#CBR6 Book 7: "The Chocolate Temptation" by Laura Florand

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Sarah Lin hates Patrick Chevalier. She hates his golden good looks, his charming manner, the way he seems to be able to create magic with his bare hands and does absolutely everything flawlessly, without seeming to expend even the slightest bit of effort. She hates him because every time he brushes past her, or winks at her, or jokingly flirts with her, her heart beats faster and she has trouble breathing. He is her boss, and he is godlike, and he would never even look twice at a lowly little intern who never seems to be able to do anything right.

Patrick Chevalier is madly in love with Sarah Lin, the intern in the world-famous French restaurant where they work. He is the second in command in the kitchen, he is her boss, and he knows that it is grossly inappropriate for him to even consider seducing her while she's under his tutelage. But she claims that she's going to go back to California once her internship is over in little over a month, and he might go insane if he doesn't get a chance to show her how she feels. His entire life, he has learned to keep his true hopes and dream deeply hidden, so they can't be snatched away from him. He's come to the conclusion that he has to use his wit and charm and skill to manipulate those around him to reach his goals. When Sarah in an unguarded moment lets it slip that she hates him, he's determined to turn that hate to love, just as he can turn sugar and chocolate into edible treasures.

Sarah's mother fled from North Korea and found a new life in the USA because she got pregnant and Sarah was born there. Becoming an engineer at Caltech to make her mother proud, Sarah feels as if she's let her entire family down when she gave up her high paying job as an engineer to pursue her dream to study as a pastry chef in Paris. Five months into her internship, she's wondering if she made a huge mistake. She can barely afford to pay the rent, she works until she drops, and all around her, the others in the kitchen create marvels while she feels she's a constant failure. The only woman in the whole kitchen, she struggles to keep up with the intense work, and spending so much time around a gorgeous man she's convinced could have any woman he turned his attention to, she's decided that the only way to guard her heart is by hating him intensely.

Patrick may be incredibly successful for his young age, although he never really wanted to become a chef, but an engineer. His messed-up mother made sure to crush any dream he ever had, and when he was apprenticed to up and coming Luc Leroi, one of his foster brothers, he made the best of it, using his inventiveness and intellect to excel in the kitchen. Even though no one understands why he's still content being Luc's second, when he could go off and get a brilliant career in a restaurant of his own, he knows that he is needed, and can't bring himself to leave. He also knows that he mustn't harass his pretty intern, but can't help from watching over her, trying to shield her from the hardest jobs in the kitchen, surreptitiously feeding her and making sure that he is the one who most often teaches her new techniques. He knows that she is clever and driven and just as perfectionistic as Luc, but he can't resist his protective urges. He believes himself to be sneaky, devious and ruthless and the way in which he tricks Sarah into inviting him in after a night out after work is certainly not entirely chivalrous, but while he has decided alpha male qualities (as do all of Florand's heroes), he never forces Sarah to do anything she doesn't really very much want to do.

Sarah needs to decide whether she actually wants to follow her dream to be a pastry chef and accept that she may not be a failure just because she can't keep up with insanely driven craftsmen who are at the top of their field. She comes to realise that while her birth gave her mother and sister a safe home in America, she doesn't have to live her entire life to fulfil some sort of imagined standard of perfection to prove herself worthy to them. Patrick has clearly been burned so many times growing up, and has turned the very bitter lemons of his cruddy upbringing into some fairly awesome lemonade. Yet he's desperately worried about losing Sarah once he gets his chance with her, and of all the dreams he has ever dared nurture, a relationship with her is the one that he daren't even hope he might achieve.

Compared to some of the deep emotional issues of Florand's earlier couples, Sarah and Patrick's troubles seemed a bit more low key, and it was a relief after the last two, with some very messed up protagonists and drama to work through. Parts of this book overlaps with Florand's previous book in the series, The Chocolate Heart, but I suspect it works fine on its own as well. Florand has played around with fairy tale and mythology elements in previous novels, with influences from Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast and the myth of Hades and Persephone. In this book, there are hints of Cinderella, but while Patrick may be a prince (his surname is even Chevalier - knight), Sarah is much more than the girl who loses her shoe and heart at the ball. The author's note at the end of the book and her blog suggests that this may be the last in her Amour et Chocolat series (apparently Luc's book was supposed to be the final one, but Patrick kept stealing scenes so she had to write his story too), but she has more books planned, set in the south of France, so I suspect I will still have her delectable writing to look forward to for a while yet.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 6: "The Chocolate Heart" by Laura Florand

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Disclaimer! I was granted an ARC of this book by Kensington Books via Netgalley in return for a fair and honest review.

