Stolen by Kelley Armstrong

About ten years ago, I walked into the my local library and saw a book on the new-books table entitled Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. It was about a woman who was a werewolf. It was horror and I never read horror. But I had started writing a werewolf romance when there weren’t too many werewolf romances around, at least that I knew of, so I picked it up from the library.

I got sucked right into the story. Bitten wasn’t an entirely successful read for me. I skimmed a lot of the second half, and I was a bit frustrated by Clay and Elena’s relationship. Still, it made an impact.

A while later I tried Stolen and couldn’t get into it. But then I got it in my head that I really wanted to read Armstrong’s Otherworld series, especially after loving Exit Strategy and hearing people rave about all her books. So I picked up Stolen again.

I know I found the prologue difficult. It’s about someone who is doomed, and it’s a little disturbing, as it’s meant to be. But I kept going this time and I found Stolen a satisfying read. I’m excited to read the third book in the series, Dime Store Magic.

Anyway, Stolen is about a psychopath who collects people of the otherworld: werewolves, witches, shamans, sorcerers and half-demons. It’s an introduction to a whole array of paranormal humans who weren’t present in Bitten. It’s kind of like Bitten was very focused on werewolves living and hiding among humans, whereas Stolen opens the world right up.

Elena meets witches, vampires, and half-demons. At first some of them gather together to try to address the threat from this man who is collecting these individuals. But then Elena herself is kidnapped—stolen.

(I didn’t actually remember that Jeremy could communicate with Elena in dreams, but then I guess I’ve forgotten a lot of Bitten.)

It was a bit difficult at times to watch how Elena is treated by a group of quite terrible people. It’s nothing she can’t survive, but it isn’t easy. Nevertheless, she keeps fighting, she meets others, including a twelve-year-old witch she wants to save, and I’m right in there cheering for her to escape and make the villain pay.

I’m a Clay fan too. At least I am in this book. But we’re also introduced to the witch Paige, and I’m looking forward to learning more about her in Dime Store Magic.

I realize this is more a ramble than a review, but hey.

Amazon pricing in Canada

I’ve been following, to some degree, the fight that broke out over the weekend between Amazon and Macmillan.

There have been a series of posts at Dear Author. There’s a long thread at Making Light.

While there are all sorts of opinions, there does seem to be a rough split down a certain line, with readers and Amazon on one side, and writers/publishers/editors and Macmillan on the other side.

But I suspect people outside the US aren’t so enamored of Amazon. At least here in Canada, I’ve found the customer service of Amazon.ca inferior to Chapters online. Plus the Kindle books are marked-up rather than discounted. For example my book Feral is sold for $6.40 rather than $5.50 at MBaM. Both American dollars. At least, I’m assuming the Kindle prices are all American dollars, because while Amazon.ca is selling Kindles, I can’t find Kindle books on their site.

If I look at something like Larissa Ione’s new book Ecstasy Unveiled. Kindle is $7.59, Kobo is $6.29, while paperback is $8.99. An older Larissa Ione book at Kobo is $7.59, so the above Kobo price may not last.

These books are US$6.99 at ARe and Fictionwise, which isn’t too different than Canadian $7.59. (I chose Ione’s books mainly because I keep meaning to read them!)

There’s no $9.99 limit. Stephen King’s latest offering is on sale for $11.99—which may be the limit. I should add that print books have always been more expensive in Canada than the US. In large part because of the dollar, which is now fairly close to par.

Anyway! My point, and I do have one, is that Amazon is hardly offering us Canadians excellent prices for ebooks and doesn’t even offer ebooks on the Canadian site as far as I can tell.

Start Me Up

This my second Victoria Dahl book, after Talk Me Down which I reviewed here. I find Dahl’s voice incredibly engaging. Somewhere between the humor, which really works for me, and the sympathetic characters, I’m pulled right along.

Lori Love is the town’s mechanic. Her mother abandoned her and her father when she was young, and her father was in a coma for years before he died, leaving Lori unable to complete university and saddled with a ton of debt. While this might seem to be a setup for lots of angst, Dahl doesn’t really write angst as such. She has an almost breezy style, but that doesn’t prevent me from really feeling for the characters, and there is depth to these stories.

