CBR18 Book 46: "Dominion" by Jean Kwok

Page count: 448 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR18 Bingo: 26 (published this year. This month, in fact)

Thank you to G.P. Putnam's Sons and NetGalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book is on sale now.

Rubi is an azure, a group of displaced and badly treated refugees. In this fantasy world, there are four dominions, each with its own specialities. There is the Azure Dragon dominion, which can control plants and all things growing, and many of their people can shapeshift into animals; the Scarlet Phoenix dominion, which controls fire; the Silver Tyger (yes, that's how they spell the name of the magical animal) dominion, which can manipulate metal; and the Onyx Tortoise dominion, which controls water and ice. The various dominions also seem to have very different views on gender equality. The Scarlet Dominion is fully matriarchal; in the Azure Dominion, men and women seem to have been treated as equals; in the Silver Dominion, there is a strong bent towards misogyny, with the current king being extremely dismissive of his only child, a daughter. Finally, in the Onyx Dominion, women are entirely subservient to men, and their magic is used to fuel the male wielders. 

The azures became refugees and had to shelter among the other three dominions after something known as the Annihilation, which was supposed to be a joyous and special event, when the Crown Prince of the Azure Dominion wed the Crown Princess of the Scarlet Dominion in a rare love match. However, demons poured forth from the ground, killing and/or devouring a lot of the guests, including the bride, the Scarlet Crown Princess, and the King of the Onyx Dominion. The whole Azure royal family disappeared and is believed to also have been devoured by the demons. Because of this, all cross-dominion alliances are considered an impossibility, and the Azure people who have had to flee to other parts of the world are mostly seen as second-class citizens and set to do all the hardest jobs. 

Rubi lives in the woods with her foster mum. She was orphaned when fleeing from the Annihilation and has more or less total amnesia. Occasionally she has dreams where a woman's voice sings her a song with a prophecy, but she can never remember the woman's face when she wakes up. Rubi runs into Blake Axefire (yes, that's his name), also known as the Ambush Master, the king's chief enforcer, when he is in the woods near the cabin where she lives, looking for an escaped tyger. When trying to defend herself from said tyger, Rubi stabs it and is promptly arrested because it is a deadly offence to injure one of the king's magical tygers. Not only that, the tyger is basically the queen tyger, the only adult female able to bear cubs. The last queen tyger died after its mate died (they're bonded for life and can't live without their mate), along with its bonded rider, Blake's twin brother Zayden (yes, also that name) during the Annihilation. 

But of course, Rubi is our super special romantasy heroine, so despite the fact that azures can't bond with tygers, and that no female tyger has bonded with anyone for centuries, Flame, the current queen tyger, bonds with her. This does not sit well with a whole bunch of people, including the king, his bruthish nephew and heir, Ire, or the princess, Malissa. They pretty much all want Rubi killed, so Flame can bond with someone else. But queen tyger makes it very clear that she'll refuse to mate and have tyger babies if they kill her chosen mate, so now Rubi has to train to be a fighter with the elite silver tyger riders.

As if that wasn't enough, a divine messenger appears and announces that the Annihilation will seem like a child's birthday party unless all the various Dominions gather a band of champions each and work together to stop a potential apocalyptic event. Despite their differences and enmities, it's very important that all four Dominions are equally represented. There's a big public challenge about it, and obviously Rubi is one of the chosen warriors. So is her best friend, Quinn, who can shapeshift into a wolf. Rubi not only has amnesia, but she also seems to have very weak magic and is not able to shapeshift.

Also, Blake doesn't hate her at all, all his grumpiness at the beginning is apparently because he was trying to fight his attraction to her. He loves her, and Jace, the Captain of the King's guard, seems to be very into her as well. 

I don't like the term romantasy. I don't particularly like the new publishing trend that means so many of these books get churned out, and all feel like they are following the same checklist. In November 2024, my bookclub read Fourth Wing, which felt like it owed a LOT of debts to A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (heck, this entire sub-genre owes its popularity to Sarah J. Maas and her books. Most of them even have titles along the lines of "A noun of nouns and nouns".) This book had so many tropes from both of these books. Rubi injures a magical creature and is taken away by a brooding man because of it. Her life will never be the same. There is a super special girl who magically and implausibly bonds with the most impressive of all the magical animals. There's a tortured guy with a very dumb name who is obviously crazy about the heroine.

I know a lot of female authors who started writing about a decade or two ago were pretty much forced to market their books as young adult to get them sold, complete with being persuaded to insert love triangles into the plot because that was what sold back then. This felt like the opposite, a YA fantasy where the author just inserted a bunch of sex scenes in the second half of the book because romantasy has to have spicy scenes and fade to black just won't cut it. 

This book felt so derivative at first, and by about 40%, I decided that if the plot hadn't improved by the halfway point, I was going to just skip to the end and read the final chapters to see what happened. As it turns out, it did get a bit better in the second half, but a lot of the plot was still quite predictable, and oh so tropey. I was all set to give this book 3.5 stars, but then in the final three chapters or so, the author suddenly revealed a bunch of stuff that was surprising enough that I was forced to reevaluate my opinion and went from not being very bothered about seeing where this series is going, to suddenly being quite intrigued. Unfortunately, the twists came a bit too late to save my overall opinion of the book. I can't bring myself to rate something 3.75, though, so a grudging upgrade to 4 full stars it gets. I most likely will read the next book in the series, but I will get it from the library, unless I can score another ARC. 