Summer Corey hates Paris. It's a city where she was frequently abandoned to be raised by ever changing nannies while her parents were globe trotting or negotiating international business deals, and it's where she felt miserable, alone and outcast in boarding school from the age of thirteen. Having been forced back from her self-imposed exile, teaching on a small Pacific island, because her father has bought her a five star hotel as a Christmas present, Summer knows that everyone is only waiting to see what the spoiled and vacuous billionaire heiress will do to end up in the tabloids now.

Of course, mistaking the internationally acclaimed chef of the hotel's restaurant, Luc Leroi, for a hotel bellboy, and propositioning him rather bluntly is not getting her off to a good start. Luc, having worked his way up from begging in the Paris metro with his gypsy father to becoming the media darling and culinary superstar of French pastry, is appalled when Summer literally falls into his arms and proceeds to offer him a yacht, before passing out exhausted as soon as he gets her to her hotel room. He plans to seduce her with the most delectable desserts, only to discover that Summer Corey, through a series of very negative associations with sweet things, never eats them.

Summer needs to stay three rainy winter months in Paris, pretending to manage a hotel, so her father will donate a satellite to the islands she longs to return to, improving their communication with the outside world immensely. Luc is determined to win her over, and proceeds to outdo himself again and again with breathtaking culinary creations that Summer continues to reject. The entire hotel watches in fascination, wondering who will crack first, the stunning heiress or the perfectionist chef.

As I have mentioned in my previous reviews of her books, Florand writes to a formula. These books have extremely temperamental, arrogant and brilliant French chefs, who nonetheless are deeply emotionally vulnerable. They all seem to fall for women who are at least partly American, with emotional issues of their own. The men try to seduce the women using culinary arts, usually involving seemingly unreal creations made of chocolate, and after a lot of back and forth where they battle their insecurities, they find their HEA.

Florand works really hard to make the readers feel sympathy with Summer, and make us realise why she has very legitimate reasons for hating Paris, and having behaved like a spoiled and outrageous brat for much of her life. To say that she has enormous daddy issues is an understatement, and she seems to think that the way to punish her parents is by throwing everything like self respect out the window and use her body to manipulate men as best she can, preferably to provoke her father as much as possible. It doesn't help that he literally blackmails her in an attempt to give up her dreams, and never really seems to compliment her for anything. But the fact remains, she's insanely wealthy and because of her upbringing, quite sheltered to the issues that less obscenely rich people have to go through, and in my opinion, it takes far too long for her to realise that her behaviour towards Luc at the start of the book is wildly inappropriate and offensive to boot.

While I normally really enjoy these romances, there was something about this book that didn't grab me as much. Whether it was the fact that Luc was so intensely controlled and refused to relinquish said control for the longest time, or it was just that it took me more than half the book to warm up to Summer as a truly sympathetic heroine, I'm not sure. All I know is that I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as Florand's earlier works. It's by no means bad, though, but I'm not going to add it to my own library until I find it for sale. The next book features Luc's second in command/foster brother as the hero, and as he is wonderful in this book, I'm looking forward to his story.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 5: "Archangel's Legion" by Nalini Singh

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 3 stars

This is book 6 in the series, and as such, not the best place to start reading. If you're really interested in the series, start at the beginning with Angels' Blood.

During a terrifying five minute time period, birds and angels start plummeting from the sky, leaving almost half of the archangel Raphael's forces incapacitated. Shortly after, his consort, the Guild Hunter Elena, discovers a mysterious and highly infectious disease that impossibly enough only targets vampires. All over the world, other archangels are developing new and terrifying powers that could be used for further warfare, while Raphael so far seems only to be developing healing abilities. Is it his relationship with Elena that's keeping him from becoming more powerful?

