This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by LauraL. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is LauraL's review:

Sanctuary, West Virginia, is one of those places I would love to visit if it were real town rather than the product of a writer’s imagination. It’s a small town where friends and acquaintances bring the new veterinarian in town chicken soup when she comes down with the flu. An internationally known chef is said to bribe locals with food from his acclaimed restaurant on the mountaintop, The Aerie. Most of the houses in town were built before the Civil War and The Laurels, a major resort, is nearby. Residents are people like Claire the art dealer and Tim the veterinarian (our heroine’s boss) from Take Me Home and hunky lawyer Paul and Julia the artist from Country Roads. They all make appearances in this book, but I would consider it a standalone story.

On the outskirts of town is Healing Springs Stables where an Olympic gold medal equestrienne gives riding lessons, trains troubled horses, and helps people find their “whisper horse.” So, what is a “whisper horse?” According to Sharon Sydenstricker, the trainer at Healing Springs, “Everyone has a special horse – or pony – who will take on their burdens and help carry them.”

In The Place I Belong, a sickly, yet plucky, whisper pony takes on the burden of cobbling a family together and comforting a teenage boy who recently lost his mother. To get started, we meet Adam Bosch, the charming yet enigmatic chef, and Hannah Linden, the veterinarian with corn silk hair, who meet (and it is definitely not a meet cute) after Adam’s dog is mistaken for a bear and shot by a hunter. Luckily, it’s just a graze and Dr. Linden fixes up Trace quickly.

However, it is enough time for our hero and heroine to interact and feel that tingle of attraction start to grow. The chef talks the vet into taking his son on her rounds the next day, offering food as a bribe. (Naturally.) Adam feels his son was responsible for the dog’s injury and needs to learn about animals and their feelings. After helping in the clinic on a Saturday morning, Matt rides with Dr. Linden to the stables for some routine horse veterinary work. The author is meticulous with her horse care and barn life details which I appreciate as a lifelong horsewoman. At Healing Springs, Matt meets Satchmo, the depressed pony who lost his racehorse stablemate, and the two become friends. Ms. Sydenstricker determines Satchmo is Matt’s whisper horse and suggests Matt spend time at the stables after school.

As events unfold around Matt and Satchmo, our hero and heroine are thrown together time and time again. Hannah Linden is an intuitive veterinarian and is a good influence on both the animals and people in Sanctuary. In one sad scene, the young vet helps an elderly customer say goodbye to her old dog. Best of all, Hannah soothes the beast in Adam Bosch, who is darkly handsome, dresses all in black, and smells of spices. The chef loves to cook and to feed his neighbors and customers, even a sick whisper pony. He is a sensual person, wearing fine clothes and enjoying fine foods. He drives a Maserati to handle the curves on the mountain roads. He is hot in bed, too.

There are plenty of sexy times in the book as the intimacy and feelings develop when Hannah and Adam spend more time together. Most noteworthy is their first time together. When Adam first tastes Hannah, ahem, intimately:

“What?” she panted.

He lifted his head. “You taste like caviar.”

Beyond the sexual chemistry, the two of them each bring a cartload of baggage to this relationship and story, making them both question whether they should be together. Adam is an alcoholic who has thrown himself into his restaurant business. He had been surprised by a “secret baby” in Matt a few months earlier and is not sure he can be a good father. Hannah felt compelled to flee Chicago and find a new job in a small town after she was accused of animal cruelty by a high profile politician and was dumped by her fiancé. Rather than fill in the details of the story, I’ll say both Hannah and Adam face their demons in the last third of the book. Their inner and outer conflicts are realistic. Secondary characters have a big role in the resolution of the challenges as a small town takes care of its own. Everything then comes to a satisfying conclusion with an epilogue showing us all is well in Sanctuary. Even the pony is happy. And anyone who knows ponies knows that if the pony ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

I looked forward to reading The Place I Belong a third, or maybe it’s a fourth time, for this SBTB review. The combination of this compelling couple, plus the location and the secondary characters, both human and animal, kept Adam and Hannah’s story in my mind long after reading the story, which made it an “A” in my book.

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by ReneeG. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is ReneeG's review:

The Place I Belong is the third volume of Herkness’ Whisper Horse series (I can’t call it a trilogy as there is a novella winding up another character’s arc).  This book involves many secrets and a few lies and I really enjoyed it.  Although it is part of a series, it can easily be read as a stand-alone book.

The thread running through the series is the idea of a Whisper Horse – that there is a special horse for every person and that relationship will help heal both the horse and the person (you whisper what you need to the horse).  I sometimes wish I had a Whisper Horse, although it sounds like they can be a bit pricey.

The main thread running through this book is secrets.  All our main characters have at least one secret and they have negatively impacted the secret-holder.  However, refreshingly, people tell their secrets and communicate about their damage (not that the communication has fixed the damage, but at least there are no lurking relationship holes).

Our first two main characters are the Hero, world-famous chef Adam Bosch (who has layered secrets), and the Heroine, new-to-town veterinarian Hannah Linden (she only has the one secret).  Their secrets and the resolutions thereof drive the story line.  The book realistically shows how important it is to take care of yourself when involved in a relationship with someone who is wallowing in their pain.

Another main character is Adam’s son, Matt.  Can you count a young teenage boy as a plot moppet?  Although, since he is the lucky one who gets the Whisper Horse in this book, he probably doesn’t count as a plot moppet (in the other books, the heroines get the Whisper Horse).  His secret reveals some of the issues Adam has and the reveal itself seems very natural.

There are some additional side characters who add some spice to the mix.  We also get to see some of the characters from the other books again, but they come into the story organically and help advance the plot.  There aren’t any loose threads left hanging at the end, which is nice.

I enjoy the animals in the series and especially in this book – the horse and some nice dogs and cats.  Of course, you have to have a horse in a series named “Whisper Horse” and Satchmo is the one here (actually, he is a Whisper Pony).  In a way, Satchmo also has a secret (I’m telling you this book is FULL of them!).  Satchmo and Matt’s relationship also matures during the book.

The plot is tight and realistic.  It focuses on resolving the issues surrounding the secrets – lancing the boils, if you will – and moving our characters towards their happy ending. Choices from the resolutions are handled well, without a lot of angsty circle-guilting (except where it added the final conflict to the story), and each conflict resolution ratchets the tension up to the final denouement.  Our characters show growth and don’t make you want to strangle them for not seeing the truth right in front of their noses.  Ok, I did want to strangle Adam a couple of times, and Hannah too, but not really in a mean way, just to get their attention.

I liked the love story overall and the sexytimes were nicely written (some involved food other than chocolate!).  The couple hung together well – their issues were understandable and Hannah took care of herself instead of acting like a door mat. There was Insta-Lust, to get us going, but the love portion seemed to grow naturally (for a fast romance).  It was very enjoyable.  I have to say that it was pretty vanilla sexytimes, but that is nice, too.

Of course, with a main character that is a chef, food plays a big role.  There are no recipes in the back (bummer!), but the food porn is nicely done.  It just slips right in until you wonder why you have chicken curry on the brain.

The writing flows well and there aren’t a lot of errors to toss you out of the story.  There are some tearful moments and the ending was a “gotcha” (but in a good way).  The backstories from the other two books were slipped into place without a noticeable DATA DUMP HERE flashing sign.  I am not enamoured with the name of the town (Sanctuary, West Virginia) where our series takes place, but the books have made the place seem so real that I would have liked to visit.

I thought The Place I Belong was the strongest book of the trilogy, and I actually liked that the heroine didn’t get the Whisper Horse.  The plot moved briskly and the love stories plucked at my heart strings without wallowing in goo.  There is a hint of a TGTBT world running thru the series, but what can you expect from a town called Sanctuary.  I was surprised at how well this book stands on its own and how the author didn’t over-dump the data and really kept it to what was needed for this story.

This isn’t a book that I can’t put down or get out of my mind, but it is a relaxing and enjoyable read that doesn’t encourage any book or Kindle throwing.

When The Avengers: Age of Ultron came out, we ran a post called “A Romance Reader’s Guide to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.” In that post, we talked about why we adore the men of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Now that Ant-Man is almost here, with Evangeline Lilly punching Paul Rudd in the face, let’s talk about the women of the MCU!

Although the MCU has yet to give a female character a solo movie (Captain Marvel doesn’t come out until 2018), the MCU is full of fantastic female characters. Interestingly, I found that they were much harder to put in categories than the guys – they might start in certain categories (Action Chick, Career Woman, Science Geek) but they are too complex to stay in their tidy boxes, and there’s too many of them to talk about them all in detail. So this is a meditation on the women in the MCU in general, with some specific examples as highlights.

There’s a whole other box to unpack, which is full of stuff like how Marvel as a company treats its female characters as opposed to how Marvel writers and directors treat them, and how the women are discussed in the media, but that’s a box full of giant hideous hairy fanged spiders so, no. Short answer – within the movies and shows we’re given, the writers, directors, and actors seem to put a lot of effort into giving women agency and identity beyond being “The Girlfriend.” Within the company and in the media, hey, guess what, sexism is totally still a thing. Any discussion of the MCU women takes place in a context of scarcity – something that was brought into sharp relief by the release of Mad Max Fury Road, which transformed the conversation about female roles simply by having multiple female leads and giving all of them something to do, as opposed to the MCU model of having one major female character per movie and a couple of female supporting roles.

The MCU (which includes movies and television shows) features several female action heroes including Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow), Agent Peggy Carter, Lady Sif, Agent Melinda May, Bobbi Morse (Mockingbird), Gamora, and Maria Hill (for starters). Even though they can all be described as “Action Heroes”, they are all very different people. The easy banter of Mockingbird and the military correctness of Maria Hill could never be confused with Natasha’s ferocious survival instinct or Gamora’s somewhat crazed assassin persona. Many have redemption arcs, as do many of the male heroes, but not all of them (I’m secretly hoping to discover that Sharon Carter of Winter Soldier has no angst whatsoever and just likes kicking ass).

Then we have science geek Jane Foster (Thor), science geek Simmons on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and hyper-competent CEO Pepper Potts (Iron Man), as well as an under-used science geek in Ultron, Helen Cho. Sometimes the characters get to move outside of their comfort zones in ways that reveal their complexity. For instance, In Iron Man 3 Pepper got to be a truly terrifying action heroine for about five minutes (after which she said, “Oh, my God. That was violent.”) In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Simmons has a sweet personality and as such people around her constantly forget that she’s also got some serious experience as an undercover agent and can lie her head off if she has to. Pair that with a recent ruthless streak and she’s completely unpredictable even before something extremely startling happened to her in the Season Two Finale.

The only woman to date to have her own TV show is the wonderful Peggy Carter, star of Agent Carter. Peggy first appeared in Captain America, where she could easily have just been Steve’s love interest. However, Peggy was a clearly defined character in her own right, someone who had goals and dreams beyond her relationship with Steve. She ended up with her own TV show, Agent Carter, in which she tackled sexism in and out of the workforce while solving a conspiracy. The series had a great supporting cast of women but to tell you much about them would be to spoil the reveals. We at Smart Bitches were crazy about the show and we are ecstatic that it’s getting a second season. You can read our recap and review of the pilot here. We loved Peggy’s well-rounded character, her total lack of fucks to give, her persistence, and her ability to improvise weapons from office supplies. I’ll never look at a stapler in the same way again.

Of The Avengers, the heavy-hitter is Natasha Romanoff, AKA Black Widow. Natasha was raised in a spy training program in Russia. She has a dark and troubled past. Natasha showed up in Iron Man 2 but she was basically kick-ass eye candy in that movie. It wasn’t until Joss Whedon included her in The Avengers that she totally stole the show.

Natasha has “a very specific skill set” which includes combat skills and interrogation skills (in the sense that she outwits everyone she talks to, causing them to spill all their secrets without even noticing that they just did so). As someone who is super-trained and super-skilled, but not super-powered, she brings a human and vulnerable element to the group without being regulated to being “the chick.”

