Review: The Epic Love Story of Doug and Stephen

I loved this book.  The protagonist, Doug, is like Bill and Ted's dumber, hotter friend, and he falls in love with an almost murderously antisocial, uptight, artsy queer guy, Stephen.  The narrative is laugh-out-loud funny and teeters on the edge of farce, but is saved by having a really charming emotional core.

It breaks conventions that I wasn't aware could be broken. For example, Doug is not slow-by-common-measures-but wise-in-other-ways.  He really is just dumb as a rock.  He's also a lazy, cowardly, amoral, slutty slob. From that description, I should hate him (I'm judgemental like that).  Yet he ended up being a really sympathetic character for me.  Stephen is intellectual, anally neat, and interested is almost a caricature of a east coast liberal, wishing that there was just more injustice in his life to rail against and more angsty than a goth teen.  He's also not someone I would normally find attractive, but I eventually appreciated him though Doug's eyes.

And Stephen really doesn't like Doug at first and is pretty mean to him.  If it were a girl, I'd feel uncomfortable with having her be hot but so much dumber than the guy she loves, or having her be such a doormat that she take his abuse and never defends herself.  But somehow since they're both guys, it doesn't feel misogynistic and just becomes a story about unconditional love.

For a while, I didn't know if I really wanted them to be together.  I kept reading just to get to more funny bits, but I didn't at first see how it would work.  I mean, if I met them in real life, I would be totally on Stephen's side in trying to dissuade Doug from pursuing/bothering him.  They seem a horrible match.  Completely different in every possible way, and not in the "he completes me" sense.

Also Doug starts out heterosexual. The "queer for you" trope has a bad reputation for a reason, but here it worked for me, because I could actually believe that Doug could go his whole went his whole life without questioning the default sexuality and then switch his assumptions without it bothering him all that much.  He's as deep as a puddle.

The only thing I didn't love about the book was the climax.  Although entertaining, there was just too much coincidence for me.  YMMV.

Overall though, I'd recommend it.  Plus, it's free on Kindle Unlimited, so there's that.

Review: Serial Hottie by Kelly Oram

Serial Hottie is a YA romance about a tomboy and the mysterious new guy who moves in across the street.  She finds him attractive, but their first few interactions don't go well.  When a serial killer starts killing red headed teen aged girls in her home town soon after he moves in, she suspects he's the serial killer.
The relationship is a little creepy. She's a bit violent, including punching him at one point.  He is over-the-top jealous and stalker-y, and a couple of times physically restrains her to get her to listen to him when she doesn't want to.  On the other hand, we eventually understand why he acts the way he does, and when she calls him out on the creepy psycho stuff, he realizes that it's a problem and tries to change it.
Other than that, I think it's a good story.  I have a soft spot for stories about beautiful bad boys who are head-over-heels over a girl (Beautiful Disaster, et al).  The author does a decent job of showing the problems with dating a violent boy with stalker-ish tendencies and socialization issues, and how their relationship evolves as they learn he starts to learn how to act right.  She also has some issues with defensiveness and not really feeling comfortable with her feminine side, and with his help, she starts to feel more comfortable in her skin.
The story also has a fair amount going on.  There's the serial killer sub-plot, that is mostly about them learning to understand and trust one another for most of the story, but involves some suspense and action here and there.   There's also a solid arc about the relationship between Ellie and her sister, as well as a strong dose of tomboy-gets-a-makeover story line. For all that there's a lot of potentially heavy things going on, the general tone of the book is actually pretty light-hearted.  It's a fun YA read.

