Today is the 15th anniversary of one of the days on which the universe changed. On 9/11/01 two planes were deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center, one crashed into the Pentagon, and one was retaken in its last moments by its hostage-passengers and crashed into a Pennsylvania field. The U.S. and probably the rest of the world, have never been the same. Just like the day that JFK was assassinated, or RFK’s assassination, or Martin Luther King’s, or the Challenger disaster, we all remember where we were when we heard the news, who we were with and what we did. And we always will.
Speaking of other, and considerably less fraught, milestones this week, September 8 was the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of the first episode of what was then a strange, weird science fiction TV series called Star Trek. This was a show that spawned a cultural revolution almost by accident. It changed the lives of many, including my own. Wired posted an absolutely fascinating article this week, “What If Star Trek Had Never Existed?” Even if you are not a Trek fan, I promise it will make you think.
And lastly, the naming of cats is a serious matter, as T.S. Eliot once said. We adopted a little boy kitten over the weekend. He’s about six months old, and he and Mellie are far from sure of each other at the moment. The shelter gave him the name “Alex” but that doesn’t feel right. So we are waiting to see what he tells us his name is. He looks a lot like the cat in the famous print, “The Favorite Cat” by Nathaniel Currier of Currier and Ives fame. Unfortunately the favorite cat in the famous print does not seem to have a name. So we’re watching little newbie cat to see who he is.
Carry On by Lisa Fenn (blog tour review) Mad Lizard Mambo by Rhys Ford (review) Unbe-Leaf-Able September to Remember Giveaway Hop The White Mirror by Elsa Hart (review) Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (blog tour review)
I got The Blockade and dropped everything to dive into it. Even though I can’t post the review for ages and ages, I just couldn’t resist. Some books are just like that, calling our names in ever more seductive tones until we absolutely must forgo everything to read them immediately.
If you look for yourself in the past and see nothing, how do you know who you are? How do you know that you are supposed to be here?
When Wyatt brings an unidentified photograph to the local historical society, he hopes staff historian Grayson will tell him more about the people in the picture. The subjects in the mysterious photograph sit side by side, their hands close but not touching. One is dark, the other fair. Both wear men’s suits.
Were they friends? Lovers? Business partners? Curiosity drives Grayson and Wyatt to dig deep for information, and the more they learn, the more they begin to wonder — about the photograph, and about themselves.
Guest Review by Amy:
Wyatt is moving his mother into an apartment, as her Alzheimer’s has made it difficult for her to continue running the family farm. While putting some of her things in the attic, he finds an old photograph of two men, and it makes him curious…
Grayson works at the local county historical society, and enjoys the puzzle Wyatt has brought to him. In researching the photograph, the two people learn more about each other–and themselves–than they bargained for.
When Marlene gave me this book for my attention, I was immediately interested; as a transgender woman myself, I can attest that well-crafted stories with transgender characters are a bit scarce. So as I started reading, I was unsurprised to see which of our characters is a transman–Grayson, with his dapper suit and bowtie, fits the bill quite nicely. Wyatt…now, here’s where it gets tricky, so stick with me a moment. For the first part of the book, Wyatt is referred to as “he”, but they’re hiding something from their family and friends–they’re transgender, too, a feminine-expressing genderqueer person who prefers they/them pronouns. Once this is revealed, Ottoman uniformly refers to Wyatt using those pronouns, and their gender identity is not ever at issue after that.
The two people go on a date, after finding out some significant facts about the photograph. The first date doesn’t go well, as both are somewhat afraid of being out with their partner, and have had bad experiences. There’s some internal back-and-forth, and they give it another shot…and what follows is, in this reviewer’s eyes, a truly, truly beautiful thing. The growing relationship between Wyatt and Grayson proceeds very naturally, with the only hiccup being that Wyatt’s family still thinks of him as a gay man, and Grayson’s family is mostly not talking to him at all. Ottoman, who is themself a student of history as well as an accomplished author, speaks to us through Grayson about the erasure of non-heterosexual, non-gender-binary people in history–how, so often, we must see solid evidence before we can accept anything but the default cisgendered, heterosexual identity.
Grayson is speaking of the study of history, particularly through photographs and other non-textual evidence, but it raises the question, for me, if the same could be said for literary works. In my previous read, The Heart Of Aces, one of the short stories, “Out of the Dead Land,” alludes to this, as one of the characters asserts in an academic paper that a character from a classic film is asexual. Allowing for non-default gender identities and sexualities, when it is not directly referenced in the story, allows for a much broader interpretation of characters and stories. It’s truly complicated, but it’s something I’m going to think about in my own reading moving forward.