Elena and Raphael have to discover which of the other archangel or angels are causing the attacks, and figure out a way to stop them before New York is lost.

As well as dealing with the external threats to her and Raphael's home city, Elena is trying to force her father to accept that her younger half-sister Eve is also hunter born (basically driven by an urge to fight supernatural creatures and track down vampires), and let her have the proper training. Her father is threatening to have the girl sent away to Europe to keep her safe, and in their heated arguments, Elena discovers secrets about her family she never suspected. She's also trying to figure out how to properly be the consort to an archangel, while many of the archangels consider her a mere plaything for Raphael.

I very much enjoyed the early books in this series, while some of the later ones, which have focused on members of Raphael's Seven, his core advisers and lieutenants. In this, the focus is wholly back on Elena, the vampire hunter turned angel and her immortal and immensely powerful archangel. There are a lot of tensions, and war seems inevitable. There are various interesting developments over the course of the book, suggesting changes to come. I'll probably keep reading the series, but I'm no longer waiting impatiently for each new release.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 4: "The Twistrose Key" by Tone Almhjell

Page count: 358 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Eleven-year-old Lindelin "Lin" Rosenquist is mourning the death of her pet vole, Rufus, and miserable in her new home away from her best friend and childhood haunts. One dark evening, she receives a mysterious package labelled "Twistrose" with a rose-shaped key inside. She discovers that the key unlocks a strange portal in the cellar under the house, and the portal leads to the magical kingdom of Sylver, entirely populated by animals with some kind of special bond to children on Earth. The petlings are deceased pets, and the Wilders are ones that were tamed, and in Sylver they have ways of watching over their beloved friends.

Lin is overjoyed to discover that not only is she reunited with Rufus, but he is now nearly as big as she is, and can talk to her. Lin soon discovers that in times of great need for Sylver, children who can help the eternally snow-covered kingdom are called. These children are called Twistroses, and Lin is the latest of them. She needs to find the missing Winterfyrst quickly, before the sinister and mysterious Margrave and his army of snow trolls take over the kingdom, and make it impossible for Lin to ever return home to her family.

While Scandinavian authors seem to be the big thing in the mystery genre nowadays, they're not really known in the fantasy genre, certainly not internationally. Yet Tone Almhjell, with her Masters' degree in English literature, got a profitable book deal from a subdivision of Penguin for her debut novel before it was even published in Norwegian. That the book was also favourable reviewed in a lot of places after its release made me curious, and the beautiful cover made me determined to own the book. While she apparently began writing the book in English, she wrote the majority of it in English once she secured the international book deal, and proceeded to translate the English manuscript back to Norwegian with her sister for a later Norwegian release. As the Norwegian version has a waiting list of about six months, I ended up buying the English version from Amazon.

There are clear influences from a lot of other fantasy series here, the most obvious ones probably being The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows and His Dark Materials. Lin is a plucky, brave and clever protagonist initially staggered by the seriousness of her task. Yet she doesn't back down from her challenge and with the help of the sometimes less than helpful Rufus, she starts to investigate the disappearance of young Isvan Winterfyrst.

The book is clearly written to hold the attention of a young audience. There is a lot of action, suspense and many many cliff hangers, making sure you are rarely bored. There are mysterious allies, and dastardly villains and a convoluted plot that needs to be foiled. While I though the inclusion of many traditional Norwegian elements was very cute, I'm not sure they'd be obvious to non-Norwegian readers, as they might just seem like fantasy ideas to add to the verisimilitude of the fantasy world building. At the beginning of each chapter, there are also lovely illustrations, by Jan Schoenherr, adding to

I saw a couple of reviews on Goodreads complaining that the author's English isn't up to scratch. I'm an English teacher, and read pretty much exclusively English books, and while there was the occasional turn of phrase that read as very Norwegian to me, I think Almhjell's editors have done a good job, and if I hadn't known that the author is a Norwegian, I would just have thought she was taking poetic licence with the language. I'm not sure if Almhjell is planning to turn this into a longer series, but this book is self-contained, and made me interested in checking out more Norwegian fantasy.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 3: "White Night" by Jim Butcher

Page count: 452 pages
Audio book length: 14 hrs and 13 mins
Rating: 4 stars

Chicago wizard and now a Warden of the White Council, Harry Dresden, gets called in by his friend Sgt. Karrin Murphy (she got demoted after helping Harry out in the last book) to look into a series of mysterious deaths. A lot of women have been found dead around Chicago, in what appears at first glance to be suicides, but Murphy and her team at Special Investigations can tell something is off, and Harry finds magically hidden writing that suggests the women have been killed because of their magical abilities.