Judging a book by its cover:

Not going to lie, the cover was one of the things that made me request this ARC. The defiant posture of the girl, the blue hair and swirling fabric (which I now know are Rubi's ribbons). The hint of the tiger in the background. The cover intrigued me, so well done, cover designers. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR17 Book 49: "The Change" by Kirsten Miller

Page count: 480 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Buzzwords Cover Challenge 25: Pattern

CBR17 Bingo: Red (A book with a red cover)

Official plot summary:

In the Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment...

After Nessa James's husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she's left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn't take long for Nessa to realise that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead--a gift she's inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities.

On the cusp of 50, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn't left her house in months, and from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriett's life is far from over--in fact, she's undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis.

Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty long years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with the beginning of menopause feel like the very last straw--until she realizes she has the ability to channel them, and finally comes into her power.

Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio of women discover a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off as a drug-addicted sex worker, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. Their investigation into the girl's murder leads to more bodies, and to the town's most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don't apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriett will take matters into their own hands...

This was my IRL book club's selection for April (because a murder mystery starring three witchy women seemed really appropriate in the same month as Easter (see my description of traditional Norwegian Easter pastimes here). We had a very interesting discussion about it at the end of the month, and it turned out to be a bit of a divisive book. I absolutely loved it, but I suspect that if I'd been younger when I read it (as many members of my book club are) or a man, this book might not have worked for me on as many levels as it did.

One of the things that turned out to be an issue with a lot of the readers was the difficulty in pinpointing the genre of the book. This book isn't an urban fantasy novel, even though there are seemingly supernatural elements in it. It's not a straight-up mystery/crime novel. It's not literary fiction. It's very feminist, and some of the women in the story are described by others as witches, but it doesn't fit neatly into any one category, and for some of the members, that was apparently really frustrating. I've classified it as a contemporary fiction novel with magical realism elements, and there is a mystery to be solved, but it doesn't follow the traditional genre beats of a mystery novel.

Fully in my perimenopausal era now, there were many things in this novel that I recognised almost too well. Jo's overwhelming sense of rage at everyone and everything all the time. Harriet getting to a point where she just wants to do her own thing and doesn't give a single f*ck about what anyone says about it. Nessa is probably the nicest of the three protagonists, but also the one I identified the least with. Her supernatural gift, which it's established as something that women of her family have shared for generations, seems rather horrible. Being able to see the ghosts of dead women, who need the culprits brought to justice, and just not getting peace until the issue is dealt with - it seems like a heavy burden. Thankfully, she has the two other women to assist her in avenging these helpless victims (because while it starts with one dead body, it becomes clear that she is just one in a very long line of women who have met a horrible end in the area).

The POVs of the story mostly shift between Harriet (who was pretty much a middle-aged Poison Ivy), Jo and Nessa. We also get chapters from other women's POVs, including several of the dead girls whom they are determined to get justice for. It helps the reader see these young women as actual people, not just disposable victims. There's a subplot involving a True Crime podcaster, there to delve into the case, who previously did a season on a serial killer decapitating his victims and leaving the heads as grisly trophies. When asked about it, it turns out that he can easily remember every single location a head was found, but he struggles to remember the name of a single one of the victims. Getting to see the world through the victim's eyes, even for just one chapter each, made their tragic fates so much more impactful. 

This book could be summed up as 'F*ck the Patriarchy' or 'Not all men, but almost all of them, and quite a few women who facilitate their awfulness'. Not to say that there aren't some actually good men in the story. Nessa reconnects with the former partner of her dead husband, who is a genuinely decent man and a policeman determined to help with the cases, even when it becomes clear that many of his co-workers feel differently. Jo's husband, who is out of work and working on a screenplay, may not be perfect, but he clearly loves and supports his wife, and as someone who has been with a man for 25 years now, who, because of a whole host of mental issues, depression, and the like has struggled to hold down jobs for a lot of our time together, but who is still a caring husband and father, I got rather heated in my defense of a guy a lot of other readers thought was a bit of a useless sadsack.

To me, this book about righteously angry women, who set out to right the wrongs done by privileged, spoiled and callous men, was an almost perfect read. The latter half had some pacing issues that kept me from giving it a full five stars, but I really enjoyed it when reading, and had trouble putting it down. Strongly recommended, but it may work better for you if you are a woman of a certain age, who has experienced some of the varied awfulnesses that menopause brings. 

Judging a book by its cover: I have the UK paperback edition of this book, where the cover is the black patterns on the blood red background. On some versions, I've seen more of a black border around the edges, and there's red and even a bit of violet in the colour scheme. The American cover seems to be dark blue with sinister-looking thistles on the front. Here, there's just the woman's partially obscured face, and a bee very prominently on the lower half. Both are relevant to the contents. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 47: "Partners in Crime" by Alisha Rai

Page count: 400 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Skyline

CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: Diversity 

Yet again resorting to the official plot summary, because I finished this in mid-April and I just cannot remember all the of details of the plot anymore:

At thirty-five, with a stable job as an accountant, Mira Chaudhary wants nothing more than to find a boring man to spend the rest of her life with. Having had enough excitement in her younger days and desperately trying to escape her dysfunctional past, she turns to a matching app specializing in Indian American singles to help her find someone to settle down with.

Enter Naveen Desai. An English professor with an uneventful, normal, and—dare she say it, boring—life, Naveen is perfect.