Here she is in the opening of The Avengers. Initially it looks like we are seeing a pretty gross, distressing scene of a woman in peril being menaced by men. Watch her flip the entire script at 2:05. It’s not that she flips it in terms of beating everyone up – we expect that. It’s the fact that all along she’s been in a completely different scene than we thought we was in!

In Age of Ultron, Natasha reveals that as part of her training program, which included brainwashing and various kinds of abuse, she was forcibly sterilized. She refers to herself as a “monster” following becoming a trained assassin. Many people interpret this scene as Natasha saying that she’s a monster because she’s infertile. In my opinion, that’s a huge misinterpretation of the scene. Moreover, the scene as a whole is a searing indictment of the “a woman who is infertile is not a woman and doesn’t deserve love” trope.

The important thing about the scene is that Natasha is not the only Avenger who feels that her choices and ability to have a family have been taken from her – Steve, Thor, and Tony both express a longing for home and family and a sense that they will never be able to have it in this movie or (in Thor’s case) previous films. Natasha only brings up the sterilization because Bruce (The Hulk) claims that he can’t give Natasha a happy life because a) he’s done horrible things and is therefore a monster and b) can’t father children and therefore can’t make a woman happy. Natasha’s response is to point out that a) she can’t have children either and b) both Bruce and Natasha were turned into killers against their will (we can say this about Natasha because her training began when she was a very young child and not capable of adult consent) and choices about their lives were taken from them.

While Bruce’s response is to decide that he therefore can’t and shouldn’t be happy, Natasha’s response is to mourn the loss, take responsibility for her many misdeeds (the “red in her ledger” described in The Avengers) and move the fuck on. Why should her abusers have the last say? Why should Bruce’s? Hell, yes, she thinks she deserves happiness. Additionally, the implication from how the scene is edited is that her monstrousness stems not from her infertility but from the many atrocities she committed in her past, and the forced sterilization highlights her lack of choice and power in accepting the role of assassin.

Natasha is not unique in her mourning her inability to bear children – while Tony doesn’t mention children specifically, he’s desperate to stop Avenging and have a regular life, and Steve and Bruce explicitily address the grief and dislocation they feel because they are unable to have a family life. In Bruce’s case, his inability to have children is just as biological as Natasha’s and it causes him just as much grief (and, again, he’s the one who initiates the conversation with Natasha by citing his own inability to have children as a reason that they shouldn’t be together, to which Natasha basically says, “Fuck that shit.”). Natasha is unique in her determination to build family (Auntie Nat!) and claim happiness on her own terms, while the guys are sunk in angst.

Pepper Potts is a completely different character – she’s a terrible, terrible liar, and she hates violence (because it’s stressful, not because of moral issues), and she has no combat skills whatsoever (a few glorious minutes in Iron Man 3 aside). Her strength as a character comes not from her combat abilities but from her brains, her competence, and her ability to hold her own (more or less) against Tony, who steamrolls right over everyone else around him. I wrote a lot about Pepper in this review of Iron Man 3.

In the video below, she might seem a bit wussy (I love the way her voice scales up when she says, “There’s pus!!!”) but I can honestly say that if my boss asked me to perform open heart surgery on him in the course of my office day I’d panic too. Right after this video cuts out, she tells him, “Don’t ever, ever, ever ask me to do anything like that, ever again,” to which he replies, “I don’t have anyone but you.” Awwwww.

Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy is an outlier at this point because the GoG isn’t closely tied to the rest of the MCU yet. She’s a rogue assassin with Daddy Issues and a lethal case of sibling rivalry with her sister, Nebula, of whom we didn’t see nearly enough. While Natasha is careful to suppress as much emotion as possible, Gamora is a rage machine who stalks around like a mobile grenade with the pin pulled out. Like Peggy Carter, Gamora has to fight for respect among her own sexist allies, and she resists being seduced by Quill. She gives us the epic line, “I am not some starry-eyed waif here to succumb to your pelvic sourcery!” While Peter Quill is the nominal hero of the movie, Gamora is the one who figures out how to stop the bad guy (see this great article in Slate: “Zoe Saldana is the Real Hero in The Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Incidentally, this thing where the alleged hero isn’t really the hero comes up in MCU movies a lot. The guy is the star, the guy gets the big speeches and “saves the day”, but if you pay attention you realize that women are driving the plot and frequently are the ones who actually do the day-saving. Pepper Potts isn’t much of an action girl but strictly speaking, out of three movies, she’s the one who actually kills two of the main bad guys while Tony flies around looking impressive. Agent May plays a completely different role in the forming of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. than Coulson thinks she does, and the cute nurse who lives next door to Steve in Winter Soldier has a much bigger role to play than doing laundry and flirting.

The newcomer to the MCU is Scarlet Witch. The casting of Scarlet Witch was controversial because in the comics she’s half Jewish and half Romany, and actress Elizabeth Olsen is an American blonde. I don’t know enough about either the comics character or the Romany people to comment on this too much, but MCU Scarlet Witch is depicted as an Eastern European brunette.  While whitewashing remains a concern and I don’t wish to under-emphasize it, at least they did keep some idea that she is motivated to do the things she does because of a cultural history of conflict and oppression. This is tied to the idea that Tony Stark is complicit in her suffering, which works thematically with the movie even though it’s a huge divergence from her comic book origin.

Frankly, since she’s retconned out of her comics persona almost beyond recognition (unlike her comic book counterpart, MCU Scarlet Witch is not Magento’s kid, she’s not specifically stated to be Romany or Jewish, and oh yeah – she’s not a mutant) I don’t see why the movies didn’t save themselves a lot of trouble by calling her “Crimson Sorceress” or something. Whatever, she’s awesome and we love her and her wacky rave hand dance powers.

Scarlet Witch is the baby of the group and she has a redemption arc as well as a healing from trauma arc.  Her prejudices cause her to make mistakes – she is unable to see that Tony has changed from the arms dealer he once was.  But she’s also perceptive: she can see that in some ways Tony really IS the arms dealer he once was, in the sense that he will do whatever he thinks he has to do and he gets obsessed with projects and ideas.  She’s powerful psychologically and mentally, too. By the end of the movie she can play with people’s minds in ways that leave them catatonic and throw robot drones around like rubber balls.  It will be interesting to see her grow up in subsequent movies.

One of the things the MCU does well is allude to the fact that these women have friendships and alliances with each other.  Even when we don’t see much interaction between the women on screen, there are hints of them having relationships offscreen, like when Maria Hill talks to Pepper on the phone at the beginning of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or when she makes a reference to being friends with Agent May in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  In Iron Man 2, Tony clearly thinks that Pepper and “Natalie” (Natasha’s undercover identity in Iron Man 2) are going to fight over him, but they are actually great working partners who get along just fine.  A major theme in Agent Carter is the importance of friendships between women.   There are tons of relationships between women in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., my personal favorite being Bobbie and Izzy who I ship so hard after Bobbi, in a flashback, tells Izzy, “You know I love your whole thing, right?”   Women in the MCU often try to kill each other or engage in subterfuge for political reasons, but they don’t have the kinds of stereotypical catfights that Hollywood so loves to indulge in.

Another nice touch is that all the women who engage in physical combat have distinct fighting styles that are consistent with their characters and histories. Peggy is Army trained so she’s a brawler, and she almost always grabs something to use as a weapon to give her an advantage against heavier opponents. Natasha is from the Black Widow training program, so she knows fancy martial arts with a lot of kicks and flips, but she’s also all about survival so she’s not above biting a guy during a fight. Mockingbird (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) has a great fight in which she’s teamed up with her ex-husband.  As they fight an onslaught of bad guys, they have a conversation in which their words say one thing (they don’t trust each other and can’t communicate) but their actions say the opposite thing (they work seamlessly as a fighting team and save each other’s lives repeatedly).

Since I started writing this post, the Internet basically blew up – apparently a lot of people have THOUGHTS. Some people think Ultron is sexist, and it’s undeniable that Natasha’s speech about having been sterilized struck a major nerve in viewers. But I think that some of these arguments ignore the fears that the male characters express about their physical and emotional inability to have children.

A fantastic article by Linda Holmes at NPR points out that no Black Widow storyline can be completely satisfactory, because as the once main female character she has to somehow represent all women.  As Holmes says,

These, for me, are scarcity problems.

To be honest, I can’t think of another Avenger whose story Natasha could have swapped with who wouldn’t, in some way, raise questions of whether the story was influenced by gender stereotypes. If she had Tony’s story, she’d be the one who messed up and wouldn’t listen, who created the need for a rescue. If she had Cap’s story, she’d be the one who tries to keep everyone from being vulgar – the behavior cop. If she had the Hulk’s story, she’d be the one whose superpower is being carried away by her uncontrollable emotions. If she had Thor’s story, she’d be the one who doesn’t have very much to do and is omitted from a large stretch of the movie. If she had Hawkeye’s story, she’d be the one who just wanted to go home and be with the kids.

Some people think Marvel should have more merchandising around their female characters (YES THEY SHOULD).

And as for Jeremy Renner…. Honey, for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE STOP TALKING.

With Ant-Man, I fully expect the Internet to explode again. Originally, in the comics, Janet Van Dyne was The Wasp, and she was a founding member of the Avengers. In the movie Ant-Man, Janet Van Dyne does not appear but Evangeline Lilly plays her daughter, Hope, who deliberately takes her mother’s last name (Van Dyne) as opposed to her father’s (Pym) because she is estranged from him. We don’t know a lot about Hope’s role except that she has a significant part in the heist (it’s a superhero/heist movie) and she’s morally ambiguous. Whatever happens, I’m pretty darn sure the Internet will have something to say about it.

Here’s my personal take away: the MCU is deeply flawed in representing women and people of color (and, infuriatingly, LGBTQIA characters don’t seem to exist at all).  However, I feel that with every film things get a little bit better.  I wasn’t crazy about the Natasha/Bruce romance but I found Natasha’s resilience and determination to make choices about her life to be inspiring, not oppressive.  I’m thrilled that the new Avengers line up is two women, one white guy, a purple robot, and two men of color, although frankly the movies are so stuffed that I can’t imagine what the new Avengers will be doing.

I’ve referred several times in this essay to Mad Max: Fury Road, which, to be clear, is NOT part of the MCU. It came out considerably after I had written my first draft of this essay, and it revolutionized what’s possible for women in action film simply by having more than one significant female character in the movie and by giving them all distinct personalities and a lot to do on a non-sexual level. So far, Marvel has been progressive within a conservative model – by which I mean they have stuck to male-led, male-dominated movies, but within that framework they’ve given women significant roles, fully realized personalities, realistic combat abilities (“realistic” given the unrealistic framework of the genre), and friendships with other women. My dream is for Marvel to take the next step – not to erase their male characters, who I adore, but to build a universe in which women are just as much center stage, and in which a variety of narratives are discussed.

Above all, I’m thrilled with the MCU actresses, who always uplift their material.  When Peggy Carter says, “I know my value,” she might as well be speaking for all the MCU women. It would be very easy for the MCU women to fall completely into “the girlfriend” or “the chick” role, particularly in the films. It’s largely the actresses who bring a level of humanity and personality to their characters above and beyond that of a sexy lamp (The Sexy Lamp Test was invented by Kelly Sue DeConnick and says, “If you can take out a female character and replace her with a sexy lamp, YOU’RE A FUCKING HACK.”). You can’t replace any of these characters with any other character. It’s unthinkable. The characters, as brought to life by their actresses, are under-served people, but they are people nonetheless.

Previously: Ross and D did the do and then we left them standing in front of a vicar.