As Harry begins to investigate, he starts to understand why he's not heard anything about these mysterious disappearances before. A lot of the dead women were last seen with a tall man wearing a grey cloak (just like the Wardens wear!) and others with a thin, dark-haired, attractive man, fitting the description of Thomas Raith, White Court vampire and Harry's half-brother. The fact that Thomas has been even more distant than usual lately and isn't answering Harry's calls isn't helping.

As well as trying to figure out who the identity of the serial killer, or possibly killers, and trying to clear his brother's name (because Harry is convinced his brother is innocent), Harry is trying to teach his apprentice Molly Carpenter control and self-restraint. She's excellent at hiding herself behind magical veils, and keeps trying to countermand Harry's orders and sneak along on missions she should stay away from.

I'm pretty hooked on this series now, and James Marsters keeps being an excellent narrator. Having now discovered that with the Audible app, I can play the audio books at 1.5 speed, reducing the time I spend listening (my main problem with audio books is that if I was just reading the book myself, it would be so much FASTER), but I still get full enjoyment out of them. The world building is pretty much established, and Harry's no longer a loner, trying to manage everything on his own, and as a result, is much more fun to read about. All long running serials like this become a bit like a good TV show. You don't just tune in to see what happens to the main character, the supporting cast is just as important. Murphy, Thomas and Molly are all great at keeping Harry grounded, and the conversation Murphy has with Harry about his increasingly tenuous control on his anger has been a long time coming.

At this rate, going through one or two of them per month, I have just enough credits saved up to be able to catch up in time for book 15's release in May. Then I can start impatiently waiting for new books with the rest of the world.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 2: "Svart Elfenben" (Black Ivory) by Arne Svingen

Page count: 183 pages
Rating: 3 stars

The book opens with a quote from Heart of Darkness, making the reader pretty aware that this is unlikely to be a cheerful story full of rainbows, bunnies and unicorns. Our unnamed narrator is a young Norwegian boy, not yet turned eighteen, on a rather impulsive journey to the Ivory Coast with his best friend, a former Liberian child soldier named Sam. Sam, who has lived in Norway for some years, has been told that his mother is still alive and the two boys are now trying to find her. It's revealed in brief, teasing flashbacks that they secured the money for the trip through rather shady and morally dubious means, and our narrator is on the whole, not entirely sure about how wise their course of action is.

Still, as a life-long foster care kid without any real parental figures of his own, he understands Sam's need to find his mother. He is fiercely loyal to his best friend, even if it means taking a very ill-advised journey into a foreign country ravaged by civil war. Within the first day there, they lose a large amount of money through the carelessness of our narrator, and things go from bad, to worse to really very dangerous and there is no way this is going to end well at all is there? rapidly. The narrator bought a copy of Heart of Darkness at the airport, and keeps reading and re-reading it throughout the ever more perilous journey. As well as discovering what a charmed life he has led in Norway, even without loving parents to raise him, our narrator also discovers that his best friend is a very different person in Africa than he was when they were hanging out on the streets of Oslo. Does he actually know Sam at all? Can you ever escape your past?

The book is a young adult book clearly written with boys in mind. It starts and continues at a breathtaking pace, constantly upping the danger and complications for our two young protagonists. Our narrator is never even named, and there is a very sparse gallery of supporting characters to keep track of, most of them described indirectly through words and actions. There are a lot of thorny issues dealt with in the book, not least how far is it reasonable to be expected to go in the name of friendship? Even for someone you love as a brother. It is a wild, fairly uncivilised and scary Africa depicted in the book, but a book set in a country ravaged by civil war, dealing with the issue of child soldiers would have been dreadful if it didn't show the ugly sides of such warfare. Even as the boys are dragged closer and closer to their seemingly inevitable doom, there are flashes of hope. Several of the characters are hopeful that the future of their countries will be improved, and the close friendship between the two is admirable, even as our narrator discovers that Sam might be a complete stranger to him.