Escape Rating: A+: I could gush on and on and on about this story, seriously. Ottoman has given us two protagonists who are very “real;” we’re firmly entrenched in their heads, and can see the world through their eyes. The internal cringe and stress that Grayson feels when he is misgendered by his boss is almost palpable, as is Wyatt’s discomfort at their mother’s deteriorating mental state, and the fact that their family does not know about their being genderqueer. Scenery and problems are detailed enough so that we know what the problem-to-overcome is about, without burdening the point needlessly. We know, very quickly, what our character’s stressors are, and the puzzle of the photograph keeps us interested, as a common thread that binds the discoveries together.
One of the high-water marks for me in this tale is when, on a road trip out of town, our newfound friends end up sharing a motel room. They did it for purely pragmatic reasons–neither of them has much money, really, another factor that plays heavily into the path this story takes–so it only makes sense. But the romantic tension has been building for a while, and what happens, happens. It’s a little bit of a predictable moment, but I shan’t complain, and here’s why:
I’ve found that, way too often, scenes depicting queer sexualities come off as…well, smutty, and othering, like it’s something really titillating that they’re different. This is off-putting to me in a lot of ways, as it’s quite inconsistent with my own experiences as a transwoman. Grayson cannot afford surgery–we’re not told if he’s even on hormones yet!–and early in the book grouses to himself about his D-cup breasts being hard to hide. Knowing my own dysphoric experiences during that time in my transition, I can grasp a bit what he is going through. Wyatt, for their part, seems happy enough in their skin; the disconnect for them is that they express as feminine, and aren’t out to much of anyone except Grayson.
Sex, for people who are not conforming to gender binaries, is a tricky business; there are all kinds of possibilities for hangups and traumas and things that just don’t feel good. But our two lovers do what has to be done to make it work–they communicate. The communication, while brief, tells them–and us–what will and won’t work, and expresses enthusiastic consent. The two scenes in this book that are shown are explicit, but not at all smutty. Quite the contrary: you have two beautiful, complicated people loving each other, and enjoying it.
By the end of the book, it’s obvious that Grayson and Wyatt are loving each other both in and out of bed. There are problems yet to overcome, but they’ve committed to dealing with them together. And that, my friend, is what romance is all about, to this reviewer. I give this book the strongest possible recommendation.
Poring over a dusty hatbox of photographs in her grandmother’s closet, Emily Prentice is shocked to discover her father was married to his high school sweetheart before meeting her mother.
In the summer of 1968, Jack and Libbie fall in love under the spell of their small town, untouched by the chaos of the late sixties. Though Libbie’s well-to-do parents disapprove of Jack’s humble family and his aspiration to become a mechanic, she marries Jack a year after they graduate high school. But soon their happiness crumbles as Libbie’s mental state unravels and she is drawn to alcohol and drugs. Despite his efforts to help her, Jack loses the woman he loves and is forced to move on with his life.
Now that Emily’s mother has passed away, Jack is alone again, and Emily grows obsessed with the beautiful woman who had given her father such joy. Determined to find Libbie, Emily pieces together the couple’s fragmented past. But is it too late for happy endings?
My Review:
This story is a heartbreaker. Be sure you have a box of tissues handy whenever you dive into this marvelous story. Personally, I needed a hug every couple of chapters. This story gets you right in the feels.
In part, that’s because the love story related in this novel is heartwrenchingly bittersweet. As we look back on it through the lens of the storyteller, we know that it is going to end in tragedy. What we experience as the story is told is the depth of that tragedy. They should have had a happy ending. Instead, we see bright hope turn to despair on a trajectory that is all-too-easy to anticipate, but was impossible to stop.
The other aspects that will make 21st century readers weep, and scream in frustration, is the way that the treatment of women’s health and mental health, particularly at the intersection of the two, made what was already a bad situation much, much worse than it needed to be. And while we like to believe that things have changed, they haven’t as much as we hope.
This story works in framing story type of narrative. Emily is helping her grandmother clean out the old family house in preparation for moving to a townhouse in the center of town. This is a labor of love for both women, but the process reveals more of the past than Emily knew existed.