But just when things are going well, Mira receives news that her aunt has died. Suddenly, a trip to Las Vegas to settle her aunt’s affairs turns into a mad dash to escape kidnappers, evade art thieves, and consorting with hackers who can decipher just what it was Mira’s aunt was involved with. Mira just hopes that Naveen isn’t chased away by the very same life of “excitement” that she’s been trying to get away from. But maybe, over the course of one wild night, Mira and Naveen will find the love connection that neither expected.

Mira is trying to be traditional and respectable, to distance herself from her family's less than savoury past. Naveen is trying to help his grandfather keep his lawyer's practice. The two of them have a past, and Mira broke up with Naveen via text message. Not exactly classy. He's right to be pissed off at her.

However, when they end up drugged and abducted together to Las Vegas, they try to figure out what the bad guys want from Mira's dad and aunt's pasts, before bad things happen to them (or people they care about, like Naveen's grandfather). They are forced to work together to stay ahead of their pursuers, and over the course of a whirlwind adventure in Vegas, they also get a chance to reconnect, reevaluate their past relationship and see each other honestly as the people they really are now.

Unfortunately, I don't remember a lot of details particularly clearly, but at the same time, I also don't remember anything that annoyed me while reading it, either. It was a fun read, and I finished it in less than 48 hours. 

Judging a book by its cover: Standard grumble about cartoon cover trend - but I do appreciate that both the characters on the cover look approximately as described in the story, and the scene in question, complete with fancy car and evening wear, does actually take place in the story. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR16 Book 22: "Chilling Effect" by Valerie Valdes

Page count: 464 pages

Rating: 3 stars

From the official plot summary:

Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra cruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for even smaller profits. When her sister Mari is kidnapped by The Fridge, a shadowy syndicate that holds people hostage in cryostasis, Eva must undergo a series of unpleasant, dangerous missions to pay the ransom.But Eva may lose her mind before she can raise the money. 

The tagline for this book is "Kidnappers. Alien Emperors. Psychic cats. And she's out of coffee." Two of these things apply to the plot of this book, but only one of them is really central to the story. Like my book club's choice for January, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this is a book that falsely promises cats and doesn't deliver. Eva also never seems to run out of coffee, so why this was even added is a mystery to me. 

This book was pretty much a hot mess. It's the author's debut novel, which I guess might explain the uneven story structure and the exhaustive amount of plot twists a bit. One of the main plotlines is indeed that Captain Innocente's sister has been kidnapped, which means she has to go on a variety of mini-quests in the first third of the book. Several of my book club members mentioned that this book may have started as Mass Effect fan fiction because so many of the elements are similar. The many many early side quests certainly feel like something out of a game. Unlike in Before the Coffee Gets Cold, there were at least cats in this book. A load of them, although only one seems to feature prominently. Sadly, however, these cats barely appear after the first chapter. There is also an intergalactic alien emperor who inexplicably gets obsessed with Captain Innocente, and stalks her across much of the universe, determined to capture her and add her to her harem (they literally meet for a brief moment in a bar - it's genuinely baffling what his obsession is based on). 

The many side quests do allow the author to show a lot of different alien locations, and it feels very realistic that not everything is uniform and samey in space. There are also many different kinds of aliens, not everyone is humanoid. Although it did make it harder to picture certain individuals (what the heck are palps?)

While I don't regret the time I spent reading the book, there are a lot of things that annoyed me. The story is very slow to start and the story structure is very uneven. Every time you think you know what's going on, the story suddenly takes a drastic turn, and it seems like the author has tried to cram three different books' worth of plot into one book. There's the kidnapping and attempted rescue plot, the subplot of the obsessive emperor stalking her and wreaking destruction wherever he shows up. Then things massively change and she has to find her missing ship and scattered crew, and when it feels like the main story has come to a natural end, they suddenly have to go off and recover alien artefacts. 

There also isn't really any characterisation for any character except Eva and Vakar (and even his came late enough in the book that I'm not sure it counts). It's fun with a crew of varied individuals, but since we found out very little about them, I didn't care all that much about what happened to them. Additionally, I'm all for flawed characters, but Eva was a trainwreck (and not in a fun way) and should have confided in her crew way before she did. I genuinely didn't see why anyone liked her, and she was so reluctant to trust anyone that I have no idea why her crew felt any friendship or loyalty towards her. , I didn't really care what happened to her either, and that's pretty bad when she's the main character.

On the other hand, it certainly wasn't predictable - jumping around and switching directions so many times. Since I've never played Mass Effect, I didn't get annoyed by all the blatant video game references. The general consensus in my book club is that the book was ok, but nothing great. No one really seemed very inclined to read the sequels, and the one member who had read them said that the writing style didn't get all that much better and the structure of the sequels continued to be a bit all over the place. 

Judging a book by its cover: OK, I'll give the cover designer points for the portal, which does in fact play an important part in the final part of the novel. Cute cats are also a plus, even though they sadly don't feature all that much in the plot. I like the blue and violet shades, it's an attractive cover, but having now finished the book, it doesn't really fit with the story we get inside. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR15 Book 6: "The Duke Undone" by Joanna Lowell

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 3 stars

Lucy Coover is on her way to her painting class at the Royal Academy one morning when she stumbles across a body in an alley. The man is completely naked, and she assumes he's been the victim of a crime. Then she realises he's breathing, so he seems to only be dead drunk. As a female art student, Lucy is fascinated by human anatomy but is also not allowed to ever attend life drawing classes at the Academy. She's late for class but also makes sure to get a good eyeful. This might be her only chance to ever study a naked man up close.

