The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 6-30-19

Sunday Post

There’s booming in the other room. My husband is playing Cat Quest, and it’s adorable. Cats going on adventures! With puns. Lots and lots of puns. The game is adorably cute AND fun to play.

I’m still digging out from the usual post-conference disorganization. There tends to be both a post-conference boost and a post-conference crash. So many great panels. So many excellent speakers. So many, many, many bright shiny new books. Followed immediately by the rush to get home, the continuing aching of the feet, and the need to figure out what happens next. Getting home at 1 in the morning didn’t help any.

But it’s good to be home. The kitties missed us and we missed them. Watching them over the kitty-cam is NOT the same!

Current Giveaways:

Wilde in Love by Eloisa James

Winner Announcements:

The winner of the $20 Dreamspinner Press Gift Certificate is H.B.
The winner of the Hello Summer Giveaway Hop is Chelsea W.

Blog Recap:

A+ Review: European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss
B Review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
A- Guest Review: Phaze by S.C. Mitchell
B+ Review: Say No to the Duke by Eloisa James + Giveaway
A- Review: Someone to Honor by Mary Balogh
Stacking the Shelves (346)

Coming This Week:

Star Spangled Giveaway Hop
Protect the Prince by Jennifer Estep (blog tour review)
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite (blog tour review)
Wolf Rain by Nalini Singh (review)

Stacking the Shelves (346)

Stacking the Shelves

I saw some wonderful books at the ALA Conference last week. From the looks of this list, possibly a few too many. Maybe. But for anyone wondering how I carried so many books around, the answer is that I didn’t. These were all ebooks and eARCs. Not that I didn’t see wonderful things, but when I saw them (or heard their authors) I placed requests on NetGalley and Edelweiss. My days of carrying this much around are long over.

I did also get some terrific books read in between conference sessions. And on the plane. There just isn’t enough time in the universe to read ALL THE BOOKS. Dammit.

For Review:
Akin by Emma Donoghue
Angel in a Devil’s Arms (Palace of Rogues #2) by Julie Anne Long
A Beach Wish by Shelley Noble
The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams
Bursts of Fire (Addicted to Heaven #1) by Susan Forest
Coming Home for Christmas (Haven Point #10) by RaeAnne Thayne
A Divided Loyalty (Inspector Ian Rutledge #22) by Charles Todd
The Escape Room by Megan Goldin
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
Golden in Death (In Death #50) by J.D. Robb
The Harp of Kings (Warrior Bards #1) by Juliet Marillier
Lady Clementine by Marie Benedict
A Little Hatred (Age of Madness #1) by Joe Abercrombie
The Murders of Molly Southbourne (Molly Southbourne #1) by Tade Thompson
Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson
The Rage of Dragons (Burning #1) by Evan Winter
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman
Rival’s Break (Sharpe & Donovan #10) by Carla Neggers
Royal Holiday (Wedding Date #4) by Jasmine Guillory
Sidelined by Suzanne Baltsar
Shrouded Loyalties by Reese Hogan
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
The Warehouse by Rob Hart
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? by Caitlin Doughty

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter


Review: Someone to Honor by Mary Balogh

Review: Someone to Honor by Mary BaloghSomeone to Honor (Westcott, #6) by Mary Balogh
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical romance
Series: Westcott #6
Pages: 400
Published by Berkley on July 2, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

First appearances deceive in the newest charming and heartwarming Regency romance in the Westcott series from beloved New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh.

Abigail Westcott's dreams for her future were lost when her father died, and she discovered her parents were not legally married. But now, six years later, she enjoys the independence a life without expectation provides a wealthy single woman. Indeed, she's grown confident enough to scold the careless servant chopping wood outside without his shirt on in the proximity of ladies.

But the man is not a servant. He is Gilbert Bennington, the lieutenant colonel and superior officer who has escorted her wounded brother, Harry, home from the wars with Napoleon. Gil has come to help his friend and junior officer recover, and he doesn't take lightly to being condescended to—secretly because of his own humble beginnings.

If at first Gil and Abigail seem to embody what the other most despises, each will soon discover how wrong first impressions can be. For behind the appearances of the once-grand lady and the once-humble man are two people who share an understanding of what true honor means, and how only with it can one find love.

My Review:

The entire Westcott series is the story of one family making lemonade out of what initially were some rather bitter lemons – with no sugar at all.

Humphrey Westcott is dead, to begin with. And that’s a good thing for him, because if he hadn’t died before the series opened, the line to kill him would stretch for miles. The late and totally unlamented Humphrey was a bigamist, a fact that was only discovered after his unexpected death.

