school in Boston. He's even offered to help pay for her apartment there. This Vegas weekend is Mia's last chance to cut loose, and she sure does.

Mia is shy, almost painfully so, and after her accident, she barely spoke at all for a long time. Her two besties have learned to interpret her silences and body language, but are shocked to see that when Mia is with Ansel, the hot French attorney from the suite across from theirs, she opens up, flirting and becoming a regular chatter box. That Ansel has two good looking friends that Mia's two BFFs can hook up with is a pleasant bonus. Mia has one weekend to go wild, and Ansel was only supposed to be a one night stand. But when Mia wakes up the next morning, only barely able to walk from her truly epic night, to discover a wedding band on her finger, she's not sure what to do. Ansel hands her a letter over breakfast, a letter she wrote to herself the night before. Mia wrote herself a letter once before, after her accident, and it's one of the things that gave her the strength to go on. In her drunken letter from the night before, she confesses that she's the one who proposed and that she really wants to give the marriage a try. Ansel claims he promised he wouldn't agree to annul the marriage until after the summer and wants Mia to come back to Paris with him.

Harlow and Lola, Mia's friends, also got married and have no hesitations about getting annulments. Mia thinks going to Paris is completely crazy, but after returning home, and facing a whole summer living in the presence of her disapproving father, she decides to extend her wild weekend to a wild summer, takes the plunge and goes with Ansel. Of course, she gets her period on the plane, while wearing white jeans. Then she's struck down with a horrible flu, meaning her new husband has to hold her hair back while she's sick all over his fancy Paris apartment and spoon feed her until she regains her health. Finally waking up after a week of illness, Mia is struck by that fact that she married a complete stranger. Now she's far away from everyone she's ever known, trying to see if absolutely mind-blowing sex can be the beginning of a stable relationship.

At the end of July, NPR published their list of 100 swoon-worthy romances. Sweet Filthy Boy was included among the contemporary romances. It also made it to the final eight books of Dear Author and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books' March Madness tournament, which is where I first heard of the books. Along came my key word challenge for August, where this book fit right in. I was pretty much hooked from the get go.

I really liked Mia, and related to her shyness and insecurities. All her dreams were crushed along with her leg in that car accident and now she doesn't actually know what she wants with her life. Going to business school to please her father is clearly something she's deeply ambivalent about, but at least then he'll look at her with something other than disappointment. She's so clearly the sort of person who rarely, if ever, does something without considering all the alternatives first. So hooking up with Ansel, getting married and then deciding to stay married to him, following him to Paris to actually try to make the relationship worked was clearly going so completely out of her comfort zone, she might as well have left the galaxy. I loved her friendship with Harlow and Lola, who are clearly important supportive characters in her life and that even though they could have just been mentioned briefly as shameless sequel fodder, they are actualised characters, for all that they mainly speak to Mia over the phone for much of the book.

Ansel seemed to me to be a Greek god physically speaking and a bit like an adolescent puppy dog in personality at times. He's clearly extremely attractive, and being in his presence makes Mia feel enough at ease that she can really be herself. Unfortunately, since Mia isn't entirely sure yet who her real self is after the accident, having never taken the time to really settle down and think what she wants to do with herself, their time together isn't always smooth sailing. Extremely impulsive, Ansel pretty much just liked the idea of having Mia around when he got home in the evenings, ready and willing in his bed (or anywhere else in the apartment, they really don't seem to limit themselves to just the bedroom), not really considering how much time Mia has to spend alone when he's busy working. Up over his ears in a high-profile, extremely demanding lawsuit, Ansel spends a lot of time away from Mia, whose left to explore one of the most romantic cities in the world on her own.

Luckily, both Ansel and Mia acknowledge that a marriage is going to need work, and it's clear that they do a fair amount of talking and interacting. What I didn't like about the book is that this is just TOLD to me, not shown. Mia and Ansel have a LOT of sex. So much of it. In Las Vegas, in France. There's some awkwardness once Mia gets worried and self-conscious and overthinks things for a while, but they seem to work through that very fast. I get that the physical connection is what pretty much brought them together, and from Mia's internal monologue I understand that she and Ansel spent much of their first night together talking and that this also happens in Paris. It's just that when I'm not privy to the information that's exchanged during said conversations, I don't really see how their connection builds from the spectacular smexy times and I get annoyed and honestly, a bit bored.