Several months later, Anthony Philby, the Duke of Weston is confronted in his office by a furious man pointing a gun at him. The man is convinced that the duke has had an affair with his wife, despite Anthony's vehement claims that he's never even heard of the woman. Because the angry man is a terrible shot, Anthony escapes with nothing but a nick on the arm, but shooting a duke is nevertheless a serious enough crime that he's able to pressure the man to show him his alleged proof, which certainly looks extremely damning. The mythological figure depicted in the painting, purchased by the man's wife, is clearly the duke of Weston's extremely naked form. Of course, Anthony has never posed nude for a painting and has no idea how this image could have been captured. The existence of the painting were it to come to light, would spell out inevitable scandal, something Anthony cannot afford.

Anthony's life has been plagued by controversy and scandal. He was originally the second son, and never meant to inherit the title.  However, after Anthony's brother died while sinking a stolen barge, accompanied by a young sex worker, after a very public drunken escapade, his father had no choice but to accept him as the new heir. Anthony's brother was known for his utterly unhinged and scandalous behaviour, he rebelled against all of their father's constraints and delighted in causing outrageous scenes and bringing negative attention to the family.  The children's mother was from Greece, extremely beautiful and extroverted, and exuberant. While Anthony was still a teenager, his father claimed their mother had grown promiscuous and hysterical and had her committed to an insane asylum, where she fell into a depression and committed suicide. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Anthony ended up in fistfights defending his mother's honour. Additionally, while Anthony was stationed in India as a soldier, his younger sister Effie ran away with a circus performer and was promptly disowned by their father as a result. Now no one has heard from her in years.

All of these things mean that when the former duke died, he made sure to write several very unusual provisions into his will. While Anthony inherited the dukedom of Weston immediately after his father's death, all of the money and property associated with the title were tied up in a complicated trust, meant to control and curtail Anthony's behaviour. Unless Anthony lives a life of sobriety and moderation, avoiding even the merest hint of a scandal until his thirtieth birthday, he will not gain control of his money and estates and remain under the thumb of his father's friend and advisor, Mr Yardley, who seems more than happy to continue his guardianship. The nude painting and accusations of adultery would certainly count as scandalous and ruin any chances Anthony has of escaping his tyrannical father's control from beyond the grave. 

Anthony goes to the Royal Academy to track down the mysterious L. Coover and is surprised to find that the painter is a young lady. He's not sure how she could possibly have seen him naked, and therefore mistakenly thinks she moonlights as a prostitute when not taking painting classes. Lucy instead reveals that she found him dead drunk in an alley and promises that the painting he saw was the only one she ever made of him. Anthony demands that she give him all her notes and sketches, or he'll get her thrown out of the Academy. It seems as if the two might never have to meet again after that, only Lucy discovers that the area of Shoreditch where she and her seamstress aunt live is scheduled to be demolished shortly, and the only powerful man she knows is Anthony. She shows up at his London townhouse and demands that he use whatever influence he has to try to persuade the city officials in charge of the decision to change their minds. In return, Anthony asks her to search for his missing sister, Effie, who he's very worried about.

Of course, now that they're seeing each other regularly, there's bound to be an attraction between them. However, Lucy discovers that to rebel against his father's strict rules, Anthony takes every chance he gets to get drunk in secret, hiding it from his servants and Yardley. Lucy's father was an alcoholic and she remembers all too well how devastating his drunkenness was for her and her mother. She's never going to let herself fall for an alcoholic. There's also the fact that she's an orphan from Shoreditch, while he's the duke of Weston. A happy ending for them isn't exactly in the cards.

There is a lot to like about this book, but also quite a few things that took me out of the story. As I've seen pointed out in a lot of reviews, the provisions left in Anthony's father's will, where he wouldn't be able to touch any of the money from his inheritance or estates until he turned thirty, or even beyond if he was involved in any scandals, just isn't something that could ever have happened and the complications around this plot strand just keep getting more and more ridiculous as the story progresses. Obviously, ridiculous will demands are frequently a trope in historical romance, but this one takes things a bit too far. 

As the daughter of an alcoholic myself (my father stopped drinking when I was nine, and hasn't drunk a drop since, so it could have been a lot worse for me growing up) I have a really hard time sympathising with characters with severe substance abuse problems that they refuse to deal with. I found the A Star is Born remake with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper almost insufferable to watch because I could not for a second emphasise with Cooper's character, and Lady Gaga's character should have gotten far far away from him as soon as she could. Similarly here, I found Anthony's habitual drinking, seemingly a direct result of him trying to spite his already dead father, rather immature and not at all an attractive character trait in what was supposed to be a romance hero. I'm sure it was meant to make him more tragic, but this misfired for me.

The novel also takes a turn for the rather melodramatic in the final third or so of the novel. Lucy does in fact manage to track down Effie, Anthony's missing sister, eventually but the details of her whereabouts for the past several years and who put her there and why, as well as the motivations of the villain of the piece just made me roll my eyes. 

Lowell has a really good turn of phrase, and I liked her more unusual choice of heroine (and several of Lucy's friends at the Academy), but I doubt I will be re-visiting this book in the future, and I feel no particular need to read the next book in the series. 

