One door closes, other doors open. The March Book of Choice Giveaway Hop ends on Thursday, just as the Lucky Leprechaun Giveaway Hop and the March into Madness Giveaway Hop begin. Meanwhile, the All About Diversity Giveaway Hop started early this morning and runs until the end of the month – just in time for the April Book of Choice Giveaway Hop to start.
If you like urban fantasy that may or may not be touched with a bit of paranormal romance, and you have not looked into Anne Bishop’s world of The Others, it might be time to start. I love this series (Cass hates it, she hates everything unless there are dragons in it). But even she admits that they are reading crack. Once you pick one up, you can’t put it down.
Did you remember to SPRING FORWARD? Daylight saving time starts today in the U.S. Which means we all lost an hour of reading-time last night!
A Dangerous Game by Heather Graham (blog tour review) Blood of the Four by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon (review) Good Guys by Steven Brust (review) Lucky Leprechaun Giveaway Hop March into Madness Giveaway Hop
Diversity is not just checking off boxes, or filling quotas, as is so often implied. Instead, I think it is about broadening horizons and viewpoints.
I also think it can mean different things in different contexts. And it is a very hard topic to wrap one’s arms around. It is also an extremely difficult topic to discuss, particularly in groups or situations that currently favor the status quo. It’s even difficult for me to find a way to write the intro to this blog hop without worrying about touching off one or more “hot buttons”, and there are plenty when it comes to diversity.
So let’s try to focus on diversity in books and reading, as this is a book blog. Through reading, it is possible to learn about, develop an understanding of and an empathy for people who are different from oneself. But that only works if those multiple viewpoints are published, and if you seek them out to read them.
For example, most of The New York Times Best Sellers for fiction and non-fiction in 2017 were written by white men – unless they have even a hint of romance, most of which is written by white women. There are very few other voices on those lists, and if that’s where you get your reading from, then that’s who you’re reading, whether intentionally or not. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
There have been multiple memes, themes and projects to get people to read books written from other perspectives, whether that diversity is represented by gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, country of origin, country of publication, or diversity on any other axis that shows a different point of view. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks initiative as well as A Year of Reading the World are just two of the many examples.
Representation is also important. Just as it can be eye-opening to read books written from a completely different perspective than my own, it is also affirming to read books that speak to me because they represent me. And both of those are experiences that everyone should have the chance to have, no matter who they are or where they are coming from. We do need diverse books, not just for children, but for adults as well.
Perhaps, in times like these, especially for adults.
~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
As part of this blog hop, I’m giving one lucky winner either a $10 Amazon Gift Card or a $10 Book from the Book Depository that they will hopefully use to further their own exploration of diverse books.
I could say that it was a weird week. I didn’t pick up many review books, and I didn’t buy anything from Amazon or Audible nor did I get anything from the library. On that oh so famous other hand, I did get eARCs for two books that I am really looking forward to – the next Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes book from Laurie R. King, and the next Psy-Changeling book from Nalini Singh. So I may not have gotten much, but what I did get is excellent!
Lydia Kincaid's shipping back to Boston, but she's not happy about it. She left to get away from the firefighting community—her father was a firefighter, her brother's a firefighter and, more important, her ex is a firefighter. But family is number one, and her father needs her help running the pub he bought when he retired. Soon, Lydia finds it hard to resist the familiar comfort and routine, and even harder to resist her brother's handsome friend Aidan.
Aidan Hunt is a firefighter because of the Kincaid family. He's had the hots for Lydia for years, but if ever a woman was off-limits to him, it's her. Aside from being his mentor's daughter, she's his best friend's sister. The ex-wife of a fellow firefighter. But his plan to play it cool until she leaves town again fails, and soon he and Lydia have crossed a line they can't uncross.
As Aidan and Lydia's flirtation turns into something more serious, Lydia knows she should be planning her escape. Being a firefighter's wife was the hardest thing she's ever done, and she doesn't know if she has the strength to do it again. Aidan can't imagine walking away from Boston Fire—even for Lydia. The job and the brotherhood are his life; but if he wants Lydia in it, he'll have to decide who's first in his heart.