The series is the story of all of the applecarts that were upset by that discovery learning, one way or another, and sometimes quite painfully, that the overturning of the lives they thought they had was actually the best thing that ever happened to them.

Someone to Honor is Abigail Westcott’s turn. Abigail was the youngest child and second daughter of Humphrey-the-arsehole and the woman everyone believed was his wife, Viola Kingsley. Abigail, as the daughter of the Earl of Riverdale, as Humphrey the figurative bastard was, expected to have her Season on the Marriage Mart, find a wealthy and titled husband, and be married. It was not necessarily what she wanted, but it was her duty and she seems to have had no objections to fulfilling it.

(I never have anything nice to say about the late, unlamented Humphrey. NO ONE in any of the stories has anything nice to say. If divorce had been possible, his family would have kept Viola and abandoned Humphrey – and he deserves every bit of opprobrium heaped on his coffin. But it is amazing just how present he still is, in spite of his death.)

Abby has spent the last six years trying to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. After all that time, the one thing that she is certain of is that the upending of the life she expected was a gift. She still has her family – all of it including her late father’s family – she still has all the friends who matter – and she knows who her true friends are. She has enough money that she doesn’t have to marry in order to put a roof over her head.

And she has the opportunity to be who she wants to be without having to deal with the expectations of the ton and its perpetual search for any character flaw that allows it to tear down her life, her character, her standing and her prospects.

She’s free.

But she’s not free of her well-meaning family’s desire to make a place for her on the fringes of the society that has rejected her for the so-called stain of her illegitimate birth. She loves them, they love her, she doesn’t want to anger or disappoint them – but she doesn’t want to be begrudged a place in the shadows. That life is over for her – and she knows she’s the better for it.

So when the opportunity arises to stay in her childhood home with her brother Harry, a wounded veteran of Waterloo, she jumps at it. Harry needs someone around who won’t coddle him, and Abby needs the quiet to figure out her next steps in life.

What she does not count on is Harry’s friend Gil, the fellow officer who rescued Harry from a convalescent hospital in Paris and brought him home.

In some ways, Gil and Abby are opposites. Where Abby was raised as a lady only to discover she is a bastard, Gil was raised as a bastard only to rise to the officer ranks, and therefore become a gentleman-by-courtesy, in the Army. The illegitimate son of a washerwoman and a nobleman, Gil raised himself up mostly by his own efforts, while Abby fell through no fault of her own.

In their little household of three, Harry, Abby and Gil, Abby and Gil draw closer to each other in fits and starts. Both over their shared concern about Harry, and in their surprising commonalities with each other.

When Gil’s secrets are finally laid bare, Abby is ready to stand up – and stand beside him – come what may. That the entire Westcott family stands with them guarantees that love will triumph, no matter who stands in the way.

Escape Rating A-: I have loved this series from beginning to end. (There was one half-exception, but even that was good – just not great). A big part of what I love about this series is that they are romances but are not frivolous. Or perhaps I should say that the heroines are not frivolous. The heroines of this series, to a woman, both have agency and remain a part of their times. Their situations are not pulled out of whack in anachronistic ways in order to give them the kind of choices that make them relatable for 21st century readers.

It helps that, with the exception of Anna Snow in Someone to Love, the women are no longer members of the aristocracy. Humphrey’s asshattery pulls them down into the upper middle class, removing them from the absurd expectations of the ton while giving them obstacles to overcome and lives to make of their own choosing.

Abigail can be who and what she wants to be and her family will still love her and support her in the emotional sense. Her finances give her freedom to be anything a woman of her times could be – including a spinster if that’s what she decides.

Her decision to marry Gil is not initially a love match – nor is it an arranged one. They have become friends, more or less. They like and respect each other – and they desire each other. She would like to marry, and Gil needs to marry. They enter their marriage with eyes wide open to everything except their true feelings towards each other. Because the seeds of love are certainly there, even if neither of them has the experience to see them.

Plenty of happy marriages begin with much shakier foundations.

In the end, this is a series about a fascinating group of people dealing with unexpected adversity. Life has thrown a monkey wrench into their expectations, and with each book we see the Westcott’s make lemonade out of that crop of lemons. And we see them rise together and support each other, which is certainly a treat.

The Westcotts seem to be the exception that proves the rule about all happy families being alike – they have become a happy family, and a stronger one, by moving forward from something that should have divided them by behaving in a manner that no one expected. It’s what makes them so much fun to read.