Quinn, on the other hand, doesn’t have a particularly heavy backstory. He’s an architect, and isn’t terribly good at relationships, mainly because he gets lost in his work—and because he hasn’t been involved with the right women. Lori Love is a good friend of his sister Molly (the heroine from Talk Me Down), and they agree to have a fling.

It’s actually pretty hilarious how they agree upon this, which is better read than described by me.

While this is going on, there’s a mystery as the sheriff decides that Lori’s father’s head injury, from which he never recovered, was not likely an accident. At the same time, people are becoming inordinately interested in land her father bought years ago, including people Quinn works with. And this all gets tangled together in the second half of the book before Quinn and Lori get their happy-for-now.

There’s a third book in this contemporary series, Lead Me On, and I can’t wait to read that one next. I liked Start Me Up just as much as Talk Me Down, so I have high hopes for the next one.

There have been a bunch of reviews:
Smart Bitches C
Dear Author (Janet) B-
AAR (Abi) B+

After reading these reviews and comments, I should stress how much I adored the somewhat baffled but completely lovestruck Quinn.

Didn’t make it

I didn’t make this month’s TBR Challenge run by avidbookreader, even though I had my book picked out: Carla Kelly’s Beau Crusoe. Unfortunately, I didn’t read nearly as fast as I hoped to this past week, and I’m not good at reading two books at a time.

So next month’s challenge, which is Hero in Pursuit or Virginal Hero, must be read earlier, so I am prepared and able to post something!

Review of Selkie Island

I got a very nice review of Selkie Island at Long and Short Romance Reviews. 4.5 books :)

This is the kind of novella you’ll enjoy from beginning to end. The characters are fantastic, the plot is wonderfully developed…

Thank you, Fern!

The King’s General

Well, my first read of 2010 was a rather slow-going 1946 novel by Daphne du Maurier, The King’s General. I read it mainly because of the time period. It’s set during the English Civil War. To my mind—though I am totally not an expert in any way—it gives a feel for the era, and also for the horrors of the land being split in two by the war. So I’d recommend it for its historical feel and detail, if you like reading novels for those reasons.

The narrator is one Honor Harris who begins life as the spoilt younger daughter of a large, well-off family. She falls in love with her brother’s widow’s brother, Richard. Richard goes on to play a pivotal role in the war in Cornwall as the king’s general.

The book has a large cast of characters, with Honor’s and Richard’s extended families, and the people are all well rendered. My biggest problem with the novel is that I didn’t particularly like most of the people. Honor is…okay, but Richard is a rather awful if compelling man. And I got a little tired of her love for him, even if it made total sense in the context of the novel.

I don’t think The King’s General reached nearly the heights of popularity that Rebecca did. Well, I guess none of her books did. In Rebecca, too, I didn’t particularly like the people, but the book was more of a pageturner, if not as historically interesting. I wouldn’t say the “heros” are similar exactly, but my dislike of them feels similar. Though at least Richard had a bigger task he was trying to accomplish for his country and king. (I don’t mean to imply that the stories/plots are the same.)

My favorite book of du Maurier’s is Frenchman’s Creek. There you have interesting historical detail and likeable characters. But perhaps that’s a bit of an anomaly for her books. I will, at some point, pick up another du Maurier, though I’m not sure what one.

TBR2010

Keishon aka avidbookreader is running her To Be Read 2010 challenge, starting January 21. I joined this last year, and while I didn’t do particularly well in meeting the reading deadlines, I nevertheless think it’s a great idea. I have a number of books at home that I’d really like to get to, and I’m hoping I do a lot better this year.

You can join in the fun here.

Book Utopia

Book Utopia hasn’t necessarily liked everything I’ve written, but she always gives a thoughtful and interesting review. At the end of each year, she makes some best-of lists, and I was honored to see that Morag of Selkie Island was her favorite heroine of 2009.

…Morag made me cry. Her loneliness was a physical thing, bleeding from every word. She made me believe in water shifters, and more, she made me care, where water shifters tend to leave me cold. The juxtaposition between her innocence of the world and her weariness of it gave this novella depths others could only hope for.

Not only that, Selkie Island was first runner-up in her favorite novellas of 2009.

I can’t describe how happy I was to see Selkie Island get this kind of attention :)

Books read in 2009

I still didn’t read enough books, though more than last year at 41. As usual, I like to break them down.

