Double review: Necessary Risk and The Luckiest Lady in London

The title: Necessary Risk
The author: Tara Wyatt
Publication: Hachette, 2016
Got it from: The library

The title: Necessary Risk
The author: Sherry Thomas
Publication: Berkley, 2013
Got it from: Hoopla Audiobooks

Since I just finished two books (one in paperback, one in audiobook), I thought I'd do a double review.  These two romances couldn't be more different.  Necessary Risk is a contemporary romance set in L.A. featuring Sierra Blake, a former child star who is an advocate for a women's reproductive health center called Choices (think Planned Parenthood.)  When she's targeted by hateful anti-choice activists, she hires hunky private security bodyguard Sean Owens to protect her.  If you love bodyguard romance (and I know I do), this one is for you.  With a refreshingly feminist political agenda, intelligent protagonists, lots of excitement, action, and scorching hot sex, this was a real page-turner.  If only I didn't feel so inadequate that this was written by a fellow librarian who works near me (although I don't know her personally.)  Highly recommended, and I can't wait to see what she does with the other books in the series (this being the first.)

The Luckiest Lady in London was a bit of a mixed bag for me.  There was no external conflict facing the protagonists, which was something of a disappointment, since I love that "hero and heroine against the world" aspect of romance.  All the obstacles faced by the main couple came from their own emotional conflict.  Louisa Cantwell is smart but poor, and faces ruin if she doesn't marry soon.  Felix, the Duke of Wrenworth, is a bored and jaded aristocrat who is intrigued by Louisa's intelligence and obvious lust for him.  He's closed off, though, because of his mother's emotional distance despite his love for her.  Felix and Louisa play a cat-and-mouse dance until Felix realizes he must propose to her in order to "win" the game.  The rest of the book is them learning to trust each other as husband and wife, despite some rather cruel emotional manipulation on Felix's part to spare his own feelings.  Despite great dialogue and an interesting foray into Victorian astronomy, I can't say this book hit quite the right note for me.  It was a little bit too angsty for my liking, but I can see how people who prefer the emotional roller coaster aspect of a romance would like it.

Something About You

The title: Something About You
The author: Julie James
Publication: Berkley Sensation, 2010
Got it from: Hoopla Audiobooks, 2016

Readers of this blog know I love a romance heroine who has a job with authority, and her protective hero.  Something About You has both those elements.  Well-paced, well-plotted, funny, and super hot: I loved this book.  The first in the author's FBI/US attorney series opens with the heroine, Cameron Lynde, taking time out from her stressful job as an assistant US Attorney by staying at a fancy hotel.  Unfortunately she can't sleep because of the couple gettin' it on next door.  When she calls hotel security, they discover not sexy times, but a dead body.  Bad: Cameron spied the killer through the door's peep hole.  Worse: the FBI are called because it implicates a prominent US senator.  Even worse: the agent who shows up to interrogate Cameron is Jack Pallas, the same agent who worked with Cameron three years earlier on a case that went south.  Because of a big misunderstanding, the case ended up getting thrown out and Jack blames Cameron for the three years he got transferred to Nebraska.

Some of the real highlights of this book are the scenes where Jack and his partner are interrogating Cameron: it's right out of a 1940s screwball comedy.  Cameron's got sass, Jack is straightlaced, and Jack's partner Wilkins is the laid-back good cop.  Naturally Jack and Cameron are totally hot for each other, and it takes a good long time to clear up the big misunderstanding, as they fight their unwanted sexual attraction by trading barbs.  As you might expect, Jack soon becomes extra protective while they try to identify the killer, who the reader knows but the characters don't.  There's some pretty funny moments, often brought about by Jack's partner Wilkins getting involved in his love life (and a certain hilarious mistaken male stripper incident), Cameron's hired cop protectors who also become involved in her love life, and Cameron's gay friend Colin who Jack is jealous of. 

I listened to this on audiobook, read by Karen White, who did a great job bringing the the different characters to life (I particularly enjoyed her Agent Wilkins' happy-go-lucky voice) and made the sex scenes sound really sexy.  The danger wasn't super intense, allowing the relationship to take its rightful place at the forefront.  I do enjoy an edge-of-your seat, on-the-run romance, but this was different and it worked for me. 