So I’m very happy to say that they’ll be back in Someone to Remember, late in the fall. I can’t wait!

Review: Say No to the Duke by Eloisa James + Giveaway

Review: Say No to the Duke by Eloisa James + GiveawaySay No to the Duke (The Wildes of Lindow Castle, #4) by Eloisa James
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical romance
Series: Wildes of Lindow Castle #4
Pages: 384
Published by Avon on June 25, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads


One little wager will determine their fate—a daring escape or falling into temptation with a rakish lord.

Lady Betsy Wilde’s first season was triumphant by any measure, and a duke has proposed—but before marriage, she longs for one last adventure.

No gentleman would agree to her scandalous plan—but Lord Jeremy Roden is no gentleman. He offers a wager. If she wins a billiards game, he’ll provide the breeches.

If he wins…she is his, for one wild night.

But what happens when Jeremy realizes that one night will never be enough? In the most important battle of his life, he’ll have to convince Betsy to say no to the duke.

My Review:

The Wildes of Lindow Castle are all very, very wild. Or, at least the Wildes that have featured in the previous books in this marvelous series, Wilde in Love, Too Wilde to Wed and Born to be Wilde certainly have been very wild indeed. But the Wildes of the previous books have all been men.

The story in Say No to the Duke is the story of Lady Boadicea Wilde. Who would rather be called Betsy. Not just because Boadicea is rather a mouthful, but because Betsy fits much better with the persona she projects to the world. Lady Betsy gives the outward appearance – and performs all the public actions – of the perfect lady that she pretends to be.

Only one man seems to see through Betsy’s never-ending stellar performance. Jeremy Roden may seem to be in his cups nearly all the time, but his performance as a drunken wastrel is just as perfect as Betsy’s – and just as fraudulent.

Not that Jeremy doesn’t seem to drink like a fish – but he doesn’t get drunk. He wishes he could. Get drunk. Or sleep. Or do pretty much anything to keep his demons at bay. The ghosts of the men he lost during England’s vain attempt to get her rebellious North American colonies back.

It may be that it takes one to know one. Jeremy pretends to be drunk to keep his well-meaning friends away while he stews in his own regrets and remorse. Not to mention his misplaced guilt, his all-too-real fears and his PTSD.

Betsy pretends to be a lady because her mother manifestly was not. And because the “mean girls” at her boarding school spent all of their gossiping time speculating on just when her mother’s lascivious nature would manifest in her daughter.

Betsy can’t get their cutting words and nasty whispers out of her head any more than Jeremy can stop the voices of the men who followed him to their deaths. So Jeremy drinks and Betsy projects the perfect image of a perfect lady, while underneath she is torn between “winning” her debutante season by being perfectly respectable every single moment and collecting marriage proposals from all the high-ranking bachelors participating in the Marriage Mart – or being the person she really is.

Because what Betsy really wants is an adventure – just like all of her brothers. She wants the chance to go out and do the things that men do without either thought or consequence. Not anything truly scandalous – or not exactly. She’s not really looking for a romantic dalliance. What she wants is the opportunity to play pool in a club, go to an auction and bet on something – on her own. She wants a day without having to be a perfect lady every minute and watch every second of her own behavior – because men never have to.

Betsy is every bit an unconventional as every single one of the Wildes – even the ones who are adopted. And she wants one adventure of her very own before she says yes to that duke.

But just as she’s beginning to edge her way towards that “yes”, Jeremy finally realizes that he wants her to say “no” – even though that duke is a good man and one of his best friends. And that as much as Jeremy himself wants Betsy, he knows that he is much too damaged to be good for her – even if she’s perfect for him.

Escape Rating B+: There are a lot of things that I really enjoyed in Say No to the Duke, and just a couple that made me go “huh?” and kept it from being a Grade A book.

One of the great things about this one, like all of the books in the Wildes series, is the quality and quantity of the banter between the characters. All of the characters in this series are both interesting and intelligent, and they all talk to each other, about each other and frequently over each other with wit and style and verve.

Another thing that worked really well is that even though this story sounds like it might veer into the dreaded “love triangle” territory, it actually doesn’t. The heroine does have to make up her mind between the duke and the (pretend) drunkard, but there’s no “torn between two lovers” angst.

Not only is her decision-making logical, she also has the option of choosing neither. She does not have to marry either one. Unless she wants to. Or unless she thinks she ought to for some reasons that didn’t work too well for this reader.