This was one of the books I had to read for my Norwegian course this semester, and I doubt I would have picked it up if I hadn't had it assigned as part of my curriculum. It's good to see that even in immensely privileged Norway, there are authors who highlight the less pleasant issues in the world today, and try to make teenagers aware of it without preaching or getting sanctimonious. I have several pupils I suspect would like this book, and will recommend it to them.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 1: "The Golem and the Jinni" by Helene Wecker

Page count: 486 pages
Rating: 5 stars

What a lovely way to start my new reading year. First of all, I want to thank Jen K for this lovely book. She gave it to me as part of the Cannonball Read gift exchange, and as I was fairly sure I wasn't going to be able to do it justice when I was hurrying through books at the end of December to finish my triple Cannonball, I decided that it would be my first book of 2014. As it turns out, due to me getting ill over the Christmas holidays, I was stuck with huge amounts of correction work for the first week and a half of January, and only really able to read on the bus to and from work and in the occasional stolen moment before I passed out exhausted in bed each night. I am given to understand that this may be all the reading, or even more than, the average person does. Well, to me, it's pretty much akin to torture. Suffice to say, the fact that the book was so engrossing made this experience extra frustrating for me. But what is this delightful book about, you ask?

Chava is the titular golem, a woman made of clay supposed to be bound to one master, created by a disgraced and sinister rabbi in Poland. Her master, the man who commissioned her, brings her to life on the sea voyage to America, and dies very shortly after. Hence Chava no longer has one person's commands to obey and begins hearing the thoughts and wishes of all those around her. She arrives alone in New York in 1899, and luckily a kindly rabbi recognises her for what she is and takes her in, determined to teach her to fit in, so she doesn't lose control and use her inhuman strength to harm or kill anyone. He helps her get a job in a bakery, and coaches her to hide her true nature.

Ahmad is the jinni, or djinn. Trapped for centuries in a copper oil flask by a Bedouin wizard, he wakes up on the floor of a tinsmith's shop, with no memory of how he ended up so far away from the Syrian deserts he came from. Arbeely, the young tinsmith is rather shocked to discover that the childhood tales of djinn he was told are apparently true, and does what he can to help Ahmad (a name Arbeely gives him, djinns don't have human names) settle in amongst the residents of little Syria in lower Manhattan. Ahmad may be free of the lamp, but he still has an unbreakable iron cuff around his wrist, forcing him to stay in human shape. He needs to discover how he was trapped in the lamp in the first place, and seeks to find the means to fully free himself.

The book contains a number of interlinked stories, those of Chava and Ahmad are only two of them. There is the story of rabbi Meyer, who takes Chava under his wing and his estrangement from his nephew, Michael. There is the story of the Jewish magician, the disgraced rabbi Schaalman, Chava's creator, as we in flashbacks discover how he came to be the bitter and twisted man who Chava's master approached to have a wife made. There is the story of Mahmoud Saleh, a downtrodden ice cream seller in little Syria, who can't look anyone in the eye, and once used to be a successful doctor back in Syria, the story of socialite Sophia Winston, who catches Ahmad's eye in the park, as well as a number of other characters and stories. In a lot of cases with stories like this, I tend to get bored when the focus shifts away from characters I love, and I am tempted to just skim and skip ahead to get past the sections concerning characters I'm not all that interested in. Wecker writes so compellingly that I was never tempted to do that. I was fascinated with each and every one of the story strands, and curious as to how they would all come together in the end.

Historical fiction featuring fantastical elements from various cultures, the book is pretty much Malin catnip. I'm so very glad I was given this as a gift, otherwise it may have got lost among the hundreds of other books on my TBR list that I hear about, find a bit intriguing and decide to read at some future date. It's a lush and intricate and beautifully told book, with the friendship between the Golem and the Jinni at the centre of it, both incredibly lonely and mythical creatures, delighted to find someone else truly unusual to confide in. I would pretty much recommend this to anyone, and will be buying it as presents for all my friends once it's out in paperback.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.