Review: Do Over by Emily Evans

Pez, the heroine and POV, really makes this story. She's a born leader - smart, organized, decisive, and understands people. She mostly channels that into her prom committee, although she's really like that all the time. She's also determined to be a fashion designer, and the contrast between her interest in fashion and art and her practical, level-headed approach to everything is great.
The main blemish in her life is that her parents are divorced. Not one to take things lying down, she's determined to make prom into a perfectly romantic event so her parents get back together, bonding over pre-prom rituals (I found this reasoning a little weak, but not a deal breaker - it's clear that she's having trouble accepting that they're not getting back together and is being a little irrational about it). In the meantime, her father is engaged to a professional cheerleader, who Pez gets to know over the course of the book. Their relationship was a surprisingly strong point of the story.
Mostly though, the story is a romance. Pez is forced to interact with the jocks her father coaches. She finds one of them attractive, but she recognizes that he's promiscuous and isn't generally into jocks, so doesn't act on it. Over the course of the story, they get to know each other better and develop a relationship (although not a romantic one for at first). The romance is understated. There is some tension before they act on their attraction, and there are difficulties they overcome when they start having a relationship, but the author doesn't unnecessarily draw out the problems, and Pez doesn't spend all her time wallowing in thoughts about the relationship - she's got things to do! For all that, when they do come together, it's intense and passionate considering that they only kiss (it is YA, after all).
I love that the author avoids the standard YA tropes and tendencies. There's no love triangle, insta-love, or angst. The girl doesn't feel unworthy of attention and she doesn't need - or get - a makeover. She's popular and good at school without being a genius or a goddess. The boy has no impulse control issues and wasn't her best friend from when they were kids. Nobody is abused or bullied. Mind you, I've loved stories that had all of these things, but it's refreshing to see YA romance that doesn't use any of them.

The only thing keeping me from rating it a five star instead of a four is that the climax isn't so climatic for me. When they run into relationship problems, there's some time when I'm sure Pez is hurting, but it really takes place off stage. So we go from conflict to resolution without tearing my heart out too much in between. Perversely, I would have liked my heart torn out just a tiny bit more. Other than that, though, I thought it was great. Highly recommended if you like YA romances.

Review: Twist, by Dannika Dark

Dark's sophomore effort is a great urban fantasy with more of a focus on relationships and romance than the first in the series.  It's teh hot. I enjoyed it so much, I read it twice.  :)

Twist, by Danika Dark, is the sequel to Sterling (Mageri Series: Book 1), a book about a woman who is brutally attacked and turned into a mage and finds herself part of a dangerous, magical side of the world she never knew existed.

This one starts off with Silver chafing a bit under Justus' tight restrictions. She clearly respects him and understands that's he's trying to protect her, but she has her own ideas of how her life needs to be. Throughout the book, she disobeys him to either do things that she thinks is right or that she has a right to do. This dynamic could have come off like a self-centered teenage rebellion against a father figure/love interest, but I think the author succeeded in crafting an arc for the relationship between Justus and Silver that makes sense for two adult characters. She is a grown woman with very understandable issues about control and independence, and he is a controlling, honorable, very old (very hot) man who is uncomfortable with affection and not really human. They don't see eye-to-eye, but they both want their learner-ghuardian relationship to work. I don't know if it worked evenly throughout the book, but overall I liked it. I also liked what the author did with Silver's other relationships in general. More on that in a minute.

Review: Coexist by Julia Crane

I really wanted to like this YA paranormal romance.  The heroine is an elf that blends into human society, and the story looks like it has yummy romantic tension with less emo angst than the typical vampire YA PR.   But in the end, I couldn't suspend enough disbelief to enjoy it.  It may work better for younger teens.

Coexist, by Julia Crane, is the first book in a YA contemporary paranormal trilogy.  It's a story told mainly through the POV of sixteen-year-old Keegan, the light elf heroine, although the story does show scenes from her brother  Thaddeus, friends, and her Chosen (soul mate) Rourke.