My Review:
I plucked this out of the towering TBR pile because I’m reviewing the fourth book in this series, Hot Response, for a tour next month. While I don’t have time to read the middle books before my tour date, I did want to take the opportunity to see where it all began.
The series features the firefighters in one particular Boston Fire company, as well as some of the regulars at the bar that most of them use as a second home. That the bar is owned by a retired member of their company probably has a lot to do with that.
Lydia Kincaid has kind of run away from home, and from that home-away-from-home known as Kincaid’s Bar. Between the bar and the firehouse, it’s a very close-knit community, and Lydia was tired of everyone knowing her business – especially since that business includes a divorce from a firefighter. Not to mention that Tommy Kincaid, the owner of the bar, is her father. His expectation that both Lydia and her sister Ashley would work at his bar and nowhere else is just the beginning of his attitudes.
He still seems pissed that Lydia divorced her lying, cheating ex-husband instead of giving him yet one more chance. Dear old dad is a bit locked into 1950s.
But that tendency of the bar regulars to know and be up in the Kincaid’s business is currently more than her sister Ashley can handle. Ashley and her firefighter husband Danny are separated, and she can’t cope with every single bar patron commenting on her life and her choices.
Sister to the rescue! Lydia comes home and takes Ashley’s place behind the bar, as well as her guest bedroom. It’s all supposed to be temporary, until Ashley and Danny either figure out how to fix what’s gone wrong, or figure out that it can’t be fixed. Then Lydia will run away again, as far from Boston as she can stand.
Lydia’s plans are derailed when Aidan Hunt happens to them. She’s known Aidan forever – he’s her younger brother Scotty’s best friend. And he’s Scotty’s partner in the fire company, which means that he should be off limits to her. From the perspective of the story, it’s much more that she should be off limits to him. Both as his best friend’s sister and because any relationship drama will ruin the cohesiveness of a fire team that has to have each other’s backs every moment.
But their chemistry can’t be denied. And instead of fighting it, they give in, both believing that the whole thing is only temporary, and that nothing good will happen if they tell either her brother or her father that they are seeing each other.
Of course, they’re only half right.
Escape Rating C+: I loved many of Shannon Stacey’s earlier books, including her Kowalskis series, and I really wanted to like Heat Response more than I did. Instead, I have a lot of mixed feelings.
The overall feeling I got from this story is that it is a “bros before hos” story, to put it bluntly. Lydia and Aidan are both single and completely unencumbered. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the two of them getting together, whether it’s just a hookup, a friends with benefits relationship, or something more.
But they both know that her brother Scotty and her father will be pissed that Aidan and Lydia are seeing each other, so they keep it secret. And, of course, when the lies are finally exposed it makes the situation exponentially worse. The problem for the story is that it feels as if all the tension created by their relationship and its secrecy is false. It feels unneccessary, especially as there are plenty of real sources of tension between Lydia and Aidan without adding a fake one.
Lydia left Boston because she found the close-knit atmosphere of the firehouse and the bar stifling. Her relationship with her father is contentious at best, and her previous marriage to a firefighter was disastrous. Her ex was a lying, cheating jerk who used his uniform and his job to find more opportunities to cheat and more ways to hide his cheating from Lydia. Her dad seems to have put his job and his brotherhood ahead of his family. Lydia is tired of playing second-fiddle to a fire company, and has no desire to get into any kind of relationship with any more firefighters than she already is between her dad, her brother, and her currently estranged brother-in-law.
Her vow to stay away from relationships with firefighters along with her frequently stated plan to leave Boston as soon as Ashley is back on her feet, provide enough reasons for Aidan to be wary of a relationship with her, because she’s clear from the beginning that she’s not planning to stick around.
That means that there were plenty of problems to provide conflict for their relationship without adding the lying and the eventual fighting between Aidan and Scotty. Or at least that’s my take on it.