Demelza (singing happily, as she does) and Garrick are walking along the cliffs at sunset (I almost said dawn and then did the geography and this isn’t really relevant, but I did it and I want someone to be impressed. I could have kicked ass on Where in the World is Carmen Sandeigo if they’d done casting at my school, dammit). “T’aint right, tain’t fair, taint fit, taint proper!” snaps Jud and Prudie, a they walk into the kitchen. They continue to bitch and moan about D’s commonness (“Too common to curtsey!”) and the whole business of this marriage, while outside, D frowns at the house and says “He’s late tonight, Garrick.”

In bed with Ross (he’s shirtless and she’s got her head pillowed on his fine, fine abs, lucky girl), D frets that people will wonder and she doesn’t really understand how all of “this” happened. Ross says that she’s not required to understand, just to accept it as a fact of life. “So it’s not to be a secret?” she asks. “Why should it?”

Women are on the cliffs, looking out to sea, and Ross rides up and they express their concern that some kind of fish (I’ve rewound three times and can’t catch what kind she says they’re waiting for, the book says they are pilchards) has missed them entirely and skipped off to Ireland. If the fish don’t come, that’ll make living through the winter very difficult, and people will starve. Ross hopes it won’t come to that.

At Grambler, Francis snaps that he can’t conjure wages out of thin air, and men will just have to wait. That sucks, Francis. You’re a dick. Ross comes up and Francis is like did my father send you? Or Elizabeth? To read me the riot act of everything I do wrong? Ross asks why either one would want to. “Oh idk, gaming whoring, whatever.” Ross announces that he’s gotten married. “To your KITCHENMAID?” Francis informs Ross that he’s now cut himself out of society- no one will receive him. Ross is pleased at the idea of a life of peaceful seclusion. Won’t Francis please share the happy news with everyone at Trenwith?

Now we get a delightful cut of scenes of everyone reacting to the gossip. Uncle Charles and company is shocked. The local dark-haired prostitute sits next to Ross and snickers that she didn’t think he was the marrying type. “Is she wealthy?” “Not at all” Ross responds. The Warleggans are disgusted that he wasted an opportunity to marry a decent dowry. “It beggars belief.” “It may beggar him.” No one can believe it. The prostitute asks if she’s pretty (“In her way”) and “Do you love her?” “We get on.” The Warleggans are excited at the idea of Ross Poldark ending up in the gutter, like that’ll make room for them on top.

Verity sends Ross and D a congratulatory letter, pointing out that she is in no position to judge attachments.  “See!” Ross says, “we have one friend!” D, working on cooking, is less than happy to think about dealing with people calling on her, and what the fuck does that mean, anyway? “I’ll call them.”  Jud and Prudie look at her judgingly, and D’s like I didn’t fucking ask for this, and this is your fault, anyway. You’re the assholes who raised me up and taught me everything I know.

In the mine, Ross and the boys (and one of his investors) are digging though, hoping to strike copper in the next few months. But it’ll require luck and a rise in the price of ore. At night, Ross frets over paperworks and angsts (I’ve been there, dude) while D sleeps. Happily for us, Ross angsts shirtless.  Possibly pantsless, too.  In the morning, Ross sets off for a shareholders meeting where he needs to ask for more funds to keep the mine going. D puts his papers in his saddlebag (the easy familiarity of it makes me smile) and asks, “aren’t these friends of yourn?” “They may be reconsidering the connection” and he heads off.

At the docks, women are still looking for the fish, while the investors congratulate one of their number, who’s son has married the young miss who set her sights on Ross two episodes ago (“A very determined girl”), and they also congratulate Ross on his wedding. Ross excuses himself to talk with a captain, while the other move off to gossip. Ross’ early skirmishes with the law, and the whole contempt of court thing, and now marrying his serving girl? Seems unsteady! Reckless! Foolish! Is he fit to hold such a venture?

In the meeting, a number of investors are unwilling to invest more money until and unless they hit copper, but a few are willing to toss in some more money.

At home, Ross comes in with a package, and D asks if he got candles and twine, but what he did get her was a book (to help her practice her letters) and hair ribbons. He also wrote to her father and she’s like whatever, nothing’s changed. “Nothing?” Ross asks. “I do get less sleep.” D admits, grinning. “And that’s your only complaint?” “I have no complaints.”  He does- he wants her to make an official visit to the mine. She’s dubious about a kitchen maid giving herself airs, and he’s like “I see no maid, just a wife taking an interest in her husband’s work!” It’s set for the next morning.

At Trenwith, Charles is trying to haul his ass on a horse while everyone (including the baby) try to argue him out of it, but he’s determined to go to the mine. But then he falls off to the ground and the baby is like “I’m less than a month old and I fucking told you so.”

At Wheal Leisure, D is with the other women, watching for the fish, while Ross and his superintendent grouse about the rock being like iron and hard to get through. “Our luck as deserted us.”  Hopefully the fish will turn up. Ross introduces Henshaw to D, and she tries really hard to be a proper lady but she’s just not.

Walking home, D is fretting about how to be a lady, and being at the mine is one thing, but mixing with Ross’ class is another entirely. Ross tries to tell her that she is a quick study (and she is, going from the feral being she was to where she is now), but then she sees Jud crossing the yard with a pie in his hand and she goes after him for being a thief. By “go after” I mean she jumps on him and knocks him to the ground, and it’s glorious.  Ross pulls her off before she can actually rip out Jud’s throat. “I cannot have my wife wrestling my man servant. It’s unbecoming.”  Ross marches D down to Jinny’s cottage, and has her hire Jinny as a maid for the house.

At Trenwith, Charles is in bed, getting bled, and the doctor is like he’ll totally make to Christmas.  Totally. Charles asks how Ross is getting on without a kitchen maid, and then jokes that Francis ought to be relieved, since with Ross happily married, it’s less like that Ross will wander over and steal Elizabeth! Ross chuckles and Verity is shocked, but then Charles heart seizes up again, and he actually yells that the doctor promised him Christmas.

Ross at a window, looking glum (hot, but glum) and Francis comes in, telling Ross “He’s asked to see you.”

“I’ve lost all faith in this world of ours, and my legacy.  We both know Francis is not the man you are. Look after him for me? And our family? And our good name?” Ross takes Charles’ hand. “You have my word.” At the churchyard, everyone is in black (including Elizabeth in a really great hat) and Francis ad Ross stand, looking at the grave. “He’ll be missed.” “Not by me. It’s terrible to feel nothing but relief.” Francis says that nothing he did was ever good enough. Charles said that Elizabeth would make a fine mistress of Trenwith and Francis an indifferent master. But now Francis is one of the most important men of the county.

In her room, Elizabeth tells Verity that she’s unwell and can’t bear facing everybody. Yes but someone has to play hostess, Elizabeth, and it’s unspoken but Verity is trying to get Elizabeth to realize that that is her fucking job now. “She didn’t come” Elizabeth says. “Ross’ wife, she didn’t come.” Verity’s like please this is SO not the situation to be introduced to the family, is it? But Elizabeth is unmoved.

In the public rooms, Francis moves through the crowd, sniping that not even a tet-a-tete with Ross could convince Elizabeth to come down?  “You must be relieved” he tells Verity. “You’re not the only one to disgrace the family with an unsuitable attachment.”  Verity is just speechless. Francis is the worst.

George Warleggan claims to Ross that “I’ve figure you out. You claim to be above society’s rules.” “Not above, just indifferent.”  Ross excuses himself. George turns his slimey sights on one of the investors in Wheal Leisure that did not throw in more money.  “Mining is always a gamble. And the gamster rarely meets the good samaritan.” George means someone who might take a bad investment off of someone’s hands: “But if I should hear of anyone, would you be interested?”

The mines continue to mine, and Wheal Leisure continues to not hit copper, the fish continue to not come, and Francis stares off the cliffs a lot.

D walks into the house with an armload of wood, and Ross is like look, I don’t require you to sit an embroider all the time, but I also don’t want you being a beast of burden. D’s like whatever dude, the wood needs hauling, so…. “Are you happy?” Ross asks, and D’s like yes why. “Then I’ll hope you’ll be even happier when I tell who’s coming to stay!”  D is really stressed out by this idea.

It’s Verity! Verity is going to stay for a while! Yay!

In the mine, they’re planning on blasting to find the copper, and I’ve seen enough shows where mining disasters happen to find this to be INCREDIBLY STRESSFUL.  Verity and D are in the parlor- Verity is embroidering, and D is sewing, and the awkward silence is SO AWKWARD. D rings for tea, but it’s a bit early for tea, says Verity. Verity says that Ross is very dear to her, and the woman he married would have to be awesome to deserve him. “SO when I heard you married him I was-” “horrified” “-relieved.” Verity’s face is so open right now, and D needs this so much.  “Before he met you he was…broken. Lost. So, I was relieved to think that he found someone who could console him…. but now I see it is more than consolation. You’ve given him hope.” Verity speaks on love, and D’s like no, it’s not like that. “You don’t love him?” “Beyond anything. But I can’t imagine that he’d love me.” D is super realistic: they get on, and sex is great, but she doesn’t think he’d ever love her.

“Oh, my dear, do you think I care a jot where you come from? Or that you can’t curtsey?” D grabs at that. “Will you teach me to curtsey?” Cut to Jud and the girls carrying a large heavy table out of the room, and Ross coming into to find this giggling nonsense, very confused. “We thought to move it into the parlor so Demelza can learn to dance.”

Verity gives D dance lessons and curtsey lessons, and how to set a table and use a fan, and it’s so nice to see them both happy.

In their room, D asks if no one has heard from Blamey, Verity’s suitor. She chides Ross for not standing up to his uncle on Verity’s behalf, and that love is important. “What do you know of love?” Ross asks, “Oh, a little” says D, coyly, and they tumble back into bed. “Then we must practice more.”

Francis puts on his clothes while the brown-haired prostitute looks on. Elizabeth snuggles the baby (it’s a real baby this time). D and Verity go shopping! Verity is going home the next day, as the girls ride home, D ask if she really has to. “Francis needs me.” Maybe he does, boo, but you don’t need him. “Did you really hate today?” asks Verity, and D’s like no, that was fun, but I hope it’s not a waste because maybe my measurements won’t stay the same for long. Verity grins in delight as she realizes what this means- “don’t tell Ross yet!” grins D. “He’s not liked me for long, and when I get waddling around like an old duck, he might not remember that he does!”

At Wheal Leisure, they’ve got one more blast of gunpowder, and everyone gets tense. Ross rides for home, and the alarm bells ring- the fish have arrived!  Ross gets home, and hauls D on his  horse and then ride for the shore- the boats are harvesting, and everyone is helping bring in the catch. Maybe they won’t starve this winter after all! (yuck dried fish for months). The catch is really good, and Ross and D are happy for everyone. “Everyone’s happy tonight.” “They like you,” D tells him. He cares about them, and helps them. “I married you.”  “Oh, they don’t know what to make of that. But they like you just the same.”  “And you? Do you like me?” She does. “And I you.”

Back in the mine, they still haven’t made it through to the copper. How much longer can they go on? “An optimist would say three months.” And a realist? “Two.” Ross must find more investment. In town, there’s no one willing to risk it on Ross and his riskiness.

At the mine, Ross is disgusted with himself. He should have foreseen that marrying his kitchenmaid would go sideways. They have enough money to make it to the week before Christmas. Ross is like no, lets make it stretch until the week after. “if I have to sell my house, let it not ruin Christmas.”

Snow covers the the land, and Francis has invited Ross and D to spend Christmas at Trenwith. D’s not that excited at the idea. “They’ll send me to eat with the servants!” Ross asks if D thinks he ought to be ashamed of her, and D’s like no, but they’ll all look down their noses at me- well, not Verity- but Elizabeth…. Ross talks her down, and accepts the invitation.

They walk to Trenwith (D is wearing the hair ribbons Ross gave her), and they pass by Wheal Leisure. Ross is in full self-flagellation mode. “What a sorry Christmas I’ve handed them.” “No, you’ve given them twelve-month they would not have had.”  At Trenwith, Verity welcomes them in, and escorts D into the hall- it’s the fanciest place D has ever seen.  D looks like she might literally puke, except her common puke would not be welcome on these floors (Be real, D, Francis has totally puked on these floors, and you’re twice the person he is. Five times. Twelve.)