The way Chosens work is that each elf has someone that's chosen for them when they're born (in a mysterious way that isn't explained), but they are not allowed to meet until they turn eighteen (it's also not explained who makes that rule).  Once they're both eighteen, the Chosen bond flares to life, and they instantly fall in love and can sense each other from far away et cetera.  At the beginning of the book, Keegan's learned Rourke's name, so every time she thinks about him, he feels it and can see of what she's doing.  Of course, being a teenage girl that knows she has a perfect soul mate out there somewhere, she thinks about him a lot, so he's constantly being distracted by her and desperately wants to meet her, but knows he should wait until she turns eighteen.

Satisfaction Guaranteed and Perfectly Satisfied

I liked the characters and was in the mood for a friends-to-lovers contemporary romance, but they felt sketched in to me rather than fully fleshed out.  Meh.

Satisfaction Guaranteed and Perfectly Satisfied, by Tori Scott, are the first two of a planned trilogy.

They weren't horribly written, but the first one squicked me out at first when it seemed like the love interest was going to try to force or manipulate the female lead into having sex with him.  It got less squicky later, but I felt it still went too fast to be emotionally believable.  When they started, they had fallen out of touch and she had never really thought of him as a love interest.  A few hours later, they were passionate lovers.  A couple more hours and they were engaged and the book was over.

I liked the secondary characters better and they got together in the second book, which was a still too short for the story, but better than the first.

The Hedgewitch Queen

I really enjoyed this romantic fantasy novel.  It's a palace intrigue with some adventuring around the countryside thrown in.   Be warned - the main plot arcs aren't resolved by the end of the book.

The Hedgewitch Queen, by Lilith Saintcrow, is set in a world that felt a bit like a magical three musketeers, but told from the point of view of an idealistic young royal who has to flee with her musketeers (or, in this case, the Queen's Guards) after a palace coup.  The guards, of course, are led by a loyal, hot, mysterious captain of the guards.

Towards the beginning of the book, I thought I knew where it was going. Saintcrow uses some pretty familiar cliches, such as a magical jewel that proclaims the rightful ruler, hedgewitchcraft being less prestigious than court sorcery, etc.  However, she ended up surprising me a bit towards the end.  She manages to put in enough moral complexity that I'm still not sure how certain things will - or should - be resolved in the next book.  Kudos if she manages to wrap things up with an HEA without resorting to a deus ex machina.

Review: Darkness Dawns by Diane Duvall

I had some issues with this vampire-type paranormal romance, but I've definitely read worse.

First the good.

I liked the characters.

I liked the heroine and how she's introduced.  She's strong in a regular human way, not in the sense of having special powers.

I also liked the hero.  He's dark and brooding in a humanizing "don't always know the right thing to say" kind of way rather than in the overly melodramatic kind of way.  There are also a bunch of secondary characters and the author seems to be trying to breathe some life into them.

I also liked the arc with the head good vampire and the mystery woman.  It isn't resolved by the end of the book, which bugs me a little, but I think overall the author does a good job of juggling different arcs in the book.

The Storm That Is Sterling

A decent read.  If you liked the first Zodius novel, The Legend of Michael, you'll probably like the second one too.  In terms of tropes, you're looking at a special-ops/soul-mate/genetic experimentation romance thriller series.

The premise for the series is that a group of soldiers were inculcated with an alien virus (against their knowledge) that gave them special powers.  They're all called GTech.  They can all wind-walk and heal extremely fast, and some of them also get additional unique powers.  Each book features a new romantic pair as well as movement in the various plot lines.

In the first book, some of them turned evil and then the evil group split up and the government doesn't trust any of the turned super soldiers, so we're looking at a setting that includes at least four major factions: US government, Zodius (bad supernatural soldiers), Renegades (good supernatural soldiers), and General Powell's camp (he who started the mess in the first place).  It has a definite soap opera complexity to the story arcs.

True Colors

Summary: Good stand-alone novella set in the Elder Races universe.  Recommended for fans of  paranormal romance.