I found the secondary romance between Ashley and Danny to be much more interesting, and wish we’d seen a lot more of it. They’re separated, not because either of them did anything wrong, but because Danny suppresses all of his emotional reactions. Ashley feels lonely all the time, because Danny just isn’t emotionally present. It is a big and very, very real problem, and it takes them most of the book to finally start talking with one another. I loved seeing them start working things out, and I wish I’d seen more of their story.
Rescued from alien slavers, former cop Dayna wakes to discover she’s host to a powerful alien symbiont, and the only man who can help her is the mysterious and dangerous casino owner, Rillian.
Dayna Caplan has dedicated her life to protecting others…and now that she’s no longer a captive at the desert arena of Zaabha, she desperately wants to help find the last of the other human women who were abducted by the Thraxians. But now she has to deal with the intense hunger and powerful new abilities the alien living inside grants her…and the person forcing her to confront her new reality is the cool, enigmatic, and far-too-attractive Rillian.
Rillian has wheeled and dealed his way to the top of the food chain on the lawless desert world of Carthago. He lets no one close and keeps iron-clad control on his life…which vital to keeping the lethal power within him in check. But one human woman—tough, stubborn, and fascinating Dayna—works her way under his skin, and he finds himself obsessed with protecting her. But as dead bodies start appearing in his casino as a deadly warning, dangers are closing in on them.
With their allies, the gladiators from the House of Galen, Rillian and Dayna find themselves fighting for survival on every front. On the hunt to find Zaabha and the lost humans, they will face murderers, slavers, and the deadliest of all challenges…the aliens living within them.
My Review:
One of the things that I absolutely love about Anna Hackett’s writing, and particularly in her Galactic Gladiators series, is the way that so many tropes get set on their pointy little heads.
In fantasy, SF, and so many fairy tales, the woman is the reward that the man gets for finishing his quest, whether that’s fighting evil, finding treasure or simply surviving. In the Galactic Gladiators series, it feels like the gladiators are the rewards that the human refugees get for surviving all the crap they’ve had to deal with since the Thraxian slave traders kidnapped them from Jupiter Station and took them back to Kor Magna through that blasted temporary wormhole.
While in most of the stories, the human is female and the gladiator is male, the reversed trope really isn’t reversed in the one story where those boots are on the opposite feet. The gladiator Saff is Blaine Strong’s reward for surviving the hellhole that is the underground fight rings of the planet Carthago. But it can also be seen that he is her reward as well.
But in Guardian, as in most of the stories in this series, the human is female, and the one native to the Kor Magna side of the galaxy is male. But as is becoming increasingly common (and a nice change), the male in this particular entry is not a gladiator. Not that Rillian, the owner of the Dark Nebula Casino (and possibly half of Carthago) can’t fight with the best of them, but his skills lie outside of the Kor Magna Arena.
Which hasn’t stopped him from banding together with the gladiatorial House of Galen to wipe out the illegal slave trade and the underground fight rings that it feeds. Particularly now that one of those rescued humans, former police detective and security officer Dayna Caplan, is in his care.
She came out of her ordeal with a symbiont bonded to her body, and Rillian is the only person who can help her – because he has a symbiont of his own. He also suffered through a bonding process that he wasn’t expected to survive. He’s willing to use his experience to help Dayna, not just because he knows what she’s going through, but because she’s the answer to all the questions that he’s never dared to ask.
But when the Thraxians begin targeting women from Rillian’s past and his present to keep him from helping the House of Galen, he knows that Dayna is next. And that he’ll destroy anyone who threatens what’s his – even if he has to let go of his much vaunted control to make that happen.
If he can’t keep control of his symbiont, he’ll become the kind of killer of which nightmares are made. But if he can’t let go, he won’t be able to save Dayna from everyone coming after her.
And he’ll never be able to save her from the most dangerous predator that she faces – himself.
Escape Rating A-: As I said at the top, in this series it particularly feels like the gladiators (and the other oh-so-hot alien males) are the women’s reward for surviving their one-way trip across the galaxy and everything that Carthago has thrown at them. Especially as most of what’s been thrown at them has been pretty damn awful until the point where they get rescued.