I also thought, apart from his massive work load, Ansel seemed just a little bit too perfect. Sure, he's obsessively tidy, but he's also gorgeous, attentive, funny, generous, an amazing lover - you get the gist. Where were his flaws? About two thirds of the way through the book, one pretty major flaw is revealed, however, and it's a pretty impressive dark secret to have been harbouring. I very much admire the way Mia dealt with it, in a way that shows how much she develops over the course of the book and through her time with Ansel. While the ending may have been abrupt, it seemed pretty obvious that while Ansel and Mia's time as main characters is over, their story will continue as they pop up as supporting cast in Harlow and Lola's books. This is my first of Christina Lauren's books. They are apparently best friends who write highly successful romance novels together. Based on Mrs. Julien's reviews of their Beautiful Bastard series, I'm not sure they'll be something that appeals to me, but I will certainly be reading the rest of their Wild Seasons books, because I want to see all the characters get their HEAs.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 88: "Also Known As" by Robin Benway

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Margaret "Maggie" Silver learned to pick her first lock when she was barely past the toddler stage, which is unsurprising since both her parents and all their friends are spies. Maggie's father can tell her she's grounded in more than twenty languages, but she's never actually gone to school and rarely interacted with someone her own age. So when the Silver's current mission requires her to go to a fancy prep school in Manhattan, Maggie is actually more out of her depth than when her family had to flee Luxembourg in a hurry.  Now she has to wear a uniform and make friends, armed only on the knowledge she's acquired from countless books and TV shows.

Maggie's job is to get close to Jesse Oliver, whose father is about to publish a tell all article where Maggie's parents, Maggie herself and many they care about may have their true identities revealed. As this would be disastrous, time is of the essence. While Maggie might have twelve different passports and there is barely a lock or a safe she can't break into, she clearly has no idea how to talk to kids her own age. She's never been able to have real friends, as her family are constantly on the move, nor has she ever even thought about a life that doesn't involve deception and being a spy. She's a fish out of water in high school, struggling to fit in. Initially, she believes her target to be spoiled and arrogant, but as she gets closer to him, she has real trouble keeping herself detached and objective. Lying to her friends feels wrong, and the longer she works the case, the longer her instincts tell her that something is seriously up with the mission. But can a teenage girl tell her professional spy parents that she thinks they're being set up?

The fact that this is Maggie's first proper mission, where her parents have to take the back seat, actually just being her parents, is one of the things that creates tension in the book. It's clear that Maggie has a real gift when it comes to lock-picking and safe-cracking, but because of the life she's led, she's never actually been presented with or even considered any options to life as a spy. Only when Maggie actually has to explain her unusual upbringing (without revealing any specific details, naturally) to her new friends, does she realise how truly strange her life has been.

This was a fun book, with a fun protagonist. Roux, the girl she befriends at school, a former queen bee whose now ostracised because she slept with a friend's boyfriend and consequently lost her lofty position, is great. Wounded, sarcastic and initially quite self-centred, Roux provides Maggie with invaluable help in fitting into high school, even if she'll never exactly be popular hinging out with Roux. Jesse Oliver, whose file suggests he's a spoiled and attention-seeking rich kid, is actually bright, funny, vulnerable, as well as cute as heck, and it's perfectly believable that Maggie falls for him hard. While Maggie feels like a complete spaz every time she's near him, he seems to find her quite mysterious and intimidating. Their first date is absolutely adorable.

This book was perfectly fun entertainment and I liked Maggie, her friends, her parents and especially Angelo, the family friend who may or may not be an assassin. Teenage spy has to fit into high school seems like a great premise for a CW show, frankly, which I think I would actually watch. There's at least one more book in this series and I will be checking it out too.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 86: "If I Fall" by Kate Noble

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 3 stars

On the evening of her betrothal party, the duke Miss Sarah Forrester is set to marry, confesses that he is in love with another. Sarah is instantly named "the girl who lost a Duke" in society and prepares to become a complete social outcast. However, one of the leading ladies in society advises her to reinvent herself, and soon Sarah is known as "The Golden Lady", the glittering, carefree toast of the town. Not everyone is as happy about her drastic changes, though.

Sarah's childhood friend Lieutenant Jackson Fletcher is back in London as the ship he was serving on is too old to sail any longer. While he cools his heels, living with the Forresters, waiting to find out the final fate of his ship, he also determines to breach Sarah's glittering facade and see if there are any traces left of the trusting and adventurous girl he once knew. A truly outrageous scheme involving costumes, lurking in a cupboard and assumed identities leads to a passionate kiss, as well as Jackson being recruited to help solve a high-profile murder. The last thing he wants to do is keep secrets from Sarah, as secrets were what broke up her engagement with the Duke.

This was my first romance by Kate Noble, and I must admit, it was a bit of a hot mess. There were so many different story beats, and it seemed difficult to pin down what the story really wanted to be. There was Sarah's transformation to society "Mean Girl" in order to mask her heartbreak. There was Jackson's struggle to acknowledge that life as he'd known it might be over, and he'd have to get used to a civilian life. There was the preposterous scheme Jack hatched to re-awaken Sarah's sense of fun, which amounted to him disguising himself as "The Blue Raven", a masked spy having worked against the French during the Napoleonic wars, basically Sarah's childhood hero. Then there was the plot to uncover a murderer, which both Sarah and Jack eventually got involved in. Too many things happening, none of which felt like they were really properly committed to.