Here’s some awkward in the form of Elizabeth. D curtseys, and Elizabeth welcomes her kindly, and takes D in to meet Aunt Agatha. Aunt Agatha, who is perhaps starting to show signs of dementia, demands to know why no one told her about Ross marrying. “I DID, aunt,” Francis says with the long suffering sigh of someone who’s had the same conversation 12 times. “No one tells me anything” says Agatha, then begins giving D the 3rd degree. She names several people from D’s hometown. D doesn’t know them.

“Six generations of Poldarks I have seen! What do you think of that?” D wisely does not answer. “You think I don’t look enough!” D wisely nods. “Now, go sit next to Elizabeth so I can see how you measure up.” D and Elizabeth awkward next to each other. “Pretty little thing. A mite coarse next to Elizabeth, but no doubt she’ll polish up.”

Francis, in private, sneers that Elizabeth is just trying to show Ross how kind and generous she is and Elizabeth is just over it all. My roommate sighs that she feels like the show wants her to be outraged by him, she just wants to tell that dick to go suck an egg.

Ross answers the door to his and D’s chamber, and it’s a large dress box. D won’t let him see what’s in it, and he tells her that she doesn’t need to get all gussied up for a simple family dinner. “I asked Verity and she said it was right to change for Christmas dinner!” Fine, Ross says, but don’t lace your stays too tight because they feed you well here and I know your appetite. D is hurt by that comment, and my roommate advocates for a punch to the dick.

Ross comes into the parlor (I guess?) and Elizabeth is there. He thanks her for being kind to D, and Elizabeth is like she’s young and like a startled fawn. This is very overwhelming for her. He asks if she’s not disgusted by his choice, and she’s like I am in no place to judge. Francis is drinking and gambling away his inheritance and people tell me he’s got another woman, and that’s just the shit I know about. Ross can not confirm that Francis has another woman, but if he does, he’s an idiot. Said idiot wanders in, wondering when on earth they’ll be dining.

D is in her underclothes, fretting about being made a fool. She’s so stressed out. “Ross will be sorry he ever wed me.” Verity laces her up and tells her to “trust Ross and yourself.” There’s a knock at the front door, and who should show up but the Warleggans, the now-married Ruth Teague and her husband. They were just wandering by! Couldn’t possibly assume that there would be room for them at the- Elizabeth puts on her polite hostess face and has four more places laid for dinner.

Ruth’s husband is surprised to see Ross, and Ruth snarks that they’d find D in the scullery. They all go into the dining room, and D comes in, with her hair neatly done and a very simple, very pretty red dress. As dinner progresses, Ruth’s husband (John? I think?) damns Ross for “keeping this rosebud a secret.” “Oh hardly a secret!” simpers Ruth. “All the county was talking about her!” D takes all of this in silence.

Ross says the mine is doing fine, just fine, and Francis is like glad someone is doing okay. The Warleggans mutter that it’s probably not true.

Ruth asks Elizabeth about her servant situation- after all these girls these days with ambitions beyond their stations- it’s just horrible, isn’t it? Elizabeth is doing just fine with her servants, thank you. “At least I have my own household” Ruth goes on. All her sisters are as of yet unmarried, and at 23, well, one would just need to give up hope,  wouldn’t one? Verity is visibly upset by this, and D’s had enough.  “I don’t think there’s ever reason to give up hope. It’s sometimes a question of waiting.”  “And seizing the opportunity when it comes. I bow before your expertise, mum.”

After dinner, D is in her room, having a good cry and a very full belly. When she goes back to the party, Ruth invites her to play the harp. D demurs. “Oh, did your governess not teach you?” “Demelza sings,” Ross informs everyone, and D performs a lovely song to Ross- everyone else just happens to be there. Francis and Elizabeth share a look.

As everyone is heading up to bed, Francis and Ross share a drink in the dining room while D and Elizabeth chat in the parlor. “It’s a curious thing. We envy a man for something he has, yet the truth may be, he hasn’t got it after all, and we have. …am I rambling? Merry Christmas, cousin.”

D is dead asleep, and Ross murmurers to her “Merry Christmas, my love.” In the morning, Francis bids Ross and D good bye, and Elizabeth looks at Francis like maybe something has changed, but he goes into the house without a word.

D and Ross are nearing Wheal Leisure on their way home, and Ross frets (mildly, but he’s fretting) that he hopes D won’t regret her choice of a husband- they might well be destitute by spring. “Here’s other kinds of treasure” D says, pragmatically, like the woman who never dreamed of having two pairs of shoes at a time that she is. The bell at the mine begins to ring (And I’m like shit something blew up and everyone is dead). D agrees with me, and asks if it’s a rockfall.

But no!  They found the copper! It’s going to be okay! Everyone is happy and hugging.

“So how did I do, Ross? You’re not too ashamed of me?”  Ross asks why she thinks he married her. She doesn’t know. “To satisfy an appetite. To save myself from being alone. Because it was the right thing to do. I had few expectations. At best, you’d be a distraction, a bandage to ease a wound. But I was mistaken. You’ve redeemed me. I am your humble servant, and I love you.” She melts at this speech, as many would. “I hope you’ll have a little love to spare.” “For what?” “Our child.” He smiles delightedly, and on that note, we end for the week.

Carrie S:

SO MANY TISSUES.

This episode was so incredibly emotionally satisfying. It was almost too wonderful, because now I have a problem – as far as I’m concerned, yay, the series just ended! Wasn’t it great! We are so happy now! That is a problem because we are only half way through Season One. That makes me happy, because I want to watch more of these beautiful people in beautiful Cornwall, but it also makes me sad, because in all likelihood the beautiful people will be fucking up the lives that they JUST FIXED.

Demelza taking out a room full of aristocratic vipers with the comment, “People do love to gossip” was FUCKING AWESOME. You go, girl. Also, although poor Francis has succumbed to complete douchebaggery, I still like the occasional moments in which he and Ross set aside the drama and are just cousins (with more of a sibling relationship). “Merry Christmas” indeed. When Ross makes his speech to Demelza and says he loves her I cried like a baby.

I suspect we haven’t heard the last of Ross/Elizabeth which is a problem because they have very little chemistry, I can’t stand Elizabeth (I’m sympathetic because she’s in a sucky situation, and she seems nice enough, but she has no agency at all), and Ross and Demelza are clearly a couple made in heaven. I mean seriously, I DO NOT CARE about Francis and Elizabeth at this point. I just want to see Verity and Demelza be awesome. Still holding out for them to become pirate queens. Make it so.

RHG:

Look at all the ways in which a cross-class marriage can fuck you up! We all know that D is way too good for Ross, right? Because she is. Literally jumping on Jud for stealing a pie? I can relate.  I mean, on an emotional level, not a… I’m not admitting to anything.  Shut up.

I loved seeing D and Verity become friends- D needs friends and so does Verity, and they both need family that appreciate them. God knows Francis is incapable of being a person and Elizabeth has to spend a LOT of energy dealing with Francis.

What makes Ross work as a hero is what D said about him caring about the working class people- he wants to make sure that people can survive, and he understands their concerns. He hopes the fish come, he doesn’t want to ruin Christmas for everyone just because the mine isn’t doing what it needs to, and he’s tried to do the best for everyone. He’s kind of a dick, but he’s trying. Even if he’s destitute, he’ll still be a Poldark. If the working class is destitute, they’ll definitely starve.

That doesn’t mean that the miners know what to make of him marrying across class lines, though.

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by KnitterJacqui. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is KnitterJacqui's review:

There isn’t a lot I didn’t like about this book.  I’ve read a few of Liz Talley’s books before and her voice and style generally work well for me. Her characters seem human, she has an ear for dialogue and the issues facing the protagonists seem realistic and serious, but not too angsty or over the top.  The Harlequin Superromance format and length also provides high enough word count to let the author really explore the development of the characters and the relationship. I generally like this better than the shorter category formats.

The book uses a number of tried-and-true tropes – the biggest being the accidental pregnancy that is the catalyst for getting the hero (John) and heroine (Shelby – an unfortunate name, in my view) together. Somehow, though, these tropes don’t seem stale or clichéd in the author’s hands.

The pregnancy is the result of a drunken hook-up in a bathroom and the sex is described as not particularly good.  This description, which occurs in the first chapter, was already a point in the book’s favour, to my mind, since I tend to be sceptical of drunken hook-ups in which the earth moves and the heavens sing. The characters regret the fact that they turned to each other out of loneliness. John feels guilty because it is the anniversary of his wife’s death.  The whole incident is presented as realistically sordid. Even so, the pregnancy is a result of condom failure, not unprotected sex, and neither of the drunk protagonists drives themselves home.

Shelby is a strong heroine. She is not looking to John to take care of her or her unborn baby, although he ultimately wants to. She is more than capable of supporting herself as a high school math teacher and has family money to boot. There is something overly pat, perhaps, about the fact that a job seems to fall into her lap, but this is romancelandia so I went with it. John is a great hero – he doesn’t talk too much, but is obviously a sensitive man. He is clearly wrestling with some lingering grief and guilt at wanting and needing to move on, but he genuinely likes Shelby and appreciates aspects of her character that make her different from his wife. He makes mistakes while he’s feeling his way into a relationship with Shelby but his ineptness is endearing and creates opportunity for some good grovelling.

Another point in the book’s favour is that the characters behave like adults and for the most part, they talk to each other, except for one big misunderstanding at the end.  Even after they decide to spend some time together getting to know each other in order to make some decisions about how to incorporate a child into their future lives, the pregnancy doesn’t magically cure their issues. Shelby doesn’t hesitate to state her terms for moving the relationship to a deeper level with John, for example, and this requires him to move forward from the grief of losing his wife before she will agree to any future physical intimacy. Although the sexual chemistry between the couple is hot, this chemistry is not presented as a proxy for deeper feelings or as the “cure-all” for the emotional issues that the characters need to work out in order to be together.

Finally, I was relieved that the author chose not to villify John’s dead wife. There are few things that can make me close a book faster than a story about a widowed character whose dead spouse was somehow inferior to the new love interest, leaving the widowed character is free to move on because of this fact. In this story, much of the emotional tension comes from the fact that John and his wife had a good marriage (though not a perfect one) and that John is still experiencing deep and real grief at her loss, despite feeling as if he needs to move forward.

I had a few quibbles. There were moments where John’s grieving mother-in-law seemed a little too much like a caricatured villain of the piece. But the author came back from that brink, to my mind, by acknowledging the emotional effects of grieving the loss of a child and portraying the mother-in-law as clinically depressed and perplexed by her own actions. Also, (minor spoiler alert)

The book contains some obvious sequel bait, but it wasn’t too obtrusive. In fact, it made me want to go out and buy the other books to read the other characters’ stories, which I promptly did.

Overall, this was a nice, engrossing book with some emotional depth and a few flaws.

Love is the Drug is a thrilling YA science fiction book with a great romance. The only reason I think it’s not, technically, a “Romance Novel” is that in a romance novel I care more about romance than anything else. In this book, I cared about the romance, but really I just wanted the main character, Emily Bird to be happy, because that girl is MADE OF WIN.

This book is set five minutes into the future. It’s just barely science fiction. Emily Bird is a Good Girl. She gets good grades at her prep school, and she has “good” (relaxed) hair, and she lives up to her mother’s high expectations, which include dating an ambitious boy named Paul despite having a huge attraction to Coffee. Coffee is the school drug dealer. He sells pot, Adderall, and some hallucinogens to other students, all of whom love his product but look down on him for his own lack of ambition. He’s also a chemistry genius.