True Colors, by Thea Harrison, has likable characters and a sexy-yet-believable relationship at its core, with a little bit of a thriller thrown in.  I liked it, and, if you're looking for a quick read of the werewolf-meets-soul-mate variety, then this fits the bill.

The premise is that a serial killer is targeting the rainbow chameleon shape shifters, and it looks like our sweet school teacher/chameleon heroine is next on the list.  The hero is a werewolf policeman (more or less) who leads the case.  They almost immediately recognize in each other their soul mate and the rest of the story is them getting to know each other and settling into the relationship while figuring out who the killer is.  HEA, the end.

OK.  That all being the case, I'm a little torn in looking back at this story.  I think if it had been written by almost anyone else, I would be able to end this post with a happy "I liked it" type of statement and go along my merry way.

Burning Up

Summary: I liked it.  This anthology features four well-crafted stories of true love and hot sex in a fantasy, paranormal, or steam punk setting.  Although all the authors each have popular series, all of the stories stand alone and can be enjoyed by non-fans.  Woo hoo.

Burning Up totally works as an anthology.  Although the stories were pretty disparate in terms of setting, it felt like they hang together in terms of personality, if you will.

Whispers of Sin, by Nalini Singh, is the first story.  In it, a Chinatown resident is attacked by a thug trying to shake her parents down for protection money.  She's saved by a changeling (were-leopard) member of the pack that's trying to claim San Francisco as their territory.  It's true lust and protectiveness at first sight, and it evolves into something deeper as they continue to spend time together.  Their respective family and pack really enrich the story.  I've never read her popular Psy/Changeling series, but I've heard of it, so will probably look it up based on this story.

Shattered Dreams

Summary: A nice regency romance available as a $.99 e-book. 

Shattered Dreams, by Laura Landon, tells two love stories set vaguely in Regency-era England, with a little action near the end for spice.  The first love story is of a perfect man (handsome, charming, titled, rich, well-adjusted, etc.) and a flawed woman (beautiful, vivacious, and titled, but also dealing a disability and accompanying emotional issues).  The second is of two former lovers who were separated by a misunderstanding.

The book is worth reading if you regency romances, but it's not so great that I'll accost random strangers on my way to work and force them to read the book.  I'm not that sort of person, after all.  I think where it fails for me is that there are four main characters, but only one of them has any real complexity.  The others are fun to read, but shallow, which ends up making the book a bit fun-but-shallow also.

My Favorite Romances with Differently Abled Leads
Reading this book did get me thinking about my what romance books I enjoyed that have a lead dealing with a disability of some sort.  Here's my top 5:

1. Miles in Love by Lois McMaster Bujold.   It's my favorite series in general.  You should really start earlier in the series, but this is the core romance part of it.  It's a far future science fiction with a a brittle-boned, hyperactive, little person genius protagonist.  Imagine all possible good things you can say about a book and you can assume they apply here.  Yay!
2. The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie by Jennifer Ashley.  OMG, autism spectrum disorders never sounded so sexy as in this regency.
3. Candle in the Window by Christina Dodd. Medieval romance with a blind heroine.  Actually, the hero is blind, too, now that I think about it.  Well-deserved RITA award winner.
4. Seeing Eye by Patricia Briggs in the Strange Brew Anthology.  Short story paranormal romance/adventure between a blind witch and scarred werewolf.  Set in Seattle, it features secondary characters from her Alpha and Omega series
5. Nothing to Commend Her by Jo Barrett.  Hero is severely disfigured from burns, set in Regency England. Warning, it's a bit corny, so don't come here expecting an award winner.  But I really like the characters and find myself rereading on occasion to recapture the happy feeling it gives me.

Irish Moon

Summary: $.99 e-book price and high reviews made this a tempting read, but I just couldn't get into it enough to finish the book.  Meh.

Irish Moon, by Amber Scott, is a romance set in an alternate dark age Ireland where druid magic really works.   I feel like I should like it more than I do.   I went back to check on the Amazon reviews afterward to figure out what other people saw in it (because it has an average review of 4.5 and the only two negative reviews both said they thought the story was nice) and I still didn't get it.