I also liked that this one did not fall into the dreadful trope of being forced to choose between a dreadful but financially stable marriage and a happy but poor one. The Duke in question is a decent man, and will make someone an excellent husband. He’s just the wrong husband for Betsy and she’s the wrong wife for him. But there’s nothing wrong with him. Nor does he pursue once he knows his suit will not be accepted. A decent chap all the way around.

There were just those couple of niggles.

I liked Betsy as a character a whole lot more after she stopped nattering on about stamping out any hint of anything less than ladylike behavior for fear that she would be seen as just like her rather wayward mother. I understood why she kept up that veneer in public, but her inability to let herself be herself in private didn’t quite ring true – particularly with the wild reputation of the Wilde family – both male and female – to bolster her.

The other issue revolves around the villain of the piece, Jeremy’s completely vile cousin. As a character he was over-the-top and his part of the puzzle ended up feeling unresolved. When his hamfisted attempts to either get Jeremy killed or remove him from the line of succession to his father’s marquessate fail, it felt like the punishment phase was left unresolved in rather glaring fashion. And the whole farrago just didn’t feel necessary to add tension to the story or to put roadblocks in the way of Jeremy and Betsy’s relationship. They were perfectly capable of adding plenty of obstacles without outside assistance.

In the end, Betsy and Jeremy fall for each other not just because they complete each other, but because they truly understand and accept each other – as they are – warts and impulses and demons and all. And it’s lovely.

Betsy Wilde may have said “No” to the Duke, but you’ll want to say “Yes” to this book. If you love witty historical romance, you’ll be glad you did!

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

To celebrate the release of SAY NO TO THE DUKE by Eloisa James, we’re giving away a paperback copy of Wilde in Love by Eloisa James to one lucky winner!

LINK:  http://bit.ly/2VyJ1Wf 

GIVEAWAY TERMS & CONDITIONS:  Open to US shipping addresses only. One winner will receive a paperback copy of Wilde in Love by Eloisa James. This giveaway is administered by Pure Textuality PR on behalf of Avon Books.  Giveaway ends 6/28/2019 @ 11:59pm EST. Avon Books will send the prize to the winner directly.

Guest Review: Phaze by S. C. Mitchell

Guest Review: Phaze by S. C. MitchellPhaze by S.C. Mitchell
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: paranormal romance, science fiction romance, superhero romance
Series: Xi Force #2
Pages: 215
Published by Soul Mate Publishing on April 4th 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleBookshop.org
Goodreads

When Kayla Armstrong is attacked in her lab, she falls into a chemical stew. Now she’s walking through walls and falling through floors.

As the leader of Xi Force, Joel Weisberg is always looking for new superheroes for his team. What he wasn’t looking for was sexy Kayla Armstrong falling through the ceiling of his apartment right into his bed. Still he isn’t complaining when the event finds him a new Xi Force member and a new love. Now she just needs some training and some time.

But when an old enemy comes back with new powers and captures Joel, it’s up to Kayla to lead the Xi Force against her. But can they rescue Joel before he’s murdered . . . again?

Guest review by Amy:

Kayla Armstrong is a scientist for a hush-hush operation for the government, dubbed “Xi Force.” From the very first words of the book, she’s doing fancy science for her team, when she’s waylaid by someone who – honest to gosh – teleports into the room, knocks her about, steals her laptop, and vanishes. In the midst of the roughing-up she knocks over a cart with chemicals, and the soup of it she falls into changes her. She’s got superpowers! She’s going to be a field member of Xi Force! Just call her…Phaze.

Escape Rating: A-: I’m not quite sure whether this is a sci-fi romance, or a paranormal. There’s an awful lot of science going on for a paranormal, and an awful lot of mystical woo-woo goings-on happening for a sci-fi. Off the pen of S. C. Mitchell, though, it works, somehow. Kayla falls through the floor of her lab after getting soaked in chemicals, leaving her clothes behind, and landing in the bedroom of the on-site apartment occupied by her boss. Who’s just gorgeous, and she’s had the hots for him for a while. Oh, and he sleeps naked, too. Isn’t that convenient? She rapidly finds out she has the ability to walk through walls, fall through floors, all that. Pass through solid matter. That’d be a handy skill; it’d make it hard for me to lock my keys in the car again.