Judging a book by its cover: The delicate flowers on the cover and the whimsical silhouettes, make this look like a much more frothy and light-hearted novel than it actually is. There's a lot of dark subject matter being discussed in this novel, and this cover might mislead a reader into thinking they're going to get an undemanding romp, rather than a hero with PTSD, substance abuse problems, and a truly sordid family history. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR14 Book 23: "The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes" by Cat Sebastian

Page count: 352 pages

Rating: 5 stars

CBR14 Bingo: Gaslight (Marian was lied to and manipulated by the duke, book also set in the Georgian era)

Spoiler warning! I'm going to do my best to review this book without spoiling major plot points from The Queer Principles of Kit Webb or this book, but if you want to remain fully unspoiled, you'd probably want to skip this review until you've actually read the book. Which you should (read the book, I mean), it's absolutely marvellous.

Marian Hayes, believed to be the Duchess of Clare until the truth about her husband's first marriage comes out, is on the run. The Duke of Clare was critically injured during a highway robbery, and Marian is not going to stay behind at the duke's estate to wait for the loathsome man to actually die, nor to be asked intrusive questions about the incident where the duke ended up with a bullet in his gut. Unfortunately, Marian doesn't have a lot of people to turn to in her hour of need, and so ends up fleeing her husband's deathbed aided by none other than the man who revealed the truth about the duke's bigamy in the first place - Robert "Rob" Brooks, scoundrel, con artist, former highwayman and currently Marian's (not exactly unwilling) kidnapping victim.

Rob has been on the wrong side of the law for most of his life, and what was supposed to be a rather simple blackmailing plot turned into a months-long correspondence with his blackmailing victim. It also involved her tailing him through the seedier side of London during various nighttime jaunts, and culminated in her drugging him and leaving him tied to a bed just as he was about to assist his former best friend and Marian's sort of stepson-in-law rob the Duke of Clare. So when she shows up in the rooms she rented to keep him captive (he managed to get out of her rather inept knots without too much trouble), covered almost head to toe in blood, utterly furious and infuriatingly enchanting, what's a charming rogue like Rob supposed to do? Leave her to fend for herself?

Marian insists she needs to check on the safety and welfare of her father and she and Rob set off, picking pockets, drinking, bickering (on Marion's part), and flirting (on Rob's part), trying to stay ahead of the law and completing the process that began with their unusual correspondence. Rob was pretty smitten with Marian even before he really spent any time with her. During their unorthodox road trip, his feelings deepen and increase. Marian, on her part, has never exactly been what was considered the feminine ideal. She is deeply disillusioned by her relationship with the Duke of Clare, which wasn't exactly a romantic dream even before she discovered that he was a bigamist with a wife alive somewhere, either in the French countryside or somewhere in England. She's acerbic, sarcastic, deeply practical, and believes herself to be pretty unlovable, her best friend Percy's affections notwithstanding. That living golden retriever Rob, with his good looks, and cheerful demeanour, not to mention a flirtatious look and/or word for everyone claims that he loves her, she has trouble both believing herself worthy and in returning his affections as she feels he deserves. 

An additional potential complication in the relationship between Rob and Marian is that, while Marian survived her very difficult pregnancy and the birth of her daughter Elizabeth (who is safely in the care of Kit and Percy, for those of you worried about Marian haring off without her baby), it's also clear that she would not necessarily survive another pregnancy and therefore traditional intercourse could have life-threatening consequences for her. While the Duke doesn't seem to have cared about his young wife's safety at all, Rob is all about respect and consent and is more than creative enough to make sure that he and Marian can enjoy themselves without Marian ever having to be at risk. Both in this and in the rather wounded and seemingly spiky heroine, this book reminded me of The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan, where a rather abrasive (on the surface) heroine has experienced a lot of trauma in marriage and finds true love with a clever, handsome man who utterly adores her. I didn't even know that this was a trope I cherish, but it clearly is when handled deftly by a good writer.

I'm sure this book isn't going to be 5 stars for everyone. The opening correspondence between Rob and Marian is excellent, as is their banter throughout, but I can see that some might find the somewhat disjointed road trip narrative, not to mention Rob and Marian's subsequent further forays into criminal endeavours and trying to find justice for the little people by threatening the rich (it was only after reading a comment on another's review of this on the Cannonball Read that I actually realised that Rob and Marian are obviously meant to be inspired by Robin Hood and Maid Marian, at no point while actually reading the book did this cross my mind). Meanwhile, I had trouble putting the book down, and on the occasions when I had to do so, to eat, sleep, do actual paying work, or take care of my family, I still kept thinking about Rob and Marian and wanting to spend more time in their company. To me, this was a pretty perfect read, and will in high probability be one of my top three reads of the year. So glad I finally read these books. 

Judging a book by its cover: I absolutely adore this cover, the way Marian is basically jumping into Rob's arms. It's passionate and playful at the same time and makes me smile every time I see it. I know I gripe a lot about cartoony covers, but this is basically perfection. Love it! 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 7: "Hunt the Stars" by Jessie Mihalik

Page count: 428 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Hello, welcome back to Malin reviews things she read several months ago, in this case - FIVE whole months. Let's start off with the official book description:

Octavia Zarola would do anything to keep her tiny, close-knit bounty hunting crew together—even if it means accepting a job from Torran Fletcher, a ruthless former general and her sworn enemy. When Torran offers her enough credits to not only keep her crew afloat but also hire someone to fix her ship, Tavi knows that she can’t refuse—no matter how much she’d like to.

With so much money on the line, Torran and his crew insist on joining the hunt. Tavi reluctantly agrees because while the handsome, stoic leader pushes all of her buttons—for both anger and desire—she’s endured worse, and the massive bonus payment he’s promised for a completed job is reason enough to shut up and deal.