Dietland

The title: Dietland
The author: Sarai Walker
Publication: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015
Got it from: Hoopla Audiobooks

I actually finished listening to this book on audiobook a few weeks ago, and it has been running through my mind ever since.  It's not the usual sort of book I read, but then again I don't think there's another book like it.  I would never have picked it up except something about it piqued my interest from the reviews.  That something is, "shadowy feminist group takes revenge against scumbag men."

But to say "that's what it's about" is to do a disservice to this book, because it's much more complicated than that.  If I were to sum it up as succinctly as possible, I'd say it's about a self-loathing, obese twentysomething woman who goes on a journey of self-acceptance and opens her eyes to the reality of the world around her.  If you read the reviews on Goodreads and elsewhere, you'll see this book has divided a lot of readers due to its strong feminist perspective.

I can imagine that if you're not already a hardcore feminist (as I am), some of the book's revelations about the way men treat women might seem shocking.  But when you're talking about a scenario where women are kidnapping men who brutally rape a young woman (for example), and then dropping them on a freeway, the idea isn't supposed to be "is this right or wrong?"  It's to take a look at the millions and millions of instances of injustices women have faced, and think, "what would it actually be like if even a tiny fraction of violence men do to us were turned on them?"

Men's rights activists can breath easy: that's not likely to happen any time soon.  Even the novel's heroine, Plum, is shocked and horrified by the actions of the secret feminist action group, known as "Jennifer" (after a name on a piece of paper stuffed in a victim's mouth.)  Well, she is at first - when she's a downtrodden, miserable hermit with a crappy dead-end job.  If people take nothing else from this book, they will remember its depiction of the various ways Plum suffers because of her weight.

And it's brutal. I mean really, really brutal. This book holds nothing back in highlighting the shameful, disgraceful way our society, and particularly men, treat women who are overweight.  Plum's journey is heartbreaking, from her unhappy childhood to her teenage suffering on an awful diet plan to her current life as the faceless agony aunt behind the "Dear Kitty" letters in a teen magazine. Seeing the various ways Plum gets rejected, harassed and even beaten by men who are complete strangers simply for being overweight is painful.  No wonder she's desperate to have gastric bypass surgery and unleash the thinner "Alicia" she thinks is inside her.

The book takes a turn for the better when she gets taken in by a group of outcast activist women, led by Verena Baptist, the daughter of Plum's one-time weight-loss guru.  Fans of mythic tropes will recognize many aspects of the hero's quest in the way Plum must undergo a series of challenges to transform herself (at first for money, later purely for her own benefit).  Eventually, Plum is reborn.  I won't spoil it for you, except to say that her eventual self-acceptance is long, painful and triumphant.

As for Jennifer?  It didn't bother me.  Some of the stunts they pulled were actually pretty funny: my favourite was when they blackmailed a British tabloid to replace the page three girl with naked men. Eventually England is covered in images of buff men and women flock from all over the world  to see it.

I'm not even sure this book is actually condoning the violence, although these particular men largely deserve it.  Instead, it's flipped the violence around in a way we're not used to seeing.  As the main character in the wonderful movie Suffragette says, "We break windows, be burn things, because war is the only thing men listen to."

Sometimes in books, things get ugly.  They show the world as it is, not as we want it to be.  I hope it will be a revelation to any woman reading this novel that we should live our lives to please ourselves first.  As one of my favourite Oscar Wilde sayings goes, "to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."

Absolutely Truly: A Pumpkin Falls Mystery

The title: Absolutely Truly: A Pumpkin Falls Mystery
The author: Heather Vogel Frederick
Publication: Simon & Schuster, 2014
Got it from: Hoopla Audiobooks


Exciting news for fans of the Mother-Daughter Book Club series: after writing what was supposed to be the final book in the series back in 2012, author Heather Vogel Frederick has announced another installment due next spring.  In the meantime, I've been listening to the audiobook of her new chapter book for younger readers.

Truly Lovejoy is 13 and her family has just moved to Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire from Texas after her father sustained an injury fighting overseas.  Truly's family is concerned about the change in their father, who has become more stern and withdrawn.  Taking over the family bookstore might be what he needs to get back on his feet.  Meanwhile, Truly has to deal with the awkwardness of moving to a new town and adolescence in general.

At first I was skeptical.  These weren't my beloved Mother-Daughter Book Club characters, and Truly seemed like a bit of a whiny brat.  But as with the MDBC series, I began to warm to the story and the charming small-town characters.  The book doesn't really start getting good until Truly starts solving the mystery.  As with the girls of the MDBC, Truly leads a busy life that involves dancing lessons, swimming, birding and algebra lessons that she has to squeeze the mystery around.  The mystery involves a series of clues found in a first edition of Charlotte's Web.  (I totally figured out who the letters were for early on.)  As an added bonus, a familiar character from the Mother-Daughter Book Club universe makes a hilarious cameo.

Hooray for Pumpkin Falls and what will hopefully be the first of many in a new mystery series.

Indigo

The title: Indigo
The author: Beverly Jenkins
Publication: Avon, 1996
Got it from: Hoopla Audiobooks

I wish - I really, really wish - that there were more romances featuring minorities.  And I wish there were more historicals.  And I wish they were as good as Indigo.

But there aren't, so I will have to rejoice in how much I enjoyed Indigo.  It felt like a breath of fresh air.  There was a lot going on in this book that I loved.  First of all, it is set in Michigan in the 1850s, a time and place I know almost nothing about.  The Civil War is looming in the distance, and slavery is still very much a thing.  Hester Wyatt is a former slave who has made a life for herself in the free north.  Since the death of her beloved aunt, she has had to survive on her own.  What I liked about her is how fiercely independent she is, but still shows cracks of vulnerability.  Hester knows her life as a free woman is precarious: slave catchers have been kidnapping freed slaves and sending them back south.  Hester could give in to despair, but she doesn't.  She has worked hard, scrimped and saved, and denied herself every luxury to remain independent in her own house.  Nor has she turned her back on those less fortunate.  Her home is part of the Underground Railroad, and this is how she encounters the hero, Galen Vachon.

Galen is from a wealthy New Orleans family, members of a group known as the free people of color.  Here again I learned about something I was entirely ignorant of.  Galen's family occupies a unique position in their society: they are wealthy and privileged, but because of the color of their skin, they are looked down on by whites.  But because of their distinction, they are not really accepted as being true members of "the race" that Hester and other African-Americans identify with.

Galen reminds me a lot of the Scarlet Pimpernel, because he has used his wealth and privilege to help others escape capture.  He works for the Underground Railroad and has earned the nickname "The Black Daniel" because of his heroic rescues and legendary derring-do.  When the story opens, he has been betrayed and is caught and badly beaten.  Luckily he is found and taken to Hester's safe house for recovery.

Of course in true romantic fashion, he's a surly patient and she's a stubborn nurse.  But they gradually come to respect one another for the lives both have built.  Naturally, there's romantic tension, but Hester immediately senses that she won't be welcome in Galen's aristocratic family.  She knows her hands, dyed indigo from her years spent  picking dye plants, will forever mark her as a former slave. 

I love novels that involve politics, and this one has it in abundance.   It was wonderful to see it from the perspective of the African-American community of her time.  Some of Hester's friends, including Hester herself, prefer to take a course of direct action by helping runaway slaves make a new life for themselves in the north.  Other people in Hester's circle are more involved in the intellectual side of the movement, taking part in debates and reading and writing for abolitionist papers.  And some of course do both.  But this novel doesn't always dwell on this serious subject, even though there's some pretty heavy stuff going on (including a slave catcher who's stalking Hester).  There's also some more lighthearted moments, such as carriages breaking down, making mud pies, shopping trips and fairs.  As Hester and Galen's relationship grows, they become more playful and fun together, bringing comfort to each other amidst dark and troubling events.  And the ending?  I was in tears.

It may be a touch old-school (it was written almost 20 years ago), but there's nothing in here for anyone to object to.  It's a fascinating history lesson, a tender love story and an exciting adventure rolled into one.  What's not to love?

Double review: Further Chronicles of Avonlea and The Story Girl

The title: Further Chronicles of Avonlea
The author: L.M. Montgomery
Publication: L.C. Page & Company, 1920 (My edition: Seal Books 1987)
Got it from: N.B. c.1993

While I was in the middle of reading one L.M. Montgomery book and listening to another on audio, Anne fandom was hit with a huge blow this past weekend with the death of Jonathan Crombie who played Gilbert in the classic Sullivan films.  Two weeks ago at Easter when I reviewed Cool Japan Guide I went down the rabbit hole and started researching the Japanese obsession with Anne, and somehow ended up finding this interview with Crombie. Even though Gilbert of the books will always be my favourite, Gilbert of the movies was everything he should be.  A generation of Anne fans will mourn him deeply.

Anne and Gilbert don't make make too many appearances in this follow-up to Chronicles of Avonlea, although Anne does narrate one of the stories.  What makes these two collections interesting is that they were written to be published as a whole from the beginning, rather than compiled together from various stories like many of the Montgomery collections that began appearing in the 1990s.  The fact that it's set in Avonlea is almost non-essential.  Except for a few mentions of peripheral Anne characters, these stories could be set anywhere in Montgomery's beloved turn-of-the-century P.E.I.  As always, her stories are full of warmth, humour and the follies of human nature, and I enjoyed them with a few serious caveats.

On the whole the first few stories felt stronger than the last handful and overall I thought Chronicles of Avonlea was stronger than its sequel.  Fans of the TV show Road to Avonlea will recognize the story "The Materializing of Cecil," about a spinster who makes up a beau from her past only to have a man with the same name show up in town.  "Her Father's Daughter" was a nice story about a girl who reunites with her estranged father on her wedding day.  "The Brother Who Failed" shows Montgomery's Victorian sentimentality with her It's a Wonderful Life plot: a brother who feels like a failure is proved to be everyone's hero.  "The Son of His Mother" showed Montgomery's near-obsession with sons (she had two herself and was unapologetic in her bias).  This story features a mother so obsessed with her son it borders on mental illness. 

Each story is worth discussing, but I want to focus on a couple of things that rubbed me the wrong way as a modern reader.  "The Education of Betty" has a man raising the daughter of a woman who refused him, and he ends up romantically with the daughter in the end.  Yuck.  I find May-December romances incredibly creepy, especially when it's the man who's older.  Even though the girl in this was 19, I just found the whole concept gross, especially as the "lover" was her father figure growing up. 

The other aspect of these stories I can't forgive is their casual racism, even though it was perfectly acceptable at the time.  As much as I love Montgomery, holy crap was she racist.  She basically looks down on anyone who isn't a white well-to-do Protestant, but it's even more pronounced here.  There's a throwaway line at the end of "The Materializing of Cecil" disparaging the Chinese, but you could write a thesis on last story, "Tannis of the Flats," and its depictions of First Nations people.  I'm not going to repeat the slurs here but suffice it to say the whole story is based on racist stereotypes and ethnic insults abound.  Modern readers will be horrified.

The title: The Story Girl
The author: L.M. Montgomery
Publication: L.C. Page & Company, 1911
Got it from: Hoopla Audiobooks, read by Grace Conlin, 2006

Less racist (although still classist) was my audiobook listen of The Story Girl, which along with its sequel and the Chronicles of Avonlea formed the basis of Road to Avonlea.  This is the only one of Montgomery's books that I didn't remember a thing about from having read as a child, except for the scene where the children pay someone for a picture of God. Montgomery has said it was an autobiographical story.  It features a summer in the life of a group of clannish cousins, along with their mischievous hired boy Peter and a wet blanket of a friend named Sara Ray.  It's narrated by one of the boy cousins, but the true protagonist of the story is Sara Stanley, the narrator's cousin.  Although she's not as beautiful as their conceited cousin Felicity, Sara is more beloved for her imagination and her ability to tell marvelous stories.  Her tales form many stories-within-stories that often reflect events in the children's lives.  Grace Conlin reads beautifully and the oral storytelling in the book makes for a perfect audiobook experience.  I expect to follow up with the sequel The Golden Road in the near future.

The Wilder Life

The title:  The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
The author: Wendy McClure
Publication: Riverhead, 2011
Got it from: Overdrive

One of the many pleasures of owning an iPod touch is getting to download free audiobooks from the library.  In the last two years I've been able to visit several favourite children's books that I wouldn't have had time to read otherwise: Little Women, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne's House of Dreams, Five Little Peppers, and now I'm about to start on Sidney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family.  But I also have been enjoying some non-fiction as well: Betty White's hilarious autobiography If You Ask Me..., Joseph Ellis's biography of John and Abigail Adams, First Family, and most recently Wendy McClure's entertaining The Wilder Life.