But even though they are definitely in need of rescue, it’s not because they are weak women who have turned into damsels in distress. Anyone in their situation would need to be rescued, as is shown by the rescues of both their male colleague Blaine Strong and the rescue of the big blue alien warrior Vek.
There are times when everyone needs a little help from their friends, even friends they haven’t met yet.
One of the other things I love about this series is that while it may be moving towards its ending, there isn’t anything integral to this world or the situation that requires that it come to an end. (Unlike the Hell Squad series, where as much as I love it I also need the catharsis of kicking the invading Gizzida off our Earth).
Although there seem to have been a limited number of humans brought to Carthago, the real limit to the number of humans is the size of Jupiter Station, which has not been established. There could have been more ships in transit that got scooped up by the Thraxians.
And there are plenty of innocents trafficked into slavery by the Thraxians and their allies the Srinar. The series could branch out into saving other people. Or another wormhole could temporarily open up.
Unfortunately, while it looks like the House of Galen will eventually take the Thraxians down, the underground fight rings exist because there are beings who are willing to pay for the deadly “entertainment” they provide. Which means that taking down the Thraxians is not a permanent solution, because there is no permanent solution.
This particular entry in the series is interesting because neither Dayna nor Rillian follow any of the usual patterns in this series, so far. And because it expands the different types of people who got captured from Jupiter and who help them. Dayna was a cop, and has no desire to become a gladiator. She wants to work security and solve crimes – it’s what she’s good at. And Rillian still wants to buy the other half of Carthago one of these days. A casino owner can always use more good security people, and Dayna is one of the best.
They are good together. Rillian is someone who, of necessity, keeps everyone else at a distance. Dayna needs to be let in. They drive each other crazy, at least until they figure out why they drive each other quite so crazy. They’re a great match. And they’re terrifically fun to watch.
I’m looking for more great stories from this series. The next one, Cyborg, is obviously going to add a cyborg romance to the mix. And I think we’ve finally met the woman who will match Galen himself. I can’t wait!
In this thrilling and suspenseful fantasy, set in the world of the New York Times bestselling Others series, Vicki DeVine and her lodger, the shapeshifter Aggie Crowe, stumble onto a dead body . . . and find themselves enmeshed in danger and dark secrets.
Human laws do not apply in the territory controlled by the Others–vampires, shapeshifters, and paranormal beings even more deadly. And this is a fact that humans should never, ever forget . . .
After her divorce, Vicki DeVine took over a rustic resort near Lake Silence, in a human town that is not human controlled. Towns like Vicki’s have no distance from the Others, the dominant predators that rule most of the land and all of the water throughout the world. And when a place has no boundaries, you never really know what’s out there watching you.
Vicki was hoping to find a new career and a new life. But when her lodger, Aggie Crowe–one of the shapeshifting Others–discovers a dead body, Vicki finds trouble instead. The detectives want to pin the man’s death on her, despite the evidence that nothing human could have killed the victim. As Vicki and her friends search for answers, things get dangerous–and it’ll take everything they have to stay alive.
My Review:
There’s a famous saying that “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000.” And that’s true even if homo sapiens is no longer around to see her step up to the plate. But what if, instead of Mother Nature, or Gaia, or the workings of chemistry, biology and physics on the environment, instead of working, let’s call it, translucently, had an actual batter in the on deck circle all the time, one who regularly stepped up to the plate whenever homo sapiens screwed up.
Which we do. Frequently and often.
In some ways, that’s the premise of the world of The Others. In the earlier books of this series, starting with Written in Red, we see a world where nature is personified by beings known as “The Others”, where homo sapiens is not the dominant species. A fact that some members of the species keep trying to forget, and with predictable results.
Instead of doing whatever we want to the environment and the planet, the Others have very strict limits on what humans can do, where they can do it, and how much damage they can do. When those limits are exceeded, the Others slap humans down. Hard. Deadly hard.