But when they uncover a deeper plot that threatens the delicate peace between humans and Valoffs, Tavi suspects that Torran has been using her as the impetus for a new war. With the fate of her crew balanced on a knife’s edge, Tavi must decide where her loyalties lie—with the quiet Valoff who’s been lying to her, or with the human leaders who left her squad to die on the battlefield. And this time, she’s put her heart on the line.

I enjoyed the first two books in Mihalik's previous series, Consortium Rebellion. But Malin, if you liked those books so much, why didn't you read book 3? To which the answer is obviously that I was busy or distracted with something else when the book came out, I bought it when it appeared in an e-book sale so I'd have it when I wanted it, and then I completely forgot about it because it wasn't the newest and shiniest thing grabbing my attention. In other words, Chaos Reigning, I will get round to you at some point. 

This, on the other hand, was new and shiny and caught my attention immediately upon release, especially because my friend Emmalita gave a positive review of the ARC. She has excellent taste and if she says a book is good, I'm likely to really enjoy it too. So never mind me not having finished Mihalik's previous series (the books are stand-alones, anyway), my brain wanted this brand of romantic space adventure escapism instead. 

I really have not done myself any favours by waiting five months before reviewing the book. Hence this is all going to be what I remember now, with my swiss-cheese depression brain. Tavi and her crew mates (think found family) are veterans of some sort of space war.  Now they basically work as bounty hunters of sorts. One of the generals from the enemy side of said war comes to Tavi with an offer she basically can't afford to refuse, because of course her spaceship is badly in need of repairs (these spaceships are so rarely new and state of the art). If I remember correctly, Tavi and her crew are humans, while the enemies are humanoid and could pass for humans, but have woobly psychic powers of some kind. Possibly only some of them have the woobly psychic powers, the general certainly does. But Tavi has trained herself to shield her thoughts, and she's taught her crew as well. Hence the general can't mess with them.

Anyways, they take the job, even though they're not exactly happy about it. Tavi charges the general a truly exorbitant rate, and figures that the mission has to be both very dangerous and very personal to him since he's willing to pay without hardly any haggling at all. The mission will take them to the general's home world. Is it all a trap? How long will it take, with both of them forced together on a small ship, before Tavi and the honorable and quietly dignified, but also dangerous enemy general fall prey to their pants feelings for one another? How many secondary romances are going to be set up as sequel bait? 

You'll have to read the book because by now, I really don't remember. As well as the ragtag bunch of found family members on a space hulk, we also have an adorable pet thrown in the mix. Tavi has a pet fox-like creature that she rescued during the war. Apparently, these creatures are seen as almost sacred on the woobly psychic alien world, so the fact that she's had one since it was a poor orphaned baby is also something that earns her the respect of the former enemies. 

As enemies to lovers romances go, I seem to recall that it doesn't take that long for the enemy part to fade away to mutual respect, and Mihalik seems to like sci-fi romances where each couple gets their own book. So in this one, it's Tavi and general Torran (I almost called him General Woobly, which I like better) who fall crazy in love and there will be at least two more books, I think, with a new couple in each one. There's a bunch of action both on and off the spaceship. There are quiet moments of getting to know one another, there are thrilling moments, and the occasional tense (oh noes we're in danger) moments. Even now, five months later, I remember the book fondly enough to give it four stars. It's not one of those reads that's likely to change your life, but it's entertaining and I liked spending time with the characters, and look forward to what comes next in future installments. 

Judging a book by its cover: There are some covers that do pretty much exactly what you need them to. This book features romantic science fiction, and the cover promises you exactly that. You've got your spaceship, your impressive space vistas, your heroic protagonists in silhouette, both facing away from each other and clearly together. The colour choices are pleasant, but I've seen a lot more interesting covers in the past. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR9 Book 20: "Every Word" by Ellie Marney

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 4 stars

This is the second book in a trilogy. While readers could start with this one, I would recommend that they start at the beginning with book 1, Every Breath. There may be mild spoilers for the first book in the series in this review, so if you want to go in completely cold, skip this until you're caught up. 

Rachel Watts has pretty severely grounded after the events that led to both her and her new boyfriend (also her neighbour from two doors' down the street) James Mycroft ending up in a near death situation, having caught the attention of some rather ruthless people while investigating the death of a homeless man. They hardly get any time to themselves, which doesn't exactly decrease the unresolved sexual tension between them. Their developing relationship may be over before it's really had a chance to properly begin, however, when Mycroft suddenly travels to London, leaving Rachel only a short text message, nothing else.

Having lost his parents in a horrific car jacking seven years ago, Mycroft, who despite still being a teenager, is something of a wunderkind of forensic science, has been obsessed with finding out more about their murder. Having been in the car at the time his parents died, he's scarred both physically and emotionally and the reason he persuades his supervisor, Dr. Walsh, to allow him to go along as a consultant to London is that the death in question bears a striking resemblance to the car jacking where his parents were killed. A rare Shakespearean Folio has been stolen from the Bodleian library in Oxford. Now one of the librarians who worked there has been killed in another car jacking, his car driven off the road. Mycroft is convinced the case is linked to that of his parents', not that he's going to tell Dr. Walsh that.