Emily, Coffee, and Paul are at a party which involves students networking with influential adults upstairs and Coffee dealing downstairs. Emily finds herself in a car with Paul, clearly drugged despite having no memory of having taken anything. Next thing she knows she’s in a hospital with shadowy memories of being interrogated. She’s free to go – but under constant surveillance, and into a world which was stricken by a deadly flu pandemic while she was in the hospital. Emily’s mother (Carol) encourages her to stick with Paul and trust the military guy who’s shadowing her. Her friends want her to avoid scandal and keep fitting in. But with the world rapidly spiraling into a devastating crisis, Emily cuts her hair into a short Afro, makes some new friends, and adopts the name Bird. Emily may have been content with safety but Bird wants justice.

I loved this book for the conspiracy thriller angle that kept me turning the pages and because Bird was such an engaging character. It was very easy to relate to her need for approval and to her desire to play it safe and make everyone around her happy, versus her need for truth. I also loved it that as Bird matures she begins to accept the adults in her life as flawed human beings. Her uncle, who Carol hates and who Bird adores, really is adorable, but Carol has a point in that her uncle is kind of lazy. Her mom is often cruel and abusive but she’s also desperate to see her daughter achieve the kind of safety that can only come from being socially and economically powerful. It’s a coming of age story in the best way – not a whiny, angsty way but one that involves a character growing to become someone more powerful and more compassionate.

Another great thing about this book is the way it handles the flu angle. This book definitely has an aura of apocalypse about it, but it keeps things subtle and realistic. There’s no vast breakdown of society. People live their lives as normally as possible with the hope that all this disruption will be temporary. At the same time, people who are very scared are suddenly a lot more willing to trade freedom for safety, which manifests in political ways (the president takes on huge levels of power) and personal ways (the students are willing to stay at their school full-time because they are told they will be safe there). The flu virus has a long incubation period which is what makes it so difficult to contain – a nicely realistic touch, and one that adds to the menace since no one can tell who is or isn’t contagious at any given time.

Bird is in a triangle of sorts, but it’s not a love triangle. From the opening pages Bird intends to break up with Paul and when she does break up with him she doesn’t run straight into a romantic relationship with Coffee because she recognizes that her whole situation is crazy enough that romance has to take a back seat. However, Paul is a presence she can’t shake because of his link to the conspiracy. Meanwhile Coffee is a pretty awesome romantic hero who will do anything for Bird. Coffee tries to influence Bird just as much as her mother does. The difference is that Bird’s mother tries to mold Bird into the person that her mother wants her to be, while Coffee tries to encourage Bird to be the most authentic person she can be – the best version of her own true self.

In the best romance, there’s a combination of the lovers loving each other unconditionally and the lovers helping each other be the best possible versions of themselves. I never quite bought into the drug-dealing thing, though. While I loathed Carol, I did think that her not wanting her daughter to date a drug dealer had a sensible ring to it (although Carol was less concerned with how dating a drug dealer would feel for Bird and more with how it would look to everyone else).

This is a diverse cast in a lot of ways (race, class, gender, sexuality). Bird is Black and her parents have worked their way into the upper class socially speaking. Her uncle and his son are more blue collar. Coffee is Brazilian and looks Caucasian. Bird’s new best friend at school, Marella, is a lesbian. There are a lot of scenes that involve the ways race, class, gender, and sexuality affect daily interactions and life-long outcomes in terms of micro-aggressions and vast systemic life and death in-equities. The slight science fiction angle brings the dynamics that people live with today into sharp focus.

While the most dire angle is that, as Bird observes early on, the rich don’t seem to get sick, one of the most painful moments involves Bird and Marella trying to buy dresses and the shopkeeper assuming that Bird doesn’t have any money because of her new haircut. It’s a sharp reminder that when Carol tells Bird to dress and wear her hair in specific ways, she’s being a jerk to her daughter but not without some reason – she knows that Bird will be perceived one way with an afro and casual clothes and another way with relaxed hair and more business-like clothing. The difference between Carol and Bird is ultimately that Bird is willing to live with those consequences while Carol is not.

The romance in the book is solid and satisfying. At one point, Bird, her uncle, and her nephew become noticeably tense as they prepare a Thanksgiving dinner because they know Carol will judge the turkey and find it inadequate. Coffee picks up on this and offers to improvise a “Brazilian Style Turkey:” Carol can’t say he did it wrong if she doesn’t know what it’s supposed to taste like. It’s a clever and tactful (and rather tasty) solution, and very telling that Coffee so quickly realizes what the problem is and how to help Bird solve it.

Still, I cared much more about Bird than I cared about Coffee. The book is tightly focused on her attempts to develop some personal power and autonomy, and her attempts to solve a conspiracy, and the romance is more of a side plot than a main focus. This book isn’t being marketed as romance so that’s a feature of the book, not a bug.

A | BN

This Help a Bitch Out request is from Dorothy, who is looking for an American historical:

I’m looking for a historical romance from the 1980s. It was set in turn-of-the-century Chicago, and the heroine’s father owned (I think) a very successful brewing company.

The hero is the company lawyer, and the Dad will do anything to get these two together.

The problem is that the heroine is in love with another man, who is naturally a scoundrel but she can’t see it. What I loved about this one was that it wasn’t “wallpaper historical,” and it dealt with some cool aspects of the robber-baron-like class of folks in Chicago.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I remember this author wrote a handful of really good books with a distinctive vibe, but I can’t remember her name for the life of me!

This sounds really cool – do you recognize this book?

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Christine. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is Christine's review:

I grabbed this book when the sign-ups came out because I’ve enjoyed Ms. Cullinan’s writing in the past—her story Let it Snow is something I’ve reread a couple of times, even though I don’t generally reread things. It’s a sweet, pretty low-angst Christmas story with interesting characters, and I really enjoyed the Minnesota backwoods setting. Fever Pitch didn’t work quite as well for me, but I still found it eminently readable and gobbled it up.

First off, I have to say that I like the cover; it caught my attention in a positive way with its utter lack of shirtlessness and groping. The geeky guy playing air guitar led me to expect something upbeat and funny, though, and what Fever Pitch delivers is actually a lot of young adult drama and angst and not so much youthful whimsy. To be fair, the cover copy definitely alludes to the main characters having serious problems that they’re hoping to escape in college, but I still clung for a long time to the expectation of quirky joie de vivre.

Despite being somewhat caught off-guard by this disparity between cover and content, I had a hard time putting this book down. There’s so much at stake for the protagonists, and that transitional time between the end of high school and the end of the first year of college is really compelling to observe, whether in fiction or in real life. Also, I went to a small liberal arts college, so reading Fever Pitch was kind of like attending an alumni weekend, I guess. I enjoyed getting to know the campus alongside the protagonists, and I learned about the Minneapolis skyway system, which was cool.

That being said, this book is not for everybody—by which I mean that it feels like it was written with a very specific readership in mind: basically, music geeks in their late teens. Make that, privileged music geeks in their late teens who are attending lovely, small liberal arts colleges right now. There are so many pop culture references that I fear the book will have a very short shelf life (so to speak). I’m only vaguely aware of most of the music the characters reference (and only because I have a young teenager myself), and I imagine that in three years the huge love the characters feel for songs like “Titanium” will not resonate, even with college-aged readers.

The sheer amount of stuff happening in Fever Pitch also made it hard for me to get deeply involved in the story. There’s a lot of slice-of-life stuff where the story’s momentum kind of dies, there’s a ton of introspection, there’s lots of angst and drama, there are many pages devoted to secondary characters (who all eventually kind of ran together for me) and the reappearance of characters from the first book in the series….

And on top of all that there are many lengthy descriptions of music-making: jam sessions, lessons, rehearsals, auditions, composing, arranging, performances. Am I forgetting anything? Probably! I know that there are readers out there who are going to love this book so hard because of all the music stuff, but personally I found myself skimming those sections. (And I actually did spend a lot of time in practice rooms during college, so although I’m no musical genius, I can relate at least a little to the college musician experience.) In this respect, Fever Pitch felt sort of like fanfiction to me because there is so much self-indulgence in the choice to include All The Things and then add a musical score, too. I was happy to take the trip with the author, but I didn’t really feel like it was written with the average romance reader in mind, and I didn’t ever get terribly invested in the protagonists or their relationship.

I’m not sure how I feel about the portrayal of the young gay person’s experience here. Do that many straight high school guys have sex with gay guys out of desperation and/or self-loathing and then bully or assault them? I don’t know. I have a hard time believing that Giles had sex with such a substantial portion of the male student population at his high school, but maybe I’m naive. Also, Giles was put in the hospital twice by gay bashers during high school. His parents are written as being very loving and supportive–and they do basically swoop in and save all the gay kids at college towards the end of the book. But that leaves me wondering why those same parents seem to have basically just sat on their hands for years while their kid was getting bullied/ostracized/assaulted all through high school. The dad is a pediatrician; you can’t tell me the family didn’t have the means to take their kid out of school and send him to a private school, or homeschool him, or move to a whole different place if that’s what it took. I mean, if even a tiny fraction of what happened to Giles happened to one of my kids, I would intervene in a way more dramatic fashion than Giles’ parents apparently did. I had a much easier time believing in Aaron’s narcissistically negligent parents who at least behave consistently throughout the book.

Anyway, Fever Pitch kept me reading despite editorial and content choices that seemed questionable to me, and even though it made me feel sort of old and out of touch. The prose is engaging and the setting is very well developed, which seems like one of the author’s trademark strengths.

This HaBO is from a More Different Dorothy from the Dorothy of this morning, and this More Different Dorothy is looking for one heck of a contemporary romance:

I need help looking for an “old” contemporary (oh, sweet irony) Harlequin, released between the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The book was given to my mom by a college professor, in the hopes that she’d be inspired to read more English texts and increase her vocabulary. Instead, it sat in our living room for years, unread and unloved, until I found it shortly after my 10th birthday. By then, this literary gem had lost its front and back covers, as well as its first few pages. My sister and I always meant to find out what book this was because the hero’s one-liners were so damned funny.

But I digress. Here’s the plot:

A man with a thirst for vengeance (truly, which contemporary romance hero doesn’t have this?) kidnaps the pampered daughter of his business rival. They hide out in a secluded cabin, battling their growing desire and a fever (no joke, the hero developed a fever after getting nicked by a rusty nail). In a confusing mix of lust and Stockholm syndrome, the virginal violet-eyed heroine cared for him rather than flee.

In the book’s most memorable scene, the heroine tries to cop a feel while helping the hero change his shirt. He mockingly offers her sex, which of course, offends (and intrigues) the virginal heroine (yep, this was published while the virgin trope was popular in contemporary romance). To which he said something like, “What’s the big deal? Sex is nothing more than a lot of heavy breathing and unrestrained passion.”

20 years later and those words still make me giggle.

After this scene, I can remember just a few details of the book. The heroine’s father was a bonafide villain; he had no qualms with killing to succeed in business. Yet most disturbing was how he treated his daughter. Based on what he yelled when he discovered the pair in their love nest, it was clear that in his mind, his daughter had become his deceased wife. The father’s overprotectiveness/possessiveness led him to chase away all of her potential suitors, while making her afraid of physical contact with strange men.

With the hero’s support, the heroine reconciled with her father in the end, but on the condition that he turn himself in.

I remember seeing the Harlequin logo on the top pages, indicating this was one of the short novels Harlequin released every month. I think the hero was named Justin and that the title was “Wild Justice”. Yet recent searches directed me to a Harlequin historical, which is not the “Wild Justice” that I’m looking for.

Can you HABO and help me find one of my favorite romance novels? Thanks!

Somewhere, RedHeadedGirl is making grabby motions with her hands and doesn’t know why. Do you recognize this book? Help a Bitch Out!

A | BN | K | ARe | iB

I enjoyed Gone Girl when it came out, so when the book became part of the zeitgeist I was thrilled. I was more than a little baffled, though, when people started saying that the book/movie was anti-feminist or even misogynist.