Joel Weisberg is, of course, a member of Xi Force. Some time in the past, Xi Force got attacked; it was an inside job, near as I can figure, and someone Joel loved. But she turned on him, and did a lot of damage in the process. She’s in prison now…well, until she’s not. And she’s got blood in her eye for Joel. What follows is a mystical, superhero-ey story where the good guys get some help from a dead girl, her mage brother, and a man who had his DNA blended with a wolf. Things move fast, so hang onto your seat. Xi Force originally thinks that all the shenanigans, including the attack on Kayla’s lab, are done by their arch-rivals, the multinational criminal entity Ghaim, but when the leaders of Ghaim start turning up dead, the plot gets thicker than Southern gravy, until finally Amber makes her move. She kidnaps Joel, while he’s on his first date with Kayla, now also known as the superhero Phaze. How rude!

Amber has loosed a demon. She thinks she can control it, but (of course) she’s dead wrong about that. So Xi Force has not only Amber’s powers, augmented by a mystical Japanese sword, but the demon that she’s turned loose in the process. Our hero team takes some lumps, of course, but this wouldn’t be a romance without a happy-ish ending, which, after a bit, they do get.

Phaze is a fun, fast-moving, romp of a read. Nothing too challenging, if you can suspend some disbelief, but all of the science and mystical elements fit just fine in the story, without a lot of exposition, so you can fall right into the tale. Enjoy!

Review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker

Review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. ParkerSixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, military fantasy
Pages: 350
Published by Orbit on April 9, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

This is the story of Orhan, son of Siyyah Doctus Felix Praeclarissimus, and his history of the Great Siege, written down so that the deeds and sufferings of great men may never be forgotten.

A siege is approaching, and the city has little time to prepare. The people have no food and no weapons, and the enemy has sworn to slaughter them all.

To save the city will take a miracle, but what it has is Orhan. A colonel of engineers, Orhan has far more experience with bridge-building than battles, is a cheat and a liar, and has a serious problem with authority. He is, in other words, perfect for the job.

My Review:

Usually it’s the plucky band of rapscallions who stage a breakout, and the plucky band of heroes who hold the defense. This time it’s the plucky rapscallions doing the defending! That’s the first, but far from the last, twist on pretty much everything you expect from this genre – and every other genre that it sends up, down or sideways during the course of the story.

At first, this reminded me in a very peculiar way of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers books. Like I said, it’s peculiar. But that series is quasi-military SF told from the perspective of the people who keep things running – and not the people who usually take those things into harm’s way.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is more-or-less military fantasy told from that same perspective. Orhan is the Colonel of Engineers for the military of an empire that has subjugated not just his people, but pretty much every people around that is not themselves – and then keeps them down while looking for more people to conquer and subjugate.

The Robur Empire sounds a lot like the Roman Empire. I don’t just mean the two words are similar, I mean that the two empires are very similar. And use similar sounding names and offices and officers and procedures and well, it actually drove me a bit batty. It all sounds so much like Rome that I half expected something to explain the similarity – which otherwise makes no sense.

I don’t mean that the similarities of systems make no sense – Rome makes a great antecedence for how to and not to run an empire, I mean that the constant congruence of names for things and people and places made no sense. Although on my other hand, Orhan is the most unreliable of narrators it has ever been my media consuming pleasure to run across. And I’m including Varric Tethras in that tally of unreliability. Varric is more lovable, but he’s a shade more reliable. Or a shade less shady. Or both.

The story in Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City can be taken in multiple ways. Looking at it from one angle, it’s the story of an extremely unlikely hero who rises up and defends the besieged capital of an empire that treats him as a fourth-class citizen at best.

The problem for Orhan is that as an engineer, he can’t resist trying to solve this biggest of all problems. And that his friends are on the inside of the city. He’s not so much defending it as defending them – whether they appreciate it or not.

Another way of looking at the whole thing is from the perspective that the siege of the capital, and the dismantling of the empire that precedes it, is just all of the empire’s chickens, its nasty and terrible treatment of all of the many, many people it has subjugated, all coming home to roost in one giant pile of chickenshit.

With a bit of accelerant, manure burns really, really well. The empire has been providing plenty of impetus and accelerant for centuries – now it’s time to watch the explosion. Unless Orhan can manage to stop it from happening – one underhanded way or another.

Escape Rating B: This is a very mixed feelings kind of review. I loved the opening scenes of the story. The over-the-top snarkitude of the narrator was terrific and terrifically funny as well. It’s the sort of thing that makes a reader snerk and chortle every page.

Orhan has spent his career finagling the system in order to get the job done – but his internal dialog about exactly what he has to do, why he has to do it, and how easy it is to get it done because the system is so stupid, are good for a seemingly endless supply of wry chuckles.

But once the siege begins, Orhan, in spite of himself, becomes the authority – not because he wants to be but because he just can’t see that there’s any other way to survive. He’s dead certain – and more than occasionally nearly just plain dead, that anyone else would just get it wrong. Wrong-er. More wrong.