It didn't help that I couldn't really connect with Sarah. I felt bad that she was jilted, but she clearly didn't love her Duke all that much anyway. The social disgrace and fact that she was no longer going to be comfortably settled seemed to be more hurtful than the fact that her fiancee loved another. "The Golden Lady" is a self-centred bitch and I can't fault Jackson for wanting to make her stop being so dismissive of her sisters and behave better. What I couldn't really see was why he was so determined to "break her cover" or why he fell in love with her. Even when she admits that she behaved badly, she's still not very interesting.

From this book, I learned that after the Napoleonic wars, a huge number of naval officers in England were left without positions, as there simply weren't enough ships for them to serve on. I just didn't particularly care. Then there was the dumb scheme of Jack's, that turned into an elaborate murder investigation and the romance seemed to almost be forgotten.

I've bought a whole bunch of Kate Noble books in e-book sales in the past few years, so at some point I'm obviously going to read them. This is not the first book in the Blue Raven series. I started with this one because it fit in my Monthly Key Word Challenge. One of the books in the series is about Sarah's younger sister, whose hurt that her older sister is completely ruining her first season, and as I liked and sympathised with her a lot more than with the protagonists, I'm hoping that other Noble books engage me more than this one. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 84: "The Heart of Betrayal" by Mary E. Pearson

Page count: 480 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

This is the second book in the Remnant Chronicles, following directly on from The Kiss of Deception. It is impossible for me to review this without spoilers for the first book, hence, skip this if you're not caught up.

Princess Lia is a prisoner in Venda, surrounded by what she has been taught are violent and backward barbarians. Having accepted her feelings for Rafe, she may never have a proper chance to act on them, as they are both captives and the Komizar, the ruler of Venda, seems doubtful as to the use of either of his human prizes of war. Kaden, the Komizar's assassin doesn't want the girl he loves to be killed and argues that Lia's magical gift can be beneficial to the country. Rafe pretends to be a turn-cloak adviser to the Dalbreckian prince, claiming his master is just waiting for the King of Dalbreck to die so he can rule and make an alliance with Venda. Whether the Komizar allows Rafe to live because of this, or because he can be used as leverage to control Lia, is uncertain.

While initially seemingly unimpressed with his royal captive, the Komizar quickly changes his mind about her usefulness, to the worry of both Kaden and Rafe. As Lia is offered limited freedoms, she gradually discovers that all the stories she was told about Venda were lies, and the reason for the country's fierce raids is that the more powerful kingdoms of Dalbreck and Morrighan have brutalised the populace to the brink of devestation. The common people are strong, resilient and above all, in desperate need of hope. Additionally, Lia needs to decide if she can trust Kaden, the man sent to kill her, but who chose to spare her life instead, who is now arguing passionately for her survival. She also needs to examine whether her feelings for Rafe are still the same, having found out his true identity and had to confront all the lies he told her. Most of all, she needs to step extremely carefully, to survive the Komizar's manipulations long enough for her and Rafe to figure out a way to escape their captivity.

While Lia annoyed me for a lot of the first book, I'm completely on her side here and she has come such a long way from the spoiled and impetuous princess at the beginning of the story. Her entire world-view has been turned on its head, and she's forced to acknowledge that most of what she's known before has been lies told to keep her ignorant. While there are still traces of a love triangle, it's not really there on her part, she just needs some time to reconcile the knowledge that the man she fell in love with is not a lowly farmer, but the prince she was in fact betrothed to marry and ran away from. Yes, he lied to her about his true identity, but she did also run away from their wedding, forcing him to hunt her down. He gets himself taken prisoner with her, so as to stay close to her and does his best to reassure her that they will be rescued by his men. Kaden clearly loves Lia still, but I can't really fault Lia for using every advantage she has in trying to get free, even if it means manipulating a man who is risking his life and position to keep her alive.

While I found that some parts of the book still dragged a bit, and I found the Komizar a bit too moustache-twirly to be interesting, I am still enjoying the series. The tribal society of Venda was interesting, especially in contrast of what has been revealed of Morrighan and Dalbreck so far, as were the added revelations in the back story, gradually revealed in the ancient texts Lia carries with her. I'm very curious to see how the pseudo-medieval world in this series emerged from the remnants of a high technology civilisation. I'm assuming all will be made clear in the final part, when Lia, Rafe and Kaden are clearly in for a doozy of challenges after the final third of this book.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.