A long-forgotten box of photographs reveals a piece of Emily’s father’s past that she never knew, but that Bev witnessed in all of its bright hope and dark ending. Before he married her now-deceased mother, Jack Prentice was married to his high school sweetheart, Libbie Wilkens. The box of photos is all that is left of their tragic marriage.
The bulk of the book is Bev telling Emily the story of her dad’s first marriage. Libbie was the daughter of one of the town’s richest families. She was bright and beautiful and defied her parents’ expectations to marry hard-working Jack Prentice. But she lost herself along the way to a neverending cycle of prescription drugs, alcohol, and increasingly frequent stays in rehab to dry out.
Just like her mother.
In the end, they break. We see it coming all along the way, and we want to reach into the book and shake some sense into nearly everyone. But we have more perspective on what is wrong with Libbie than her contemporaries do. This story takes place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And that past is another country.
Everyone believes that Libbie is just “sensitive”, like her mother. And that it is still Jack’s job to take care of her and protect her from anything that might stress her or upset her. The possibility that it is that protection that is part of the problem never occurs to people. She is just seen as inherently weaker because she is female. She’s not allowed to work because that might cause her more stress.
Instead, doctors prescribe more and more pills to help her. Not all of them know what other doctors are prescribing, but there is also a definite sense that because she is female her problems are all just “emotional” and pills should fix her right up. There’s never a sense that anyone believes there might be underlying concerns that need to be diagnosed.
And no one in her family wants to even think about the possibility that the stigma of mental illness might be attached to one of “them”. While Jack doesn’t feel that way, he is relatively young and completely overwhelmed. Between taking care of Libbie and working two and three jobs to keep them financially afloat, he is in over his head every second.
In the end, everything goes too far, and their brief marriage is over.
In the present, Emily is left with a dilemma. Multiple dilemmas. She feels deeply for Libbie, and wonders what happened to the bright young woman who was disappeared by her family into some unknown but probably institutionalized future. She’s worried about her widowed father, who has retreated into increasing amounts of work to cope with his grief.
So she decides to find Libbie. In the unstated hope that searching for her happy ending, or at least some closure, will provide Emily with the perspective to deal with the unresolved issues in her own life.
Escape Rating A-: The blurb essentially gives away the story, but the book is absolutely compelling, even though the reader knows the historical part of the story before it begins. This is one of those books where even though you know the what, the how of it will keep you enthralled until the very end.
The way that Libbie is treated is guaranteed to make 21st century readers gnash their teeth in frustration. But it feels very true to the time period. The world of women’s opportunities was changing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it had not changed completely (if it ever has). Libbie is growing up in what Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique as “quiet desperation”. She was supposed to be decorative and not functional, except within the sphere of the home. And it wasn’t going to be enough, with or without her family’s history of undiagnosed mental illness. Added to her mental health issues, she was doomed.
And when the story returns to the open-ended present, it still keeps you turning pages. Emily’s search gets under your skin. She may be using her search for Libbie as a way of distancing herself from her own issues, but it feels like it’s the scary but right thing to do.
Libbie could be dead. She could be happily remarried. She could be institutionalized. She could still be some kind of addict. She could still be angry at Emily’s father. And if Emily finds Libbie, Jack may not be ready or willing to revisit a past that caused him so much pain.
But in finding Libbie, Emily surprisingly finds herself. And it’s marvelous.
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.
Librarian-spy Irene and her apprentice Kai are back in the second in this “dazzling”* book-filled fantasy series from the author of The Invisible Library. The written word is mightier than the sword—most of the time... Working in an alternate version of Victorian London, Librarian-spy Irene has settled into a routine, collecting important fiction for the mysterious Library and blending in nicely with the local culture. But when her apprentice, Kai—a dragon of royal descent—is kidnapped by the Fae, her carefully crafted undercover operation begins to crumble. Kai’s abduction could incite a conflict between the forces of chaos and order that would devastate all worlds and all dimensions. To keep humanity from getting caught in the crossfire, Irene will have to team up with a local Fae leader to travel deep into a version of Venice filled with dark magic, strange coincidences, and a perpetual celebration of Carnival—and save her friend before he becomes the first casualty of a catastrophic war. But navigating the tumultuous landscape of Fae politics will take more than Irene’s book-smarts and fast-talking—to ward off Armageddon, she might have to sacrifice everything she holds dear....
My Review:
As a great storyteller once said, “There’s power in stories, though. That’s all history is: The best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine.” This could either be a quote from any of the fae in The Masked City, or it could be the raison d’etre for the entire race.