And while his many and varied attempts at getting all the city’s warring factions to work together make an interesting exercise in social engineering, they just aren’t as interesting as when Orhan and his crew were on their own. By himself, things going wrong until the last minute were funny. As the person in charge, it’s not funny at all.

The ending of the story, or rather Orhan’s end to the story, completely blew me away. But for this reader the middle went on too long. Your reading mileage may vary – no matter what units you use to measure it.

Review: European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss

Review: European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora GossEuropean Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, historical fantasy, historical mystery
Series: Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club #2
Pages: 720
Published by Gallery / Saga Press on July 10, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

In the sequel to the critically acclaimed The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Mary Jekyll and the rest of the daughters of literature’s mad scientists embark on a madcap adventure across Europe to rescue another monstrous girl and stop the Alchemical Society’s nefarious plans once and for all.

Mary Jekyll’s life has been peaceful since she helped Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve the Whitechapel Murders. Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, Justine Frankenstein, and Mary’s sister Diana Hyde have settled into the Jekyll household in London, and although they sometimes quarrel, the members of the Athena Club get along as well as any five young women with very different personalities. At least they can always rely on Mrs. Poole.

But when Mary receives a telegram that Lucinda Van Helsing has been kidnapped, the Athena Club must travel to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to rescue yet another young woman who has been subjected to horrific experimentation. Where is Lucinda, and what has Professor Van Helsing been doing to his daughter? Can Mary, Diana, Beatrice, and Justine reach her in time?

Racing against the clock to save Lucinda from certain doom, the Athena Club embarks on a madcap journey across Europe. From Paris to Vienna to Budapest, Mary and her friends must make new allies, face old enemies, and finally confront the fearsome, secretive Alchemical Society. It’s time for these monstrous gentlewomen to overcome the past and create their own destinies.

My Review:

After absolutely raving about The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, I couldn’t resist picking up European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman. I had so much fun with the first book that I couldn’t resist the second – and now I’m eagerly awaiting the third.

This story, and this series so far, is the story of all of the erased women in all of the classic monster and horror stories of the 19th century. It’s their voices that give this rollicking tale both its derring-do and its monstrous heart, and it’s marvelous from beginning to end.

As this story opens, Mary Jekyll (Dr. Jekyll’s daughter), Diana Hyde (Edward Hyde’s daughter), Catherine Moreau (Dr. Moreau’s daughter), Justine Frankenstein (Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter) and Beatrice Rappaccini (the Poisonous Girl) have banded together to form the Athena Club, which is both their home and their place of business.

And the heart of their quest to investigate the completely amoral Société des Alchemists, of which all of their fathers were members – if not necessarily in good standing. Under the auspices of the Société, their fathers experimented on all of them in one monstrous way or another. And they want the Société stopped.

So when Mary receives a letter from her former teacher and governess, Mina Harker (nee) Murray, the women of the Athena Club drop all their plans and race to Vienna. Why? Because Mina’s friend Lucinda van Helsing has gone missing, and Mina rightfully fears that Lucinda is being experimented upon by her father, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, and that Lucinda needs to be rescued. And Dr. Van Helsing needs to be stopped.

Of course they are right on all counts. And, come to think of it, Counts. With the help of Irene Norton (nee) Adler in Vienna, the Athena Club races to save the day – and rescue their newfound sister.

No matter what it takes.

Escape Rating A+: This is another book where I started with the audio, and had an absolute blast. Part of what makes the audios for this series so much fun is the way that the story is told. Catherine Moreau is writing the story, but she is writing it in the presence of all of the other women, who cannot resist adding their bits to just about every line.

All of the women have very distinct personalities, and those personalities come through both in their words and in the voicing of the excellent narrator, Kate Reading. If you have the time to take this series in via audio, it is well worth the time.

But I don’t have that much patience. I reached a point, about halfway, where I just couldn’t stand it anymore and had to finish in the ebook. I needed to know what happened next (and next and next) so badly that I just couldn’t wait.

The story hook for this series is just awesome. All I have to do is say “Jekyll’s daughter and Hyde’s daughter and Moreau’s daughter and Frankenstein’s daughter” and whoever I’m talking to (read as squeeing about this series to) is instantly intrigued and wants to know more. It’s terribly monstrous and terribly wonderful and absolutely fantastic.