I get where some people were angry that Amy lied (twice) about being raped because false rape claims make people cynical about sexual assault. But, I think the fact that Amy also faked her own death and left a really compelling trail of evidence for a fake murder leading toward her husband because she decided she hated him (mostly for being a lazy, boring douche) kind underscores the point that she was crazy as fuck.

For all her crazy, Amy was also weirdly likeable, and almost every woman who I’ve talked who has read the book or seen the movie has commented that while Amy is clearly an awful person, she’s also sometimes on point, as in this oft-cited paragraph:

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much!

And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)

The thing is, I didn’t find Gone Girl to be anti-feminist at all. In fact I think that by becoming a book read by people  who don’t normally read, it changed the nature of how psychological thrillers feature women, and I’m delighted by that. Because the thing is, Amy is not a victim.

I read a lot of thrillers and mysteries, and while women’s roles in them are evolving, they are still frequently the victims. Even when a thriller features a strong female protagonist, a cop or a lawyer let’s say, she is almost always solving the murder of another woman. Mysteries and thrillers are built upon the bodies of fictional dead women, and if that women is white, petite, and young all the better. Just like when these crimes happen in real life, this particularly blend of victim (the blonde with the toothy smile) gets the most air time, lures in the most consumers.

You can justify this as saying that it’s reflective of reality: women are often the chosen victims of serial killers and other monsters who feature heavily in mystery fiction, and women are more often the victims of sexual violence, which is also a staple of the genre. Thrillers also frequently feature the death or disappearance of children to win readers with the same chill factor.

The reason that children make such compelling victims in fiction is that we assume they are inherently innocent. That’s why it’s hard to read about or watch a child get injured or die (fuck you, Game of Thrones, fuck you). The female murder victims of mystery fiction are often pushed under that same innocence umbrella. They are often young,  attractive, and if they are not of middle or higher class, it’s made clear that something made them special, that they did not belong where they were. The reader empathizes with them.

The reality is, the poor, the itinerant, people of color, the mentally ill, and members of the LGBTQIA community are far more likely to be victims of violence, murder and sexual assault than affluent white woman, but these people rarely make it into mainstream thrillers. So it’s hard to justify all the dead bodies of women as representative when they aren’t.

Gone Girl subverted this trope. The novel’s twist wasn’t Amy’s murder, but the fact that not only was Amy not a victim, she was dangerous, too. And it made me realize that there were several books that embrace the theme of the dangerous powerful female character that I loved. If you’re curious, here are some recommendations:

I recently read The Good Girl by Mary Kubica ( A | BN | K | G | ARe | iB ). The thriller centers around the abduction of the daughter of a powerful Chicago judge. Parts of the novel takes place during the period of time of Mia’s disappearance and others take place after. The hook is that after her traumatic rescue, Mia cannot remember the months she spent with her abductor. I won’t ruin it for this audience, but the book is not the typical female-in-jeopardy situation.

A | BN | K | ARe | iB

Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell series (the first book is Heartsick) ( A | BN | K | G | ARe | iB | Scribd ) features a female serial killer who is super smart, super scary and is playing mind games with a detective she once captured and tortured. That series is phenomenal and irreverent and so readable, so if you like thrillers at all, go get it right now. Go. I’ll wait…. Back now?

A | BN | K | ARe | iB

I’m not suggesting that Gone Girl inspired all these books–in fact So Much Pretty preceded it, but by entering the public conversation and garnering so much media attention, it brought these other books to the spotlight. It gave them a table at Barnes and Noble.

Unfortunately I can’t reveal a lot of what happens in these other thrillers without ruining them entirely and I desperately want you to read them because they are so good. What they do have in common is that the woman who should be the victim isn’t–at least not in the expected way. The woman in these books–petite, white, and attractive all–have a more dynamic story to tell. They are in their own right a little bit dangerous.

I hope that this trend in psychological thrillers continues. I like fiction where you can’t expect the expected, and some of that comes from casting women as the body in the ditch. To me the killer in the basement is far less scary than a book that makes you question what the fuck is going on here? and by moving female characters out of the “victim” space and into something more complex and explored, it gives female characters more credit, makes them more human. The “innocent” blonde haired, blue eyed Midwestern girl gone missing will always draw readers — hell, it draws me — but I want my fiction to do more, to be a little bit more, and to give me the unexpected. I want more than the body in the woods. I want my female characters to be a little bit dangerous too.

Shadowshaper is a freaking incredible novel. It’s a bit outside my reading tastes because it’s urban fantasy and it’s for teen readers, a vein of YA I haven’t read much of. But it’s also got a huge portion of my catnip because it includes so many different cultures so fluently, and because so many characters in the story were individuals, with unique voices, and there was plenty of dialogue for them. I could have listened to everyone in this story talking to each other for about 500 more pages.

Sierra has just started summer break from school and she’s working on a mural in her neighborhood. Though I don’t think the book ever reveals who asked her to paint it, her grandfather’s friend Manny is urging her to finish it already. As she’s working on the painting, she notices that the mural on the adjacent wall seems to be fading, that the expression of the man painted on the wall, a man she knew, seems to be changing, growing angry or sad. Then she sees a tear fall from the eye of the man in the mural and she knows something is wrong, and that something is really, really weird.

Sierra lives with her parents and her grandfather, who had a stroke and is in the third floor apartment where she and her mother can take care of him. Her grandfather, Lazáro, hasn’t been able to speak since his stroke, but he has brief, intense moments of lucidity where he talks to Sierra, and tells her to look for someone who was in her classes at school:

Lázaro shook his head. “The boy Robbie will help you. Ask him for help, Sierra. You need help. I can’t … It’s too late.” He nodded his head, eyes closing again. “No puedo, m’ija. No puedo.”

“Robbie from school?” Sierra said. “Abuelo, how do you even know him?” Robbie was a tall Haitian kid with long locks who had shown up midyear with a goofy grin and wild drawings covering every surface of his clothes, his backpack, his desk. If Sierra had been the kind of girl who gave a damn about boys and their cuteness, Robbie the Walking Mural would find himself somewhere on her top-ten list.

There are so many details that make up the world of this story, in both the fantasy sense and in the “no, really, this is really Brooklyn, for real” sense. I keep catching myself typing them out and have to delete because they’re not germane to the review despite being awesome.  For example, the casual bilingualism of the characters, the way Spanish and English flow together in Sierra’s world, and how that blended language is one part of Sierra’s Afro-Latina heritage, which informs so many of her thoughts, her language, her personal style, her art, and her own choices.

The fact that Sierra paints murals is a terrific parallel to how much vividness is in this story. Even without the magic parts – I just realized I haven’t even gotten to them yet – Sierra’s world is so colorful. There are characters from a huge range of cultures, and they all live alongside and above and below one another in their neighborhood apartments.  For example, two of Sierra’s friends are a lesbian couple, one of whom is a ferociously talented spoken word poet and rapper, and Robbie is Haitian, with long locks and incredible artistic talent. Sierra’s Brooklyn (as opposed to many other representations of Brooklyn in popular media) is as colorful as her murals and as Robbie’s backpack.

I mentioned that I loved the way the characters talked to one another, and I could go on and on about the spoken dialogue between Sierra and her friends. I particularly loved her best friend Bennie, who is Sierra’s opposite in fashion and style, but who absolutely has Sierra’s back. When Sierra asks Bennie for help in finding some information about a person she’s just learned of, Bennie’s reply made me laugh. Plus, as you’ll see, the dialogue is also mixed in with other conversations – no one in this book is quiet, except maybe for Robbie:

Bennie sounded excited. “That cat you asked me to check up on? Doctor Wick?”

“Yeah.” Sierra walked quickly to the other side of the scaffolding, cradling the phone with her shoulder.

“¡ Oye!” Manny yelled from the ground, where he was laying down some more primer. “Esafety first, nena! And we’re about to break for lunch, so let me know what you want me to order from Chano’s.”

“Okay, Manny!” Sierra waved at him. “What about him, B?”

“He’s a Columbia professor. Or was.”

“How’d you find out?”

“This amazing thing they have now. It’s a web and it’s mad wide. Like, worldwide.”

If I listed all the challenges and issues this book addresses, this review would be really, really long. The fantasy plot reflects the larger, insidious problems of the real world, too, though I can’t really get into details or analysis without spoiling the book. There’s a LOT that Sierra and her friends deal with on a daily basis, from the gentrification of their Brooklyn neighborhood and the high priced coffee shops taking the place of shops they loved, to the threat of police violence and the casual, deeply established racism of family members. But Sierra and her friends, and Sierra by herself, deal with it and then move on. It’s painful, but it’s not the only thing going on. It’s not like she can dismiss racism as easily as she would push her hair back over her shoulder, but dealing with it is part of her daily life, and she learns how to meet each challenge with strength because the other stuff she’s facing is even bigger. And weirder.

Unfortunately that’s where this book didn’t work as well for me: the world building of Brooklyn and of the cast of characters was incredibly good. The fantasy plot and the events therein weren’t as strong, and the more I thought about the story after I finished it, the less it held together.

For one thing, I think the challenges of the fantasy world that Sierra learns about were surmounted too easily. (I’m trying not to spoil the story so forgive my vagueness.) One of my notes says, “Did she fail or fall down enough?” That may not be a fair question, and I’m still debating myself, but my initial impression was that Sierra figured out the magic of her world and the possibilities of shadowshaping so easily, it was disappointing.

There were characters who were introduced who didn’t do much of anything, like her father, who was in one scene, I think, or her godfather, who only shows up when Sierra needs a ride somewhere in a hurry. I wanted more of her family, though I appreciated that her friends were also her family and therefore as important to her as her mother and brothers. Her brother and mother, in particular, have major roles in the plot, but they sort of show up, do a thing, then fade into the background, then step forward for a moment, then fade again. Sierra’s friends, in contrast, were always vivid, always talking, always a plot in and of themselves, as opposed to the maneuvered pieces that were her family.

Moreover, Sierra’s desire to protect her family is part of what moves her to the final showdown with the big bad element of the story (how’s that for vague, huh?). I couldn’t figure out why it was only her family that was vulnerable. What about her friends’ families? What about Robbie’s family? Where are his family? Where does he live? Where does he go when he’s not showing up to move Sierra forward in the plot, telling her to run away from whatever bad thing has appeared, or explaining things to her so she’ll understand what’s going on? If he was in school with her, he must have been local, but he didn’t seem to be as much as Bennie and the rest of Sierra’s friends were. Robbie just showed up a lot, then disappeared, then showed up again.

Robbie is not as fully developed as a character as Sierra’s friends are, and it seemed to me that his lack of development may be caused by the fact that the fantasy parts on the whole weren’t as strong as the real-world parts. Because Robbie is very much part of the fantasy world, he wasn’t as multi-dimensional as the others.

There was also a LOT of time given for people to explain things to Sierra. The action would go go go and go some more then it was time for someone to explain the details of something, or reveal more information. In one particular plot element, Sierra instantly trusted someone she just met, then became suspicious of them, then trusted them again after a long explanation from that person – and there was no other evidence to suggest that that person was on Sierra’s side except that character saying so repeatedly. Once that person was back on Sierra’s side, and as a character she did undermine one of the tropes of action fantasy in a way that made me smile, the question of “How did they know where I was?” is never addressed. If that character didn’t spill the beans, who did? How was Sierra’s location revealed?

I loved the incredible richness of the world in which Sierra lived. I wanted the fantasy plot to be as vivid, but for me, the more I thought about it, the more the fantasy elements faded like the murals in Sierra’s neighborhood. While the world building of the neighborhood and the characters around Sierra were seamlessly constructed, the plot had holes for me that caused some characters to become more like plot devices, and I noticed it more because of the contrast between them.