At the end of Etched in Bone, the Others decide that humans need to be taught a lesson. Again. Lake Silence is the first story that takes place after those events, in a world where the human population has been deliberately decimated, and where the Others have become much more obvious about their true ownership of this world and everything in it.
Vicki DeVine has come to Lake Silence, one of the small Finger Lakes in what we call upstate New York, to try to make a go of the slightly run down rustic resort that she received in her divorce from Yorick Dane and his Vigorous Appendage.
Things are going reasonably well, in spite of the many restrictions that the Others have placed on what Vicki can and cannot do with the buildings on her resort, until Vicki’s one and only acknowledged tenant, Aggie Crow, brings home a “squooshy” eyeball. To eat. And that’s when Vicki discovers that she isn’t as finished with Yorick as she has hoped, and that the Others that most humans try to think of as “far away” and “out there” are, in fact, “in here”, or at least in Lake Silence. And that the Lake and all of its surroundings are, in fact, “out there” where the Others control everything.
Just because you don’t believe in Mother Nature, doesn’t mean that she doesn’t believe in you.
Escape Rating A: A friend wondered what there was to say about the world of the Others now that Meg, the heroine of the first part of the series, seemed to be well on her way to living a normal life including an eventual HEA.
It turns out there’s quite a lot to say, and quite a lot of very interesting characters to say it with. (I always thought that “reading crack” was somehow embedded in the pages of Meg’s story – and whatever it is, its still here).
The humans in this story are all too recognizably human, with the species’ ability to stick their heads in the sand and ignore anything that doesn’t conform to their desired reality, and with the all-too-frequent venality and willingness of some people to cheat whenever possible.
I did sometimes find myself wondering if the species might have developed somewhat differently in a world where humans were demonstrably not the apex predator, but that wouldn’t make for half so interesting a story or for characters who are so easily recognizable.
Vicki DeVine serves the same purpose in Lake Silence that Meg did in Written in Red, even though she comes from a completely different perspective. And unlike Meg, Vicki herself is not merely human, but garden-variety human. She has no special powers. She’s just a good person whose been repeatedly hurt, and she’s open minded and likeable. And the Others like her.
Vicki doesn’t know it but the resort she owns is meant to be a kind of “halfway house” for Others who want to learn to blend into the human world. Not because being human is considered better, because it’s not. But because the Others need to keep a closer eye on the humans in their human controlled enclaves, especially after the fiasco that culminated in Etched in Bone. And because humans, with their useful opposable thumbs, have invented some really cool stuff that some Others like to use, particularly those who live closer to humans, like the Sanguinati (read vampires) and the various animal shifters, like the Crowgard, Beargard and Panthergard who live near Lake Silence.
So when Vicki’s ex starts trying to dislodge her from her place on Lake Silence, the Others gather their forces, first to figure out what is really going on under the surface, and second to protect their friend and eliminate their enemies. By any means necessary.
There’s just enough humor to get the reader over the serious dark patches in the story, and there are plenty of both. That so many of the Sanguinati have become either lawyers or accountants, and just how good they are at professional bloodletting as well as the other kind provides no end of delight.
There’s something about the world of The Others that draws the reader in at the very beginning, and just doesn’t let go. Part of the appeal in this particular book is the character of Vicki DeVine, who has been wounded so badly and yet is still doing her best to get back on her feet and live her life. She is a character who starts out the story very small, but begins to grow into her place as the story progresses. It’s going to be fun watching her journey as the series continues.
Clarissa Goenawan’s dark, spellbinding literary debut opens with a murder and shines a spotlight onto life in fictional small-town Japan.
Ren Ishida is nearly finished with graduate school when he receives news of his sister Keiko's sudden death. She was viciously stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister's affairs, still failing to understand why she chose to abandon the family and Tokyo for this desolate town years ago.
But Ren soon finds himself picking up where Keiko left off, accepting both her teaching position at a local cram school and the bizarre arrangement of free lodging at a wealthy politician’s mansion in exchange for reading to the man’s catatonic wife.