Part of what makes this series so much fun is the “who’s who” of 19th century horror. All of the men of the Société des Alchemists were the heroes of their respective novels, but to the Athena Club they are all the villains. And their fathers. And doesn’t that make for a fascinating brew of love and guilt and horror and ultimately, adventure?

Every woman in this story – except Irene Norton – has daddy issues. And so they all should, because their daddies literally turned them into monsters. It’s the way that they cope with their monstrousness and rise above the restrictions placed on females that makes this series so very delicious.

About Irene, she’s the perfect “mentor” figure for this series. If her name sounded familiar, it should. Irene Norton, nee Irene Adler, was THE woman in the Sherlock Holmes stories, the only woman ever to get the better of him. Holmes is out of the action in this one – appropriately so – and it is time for a woman to take up the reins. Irene is perfect for this role because unlike Holmes, Irene is used to working from the shadows. The members of the Athena Club do not need someone to protect them, a role that Holmes and Watson constantly try to assume. Irene enables them and lets them do their work.

And she’s a marvelous character in her own right, in multiple senses of that phrase.

By the end of European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, the Athena Club has acquired more members – and more allies. Just in time to rescue Sherlock Holmes from Moriarty in their next adventure, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl. I can’t wait.

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 6-23-19

Sunday Post

As I said yesterday, while you read this I’m sweating to death in Washington DC at the ALA Annual Conference. Or maybe not. The weather report says cloudy, rainy, thunderboomy and in the mid 80s, so it might not be too bad. But climate’s what you expect and weather is what you get, so by the time I get there, it could be anything. Yes, I know that Atlanta is not exactly known for its cool summers but DC is semi-reclaimed swampland – it gets even muggier there than it does here. And the midwinter conference will be in Philadelphia. In January. I can hardly wait. I’d insert a sarcastic emoji here – but what would that look like?

Meanwhile, back on the blog, I may be out of town but I have plenty of stuff queued up and ready to roll while I’m away. Probably picking up more books.

Current Giveaways:

$10 Amazon Gift Card or $10 Book in the Hello Summer Giveaway Hop
$20 (USD) Dreamspinner Gift Certificate from Rhys Ford

Blog Recap:

A Review: The Women’s War by Jenna Glass
B Review: Summer by the Tides by Denise Hunter
B+ Review: Hell Squad: Dom by Anna Hackett
A- Review: Ramen Assassin by Rhys Ford + Guest Recipe! + Giveaway
A- Review: The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz
Stacking the Shelves (345)

Coming This Week:

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss (review)
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker (review)
Phaze by S.C. Mitchell (guest review by Amy)
Say No to the Duke by Eloisa James (blog tour review)
Someone to Honor by Mary Balogh (review)

Stacking the Shelves (345)

Stacking the Shelves

This is the during-ALA stack, which mostly consists of books held over from last week’s stack. Even so, there are a couple of books here that I’ve been looking for for quite some time, like The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl and The True Bastards. Both are followups to books I absolutely adored (see Monday’s review of European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman for plenty of squeeing about the Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club and my A+ review of The Grey Bastards for more deets on both series)

While you read this, I’ll be at the American Library Association Conference in Washington DC, hopefully not sweating to death, and trying not to pick up many too many ARCs and eARCs after seeing all the bright, shiny new books on display! I’m not sure whether to ask you to wish me luck – or not!

For Review:
Gallows Court by Martin Edwards
Grave Expectations (Dickens of a Crime #2) by Heather Redmond
A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh
The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club #3) by Theodora Goss
Steel Frame by Andrew Skinner
The True Bastards (Lot Lands #2) by Jonathan French

Purchased from Amazon/Audible:
The Bachelor Girl’s Guide to Murder (Herringford and Watts #1) by Rachel McMillan
Conductor of Light (Herringford and Watts #2.5) by Rachel McMillan
A Lesson in Love and Murder (Herringford and Watts #2) by Rachel McMillan
Of Dubious and Questionable Memory (Herringford and Watts #1.5) by Rachel McMillan
A Singular and Whimsical Problem (Herringford and Watts #0.5) by Rachel McMillan
The White Feather Murders (Herringford and Watts #3) by Rachel McMillan

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter


Review: The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz

Review: The Sentence is Death by Anthony HorowitzThe Sentence is Death (Hawthorne, #2) by Anthony Horowitz, Rory Kinnear
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery
Series: Hawthorne #2
Pages: 384
Published by HarperAudio on May 28, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

8 hours, 36 minutes

Death, deception, and a detective with quite a lot to hide stalk the pages of Anthony Horowitz’s brilliant murder mystery, the second in the bestselling series starring Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne.