Historical 1
Nonfiction 1
Mainstream 3
Science Fiction/Fantasy 5
Romance 31

Within romance, I read a lot of gay (15), historical (10) and contemporary (11) romance, as well as some paranormal (4) and romantic suspense (5). I actually thought I’d read more paranormal and RS.

I tend to set aside books I’m not enjoying, so most of these were good ones. However, I’m going to list the ones I absolutely enjoyed the most this year. I’m not going to give the exact grades, because they’re not that meaningful. Clearly a C is different than an A+, but I didn’t give out any A+’s this year even though I had as great a reading year as last year. I tend to give a lot of B+’s, even though I loved some of them more than others.

Mexican Heat by Laura Baumbach and Josh Lanyon
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
Goddess of the Hunt by Tessa Dare
Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
The Dickens With Love by Josh Lanyon
Home by Marilynne Robinson
The Edge of Impropriety by Pam Rosenthal
Sea Witch by Virginia Kantra
White Knight by Josh Lanyon
The Price of Desire Jo Goodman
Don’t Look Back by Josh Lanyon
Out of the Blue by Josh Lanyon
Talk Me Down Victoria Dahl
Black Silk by Judith Ivory

Again, I read a lot of Josh Lanyon—who was very prolific this year, lucky me. My favorite may well be The Dickens With Love. I read three books by Virginia Kantra and thoroughly enjoyed them all, though Sea Witch probably was my favorite there. I discovered Tessa Dare and Judith Ivory while I revisited authors like Ellen Kushner and Pam Rosenthal who I hadn’t read in a while. For variety, I read some excellent mainstream/historicals, namely No Great Mischief, Home and The Book of Negroes.

I’m looking forward to reading in 2010! I think I’ll even write a post of what I intend to read in 2010, and look at a similar post I wrote in 2009 and see if I did read the books I had meant to read.

Black Silk

Well, I feel like I’m really late in reading this one, mainly because there was a discussion at Racy Romance Reviews and dueling reviews at Dear Author recently. And I couldn’t read them, because I was still reading Black Silk.

I’ve heard about it over the years. I had started another Judith Ivory book way back when, can’t remember which one though the opening scene was at a railway station? In any event, it didn’t engage my interest. So I was rather expecting that I’d start Black Silk and put it down after a chapter or so.

But, no. In large part because of the hero, Graham. I thought Ivory did an amazing job in making Graham compelling, flawed, sympathetic, attractive and just plain interesting. He kept me reading right through the book. I’m actually hard-pressed to put my finger on why I found him so riveting. He was more complex a person than most romance heroes. It’s a trick to walk that line, in making a hero complex and yet having him make sense, in a fictional sense. Yet Ivory made me believe in him, and love him.

But the novel repelled me at times, and I actually spent weeks, not days, reading it, unwilling to put it down completely, but obviously not quite the page-turner some books are. It’s a long book, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but it did seem to meander in the middle. However, what most repelled me was the character Henry, the heroine’s dead husband and the hero’s cousin who half-raised Graham. What an absolutely awful, distasteful man—who was very present in the book. There were a couple of times when I just didn’t want to read further because I did not want more of Henry. I wasn’t entirely sure if this was supposed to be my reaction. The hero, and especially the heroine, saw Henry in a much better light than I did. But that was actually a strength in Ivory’s writing. That these characters would forgive Henry or at least understand him in a way I could not.

Finally, I was fascinated by the shape of this romance novel. Written twenty years ago, when I didn’t read romance, it makes me wonder if Black Silk was unusual in its time—obviously since it’s risen to be a classic it must be in some way unusual. But was its shape unusual? The hero and heroine spend a lot of time apart. For the majority of the book, the hero is in a relationship with his mistress, and this takes up quite a bit of page time, which I don’t think would happen now. This less strict romance shape, for lack of a better description, allowed the story to be told in a way that fascinated me. (That said, it probably also allowed me to put the book down more easily. I’m used to having the tension between the hero and heroine much more consistently in the foreground.)

As for the heroine, Submit, I was not nearly as taken by her. I ended up thinking she was all right and not knowing entirely why Graham would be in love with her. Plus she does something near the end, related to her dead husband, that I found quite ugly. The very end gives me some hope for their HEA though, sudden as it was.

I’ll need to try another Judith Ivory. And read those reviews and discussion. I expect they’ll discuss things I haven’t touched on or even thought about.