The Masked City is just one front in the war between order and chaos in the multiverse that surrounds The Invisible Library.
Order is represented by the dragons, and chaos belongs to the fae. The Library does its best to maintain the balance.
These concepts of order and chaos do not represent good and evil in their absolutes. Just as in the Babylon 5 universe, both the forces of order as represented by the Vorlons and the forces of chaos known as the Shadows are interested in absolutes. Neither absolute is good for humanity as a whole.
The absolute of order is tyranny. But the absolute of chaos is neverending lawlessness, where might always makes right and the ends always justify any means at all. Neither is a particularly good place for me and thee.
In the multiverse of the Library, worlds exist somewhere on the spectrum between absolute order and total chaos. The Library is aligned with neither faction, and instead seems to confine its actions to the swath in the middle, where chaos and order exist uneasily side-by-side, and both dragons and fae occasionally bring their eternal conflict to places that are in contention.
The alternate where Librarian Irene Winters has taken the post of Librarian-in-Residence is one such world. The fae in this world have taken over the country of Liechtenstein, and the dragons seem to be mostly represented by Irene’s apprentice Kai.
But the fae, as chaos avatars, also love to sow chaos within their own ranks. And as near-immortals, they have eons to nurse their grudges and plot their revenge. Irene and Kai get caught up in one very sticky stratagem, forcing Irene to break the Library’s rules to rescue Kai from a nefarious kidnapping plot.
And prevent a war between the dragons and the fae that will wreck uncounted worlds and kill millions of unsuspecting humans.
Save the dragon, save the universe. All in a day’s work for an agent of The Invisible Library.
Escape Rating A-: Just like The Invisible Library, this is a story that always exists on the knife-edge of falling into its own chaos, but keeps leaping, dancing, and often careening out of the frying pan and into the fire. Irene is always within a whisper of failing and falling, but still manages to somehow move past the current obstacle to…the next obstacle. The story is like a platform-game, where the protagonist is always leaping to the next ledge and holding on by her fingernails.
The madcap nature of the adventure always reminds me of Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate, without, so far, the romance.
One of the subthemes in this story, and one that Irene is both caught by and sometimes manages to catch, is the concept of the power of stories. One of the interesting things about the fae is that they derive much of their power from either driving or becoming an integral part of a story. The most powerful create the story, and everyone around them finds themselves playing specific roles in that story. Those roles are often dictated by archetype. The story here is one fae’s attempt to become kingmaker, warleader and shadow puppeteer by driving the dragons into a war with the fae. Irene is constantly looking out for herself, to prevent herself from being cast as the “spy-assassin-enemy” or even worse, the “too stupid to live” ingenue.
This is a concept that was explored much more fully in Mercedes Lackey’s Five Hundred Kingdoms series, starting with The Fairy Godmother. In that series, the agency was the universe rather than an individual person or people, but the idea was the same at its heart. People were fated to live out roles in the collective fairy tale unconscious. Subverting those roles, or pushing them into a path more desired by the protagonist, was an uphill battle.
As it is here for Irene. She finds herself being challenged at every turn, as each faction tries to sweep her into their narrative and out of her own. Only her bond with the Library keeps her from sinking. But in the end, she is forced to create stories that will sweep others into her wake, in order to prevent the upcoming Armageddon. I can’t wait to see what kind of trouble finds Irene (and Kai) next in The Burning Page.
World War I battlefield nurse Bess Crawford goes to dangerous lengths to investigate a wounded soldier’s background—and uncover his true loyalties—in this thrilling and atmospheric entry in the bestselling “vivid period mystery series” (New York Times Book Review).
At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher-bearers find an exhausted officer, shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford’s aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is, the officer isn't British--he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German.
When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, won by the Germans. But is the wounded man Alsatian? And if he is, on which side of the war do his sympathies really lie?
Of course, Matron could be right, but Bess remains uneasy—and unconvinced. If he were a French soldier, what was he doing so far from his own lines . . . and so close to where the Germans are putting up a fierce, last-ditch fight?
When the French officer disappears in Paris, it’s up to Bess—a soldier’s daughter as well as a nurse—to find out why, even at the risk of her own life.
My Review:
The red herrings are much tastier, and much more substantial, than any of the meals described in this tale of Paris nearing the end of World War I. Rationing seems to have made all the food unpalatable, even if it is still served with as much French flair as ever.