As he comes to know the figures in Akakawa, from the enigmatic politician to his fellow teachers and a rebellious, alluring student named Rio, Ren delves into his shared childhood with Keiko and what followed, trying to piece together what happened the night of her death. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren struggles to find solace in the void his sister has left behind.
My Review:
The story in Rainbirds is one where literary fiction meets mystery, set in a small, fictional town not far from Tokyo.
Considered as a mystery, Rainbirds seems to transcend its genre. On the other hand, as literary fiction, there is a bit more plot and action than that particular genre is usually noted for, making it very readable for someone who doesn’t usually read lit fic but wants to dip their reading toes into it.
The story is both simple and complex. Ren Ishida comes to the tiny town of Akakawa to scatter his sister’s ashes in the place where she lived and worked. But there is a mystery about Keiko Ishida’s unsolved homicide. As the story unfolds, Ren discovers that there are multiple mysteries about her death, not limited to who done it.
Ren also realizes that he didn’t know nearly as much about his sister as he thought he did. But he can’t find closure over her loss until he investigates why she died. He begins that investigation by following in her tracks. He takes over her old job, he inserts himself into the circle of her friends and colleagues, and he even rents her old room.
In a between place in his own life, Ren is more than willing to put himself into Keiko’s in order to find out what happened to her.
But a series of dreams leads him to the deaths of two other lost girls as well as the life of a third, and it’s not until Ren follows all the clues that he is able to bring resolution to their deaths, their lives, and his own.
Escape Rating A-: For literary fiction, Rainbirds is surprisingly absorbing. For a mystery, it is surprisingly dreamlike and poetic. I certainly got caught up in the story, even though it is far from being a typical mystery. Not that in the end Ren does not find the answers that he seeks – or at least most of them.
This story is told forwards, backwards and just a bit sideways. Forwards, in the present tense, Ren goes to tiny Akakawa to pick up his sister’s few possessions and scatter her ashes. But he is drifting at the moment, having presented his thesis for his graduate degree but not yet having heard the results. He studied English and American literature because he drifted into that too. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do so he followed in his sister Keiko’s footsteps – as he so often did.
Following in Keiko’s wake seems to be the pattern of Ren’s life. There’s a rather large Keiko shaped hole that Ren can’t figure out how to fill. So he decides to look into her death by literally stepping into the footsteps of her life. He has time, he wants answers, and he really doesn’t know what to do with himself.
But even as Ren moves into her world to see who and what she knew, he also drifts a bit backward, flashing back to their shared childhood. Or rather, to the childhood that he actually managed to experience while Keiko raised him. Their parents were physically present, but mentally and emotionally absent. Also fighting with each other too much to bother taking care of their children.
As Ren remembers just how important Keiko was in his life, and as he lives a significant chunk of hers, he dreams about a little girl in pigtails who wants him to follow her to find the secrets that bound her life.
If you are looking for a straightforward mystery, you won’t find it in Rainbirds. But Ren, in his own purposefully purposeless way, does manage to solve the mystery. He makes himself available and he listens. And he keeps listening until the truth finds him. All the truths.
Then, and only then, he can go back to the life he left behind. But his experience has changed him, and his future will be different from the one he had been drifting into. In searching for the truth of Keiko’s life, he manages to find the truth of his own.
~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
I’m giving away a copy of Rainbirds to one very lucky U.S. commenter.
Do you remember your first love in high school? What if you never stopped?
For decades, Katherine "Kitty" McNally has secretly loved John Henshaw, the man lying shot and unconscious in the hospital bed next to her. Then again, maybe not so secretly. Those closest to her, including her soon-to-be ex-husband, have suspected it for years. Their story ended with a gunshot wound the last time, too. Life seems to have taken her full circle, but only the dead know the secrets she still keeps.