“You shouldn’t be here. It’s too late . . . “

These, heard over the phone, were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, found bludgeoned to death in his bachelor pad with a bottle of wine—a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, to be precise.

Odd, considering he didn’t drink. Why this bottle? And why those words? And why was a three-digit number painted on the wall by the killer? And, most importantly, which of the man’s many, many enemies did the deed?

Baffled, the police are forced to bring in Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, the author Anthony, who’s really getting rather good at this murder investigation business.

But as Hawthorne takes on the case with characteristic relish, it becomes clear that he, too, has secrets to hide. As our reluctant narrator becomes ever more embroiled in the case, he realizes that these secrets must be exposed—even at the risk of death . . .

My Review:

This series doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as hammer it down to the ground with a police truncheon – and extreme prejudice.

The Sentence is Death begins much the same way that The Word is Murder kicked off the series – with an unexplained death and ex-cop turned police consultant Daniel Hawthorne interrupting our author/his Watson in the midst of an important real-life event.

Anthony Horowitz was late to the set on the first day of shooting season 7 of Foyle’s War. Whether the day went exactly as outlined in The Sentence is Death, both the series and the episode are as portrayed in this book. You can still hear the echoes of the fourth wall shattering from here.

Horowitz, more explicitly Watson to Hawthorne’s not just misanthropic but often downright sociopathic Holmes, finds himself dragged into yet another one of Hawthorne’s strangely compelling cases. A case that has already cost at least one man his life, and might very well cost the author his career – if he’s not careful.

The problem for the author is that while he’s never sure that he actually likes Hawthorne – and it’s impossible to blame him for that judgment – the man only comes to “Tony” when he has a truly puzzling case to solve – over and above the fascinating case of Hawthorne himself.

“Tony” can’t resist getting dragged along in Hawthorne’s wake yet again. No matter how much he knows that he should.

Escape Rating A-: This was a rare case where I stayed with the audiobook all the way through. Not that I wasn’t impatient to see how it ended, but the audiobook was just SO GOOD. The narrator, Rory Kinnear, does an excellent job of voicing all the characters and differentiating them all. Each character in the story was very distinct in accent, in tone and in their manner of speaking.

And it’s also short enough of an audiobook that I didn’t have to play too much Solitaire to finish it in less than a week. (Which reminds me, the book is 384 pages, but there is a lot of white space and relatively big printing on those pages. It’s a breeze to read or listen to.)

The series in general, and this entry in particular, feels like a combination of whodunnit, whydunnit and Sherlock Holmes homage. The references to this being a Holmes homage, with Hawthorne as Holmes and Horowitz as Watson, are particularly explicit in this story, to the point where “Tony” (he hates it when Hawthorne calls him that and it differentiates the character IN the book from the writer OF the book – at least a little) tells Hawthorne just how much he dislikes being his Watson. Particularly since, just like the popular image of Watson, he never seems to figure out whodunnit ahead of his Sherlock.

Hawthorne is an extremely annoying character, and “Tony” is generally pretty annoyed at him. Hawthorne is always a disruption to his life – and it seems like working with Hawthorne puts “Tony” in danger of losing either his career or his life at every turn.

One of the mind-twisty parts of this story, in addition to the murder itself, is just how much of a nebbish the character of “Tony” turns out to be. There’s always a bit of a disjunct in my mind, as my mental image of the author bears a sharp resemblance to Michael Kitchen’s portrayal of Christopher Foyle in Foyle’s War. Not that I have any personal knowledge, but Foyle’s War was my first serious exposure to the author and I recognize I’ve conflated him with the character he created. It’s not about how either of them looks, it’s that Foyle is both thoughtful and decisive, and it’s jarring to see “Tony” as a bit of a milquetoast. Hawthorne pushes him around – a LOT – and so do the police detectives assigned to the case.

But that case is intricate and absorbing and convoluted. The resolution is completely unexpected, not just by “Tony” but by the reader as well. At the same time, it thoroughly follows the conventions of the mystery genre, so that once you do know whodunnit, you can see that all the clues have been there all along – just like they are supposed to be – and that the solution was obvious IF you made the correct connections. As Hawthorne certainly did.

In the end, all is made tragically clear. But “Tony” is tired of playing Hawthorne’s bumbling Watson. He wants out. He wants to go back to Foyle’s War and his next “real” Sherlock Holmes book, Moriarty.

But we just know that he’ll be swept into Hawthorne’s orbit yet again, as soon as there’s another case worth writing about. And we’ll be sucked back in right along with him!