Rachel, however, is fully aware of what Mycroft is doing, and worried about his mental state, she impulsively spends most of her savings on a return ticket to London to follow him. Alicia, her brother's girlfriend, is spending the next three months travelling in Europe, so her first time on a plane ever won't have to be a lonely experience. When she and Alicia track down Mycroft, he's both shocked and dismayed to see her, but can't really make her return to Australia when she followed him halfway across the globe.

Together with Dr Walsh, the teens are able to visit the accident site, and you don't have to be an investigative genius to see that the story that the victim's alleged girlfriend is telling about the accident doesn't match up with the actual evidence on the scene. While the car jacking victim had an alibi when the Shakespeare Folio was stolen, both Rachel and Mycroft suspect that he was involved somehow, and that is why he was driven off the road and shot at. When Rachel takes it upon herself to visit the dead man's work place in Oxford, claiming to be his niece, she finds clues that suggest their theory is correct, but before she can tell anyone about it, she's abducted and wakes up in a remote warehouse. Some very threatening people want to know what she knows about the case, and whether she knows anything about the extremely valuable Folio's location. They're clearly the people responsible for the murder, and everything suggests that if she doesn't come up with something clever, she will be their next victim.

I really rather enjoyed the first book in the series, where we first get introduced to the likable Rachel and her somewhat abrasive, but brilliant neighbour Mycroft, who over the course of their first murder investigation fall in love. If I was fond of them in the first book, my affection and worry for them only grew the further I got into the story of this one. As the two were friends before they became a couple, Rachel is willing to travel the very long distance to England to be with James, even if he's so unhappy to see her there that he breaks up with her. She's honestly not sure how he'll react, but also knows that the whole situation with his parents' death is so fraught for him, and he's so incredibly obsessed with solving their murder that he may put himself at serious risk. She wants to be there for him as emotional support, whether it means losing him as a boyfriend or not.

As Mycroft is clearly teetering on the edge of a breakdown by the time Rachel shows up on the doorstep of his hostel, it's clearly a good idea that she threw caution to the wind and hopped on the first available plane from Melbourne. Chain-smoking and soothing his jangled nerves with far too much alcohol, Mycroft is not entirely reliable, and his supervisor, Dr. Walsh, very much appreciates Rachel's assistance in keeping his mind on the task at hand. As it becomes more and more obvious that the car jacking case involving the Bodleian librarian is indeed most likely linked to that of Mycroft's parents, seven years ago, he just becomes more and more sharpened on his goal. Rachel is frustrated that he refuses to share any of his thoughts and feelings about their actual deaths, though, believing it may help him get some piece of mind, no matter what the outcome of the current investigation.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book, other than Rachel and Mycroft exploring London a bit. I was not expecting the really very creepy and suspenseful turn the book took as Rachel is kidnapped from the Bodleian, by people who believe her to be the dead man's niece. They have already killed to get the missing Shakespeare Folio and are clearly willing to resort to both threats and outright torture to figure out what she knows about the case. Alone, desperate and scared out of her wits, Rachel is in a very bad place and is torn between agreeing to let the kidnappers notify Mycroft, to get him to reveal information that could lead to her release or stay quiet to protect him. There were some really rather unpleasant scenes in the latter half of the book, not exactly for the faint of heart.

As this is the second book in a trilogy, I'm sure the reader will not be surprised when I reveal that neither Rachel nor Mycroft die, though they both go through some real unpleasantness and it's touch and go there for a while (just as in the end of the first book). They also figure out not only who is responsible for the theft of the Folio, but eventually where it's located, as well as getting much further in clearing up the details surrounding Mycroft's parents' murder. That some of their discoveries possibly put them in even more danger than before, even as they return to Melbourne was probably not what they were expecting.

This was absolutely my favourite book in the trilogy. I raced through the latter half, too worried to find out what happened to be able to put the book down. This book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I was glad to have the third book at hand, so I could move onto the resolution as soon as possible.

Judging a book by its cover: I don't exactly think the covers for these books are amazing, but there is a teenage boy and a girl who look vaguely like the description of Rachel and Mycroft, and just so it's immediately obvious to the reader that the action in this book takes place in London, there is Big Ben in the background. The cover is a bit generic, but I've seen a lot worse on YA books.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR8 Book 87: "Our Endless Numbered Days" by Claire Fuller

Page count: 396 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Peggy Hillcoat is the daughter of a famous German concert pianist and an English survivalist, who despite the disapproval of his wife keeps stockpiling supplies in a shelter in their garden and preparing for the worst. Only eight years old, she doesn't question what is happening when her father takes her away from their big house in London while her mother is away on tour. He takes her to the German countryside, to a delapitated cabin remote in the mountains, explaining that this is their home now and that there's been a terrible disaster, they are the only ones left in the entire world.

Peggy is distraught that she'll never get to see her mother or her school friends again, but soon settles into her new reality, helping her father as best she can to get the cabin livable and gathering the supplies that they need to survive. The book begins in 1985, nine years later, when Peggy has been returned to her mother and is trying to adapt to a very different life once more. Little by little the readers discover the reasons her father took her away in the first place, and the details of the years she spent in the lonely wilderness with only the woods and her imagination for entertainment.

Because the book begins in 1985, after Peggy is returned to her mother, the reader is never in doubt that she will survive, even when the story gets really tense and dramatic. Living off the land in a primitive mountain hut is not easy at the best of times, but Peggy makes it clear in her recollections that she and her father were badly prepared for their first winter and I had flashbacks to reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, when she and her family are trying their hardest not to starve to death.