So, maybe it's just me.  Maybe it's a really great book but I'm just in a bad mood or not the intended audience or something.  I don't know.  But I did notice how just about everyone commented on how much they loved the Irish setting.  So, if ancient Ireland+romance+magic is your thing, then this may be a good book for you.

Now, why didn't I like it?  Let me count the ways.

Bodyguard

Summary: Bodyguard, a short story in the "Shifter's Unbound" universe, is a fun and sexy paranormal romance read at a great price.  

Bodyguard, by Jennifer Ashley, follows sometime between the second and third book in Shifter's Unbound.  I like the first two and recommend them, but if you want to use this short story to try out her writing cheaply, then you can start here without needing any of the plot from the previous books.

The setting is one where Fae (who mostly live in their own world) created canine, lupine, and bear shifters many centuries ago and enslaved them, but the shifters broke free and lived in hiding in our world since then.  Shifters are clannish, long-lived, and don't mix with humans as a rule.  About thirty years, they were discovered by the human world, which didn't react well to the news.  In the US, where this is set, that meant they were rounded up, put in government-created shifter towns, and are treated to prejudice and discrimination by most people, laws, and businesses.  They are also all required to where magic collars developed by the Fae that shock shifters when they get violent.

Dragon Bound

Summary: The first in the Elder Races series, Dragon Bound takes a supernatural type that I usually hate and makes it totally work.  It's a funny, sexy, well-paced, emotionally true romance set in a well-imagined, creative alternate reality and spiced up with great action and rich secondary characters.   Five stars *plus* a purple heart-shaped rhinestone spangle sticker.  I laughed.  I cried.  It was better than Cats! I'd read it again. 

Dragon Bound, by Thea Harrison, kept popping up in my recommended list on Amazon.  It was highly-rated, but by an author I'd never heard of, charging full-price, and had a premise (dragon finds soul mate) that seemed destined for gag-inducing cheesiness.  It didn't seem worth the risk.  But like an infestation of mold, it wouldn't go away.  So eventually I tried out the "Click to Look Inside" and started reading and got totally hooked.  Because it's just that good.

It starts with Pia (heroine) going on the run after she steals from Drago (hero), the dragon shapeshifter.  He soon catches up to her, but he finds himself intrigued and decided to keep her instead of killing her outright.  They get caught up a series of adventures while they fall in love.  HEA.

The story is has no real weakness and many strengths, but what really bowled me over was that it has a dragon shapeshifter as the main character and it was completely authentic.  OK, here's a little interlude with 


My Theory on Paranormal Romances
As a broad generalization, paranormal romances can be split into a categories based on they male lead's supernatural species and its real-life analog.

• Werewolves and other shapeshifters are muscle-bound, physical, loyal, (usually family-oriented) but with a real wild side.    Essentially, they're extreme versions of bad boys from the wrong side of town.  
• Vampire and demons are selfish, decadent, ancient, sensual, and baaaaad.  Usually the heroine is their redemption.  Basically they're a souped up version of the amoral celebrity/rich townie, which tells you why vampires and werewolves rarely get along.
• Elves and other fae are magical, powerful, and pretty.  They're either idealized metrosexuals Prince Charmings, complete with hunky sauce and rainbow sprinkles.  
• Immortal warriors are devoted to fighting for a cause.  They're mystical SEALs with swords.  Yum.
• Humans don't stay that way for long - at some point they sprout fangs or get injected with mutant virus or something.  They start off as well-trained demon-slayers and true-love-to-supernatural-woman types, but basically this fills the underdog/everyman role which is usually not what you're looking for when you read paranormals.  So a book or so in, they morph into something else or are are superceded by another character.
• Angels are definition-of-good authority figures with occasional punish-wrong-doers duties.  I'm not saying "daddy-issues", but I'm just saying.

