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.