Although the meals are often described with unloving detail, they are far from the point of this story.
Bess usually finds herself investigating murder in the midst of warfare – a time and place where it can be difficult to distinguish between one and the other. But this does not start out as a murder investigation, and it takes some surprising, and frequently twisted turns to get from the one to the other.
It’s the early fall of 1918, and it is beginning to look like the end of the war is at hand. Unfortunately, one of the ways that the end is being signified is for all of the forces, Allied and Central Powers alike, is to shoot off as much of their remaining ordinance as fast as possible. This war seems to be going out in a long and protracted series of very big bangs.
As a nursing Sister, Bess and her colleagues are busier than ever. Exhaustion dogs their every step. So when Bess spots a soldier who might be out of place, everyone above her in the chain of command is frankly just too damn tired to do anything about it. Until Bess unexpectedly finds herself with several days of medical leave in Paris.
That out-of-place soldier is a wounded Lieutenant in the remains of a French uniform that seems to have had all of its identification removed. While it is not completely unknown for a lost Allied soldier to find himself behind a different ally’s lines, there is one other notable thing about the man who calls himself Lieutenant Philippe Moreau. While unconscious, he speaks fluent and unaccented German. Is Moreau a German spy, or is he merely from the contested Alsace-Lorraine region, where residents were forced to use German since the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870?
When Moreau disappears into seemingly thin air, Bess’ instincts are aroused. Whatever Moreau is, he seems to be taking great pains to hide himself from his commanders.
Bess, wounded in a sniper attack, is sent to Paris to recuperate. She’s not wounded enough for a ticket back home, but the wound in her side becomes infected. She needs surgery and rest for healing. She’ll get neither in a forward aid station.
Bess, as usual, finds herself in the middle of multiple unfolding dramas while she is supposed to be resting in Paris. It is lucky for Bess that the mantra of “a change is as good as a rest” proves true, because rest seems to be the one thing she doesn’t get.
Under orders from her father, the Colonel Sahib, Bess has multiple officers, whether convalescent or not, instructed to keep her safe and out of trouble. Instead, Bess co-opts one after another in her search for the truth about Philippe Moreau. Only to find that nothing she has heard is true, and that there is murder at the heart of it all.
Escape Rating B+: I always enjoy a visit with Bess and her world. World War I is an endlessly fascinating period for historical fiction and historical mysteries. Bess’ perspective on her world is different for her time and place without being anachronistic. Being a nurse gave Bess much more agency and a considerably more active role in her world than she would normally have had. At the same time, she faces just enough restrictions because of her gender and class to remind us that her world was still very different from ours.
Unlike many of her previous books, in this story Bess finds herself somewhat at sea. She is a patient in the convalescent home rather than staff, and people look in on her, and attempt to look after her, much more than is usual (or comfortable) for her. Nurses clearly don’t make any better patients than doctors do.
At the same time, she is cut off from most of her usual resources. She is in France, and although she does speak the language tolerably well, she does not speak like a native and can’t hide in plain sight the way she does in England. Likewise, the powerful forces that she is able to bring to bear in England or even in her British Army nursing station are not available to her here. Here mother’s network of social contacts, and her father’s tremendous pull within the British Army are of no help to her on French soil.
She has no one she can trust the way that she does Simon Brandon, her father’s aide-de-camp and her own friend. Bess trusts Simon both in the sense that he will not betray her confidences and also in the sense that he knows her well enough not to stand in her way, and most importantly not to treat her like a delicate flower in need of his solicitous protection. Whatever Simon is or will be to Bess (and I do wonder) he knows her, likes her and respects her just as she is. A rare commodity for a woman who often steps out of what is defined as her sphere.
Bess begins by looking for a man who may be a spy, or possibly a deserter. She uncovers, as she so often does, a hidden cesspool that leads to an old murder. But as Bess is so often completely at sea during this case, the readers are a bit as well. The less she understands, and the more difficult a time she has putting things together, so do we.
But as her war draws towards its close, I can’t help but wonder what comes next for Bess. Wherever she goes and whatever she does, I can’t wait to read what happens next!
~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
The publisher is giving away 3 copies of The Shattered Tree to lucky entrants on this tour:
Once upon a time, Labor Day weekend was the last free weekend kids had before school started and homework began. Today many schools start in August, and Labor Day weekend isn’t quite what it used to be. But it is still a 3-day weekend and most places usually have good weather.
Although when we lived in Anchorage, Labor Day Weekend usually heralded the sighting of “Termination Dust” – the first visible snowfall on the Chugach Mountains that surround the Anchorage bowl. It was an unmistakable, but unwelcome, sign that winter was coming.
This year might be different. As I write this on Thursday, Hurricane Hermine is headed for the Florida Gulf Coast, which means a whole lotta rain in the southeast as it tracks its way across Florida and south Georgia heading for the Carolinas. Atlanta is a bit too far north for the actual hurricane, but I expect plenty of stormy weather on its fringe.
I also want to know who is responsible for the name “Hermine”. It should be Hermione. She brought plenty of bad weather to the forces of darkness in the Harry Potter books. A hurricane named in her honor would be totally appropriate.
I hope you are having a terrific Labor Day Weekend, wet or dry.
This week had several terrific books. Both The Buried Book and Last Chance Rebel were surprisingly good. A Great Reckoning lived up to my every expectation of a book in this series. Now I have to wait another year for another fix.
This coming week holds three books that I have been eagerly awaiting, based on the past performance of previous entries in their series; The Shattered Tree, the latest book in Charles Todd’s marvelous Bess Crawford series; The Masked City, the followup to the fascinating The Invisible Library, and finally The White Mirror, the sequel to last year’s unexpectedly excellent Jade Dragon Mountain. It’s going to be a great reading week.
But before I let you go back to your Labor Day weekend plans, one last note. Galen posted a lovely piece about our surprising Mellie-cat over on his blog at Meta Interchange. If you have feline overlords in your life, you will understand our delight in Mellie’s transformation. I just wish her vocabulary had a few more words. She suddenly has a lot to say, and we are in rather desperate need of a Mellie-to-human dictionary!
Wow! This is my 200th Stacking the Shelves post. I know that the official count over at Team Tynga’s Reviews (the host of Stacking the Shelves) is a bit higher than this, but there were a few Saturdays where I either didn’t have much or had something else to post or was out of town and did something easier to do from my laptop. This post can be done without a second screen, but it isn’t as easy. I get too many books.
This weekend I have a perfect lucky 7 for the graphic. And they all look interesting. I am really looking forward to Rejected Princesses. I always did love having a blast with history!
The prodigal son of Copper Ridge, Oregon, has finally come home
The man who ruined Rebecca Bear's life just strolled back into it with one heck of an offer. Years ago, Gage West's recklessness left Rebecca scarred inside and out. Now he wants to make amends by gifting her the building that houses her souvenir store. Rebecca won't take Gage's charity, but she's willing to make a deal with the sexy, reclusive cowboy. Yet keeping her enemy close is growing dangerously appealing…
He's the wild West brother, the bad seed of Copper Ridge. That's why Gage needs the absolution Rebecca offers. He just didn't expect to need her. After years of regretting his past, he knows where his future lies—with this strong, irresistible woman who could make a black sheep come home to stay…
My Review:
This is a challenging book. I mean that in the sense that it grabs the reader by the throat at the beginning, and doesn’t let go until the very end.
This also isn’t an easy story in a whole lot of ways. Our heroine begins the story brittle and scarred. Our hero has been her “monster in the closet” for well over a decade. He inflicted those scars. It’s over the course of the story that Rebecca discovers that, while Gage was most definitely the cause of her physical scars, the way that she has waved those scars as a flag, or used them as a whip and a chair to keep other people from getting too close, is pretty much all on her.
And while she is the one who carried all of the physical pain, Gage left with plenty of scars of his own. It’s just that all of his are on the inside. And even more self-inflicted, in more ways than one.
The beginning of this story happened long ago. Way back when Rebecca was a pre-teen and Gage was the town’s self-indulgent golden boy. He was also 18, making him young, dumb and too full of himself and testosterone. There’s a reason that teenage boys and cars are so frequently a dangerous mix.
Gage was playing “chicken” with his equally young and dumb friends, and crashed into an oncoming car. The car containing Rebecca and her mother. Gage and Rebecca’s mother both walked away with a few scratches, but Rebecca was carried out torn and twisted. Her needs and her rehabilitation drove her mother away. If her brother, barely 21, hadn’t stepped up, she’d have ended up in the foster care system or worse.