Wendy McClure was a big fan of the Little House books growing up in the 1970's.  I remember reading and enjoying them too, especially Little House in the Big Woods for its famous sugaring/country dance scene.  But I was more of a Lucy Maud Montgomery fan.  Montgomery's world was my world - a rural Maritime one - albeit separated by a gulf of 100 years.  I couldn't quite relate to Laura Ingalls Wilder's can-do prairie family, which seemed almost impossibly hardworking. 

In this book, McClure makes it her mission to try and find "Laura World," a sentiment I can fully relate to as I spent a significant portion of my childhood trying to find "Anne World."  She tries her hand at making butter in an old-fashioned churn, twisting hay at the original Ingalls homestead, and in one hilarious chapter, takes part in a homesteading weekend that turns out to be a haven for creepy religious "end-timers."  She also researches the original Ingalls family and discovers that the "Little House" world is part fact, part fiction.  I loved the author's writing style.  The narrator of the audiobook seemed to inhabit her voice and I found myself laughing out loud at some of her turns of phrase.  When describing rival Nellie Oleson, whom Laura based on several real-life girls, she calls her "some kind of blond Frankenstein assembled from assorted bitch parts."  

McClure also visits several of the real-life Ingalls sites in her quest for the real Laura experience.  Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes she doesn't.  Along the way she meets other people just as obsessed with the details of pioneer life - bonnets, butter churns, corn cob dolls and all.  She even converts her real-life boyfriend to Laura World - sort of.  

Some of the reviews for this book say it's only for diehard fans, but I disagree.  I was only a mild fan, but I loved the whole idea of this book and enjoyed it from start to finish.  Anyone who has ever longed to visit inside a book as a child will love the author's adventures trying to do just that.

Anne's House of Dreams

The title: Anne's House of Dreams
The author: L.M. Montgomery
Publication: Book in Motion Audio, originally 1917
Got it from: Overdrive

I wish I'd thought of listening to audiobooks sooner.  Ever since I got my iPod touch, I've been discovering apps and things that are so much easier to do with just a few clicks, and suddenly it dawned on me last week that audiobooks could be a great way to add more books to my life.  Previously, the thought of sitting next to some sort of stereo and listening did not appeal to me, but now that I can download them through my library in seconds and listen to them virtually anyway - oh my goodness, I'm hooked.  It's such a great thing to have when you're doing housework.  It's so great, in fact, that I was looking for more chores to do last Sunday night because I was enjoying my book so much and didn't want to stop.

Right now, it's the classics that I'm interested in, and catching up with old favourites I didn't have time for and new-to-me-classics that I've been meaning to get to but just haven't.  Anne's House of Dreams has been on my re-read list for years and with its short chapters and familiar story, it was perfect for listening to.  Actually, it's doubly perfect, considering so much of the story is an homage to oral storytelling.  In this fifth novel in the series, Anne is grown-up and marrying sweetheart Gilbert Blythe, who has taken a post as doctor on the other side of the Island.  (We Maritimers always refer to PEI as "the Island," because really, what other island is there?  Um, sorry, Cape Breton.)  They end up in the idyllic town of Glen St. Mary, along the sea, and settle into a little cottage with a long history, and soon make friends with their neighbours: the loveable old sea captain Jim, the hilarious and man-hating Cornelia Bryant, and the beautiful and mysterious Leslie Moore who has a dark past.  Very little of the story focuses on Anne and Gilbert's actual marriage; Anne's pregnancy is only very coyly referred to until suddenly a baby appears - or doesn't.  A tragic infant death reminds us that in Montgomery's world, childbirth was still a very risky business.  It's hard not to think that Montgomery was working out her grief at her own baby's death with Anne's loss.  

There's so much here that Anne fans will love, despite the tragedy: colourful village characters, lavish descriptions of seashores and gardens, and quaint glimpses into a long-gone rural way of life.  It's the kind of story that just goes with a chilly fall evening.  I felt like I was visiting old friends.  I expect to revisit the rest of the series in audiobook sometime soon.