But when I was reading this book, I couldn’t put it down, and I devoured it in one afternoon. I found myself re-reading parts when I went to check my notes and highlights for this review, a sign that a re-read might be required.  Despite my disappointment with the construction of the fantasy elements, the rest of the book, especially the characters, the language, the use of food (do NOT read this while hungry, y’all), the depth and complexity of the cultures within Sierra’s world and all the dialogue (all of it. It’s so good.) make this story very, very much worth reading.

Today is “Prime Day” on Amazon, and there were many ads promising great deals. For me, it’s a big ol’ “meh,” because many of the things I was most interested in were sold out before 8am ET, and I’m not super excited about what’s left.

There are, however, Kindle device deals, so if you’ve been thinking of getting one, here are the sales:

• The 6″ Kindle Touchscreen with Wifi and Special Offers (not the Paperwhite) is $30 off at $49 today only.
• The Fire HD 7, with a 7″ HD Display, Wi-Fi and Special Offers, is $60 off at $79 today.
• RECOMMENDED: The Kindle Fire TV Stick, which puts prime instant video and streaming on your tv, is also on sale: $15 off drops the price to $24.00. We have two of these, and we really like them, especially since the remote that comes with it is very easy to use.Normally the Fire Stick is $40, and it was on sale last fall as a preorder for $20. $24 is a pretty good deal, especially if you don’t have a smart tv with apps on board, and would like to watch Amazon streaming on your television.

12:00PM EST Sales

I’m posting these sales preemptively so people can snap them up ASAP. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t list the sale price beforehand. (Update: Prices!)

• RECOMMENDED: Little Humans by Brandon Stanton. I loved Humans of New York, and this is essentially the same thing but with super cute children. (48% off at $9.29)
• Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris (51% off at $12.87)
• Divergent Series Complete Boxed Set by Veronica Roth (72% off at $15.58 – WOW!)

These deals will also probably expire or sell out soon, though. Are there any other Prime Day sales that you were excited about? Please let us know in the comments!

Worth the Risk

Worth the Risk by Claudia Connor is 99c! This is the second book in the McKinney Brothers contemporary romance series. The first book, Worth the Fall ( A | BN | K | ARe | iB ), has been a huge hit with the Bitchery in the past. These books are often emotional, and be forewarned that this particular title has a heroine who works with children who are victims of trauma. It has a 4.2-star rating on Goodreads.

Two hearts locked away . . . Hannah Walker spends her days coaching children through injury and trauma, one therapeutic horseback ride at a time. She knows all too well how violence can change a child and leave scars that never heal. It’s easy for her to relate to the kids; what isn’t easy is the thought of facing her own harrowing past.

Millionaire playboy Stephen McKinney could use a little coaching himself. Five years ago he encountered his most horrible nightmare—and the nightmare won. No matter what he achieves, nothing can make up for that awful night . . . or so he believes.

Both desperate for a second chance . . . Stephen is used to getting what he wants. And he wants Hannah. So when she turns him down, he’s intrigued. What he doesn’t know is that her secrets will lead him to a place he never wanted to go again . . . to a side of himself he’s tried to forget . . . a side that would scare Hannah away from ever loving him. Now his only chance to win her trust is to bare his soul, risking everything he tried so hard to protect.

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The Spider

The Spider by Jennifer Estep is $1.99! This is the tenth book in the long-running Elemental Assassin urban fantasy series. The thirteenth book is due out later this month. In this installment, readers finally get the origin story of the series’ heroine. Though the events in the book are supposed to be a prequel, I’m unsure if this can be read out of order. Maybe the Bitchery can help.

How did I end up in a career where I always have blood on my hands? Well, let me tell you a story about an assassin who thought she could do no wrong. . . .

Ten years ago. A blistering hot August night. I remember like it was yesterday. The night I, Gin Blanco, truly became the Spider. Killing people is what I do best, especially now that I’ve honed my Ice and Stone magic. But back then, I had yet to learn one very important rule: arrogance will get you, every single time.

This particular job seemed simple: murder a crooked building contractor with ties to ruthless Fire elemental Mab Monroe. My mentor, Fletcher Lane, had some misgivings, but I was certain that I had the situation under control . . . right up until I exposed my weaknesses to a merciless opponent who exploited every single one of them. There’s a reason assassins aren’t supposed to feel anything. Luckily, a knife to the heart can fix that problem, especially when I’m the one wielding it. . . .

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My Highland Lover

My Highland Lover by Maeve Greyson is 99c! This is a historical time travel romance and is the first in the Highland Hearts series. Readers loved how the author handled the actual concept of time traveling, though some found the hero and heroine’s interactions a little silly at times. Have you read this one?

Maeve Greyson unleashes a thrilling tale of magic and desire as a feisty Southern gal falls into the arms of a rough-hewn Highland chieftain.

As the proprietor of a homeopathic store in rural Kentucky, Trulie Sinclair knows that her neighbors think she’s strange—but they have no idea how strange she really is. Trulie was born in Scotland in the thirteenth century to a line of time-traveling Highlanders. When Trulie’s grandmother convinces her to return to their homeland,Trulie jumps back in time, right onto the powerful chest of Gray MacKenna. Just as his steely good looks send ripples through her body, their fierce attraction will send ripples through the ages.

After his parents murdered, Gray is consumed by thoughts of revenge. As the new chieftain of the MacKenna clan, he has reason to believe that there’s a traitor in his midst, and nothing—not even the bonny lass who suddenly drops from the sky—can distract him from his single-minded pursuit of the culprit. But when Gray learns that this sassy beauty possesses gifts beyond the sparkle in her eye, he allows his gaze, and his heart, to linger. While he hunts for the murderer, Gray finds in Trulie a precious companion—and a timeless love.

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Men Explain Things to Me

RECOMMENDED: Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit is $2.99 at Amazon. I loved this collection of essays. The first essay is the author at this fancy academic party. She mentions her area of academia to a male attendee and he promptly begins to explain this particular academic book that deals with the same topic, not knowing the author is the one who wrote said book. Some of the essays are funny and some made me cry. But I highly recommend it and hope it gets price matched.

In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.

She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!”

This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf ’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Flo. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is Flo's review:

“…[M]y baby isn’t going to keep me up at night.”

“Spoken like a delusional first-time mom-to-be. No newborn sleeps through the night.” Claire eyed the [curtain-less] window. “Do you sew?”

“Not even a button on a blouse. If something rips, it ends up in the thrift store pile.” She stared Claire down. “What? We each have our talents. Can you drive tacks with a Glock at twenty yards? Disassemble and reassemble a Walther PPK in under a minute?”

In my local public library in the children’s section, there are computer terminals in the shelves where you can look up books in the catalog. Above the one I used most frequently this past year was this book, My Basmati Bat Mitzvah. It sticks out on the shelf because the spine is bright yellow and the writing is curly and blue, not to mention that words like “bat mitzvah” jump out at me already.

I kept picking up the book and putting it back after looking at the cover because I thought it might be too middle-grade for my reading tastes. Why I didn’t open the book and read a few pages is beyond me but I suspect it has something to do with being in the library with my kids, whose attention spans fragment in sixty different directions when confronted with the possibilities of the library: video games?! Movies?! DVDs?! Comic books!? Manga?! AND BOOKS LIKE REGULAR BOOKS OH MY GOSH.

Eventually I had three moments to inspect the book yet again and read a few pages. Y’all. Y’ALL. THIS BOOK IS ADORABLE. I finished it and hugged it and made happy sighs and Good Book Noise®. There are so many little moments that are memorable and beautiful, and oh, it’s just terrific.

Tara Friedman is in Hebrew school preparing for her bat mitzvah. Her father is Jewish, and her mother is Indian American, and converted to Judaism before Tara was born. Confronting her bat mitzvah causes Tara to confront a lot of things about herself that she isn’t sure she understands entirely. Is she Jewish? Is she something else? Does she want a bat mitzvah at all?

The simple plot summary would be: Tara isn’t sure about her faith or her bat mitzvah. But questioning both of those things means that a lot of things happen. There’s a horrible girl in her Hebrew class named Sheila who says she’s surprised Tara is even considering having a bat mitzvah at all since she wears an om pendant. Sheila then tells Tara that because her mom is Indian American, she’s not really Jewish and neither is Tara.

Tara gets in an actual fight with Sheila for saying that, which made me like Tara immediately. She’s taking no shit from Sheila.

The arrival of a bat mitzvah means a lot of planning, studying, and change for any Jewish kid. For Tara, it creates a lot of changes, some of which she doesn’t think she’s ready for. As it says in the cover copy, “it feels like her Jewish side is taking center stage,” and with all the preparation and lessons, she worries that maybe she’s turning her back on her Indian side.  Her best friend in her apartment building, a boy named Ben, seems like maybe he has feelings for her, and she’s not really sure what to do with that change, either. Everything is changing around her, and she doesn’t know what to do.

Mixed inside all those changes are a lot of cultural challenges that were always there, like the somewhat prickly relationship between her mother and her father’s mother, and the also strained relationship between her mother and her aunt, Meena Auntie, who brought Tara’s mother to the US from India and raised her. Tara’s father’s family is culturally Jewish, and her mother’s family is Punjabi, and Tara isn’t sure how she’s supposed to balance those two massive cultures without letting anyone down. She has no idea, as she puts it, how to be Indian and Jewish at the same time.

When Tara accidentally ruins the sari her mother brought with her from India, the only remaining item of value that she has from Tara’s great grandmother, she’s horrified. She’d wanted to wear it to her bat mitzvah, a plan her mother disliked immensely, along with Tara’s suggestion that her bat mitzvah openly acknowledge her dual heritage. Tara’s mother is the source of the title of the book, as she rejects the ridiculous idea of a “basmati bat mitzvah.” Tara’s gran, her father’s mother, helps her figure out a solution, and Tara begins to realize that she’s in charge of her life, and has to figure out solutions to her other problems, big and small.  Tara figures things out, but it’s not an easy process, and along the way she learns that not knowing the answers is ok.

I loved a number of things about this book. I loved Tara’s narration – it’s first person, for those of who you dislike that – and I especially liked that Tara was trying her hardest to be a good person while struggling with trying to balance people’s expectations and her own happiness. She also learned that ignoring a problem makes it worse, and that friendships change.

I also appreciated the honesty of the scene where she’s at Sheila’s bat mitzvah, and notices that everyone in Sheila’s family resembles one another. Tara says:

The thing about being mixed is that nobody ever says I look like this or that relative. And since I don’t have any brothers or sisters, nobody looks like me, either. I look at Mum and Daddy and I try to see a resemblance, and it’s as if I’m some kind of third species, not related to either of them. …

I’m kind of like a vanilla milkshake with one pump of chocolate syrup – compared to white people I look brown, and to brown people I look white. [My hair is a color] so boring, there’s not even a crayon for it. Not even in the sixty-four pack.

Tara struggles with feeling like she doesn’t belong at an age when belonging takes on huge levels of importance. She’s not sure if she believes in God; she’s not sure if she’s entirely Jewish. She’s the only Jewish person she knows with a statue of Ganesha in her room – which the lovely Sheila calls a “false idol” – and she’s the only girl she knows who spices up her popcorn with a hidden jar of chaat masala that she hides in Ben’s kitchen for their weekend movie night.

Speaking of, I also loved all the food. Do not read this book while hungry. There’s a scene where her aunt hosts a Diwali potluck, which Tara calls “Diwalikkuh” because the holidays were close together, and the descriptions of what they ate nearly made my eyes roll back in my head. Tara also really likes spicy food, and feels disoriented when she’s eating too many things that are bland to her palate. Food is a crucial part of both of her cultural identities, and there’s plenty of it in this book.

During the potluck, Tara mentions a few of the differences between her Punjabi family and the Bengali Muslim family whom they invite for Diwali – “the only place in the world where Diwali is celebrated with a vat of matzoh ball soup. Gran makes it for all special occasions… [and] twice in November — once for Thanksgiving and once for Diwali, because Meena Auntie loves it so.” (And of course Meena Auntie doctors the soup with hot pepper and onion when Gran isn’t looking.) Tara is very happy that her aunt is friends with her classmate Aisha Khan’s family because according to Tara, “Mrs. Kahn makes the best Bengali sweets in all of New York.” Tara is all about the food in this book, and that made me like Tara even more.

But the best part for me was Tara’s bat mitzvah speech, where she draws together everything that happened during the book and identifies the significance of all the choices she’s made. She figures out who she is, and what she wants, and how she wants to be, while acknowledging that the culture and heritage she received from her mother’s parents, who are both deceased, are deeply important to her, as important as those of her father’s mother, who is a near-daily part of her life.

Tara’s memories of her grandfather also help her identify her spirituality, which happens late in the book so I’ll drop it inside a spoiler tag, even though it’s not really a spoiler:

I wanted more about her feelings about Ben, her best friend who seems to have romantic feelings for her. She seemed ambivalent most of the time, and I wasn’t sure if she had feelings for him or if she didn’t know what to do with him or with herself and thought she did. That relationship could have been more developed.

I also wish that there had been more exploration of Tara’s relationship with her parents, especially her mother. Her mother is most often distant, and sometimes seemed very rigid and insecure, and Tara seems to accept that, as she does her mother’s awkward relationship with Meena Auntie. But occasionally her mother is warmer, such as one scene where Meena Auntie and her mother are decorating Tara’s hands and feet with mehndi (henna) for her bat mizvah. Tara’s mother draws stars of David on her hand while her aunt covers her arm with swirls and vines, and then they switch, giggling and talking to one another. I loved that – and I wished more about the complexity of Tara’s relationship with her mother had been part of the story. Her father, too – all the other characters were tremendously vivid, especially Tara’s rabbi. Her parents seemed less so by comparison, and I wished for more about them.

Even with the relative lack of interaction with her parents compared to the rest of her family, I liked Tara, and I really liked this book. I’m glad it was hanging out above the catalog terminal, and I’ll definitely smile every time I see it on the shelf. I haven’t read many books that speak so clearly and emotionally about how one person can blend two very strong and different cultures. The fact that Tara figured out how she could do that while being true to herself is the best part of the story, and made the ending so satisfying.

I almost never live-watch TV. I’ll DVR shows and watch entire seasons at a time, but I make a point of watching Major Crimes as soon as it comes on. This show sort of snuck into my favorites list and it’s been worming it’s way into my heart ever since.

A spin-off of TNT’s The Closer, Major Crimes was more or less designed to wrap up some story lines after Kyra Sedgwick left. Instead it took off under it’s own steam and eclipsed it’s predecessor in terms of quality.

Major Crimes is a murder-of-the week TV drama, but it’s smart, and it’s cast is stellar. Mary McDonnell plays the boss, Captain Sharon Raydor, of the LA police department’s major crimes unit. Let’s all take a moment here to appreciate the fact that the show runners at TNT decided to make a 63 year old woman the boss. In fact, it hasn’t been since Boston Legal that I’ve watched a show that actually acknowledged the fact that a person achieving a certain level of success in their profession likely wouldn’t in their mid-thirties. Raydor’s two most senior detectives, and leaders of the team, are Louie Provenza (GW Bailey) and Andy Flynn (Tony Denison) who are 70 and 65 respectively. Bailey and Denison have such an amazing rapport that it’s worth watching the show just to see them lovingly snark at each other.

So while it’s addressing ageism and sexism, Major Crimes decided “fuck it, let’s tackle all the diversity, ya’ll.” Three of the regular ensemble cast are people of color (played by Michael Paul Chan, Kearran Giovanni, and Raymond Cruz respectively), and they are not token characters. Each one of them is fully developed in his or her own right, and we get more layers to the characters as the show progresses.

And one of the reoccurring cast members, Assistant Chief Taylor (Robert Gossett), Raydor’s boss, is a black man. Raydor’s adopted son, Rusty (Graham Patrick Martin), is gay. As I write all this out, I can see where someone who has never seen the show might worry that it plays like an after school special, but it doesn’t. In fact I was probably more than half way into the first season before the fact that this show is actually really fucking diverse even hit me. Major Crimes has remarkably talented actors playing interesting characters, and those actors just happen to represent a larger snapshot of the population than we normally get on TV.

Major Crimes is also really smart and engaging. There are some story lines, like Rusty’s arc, that continue season to season, but a majority of the show is a murder/major crime of the week. The show is reflective of actual events, without borrowing as heavily from the news as Law and Order did. It deals with hate crimes, with gang violence, with public shootings.  It addresses the fact that rich white people get precedence over poor people of color when the shit hits the fan. That fact makes some of the characters, namely Julio Sanchez (Cruz) so pissed off that it threatens his career. The audience experiences the drama along with the detectives, often from a deeply personal POV, which heightens the adrenaline.

For all that, it’s not a violent show. We don’t actually get much in the way of graphic violence. Much of the mystery is built around unwinding the tangled threads left behind after a crime. Sometimes we know the killer, but not the motivation. Sometimes there is a person in jeopardy and the clock is ticking.

The show tackles tough subjects too, but doesn’t pretend to solve them. It takes a season for the squad to warm up to Raydor, who transferred from Internal Affairs. She’s aloof and cold, initially; she is not a character prone to mothering her staff. Ageism and racism are issues the characters experience and work though. While the team eventually finds cohesion, and generally seems to like each other, they aren’t found family. They are people from diverse backgrounds who work together and might not always like each other a ton, which is basically every workplace I’ve ever been in.

One thing Major Crimes doesn’t do is vigilante justice. I can’t tell you the number of crime shows that I’ve watched where the hero takes justice into his own hands. Hell, that was the premise for Justified. At one point Sanchez lets his anger get the better of him, and while we as the audience felt he was justified in beating the shit out of someone (even cheered it on), he’s seriously in trouble for it. He faces disciplinary actions. His peers and teammates don’t condone it, they don’t respect it, and they’re a little pissed that he put them all in a negative situation.

This anti-vigilante stance doesn’t just apply to not beating the shit out of assholes who desperately deserve it. When the bad guy is caught, or about to be caught, the characters have to go around it the right way for things to be admissible in court. This is one of the few shows I’ve seen–I’m looking at you The Mentalist–that deals with the “well, we can’t do this or it never goes to trial.” The hook with The Closer was that Kyra Sedgwick’s Brenda Johnson would get the suspect to confess via her intense southern accent and/or manipulation. Initially Major Crimes sticks to that theme a little–do NOT fuck with Mary McDonnell–but even as it grows into it’s own show, it shows that 98% of cases are closed in the interview room. Bad guys are not caught by bullets but by really solid police work and sometimes forensic accounting.

Clearly, I love this show. I love the ensemble cast and the fact that even minor characters, like the ME, are original and fresh, and everyone is a little bit dysfunctional and snarky. I will own up to the fact that the Rusty story line is a little crazy. He’s like the team’s Kid Friday, just hanging out in the squad room playing chess, like you do, but I love him so I’m okay with it.

If you’ve ever liked a procedural crime drama, if you’ve occasionally binged on Law and Order, then try Major Crimes. I promise, it’s worth it.

I’m back from San Diego Comic-Con and once again I spent part of the convention going “NEVER AGAIN” and most of the convention going “CAN’T WAIT FOR NEXT YEAR!

Because this year I was doing the convention with kids in tow, I didn’t make it to many panels, but of course I made it to the Outlander panel. I can’t let my Bitches down, now can I?

I don’t have a press pass or a decent recorder, so I’m just giving a few highlights here.

There’s a great breakdown of the panel at Digital Spy and you can see the panel in full on YouTube or below (assuming it doesn’t get taken down).

Last year I saw the first ever Outlander panel in a fairly small room. It was pretty gratifying that this year it was in Ballroom 20, and the room was packed with devoted fans. The panel was relaxed and fun, and the people on the panel seemed to have genuine affection for each other.

The panelists were Diana Gabaldon (author of the book series), Sam Heughan (Jamie), Caitriona Balfe (Claire), Maril Davis (Executive Producer) and Ronald D. Moore (Executive Producer). I very much wished that Tobias Menzies could have attended because I’d have loved his perspective, but as it was it was a nice combination of viewpoints from actors and people behind the scenes.

A few highlights:

The moderator asked Ronald D. Moore what we can expect from Season Two.

Well, we’re going to be picking up the story in Paris and trying to stop the Jacobite Rebellion. The first season was more of a courtship but now the characters are a married couple. We’ll return to Scotland in the second half of the season.

Recreating Paris in the second half of the 18th century was a huge production challenge but all the departments stepped up and as you can see for the footage we have new sets, new costumes – it’s a completely new show. So we’re very excited to have you guys watch it!

 

On the challenges of staying true to the books while also doing an adaptation that works in terms of the medium, time, and budget:

Well, as you know, the second book is more complex than the first one in a lot of ways. It moves around a little bit more, it’s more political, it’s historical, it has the Jacobite Rebellion. There’s a lot more parts to this second book and as a result adapting the book was more complex and took more work in the writer’s room.

So yes, we made changes, we veer, we but just like Season One, we’re always trying to get back to where the book was, we’re trying to do our very best to deliver that story that we know you love. If there’s a certain scene that we know you love or a certain line, we’ll try to get back to that place even if it’s not in the same place as the book. I’m proud of the team and I think it works well.

The moderator asked: What are you most excited about for this new season? What are you excited for the fans to see?

Cat: Oh, well, there’s so much!

Sam: She likes working with the good-looking French actors.

Cat: Well, you know…it makes a change.

Then she sort of elbowed Sam in the side and they leaned on each other affectionately and we all died. DIED.

And then there’s the glimpses of the costumes we’ve gotten so far:

At this point the moderator broke out a bottle of scotch and the cast played a drinking game with two variations.

The first was that the panelists had to take turns reading lines submitted by fans without smiling. I know our readers here at the Pink Palace will be pleased to know that Sam read Duncan’s line about “grinding your corn” to Diana.

In the second round, they read lines, some of which were from 50 Shades of Gray. If you’ve never heard Sam utter the phrase “quivering mass of female hormones” you should, it’s quite unforgettable.

The moderator asked Diana if she’ll be doing another cameo, but Diana said she’s to busy writing. She will be writing an episode in Season Two.

Moderator: Cat, you have some new highly attractive gentlemen that you’re working with this season. What’s it like for you to go to work every day?

Cat: I dunno, I keep saying to Ron and Merrill, why must you do this to me? Especially when they speak French. That’s awesome.

Sam (bitterly): They read books, listen to music, smoke cigarettes, drink red wine…

Audience member: What would you sacrifice for love?

Sam: Everything!

Audience dies again.

Sam and Cat talked about how they use humor to get through tough scenes and tough days. When asked if Jaime would consider going through the stones for Claire, Sam turned to Catriona and said, “I would do anything for you” at which the audience died AGAIN and Cat pretended to barf. They have a sort of a brother/sister vibe with a lot of teasing which is so fun to watch.

Towards the end of the panel the moderator revealed that Sam had won “Best Leading Male” in an E! Online contest. Since the runner up was Hook from Once Upon a Time), Sam had to don a leather jacket and a hook. Cat did the eyeliner honors and added a mustache and a beard. And now my life is complete.

And here’s the gag reel we were treated to – there’s lots of laughing and spit!

And now I cannot wait for the next season. How about you?

From Cyranetta comes this amazing playlist of animated shorts from Gobelins School of Communications for the Annecy International Festival of Animation in Paris:

From Lines and Colors by Charley Parker: “Each year, the Goeblins students refresh my faith in the state of 2D and hand-drawn animation.

This year, in keeping with the theme of the festival, the animations celebrate pioneering women in the field of animation: Alison de Vere, Claire Parker, Evelyn Lambart, Lotte Reiniger and Mary Blair.”

Cyranetta called the playlist, “a small series of specialness” and I agree completely.

I hope your weekend is many small moments of specialness.