Gage’s father made it all go away. He paid off the family, and no charges were ever pressed. Gage ran away, and stayed away, for 17 years. Long enough for Rebecca and his siblings to grow up, and for his father to get old. He only comes back to fix his father’s surprisingly empty finances when the old man has a stroke.
So he decides to fix everything broken he left in Copper Ridge, starting with Rebecca. There’s an immediate problem with his plan – Rebecca doesn’t see herself as broken at all, and wants absolutely nothing to do with the man who she believes ruined her life.
And Gage refuses to take into account that the most broken person of all in this mess is Gage himself. His plan is to ride in, fix everything, and leave, never letting anyone else get close to him. He’s certain that’s what he deserves.
But Rebecca challenges him at every turn. She doesn’t want his money, she doesn’t need his help. She’s made a success of her life, owning her own store and her own house, having taken her determination to get beyond her injuries and make her own life.
But Gage continues to push, and Rebecca keeps pushing back. It is a very, very short distance between hate and love, especially when the person you’ve hated is just a monster in the closet, and the real flesh and blood person is so much more.
A relationship that should never have been helps Rebecca see into her broken places. Not the physical ones, but the emotional wounds she carries inside. And bringing those wounds into the light makes her whole, whether Gage is willing to go there with her, or not.
Escape Rating A-: There’s a grit to this story, and the character of Rebecca, that reminds me a whole lot of the utterly awesome, and incredibly hot After Hours by Cara McKenna. I’m not totally sure why, but it does. So if you like the one, you’ll probably like the other.
Rebecca’s character is what makes this story so good. We see inside her, and it’s not a pretty place. There’s nothing horrible, but she’s become much, much too good at keeping people at a distance. She’s afraid to let anyone close out of the fear that they might leave just the way her mother did. So she’s walling herself off from an emotional life. While there certainly is some truth that in a society that judges women on their appearance her scars might put some men off, she also keeps herself from developing close female friendships. She doesn’t let anyone in. And people who know her history let her have her way. She uses their pity at the same time she rejects it.
When Gage bursts into her life, she is forced to rethink many of her assumptions. Not just the ones about him, but the ones she has made about herself and everyone else. She finally figures out that her hatred of him, and her anger at her mother’s abandonment, aren’t hurting either of them. They are just holding her back. That she learns to let go, for her own sake and not for theirs, is the lesson of the book.
However, Gage holds himself back during the entire story. We don’t see the real him, or his real emotional state (which is a mess) until very, very late in the story. So he never becomes as strong a hero as she is a heroine. In some ways, he’s the rock that she dashes herself upon until she finally cracks open and lets all the bad stuff out. She needs that, but it it leaves his character and motivations a bit lacking.
There’s one final thought I want to leave you with. Something that Rebecca says near the end of the book has a great deal of resonance, not just for this story, but for life in general.
“Don’t hide it. And don’t pretend it isn’t there. That’s how we make monsters… By hiding ordinary things in the closet and letting them feed off the darkness.”
Rebecca lets the light in, no matter how much it hurts. That’s a big part of what makes her awesome.
~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
Harlequin is giving away a $25 Amazon Gift Card to one lucky entrant on this tour:
And lastly, the naming of cats is a serious matter, as T.S. Eliot once said. We adopted a little boy kitten over the weekend. He’s about six months old, and he and Mellie are far from sure of each other at the moment. The shelter gave him the name “Alex” but that doesn’t feel right. So we are waiting to see what he tells us his name is. He looks a lot like the cat in the famous print, “The Favorite Cat” by Nathaniel Currier of Currier and Ives fame. Unfortunately the favorite cat in the famous print does not seem to have a name. So we’re watching little newbie cat to see who he is.
Blog Recap:
Coming Next Week:
Documenting Light by 
Finding Libbie by 
The Masked City (The Invisible Library, #2) by 
As a great storyteller once said, “There’s power in stories, though. That’s all history is: The best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine.” This could either be a quote from any of the fae in The Masked City, or it could be the raison d’etre for the entire race.
As it is here for Irene. She finds herself being challenged at every turn, as each faction tries to sweep her into their narrative and out of her own. Only her bond with the Library keeps her from sinking. But in the end, she is forced to create stories that will sweep others into her wake, in order to prevent the upcoming Armageddon. I can’t wait to see what kind of trouble finds Irene (and Kai) next in 
The Shattered Tree (Bess Crawford, #8) by 
Blog Recap:
Coming Next Week:
Last Chance Rebel (Copper Ridge, #6) by