While much of Peggy's adolescence is filled with whimsy and her frolicking in the woods, it is quite clear that her father is a seriously unstable man and that he truly comes to believe the lie he told his daugher. Even early on in the novel it is obvious that something really bad happened before Peggy was returned to civilisation and discovered that her father lied to her all those years. As the book progresses, the suspense increases and my sense of dread with it.

This is a really good book, already highly rated by five other Cannonballers. It's probably not the relaxing holiday read I was looking for, rather a haunting and suspenseful story that will stay with me for a long time.

Judging a book by its cover: The edition I read is pretty much black and white, and black is absolutely the dominant colour. The darkness is very suitable for the contents. The centre of the picture is a simple cabin, surrounded by spindly trees - probably Die Hutte, where Peggy spent most of her adolescence. Despite the picture being very simple, it conveys something ominous and sinister, which again is very apt for this book.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR4 Book 63: "A Night Like This" by Julia Quinn

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars
Date begun: May 30th, 2012
Date finished: May 31st, 2012

Shortly after becoming the Earl of Winstead, Daniel Smythe-Smith rather foolishly engaged in a drunken bout of cards, where one of his close friends accused him of cheating, and challenged him to a duel. Drunk and foolish, Daniel slipped when attempting to fire his weapon away from his friend Hugh, but instead shot him in the leg, nearly killing him. Hugh's powerful father threatens to kill Daniel over what he did to his son, and Daniel has to spend years dodging assassins on the Continent.

When his friend finally promises that it's safe to return, Daniel arrives back just in time for his family's infamous annual musicale (barely any of the Smythe-Smith women who take part every year can play the instruments they perform on, and most are completely unaware of the dreadful racket they make). This year, however, one of the more astute ladies has pulled out at the last minute, feigning illness, forcing Miss Anne Wynter, the family's governess to step in and play the piano. Daniel notices her from back stage, and is instantly smitten with her, to the point that he tracks her down after the concert and kisses her before he even knows who she is.

Anne Wynter is an excellent governess, and knows that she is incredibly lucky to be employed by a kind lady, with clever, if spirited daughters. She knows that not all women would be happy employing a beautiful woman of unknown origins in their household, so while she's equally attracted to Daniel, and flattered by his attention, she knows that nothing can come of his advances, and hopes he will keep his distance. To complicate matters further, Anne is not who she pretends to be, and knows that if her true identity and past were revealed, at best, she would find herself unemployed and friendless, with no references to her name, at worst, involved in a full-blown scandal.

Hence, while she sees that Daniel is a good man, who will loyally stand by his family, is good to his servants and quite happy to play with his young female cousins, she tries to dissuade him from spending time with her. Daniel has other plans, however, and keeps finding ways to spend time with Miss Wynter and the young ladies who are her charges.

As well as the story of how Daniel and Anne fall in love (which is told with Quinn's trademark lightness and wit), there's a subplot where someone is clearly trying to cause harm to one or both of the couple. Is it Hugh's crazy nobleman father who's reneged on his promise to leave Daniel alone? Is it someone from Anne's past, finally having discovered her new identity and location, bent on revenge? This part of the story was supposed to infuse the story with added complications and a sense of danger, but just seemed a bit far fetched to me. I did like the few appearances we got from Daniel's friend Hugh, though, and hope he gets to be the hero of his own romance in the future. Like Just Like Heaven (the previous book in the Smythe-Smith series, about Daniel's sister, Lady Honoria and his best friend, Marcus), this is fluffy and light hearted, but can't compare to the best of Quinn's novels.

CBR3 Book 65: "Stolen: A Letter to My Captor" by Lucy Christopher

Publisher: Chicken House
Page count: 304 pages
Rating: 3 stars
Date begun: August 7th, 2011
Date finished: August 8th, 2011

British sixteen-year-old Gemma is travelling with her parents in Asia and waiting for a transfer at Bangkok airport. Here she is drugged and abducted by Ty, a twenty-something-old man who takes her to the Australian Outback, far away from civilisation and everything she knows. As the book progresses, Gemma realizes that Ty's not selected her at random, he's been watching her and planning for years. He doesn't hurt her, or molest her, but claims he loves her, and that she'll spend the rest of her life in the wilderness with him.

Stolen: A Letter to My Captor does, as the title suggests, take the form of Gemma's letter to her abductor. We follow her from what she believes is her first encounter with Ty at the airport, where the handsome young man ("I didn't want to repulse you") buys her a coffee. The book has no chapters, and is a very compelling, if at times, uncomfortable read. Ty is a very intense young man, with a difficult background. He may be a stalker and a kidnapper, who claims to love Gemma with a scary intensity, but he never makes any sexual advances towards her, and treats her with quiet solicitude. He sees the Outback as a paradise, and most of his experiences with city life are negative. He can't see why Gemma won't see the beauty of the rugged and lonely landscape and realize how lucky she is to stay there with him. His thought is clearly that as long as she gets used to it, and him, she'll happily share a life with him there.

Gemma, of course tries to escape, only to have to realize that she is too far away from anywhere. As her time in captivity passes, she reluctantly gets to know Ty better, and starts to sympathize more with him. Is this the start of an unusual romance, or just Stockholm Syndrome?

Stolen is an unusual book, and while uncomfortable in places, I also found it hard to put down. I read started it late at night, and pretty much read it in one sitting the next day. Christopher's description of the Australian landscape and her characters is excellent, and the subject matter is certainly something out of the ordinary (it came out the year before Room and while both are about abductions, I think they're very different books). I can strongly recommend it.