Detective John Henshaw fell in love with his "Kat" the moment she became his geometry tutor in high school. When they graduated, he thought their future was sealed. Wrong. Enter life's nonstop curveballs. The worst two moments of his life were the two times he lost Kat. After thirty-five years and one failed marriage trying to forget her, he can't escape the fact that he's never stopped loving her. Maybe it's just his ego, but he could swear he sees a spark of love in her eyes every time she looks at him. That's what keeps him in the New Jersey town that holds his most painful memories. That's why he accepted his place decades ago as a family friend to the McNally sisters.
As John recovers from his hospital stay in Kitty's care, they slowly rediscover each other. This is Kitty's last chance to confront her past and rekindle their love--if John can forgive her once he learns the truth.
My Review:
Just as with all of the books in the Caught Up in Love series, be sure to bring tissues when you read this one. If you can get a cat to curl up in your lap for the extra comfort and snuggles, that would probably be good, too.
Like the previous books in this series, Caught Up in Raine and Shelter My Heart, the romance in this book is definitely a three-hankie special, as is all the drama that surrounds Kitty and John and the romance that was meant to be – but mostly never was.
In ancient history, when John Henshaw and Katherine McNally were in juniors in high school in the late 1970s, Katherine was one of the geeks and John was on the football team. Their worlds should never have collided, but John needed math tutoring to stay on the team, and Kat needed the money.
It was either a match made in heaven, a scenario out of Romeo and Juliet, or a little bit of both. It was certainly love at first sight. But John lived in what passed for the barrio in Summit, and Kat’s family owned a house where the rich folks lived.
Nothing about that situation was exactly as it seemed. John’s mother was Cuban, and even though he looks “white” he’s Hispanic and proud of it. Also not a dumb jock – he just missed a lot of school because of a family crisis and needed a bit of help getting back up to speed in trigonometry – and who wouldn’t?
Kat’s family may live on the rich side of town, and her mother certainly postures as if the family can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, but the fact is that they are barely keeping their heads above water because one of Kat’s aunts is in a lovely but expensive care facility, and most of their income goes for her upkeep. Kat really does need the money.
What she doesn’t need is the way that her mother treats John, as if he weren’t worth scraping her shoes. Her mother does everything she can to push them apart, while her other aunt, Vera, does everything she can to help them together.
It all goes smash at graduation, not that it hasn’t been heading there for a while. Their relationship ends but it is never really over, and in spite of failed marriages on both sides, neither of them really moves on.
Their 35th high school reunion is coming up. It feels like they have one last chance to grab the happy ever after they denied themselves all those years ago. But only if they can finally let out all the truths they’ve both been holding back. Truths that will either bring them together, or tear them apart forever.
Kat can’t keep herself from betting on the latter – and she might be right.
Escape Rating B-: I loved Caught Up in Raine, and really enjoyed Shelter My Heart, but while in the end I liked Surrender My Heart, I also have some mixed feelings.
It may be that I felt some of this book a bit too deeply. When I read Caught Up in Raine, I got caught up in the older woman/younger man romance because the author did it so very right. I was Jillian’s age when I met my husband, and we have a similar age gap. Much of Jillian’s situation, minus the baby, felt real and right.
On the other hand, Kat and I are contemporaries. I was in college when Kat was a junior and senior in high school, so my memories of that time are very similar to hers, albeit in much different circumstances. The way that the late 1970s WAS felt so familiar.
But the romance between John and Kat, and the sheer level of angst and melodrama in their on again, off again relationship and history, sometimes seemed a bit over the top. John’s situation, while it had some pretty sucky aspects, was relatively straightforward. Kat’s on the other hand, had so much going on under the surface that it could have fueled several soap operas for months.
While the story is set in the here and now, we see their past in long flashbacks from both of their perspectives. John certainly has his own issues, but he mostly seems like a young man with his head on straight, in love with a marvelous girl whose mother is a complete bitch.
Kat’s side of the story is heavy with foreshadowing, to the point where there’s so much shadow that everything drags a bit. The reader knows the hits are coming, and is even able to guess what at least some of those hits are, so there are points where the reader, or at least this reader, was just waiting for her to get on with it already.