Writing likable, authentic point-of-view characters takes skill.  Doing so when the characters are supernaturals is tougher, because it shouldn't feel the same to be inside their head as it does to be inside a human's head.  Someone, for example, who has been eating people for the past 250 years is going to have unusual emotional reactions to things.  And that's why I think dragon shape-shifters are particularly prone to feeling unbelievable.

• Dragons.  They're what you get when you want someone wilder than a werewolf, more ancient than a vampire, more magical than an elf, and more alpha and a better fighter than all of them put together. 

Because they're even more everything than all the other supernatural types put together, they're that much harder to make believable.  But Thea Harrison, the genius, pulls it off.  And she doesn't cheat by calling them dragons but then ignoring the things that make dragons dragon-y.  No.  HER dragon is as old as the solar system, a secretive, solitary, carnivore who hoards treasure, flies, and breathes fire.  Shazam!  She make's Pia's race work too, but telling you what that is is a spoiler (albeit one that you'll guess before Dragos does), so you'll just have to wait to see.

More in the Series

1. Dragon Bound
2. Storm's Heart: A thunderbird shapeshifter and a 300 year old dark fae princess - she makes them work too!
3. Serpent's Kiss: An immortal gryphon shapeshifter and the 1,000 year old Vampire Sorceress Queen - and it works too!
4. Oracle's Moon: A djinn demon prince and the oracle - not out yet, but I have it on pre-order

Run Among Thorns

Summary: A decent suspense romance at a great e-book price.

Run Among Thorns, by Louise Lucia, is in the espionage thriller end of the romance spectrum.  The premise is that before the book begins, Jenny (heroine) is in a hostage situation that starts to turn ugly.  She springs into action and kills all the attackers handily.

A government agency assumes she's some sort of super spy, but can't find any info on her, so they call in a specialist interrogator Kier (hero) to break her down and find out her secrets.  His method involves whisking her away to a remote location and spending a lot of up-close-and-personal time with her,  which is where the romance part of the suspense romance kicks in.  Of course, she's not a spy, so although he starts out with his campaign of breaking her down emotionally, it doesn't go according to plan.

Fate's Edge

Summary: In their third "Edge" series book, Ilona Andrews delivers another well-crafted contemporary fantasy romance story with clever world-building and wonderful characters surrounding around sweet-and-chewy center of Happily Ever After.  *Sigh*.  If you like this genre, then read this series and this book.  They don't disappoint.

In case you haven't read Ilona Andrew's Edge series, then the premise is that there are three analogous worlds side-by-side.  The Broken is the contemporary no-magic real world we live in.  The Weird is a sophisticated, high-magic world with an alternate history resulting in countries like Old Gaul and the Democracy of California.  Connecting the two is a patchwork of lawless, lower-magic lands called the Edge.  The first two books were set mainly in the Edge in Appalachia and the Mire (Louisiana swamplands) respectively, but this one is a bit different in that the characters travel through multiple areas, mostly on the West Coast, so the setting lends a little less texture to the prose than in the other two books.

Forged in Fire

Summary: A reasonably-priced, decent read in the sexy action/romance genre.  The author doesn't so anything particularly new, but if you're in the mood for love at first site, Navy SEALs, and a dash of paranormal, this is a good choice.  Contains violence, sex, and explicit references to rape.

Forged in Fire is, I believe, Trish McCallan's first published book, and it's a solid launch.

The premise is a blend of two familiar tropes here.  One is the close knit SEAL team (honorable, deadly, and built) who are trying to stop some really bad guys.  The other is a hero with psychic powers who's been seeking his mystical soul mate.  Anyway, no new ground, but if it's your thing, then it's two great tastes that taste great together.

The world is basically the real world, and I get the idea that although the hero has some psychic traits in the family, it's not like there are monsters running around or any sort of paranormal sub-culture.