Kat’s big secret was obvious fairly early on, and it’s not one of my favorite tropes. To say anything else would be a huge spoiler – or maybe not if you figure it out as quickly as I did.
The contemporary parts of the story worked better for me. And I loved reading a hot romance between two adults who are in mid-life. Just because someone is over 50 (or 60) doesn’t meant they are dead and/or uninterested in sex or undeserving of love. A part of me wishes that the entire story had all been told from the contemporary perspective, without so much heavy foreshadowing in the flashbacks. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
The sheer staying power of their romance is amazing, or perhaps it’s the power of unfinished business. That they never got over each other felt right. They never got to finish what was between them, so they never got past their shared past. That their families mostly stayed in touch provided a level of torture that most people wouldn’t go through, but John’s presence in their extended family over the course of the series has made this particular story highly anticipated.
In the end, I was glad to see them let all the poor cats out of all the suffocating bags, and finally get the HEA they deserved.
In my review of Shelter My Heart, there was one character I mentioned as deserving her own HEA, and my hope that she would get one in some future book in the series. I’m very happy to say that Lettie Soames will get her own HEA in Caught Up in Raven, later this year. I’m definitely looking forward to it!
~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
I’m giving away an ebook copy of Surrender My Heart to one lucky winner!
We saw Black Panther last weekend after I wrote my Sunday Post. The movie was marvelous, and it prompted me to bring The Night Masquerade out of the virtual TBR pile. I was looking for more Afrofuturism (still am) and remembered how much I loved Binti, even though the second book in the trilogy didn’t wow me. The third book was almost as good as the first, and that’s high prize. Binti swept the SF awards the year it came out.
I’m posting my review of Lake Silence this week, because this is its book birthday, but I read it a while ago, practically as soon as I received the eARC. If you are hooked on The Others series, Lake Silence is a terrific further exploration of that world. I hope we get to go back again and again (and again).
And I’m always happy to get a new book from Anna Hackett. I know I’m going to have a great time. And I did!
I’ve already read and reviewed The Night Masquerade. I picked it up because we saw Black Panther last weekend, and I was looking for more Afrofuturism. Then I remembered that I hadn’t finished the Binti Trilogy yet, and it was definitely time to do that. And we’re talking about seeing it AGAIN.
The Secret of the Irish Castle is a book I’ve been waiting for. It’s the third book in the trilogy that began with The Girl in the Castle, or at least that’s what the title was here in the U.S. One of the disadvantages of not reading print is that when a book is published in the UK I have to wait for it to cross the pond to get the ebook version. The Secret of the Irish Castle has been out for almost a year over in England, under the title The Last Secret of the Deverills. The publishers have been doing very strange things with all the titles in this series. But the books are excellent, especially if you like big, sprawling family sagas, because this one is a doozy.
Current Giveaways:
Blog Recap:
Coming Next Week:
Heat Exchange (Boston Fire, #1) by 
I plucked this out of the towering TBR pile because I’m reviewing the fourth book in this series, 
Guardian (Galactic Gladiators #9) Formats available: ebook 
Lake Silence (The Others, #6) by 
In some ways, that’s the premise of the world of 
Vicki doesn’t know it but the resort she owns is meant to be a kind of “halfway house” for Others who want to learn to blend into the human world. Not because being human is considered better, because it’s not. But because the Others need to keep a closer eye on the humans in their human controlled enclaves, especially after the fiasco that culminated in 
Rainbirds by 
Surrender My Heart: A Second Chance Romance (Caught Up in Love, #3) by 
Like the previous books in this series, 
The sheer staying power of their romance is amazing, or perhaps it’s the power of unfinished business. That they never got over each other felt right. They never got to finish what was between them, so they never got past their shared past. That their families mostly stayed in touch provided a level of torture that most people wouldn’t go through, but John’s presence in their extended family over the course of the series has made this particular story highly anticipated.
Current Giveaways:
Blog Recap:
Coming Next Week:
