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A Dragonling’s Family: Call for First Readers!

2024-04-01T00:57:58Z

I did it! I finished editing A Dragonling’s Family! Before the end of March (barely)! Now I just need to get it to first readers. Blurb:

When Vaiyae’s dying friend, disowned by her family, asked him to raise her offspring, he could not refuse. But he had some misgivings, because Vaiyae is a human/crow-shifter, and his friend—and her unhatched child—are dragons.

Daneah, a new witch in Zendzu-ksto, and her raccoon companion offer Vaiyae their aid, as the difficulties of being a single parent are amplified by his daughter being of a different species. As Vaiyae and Daneah spend more time together, romance stirs between them.

But their fragile family is threatened when the dragonling’s uncle roars into Zendzu-ksto and demands custody of his niece. Can the crow-shifter stop a dragon from taking Vaiyae’s adopted daughter?

And if Vaiyae can—does he have any right to?

This is a polyamorous MFM fantasy romance, with one plot thread being the romance and the other being a custody battle over a baby dragon. Story includes:

Trans man and crow lord/fren protagonist
Crow lord brooding (his adopted egg)
Adorable baby dragon antics
Adorable murder of crows antics
Murder of crows vs dragon! (spoiler: it’s fine, the crows are fine, nobody panic)
Hard-of-hearing sign-language-using witch and her animal companion/interpreter
Dragon shapeshifter who can’t be arsed to shift into non-winged forms properly because why would you want a body that doesn’t have wings?
Both friends to lovers and enemies to lovers because polyamory means not having to choose tropes either
Bisexual protagonists because what is monosexuality? we just don’t know

If you are interested in being a first reader, please contact me via email (my gmail address is ladyrowyn) / comment on this post/ DM on Mastodon/ etc and I'll send you a link privately. Comments are (double-checks) screened if you want to leave an email address in the comments.

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Alien Peacelords: Call for First Readers!

2023-04-15T21:44:54Z

I finished initial edits on Alien Peacelords! Now I need first readers.

Why have a midlife crisis on Earth when you can have one among the stars?
With faster-than-light space travel, flying cars, and biological advances that eliminated most diseases, Fali-tan is more technologically advanced than Earth in every respect save one: computers. Fali-tan's are no better than punch-card-programmed mainframes, and had not improved in generations until the discovery of their long-lost cousins on Earth. Now,But after discovering their long-lost cousins on Earth, Fali-tan's population is eager to achieve their own Information Age.
After her third post-release layoff from a major gaming studio, Coriolis Washington is ready to try something new. Like, going-to-another-world new. And whatever her friend's lurid romance novels might say, Cori knows perfectly well that Fali-tan needs programmers to write code -- not sexy women to fill out harems.
As the leaders of their people, the peacelords of Fali-tan's Peacelord Union will go to great lengths to attract skilled Earth developers to their nations.
... and the shocking, overwhelming physical attractiveness of humans is the least of Coriolis's charms to rival peacelords and ex-lovers Dhavoran and Tyvalon.

This is a science fiction MFM polyamorous romance. Elements include:

disaster bisexuals
aliens who are pretty much just humans in funny colors
aliens who find humans Super Sexy, Especially the Female Protagonist
character with social anxiety who actually gets professional help
friends to lovers to enemies to lovers, because apparently even my alien men can't manage to have a relationship without screwing it up horribly at least once
trans protagonist but it's no big deal to literally anyone so it only comes up briefly

If you are interested in being a first reader, please contact me via email (my gmail address is ladyrowyn) /comment on this post/DM on Mastodon/etc and I'll send you a link privately. Comments are screened if you want to leave an email address in the comments.

Thanks!

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Angel’s Grace Release!

2023-01-31T23:31:12Z

I was looking at my blog today and realized that I'd never mentioned the Angel's Grace release! It came out on January 10 and I went to visit terrycloth on January 11, so I did even less talking-up-the-new-release than usual. Oops. Here it is! This is pretty much just the newsletter announcement, which I did remember to send out.

Angel's Grace

The Demon’s Series: Book 4

If Bright had known how good it was to be a reformed demon, it would have reformed thousands of years ago.

Not that reform has been trouble-free for it, granted. Its presence in the demon hunters’ guild had been so divisive that Bright had to leave. Now Bright and its friends — Sunrise, Raven, and Mercy — hunt demons as an independent team in a foreign nation. When they stumble upon a strange new kind of demon, asking the guild for assistance means risking another backlash.

On a more personal level, Bright knows its three teammates would like to forge a romantic relationship with one another. Even its teammates know that they want a romantic triad. But for some reason, they can’t just do that. Humans are incomprehensible.

But the most worrisome issue is that Bright knows that some of the demons of Anesh have been working together to stop Bright. They’ve attacked Sunrise once, and Bright expects them to try again. Or to attack one of its other allies.

Its concerns are justified—

—but their plan is more ambitious — and far more deadly — than anything Bright imagined.

Author Commentary

I’d hoped to publish Angel’s Grace in December, but I see that I wisely put “December or January” down for my anticipated release date in my last newsletter. Right on time!

This book concludes the arc begun by Demon’s Alliance. While I expect to revisit these characters at some point in the future, this installment leaves everything in a satisfying place. It will be a few years (or more) before I get back to them.

In other writing news, I have two completed drafts to edit (Alien Peacelords and A Game to You) plus one mostly-completed draft to finish writing (A Dragonling’s Family). All three of them are in new and separate settings. Alien Peacelords will be my next release, later this year.

Books by Other Authors

Anyone who knows me knows that I have not done much reading for the last several years. I have, however, recently finished M.C.A. Hogarth’s "Haley and Nana" series. I love these stories: charming, healing, gentle, and wise. They are an excellent length: short enough to read quickly and long enough to develop a vivid cast and an engaging world. Do take a look.

Happy reading!

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Books by Other People

2021-07-25T17:44:55Z

I finished Spells, Snow and Sky by CoffeeQuills a few weeks ago. It’s a polyamorous paranormal romance novella, between a human woman, a yuki-onna (“snow woman”, a Japanese spirit), and a witch.

For the most part, it’s a fluffy, low-stakes story, with a single PoV character: Sky, the human. I’ve thought about writing a paranormal romance on occasion, and one of the things that deterred is that, while I like the dramatic, angst-filled background full of adventure, actually writing the adventure takes a tedious amount of time away from the romance. Spells, Snow and Sky addresses this by supplying occasional hints about past drama and adventure, and skipping the whole part where you write it all out. It’s original fiction, but it reminded me of fanfic in this respect; I felt like I was reading a romance about characters that had their adventures in a different book. I thought this was an extremely clever way of getting right to the romance!

As is often the case with me and single-POV-romance, the romance didn’t engage me that much. But it was a delightfully atmospheric story, immersive and wintery.

After reading that, I remembered that I’d never finished O. Westin’s Micro Science Fiction, a collection of tweet-length (144 characters, from before Twitter’s doubling of the character limit) micro fics. So I finished it finally. If you use Twitter, you’ve probably seen O. Westin’s work before, as microsff. These are bite-sized and delightful as individual works. I preferred to read them slowly, because I found devouring several dozen at a time made them lose their individual weight. It’s a good collection and I recommend it.

Next, I bounced off of three different books, which I am going to complain about here because I want to whinge and also I don’t want to pick up these books again because I’ve forgotten what they’re about. But I’ll put DNF in the titles and author names so they won’t come up in vanity searches.

Also, important note: I bounced off all three for reasons that had nothing to do with the skill of the author. It was purely an “I am not having fun because this book is Not For Me” reaction.

I have a huge number of books on my Kindle where I have no recollection of why I got them or what I was thinking when I did. Many of them were free or cheap from Bookbub deals, and others were recommended.

CytheraDNF by JoDNFGraham: I think this is SF erotica/romance, with the main pairing being M/F. Which is to say “the first chapter had an M/F pair and the blurb implied the book would be about them.” The female protagonist is a “sacred courtesan” and the male protagonist is a ship’s captain in a military fleet.

If you want to read erotica and you like the “happy prostitute” trope in erotica, I imagine this book would work for you. I expect that I picked it up because SF romance that isn’t “alien warlord” style is hard to find. I do not care for “happy prostitute” as a trope. It’s not that I object to sex work so much as to the depiction of sex work as a fun sexy romp where every client is young and conventionally attractive. I feel like fiction about sex work is mostly moralizing in one direction or another -- either sex work is cruel, brutal, and soul-destroying, or it’s beautiful and sexy and uplifiting. Neither depiction feels convincing or interesting to me.

Anyway, I made it through the sex and BDSM in the first chapter, found the second chapter started with the female protagonist “testing” candidates by groping them while asking questions, went “yeah, not in the mood for this much erotica” and put it down.

LordDNFof the LastDNFHeartbeat by MayDNFPeterson

I know why I picked up this one! An author I follow on Twitter tweeted excitedly about the third book in the series being released. So I followed the link, discovered that it was the third book, went to look for the first book, and discovered I’d already bought it.

So I opened the book, and remembered that I’d already bounced off it once.

Oh.

I gave it another try. It did not work out.

It’s an M/M romance where one male protagonist, Mio, is very femme, to the point of “mistaken for a girl by rando dude who proceeds to sexually harass him.” The other male protagonist, Rhodry, is a tall strong alpha lord with magical powers. Mio is also poor, oppressed by his family, forced into crime against his will, and begs Rhodry to rescue him from his family/life of crime.

So the setup comes across as “exactly like a stereotypical M/F romance except I changed the pronouns for the female character.” I hate this trope SO MUCH. It manages to feel simultaneously misogynistic (“I’ll write an M/M romance because vaginas are gross, ew”) and queerphobic (“but I want to keep every single heteronormative quality in my characters so one protagonist is stereotypically feminine in EVERY WAY and the other protagonist is stereotypically masculine in EVERY WAY.”)

It’s the “every way” that really gets to me. If any of the qualities were swapped -- made the femme man be the alpha lord, or made the super-masculine guy short, or SOMETHING to indicate that the author didn’t think one’s physical qualities absolutely determined one’s status, standing, identity, psychology, and preferences, it would help.

Anyway, the author is trans and I am confident she is neither queerphobic nor misogynistic. She just has the misfortune of liking tropes that make my skin crawl. I tried to persevere.

Then Mio’s mother coerced him into mind-raping a random man for political power, and Rhodry came home to find a dead boy on his driveway and his reaction was along the lines of “this is so tiresome and inconvenient,” and I deleted the book from my phone.

If you don’t mind some grimdark (it’s a romance, it has an HEA/HFN, so presumably they rise above the grimdark eventually) and enjoy the above tropes, I think this would be a good book. What I saw of the dynamic between the two protagonists was good, and it’s well-written. I feel like some interesting stuff was going to happen later in the book. There was a suggestion that Mio might be intersex, which could be cool -- I seldom read intersex protagonists. But I don’t think I’m ever going to be in the mood for the tropes involved here.

NiceDNFDragons FinishDNFLast by RachelDNFAaron

No idea why I got this book. It’s fantasy + SF in the Shadowrun style: Earth several decades in the future, plus “magic returned to the world.” The main character is an unambitious young dragon whose mother got mad at him because he’s not sufficiently cruel and ambitious. She locked him into a human form and exiled him to the “Detroit Free Zone”, where dragons are killed on sight.

I got through the first fourteen pages. There was a prologue that engaged me, and then I met the exiled dragon and his sister and his mother and kind of just hated everything. There was a letter from his uncle that was amusing, though.

The mother is physically and emotionally abusive, and at some point I may be like “sure, I can put up with the protagonist being tortured periodically by his mom” and be able to read this. But. Not in the mood. NEXT.

The Fall of Lord Drayson, by Rachel Anderson

An M/F Regency romance. No idea why I picked it up. But I actually finished this one! It was short and mediocre.

So it started off with the male protagonist, an earl, evicting the female protagonist, the impoverished teenage daughter of a vicar and a seamstress. I don’t usually like hate-at-first-sight books, but I was entertained by the banter between the two as the earl tells the girl that she and her widowed mother have to find some other place to live because he’s selling the property where they presently reside.

The earl then rides off in the rain, falls from his horse, and knocks himself senseless.

At this point, I thought “oh no, he’s gonna wake up with amnesia and she’s gonna lie to him about how he promised she and her mother would never have to move, or something like that. Ugh.” But I kept going.

The female protagonist rescued him, somewhat unwillingly, from the road. When he regains consciousness, he has amnesia, and the female protagonist somehow or other decides to tell him “you are my servant!”

...

This premise is so mind-bogglingly repugnant that I don’t know how it managed to get on my Kindle. I can only assume it was free on Bookbub and that I only read the 20 word Bookbub blurb before downloading it, and the Bookbub blurb didn’t manage to encompass the awful premise.

But the premise was so terrible that I decided to keep reading just to see if the author could manage to justify a romance ensuing from this.

Short answer: no, not really.

The romance requires copious amounts of suspension of disbelief, not only for the ridiculous amnesia subplot and for the earl deciding not to hold it against her, but for the complete lack of objection by literally anyone else in the story to the eventual marriage of the two. The characters never feel like a plausible part of their period. The first half of the book has the amnesia subplot, and if you suspend disbelief it’s still cringe-inducing but more-or-less works. The last half of the book is tedious, saved only by the too-briefly-sketched subplot of a romance between the girl’s mother and a wealthy friend of the family. (The latter two would’ve been made far more appealing romance protagonists than the actual protagonists.) The earl’s mother and sister make every effort to promote a romance between the two protagonists, with no explanation whatsoever as to why they think this is a good match. The male protagonist stops being a POV character for the second half, for no reason except, I guess, to promote suspense about what’s going to happen next? When this is a romance and we all know how it ends? So tedious.

Granted, I did finish the book; it had good qualities. The characters were endearing except when they were doing the asinine things required by the plot. There are some nice romantic scenes. It’s mercifully short.

It did not make me want to throw it across the room?

I think mostly it hit the increasingly small spot on me between “awful stuff is happening and I don’t want to endure this” and “everything is fine, so I’m bored.” I am an extremely difficult audience. -_-

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India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, by Ramachandra Guha

2021-05-30T19:23:45Z

I was reading this book for a Very Long Time -- since September 2020, to be exact -- and finally finished it a week or so ago. This is a unique case; I don’t believe I’ve ever spent nine months reading one book before. And it really was about nine months of reading one book, not "I read it for a week and put it down for a few months and then picked it up again, repeat until complete.” I put it aside for a few weeks to read Shadeslinger, and for a few days here and there to read a few other books. But for the most part, I read a few pages of India After Gandhi every day from September 2020 through May 2021.

So it’s not a book that pulled me along, where I felt compelled to keep reading and find out what happens next. But despite this (or maybe because of it), I love this book. It is fascinating and informative and packed full of interesting details.

I purchased it due to a confluence of factors:

It was on sale through Bookbub, for $1.99 -- a particularly deep discount for an ebook that normally retails at $14.99 (and is well worth $14.99, I might add)
It is a history of a non-Western country
Written by a native of that country
In English
With serious attention to scholarly detail
Intended for popular consumption

It is incredibly rare to stumble across a book that combines all of those last five features. I’m not saying they aren’t out there, but when I’ve looked for stuff like this, I’ve never found it before. So that was exciting.

The volume has citations for everything, and much of it is primary sources -- eg, “the author went to archives and read the original, unpublished correspondence of various historical figures.” It's this attention to detail that justifies the sticker price; it's a book that required years of research and diligent fact-checking. And it’s written in plain English rather than designed to impress other scholars, so it’s easy to understand. It’s thorough about the period that it covers, 1948-2016 (plus some background from 1947 and earlier), covering political, economic, military, and communal issues. So much of it is stuff I had no idea about. Like Indira Gandhi declared “The Emergency” in 1975 -- effectively martial law, where she cancelled elections -- and then actually ended it in 1977 to return India to democracy.

Much of it feels remarkably similar to American history in certain respects. India is a nation committed to religious freedom, and struggling with that commitment. Minority religious groups suffer from oppression and outbreaks of violence (on both sides, but the minorities get the worst of it.) India has indigenous populations that want to be self-governing, while India is determined to keep the nation united. India’s political dynasties are more obvious and powerful than America’s (the Indian National Congress has been headed by a member of the Nehru family pretty much since inception) -- but America has the Kennedys and the Bushes and the Clintons; it all feels familiar.

Other aspects are so foreign to my experience that I can’t help wondering why they’re so different. The Indian National Congress went from holding over 75% of seats in 1984 to holding under 30% in 1996. In the USA, we fight rabidly over a few percentage points one way or another. It’s all but impossible to imagine either of those majorities or minorities in my country -- much less for one party to go from one extreme to the other in just twelve years! I realize that some of it is because the USA’s particular electoral policies virtually guarantee a two-party system. But even so, the USA’s politics are so team-based that it’s hard to imagine us having 40%+ of the population that’s willing to switch to a new team. (I will be honest, I envy this fluidity).

Anyway, despite the length of time it took me to finish this book, I never wanted to quit. It is a fascinating glimpse into a part of the world I don’t know much about. I am glad that I read it, and a little sorry that I’ve finished it. Guha has written several other history books; I might just pick up another one.

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Frederica, by Georgette Heyer

2017-02-22T02:08:35Z

I read Frederica over the weekend. This is a romantic comedy set in 19th century England. Like the other Heyer novels I read, I found the comedy worked better than the romance. The orphaned 24-year-old female protagonist has charge of her three youngest siblings (12, 16, and 19), and one thing I particularly liked about the book is that the male protagonist's relationship with the two youngest is not an afterthought. He doesn't cultivate their affection or put up with them for the sake of Frederica. It would be more apt to say that the youngsters cultivate his affection and he finds himself powerless to resist them. Having found myself on occassion wrapped around some small child's finger and doing the most tedious things because they looked all hopeful at me, I can relate. :D The protagonists are both pretty likeable, and the male protagonist exerts himself to become a better man over the course of the novel -- but not because Frederica actively reforms him, which is another point in its favor. I like characters to redeem themselves rather than be coaxed to redemption by some outside force. The comedy in the novel is more understated rather than laugh-out-loud absurd, as in some of her other books. I'll give it an 8.

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Brood of Bones, by AE Marling

2017-02-16T13:17:35Z

I haven't written a review in a long time. This is because I haven't finished reading a book in even longer. Brood of Bones is the first book I've finished in 2017.

I started several other books, and have arguably reduced my to-be-read-pile by a few because I threw books out of it. I don't know. I might give some of the books I gave up on quickly another chance; one was "this is a gay romance and right now I really want to read a book with some girls in it and not ALL BOYS ALL THE TIME". But I was pretty grimly disappointed with the start of some others.

Anyway, I feel like I was being exceptionally judgy about book during this time, so Brood of Bones probably deserves bonus points just for making it past the "meh" barrier and getting me to read it to the end.

This is the first of the Enchantress series, which is currently five books. I don't know if Marling plans to release more, but it looks like all of his writings to date have been in this setting (though not this series), and with overlapping characters.

I didn't like it as well as the other two books I've read by Marling, which is a pity because Brood of Bones is the first and the free one. Ironically, the one weak spot in Dark Lord's Wedding -- the climax -- was my favorite part of Brood of Bones. The story leading up to the climax dragged on too much for my tastes, with the protagonist either unsure what to do or pursuing options that I could tell weren't going to work. But the climax was very satisfying and proceeded well from everything established in the story so far.

One thing I particularly enjoyed about this book -- the protagonist is determined to Do the Right Thing, and to help people even at personal cost. While Hiresha has a number of flaws and in some ways is hard to like as a person, her strong moral compass is admirable. And I liked that she had various flaws that made sense in the context of her society. A lot of characters in fantasy have attitudes very similar to contemporary American ones regardless of how different their culture is, and I appreciated the effort put in to make Hiresha a part of her world.

Overall, I will give this one a 7, and will probably pick up the second book in the series at some point, given that I like Marling's recent work.

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Review: Penric and Desdemona

2017-01-26T13:19:39Z

I forget if I ever reviewed the first novella in the series, but Bujold has three novellas total in the "Penric and Desdemona" series now. I finished reading "Penric and the Shaman" recently, and I gotta say how much I like this series. I love the way Bujold portrays the gods in the Five Gods setting, because they are a real power in the stories. They are, at various times and some times simultaneously, awe-inspiring, benevolent, utterly terrifying, subtle, and overwhelming in power. The characters in the setting pray to the gods, and sometimes their prayers are answered, and usually this is both terrifying and to their benefit. It feels very much in the nature of divinity. One of the running jokes of the setting has characters thinking hard about whether or not they actually want to pray. "Do I want divine intervention here? I know what divine intervention looks like." There's a delightfully alien feel to it.

This is especially in evidence in "Penric and the Shaman", which is one of those stories when the gods are clearly working hard to bring people together to do what needs to be done, whether they want to or think they can or not. It's also one of those stories where all the characters have good reasons for what they're doing and why they're doing it, which I always appreciate.

I enjoyed "Penric's Mission", too, which had more about their form of sorcery and fewer miracles. I'm kind of annoyed at this one, however because it didn't really resolve at the end. It wasn't a cliffhanger, but it left the characters in an uncertain position with no clear indication of how they'd end up after it.

Still, I have come to adore both Penric and Desdemona. One of the things I really like about the three novellas is that Bujold has let a lot of time pass between each one: Penric is 19 or 20 during the first, then mid-twenties for the second, and about thirty during the third. The reader gets glimpses of what he's been doing between stories, and you can see the way the relationship between Penric and Desdemona has changed and deepened over time, and the way that Penric continues to mature. I'll give the series as a whole an 8.5. Definitely recommend, and I'm looking forward to the fourth one. Bujold's released all three in the last 18 months, so I'm hopeful it won't be a long wait for the next.

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Three Book Reviews: A Girl Corrupted by the Internet; Hold Me; Pansies

2017-01-24T18:33:39Z

I did not read much last year, and I never got around to posting reviews for most of it. I will catch up a little here!

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky's, A Girl Corrupted by the Internet Is the Summoned Hero!? is written in the style of a Japanese "light novel". This is not a subgenre I'm familiar with; to me, it read like a dialogue-heavy, description-light novella.

This is kind of a strange concept for a story, because it's kind of about pornography while not actually containing any pornographic scenes. One of the key plot points is that the main character is a teenage girl who shamelessly consumed lots of online pornography. She is summoned to a fantasy world to save them from the "Dark Lord", and the magic system in the world revolves heavily around notions of sexual purity/impurity/desires.

You might think "okay, this sounds like an excuse for erotica" but no, there is no erotica. At all.

What you get instead is a lot of humor, and clever exploits of the way magic and prophecy work in the setting. Some attempts at exploits work, some fail, and the whole hangs together sensibly.

I heard about this novella because Yudkowsky is the author of the fanfic "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", which I'd read and enjoyed. This novella does have the same "clever people coming up with clever solutions" quality to it. There's also a certain genre-savviness to it; the protagonist knows the kind of story she's in, and also that it's not technically a story so may not follow the conventions she's expecting it to.

Overall, I liked it but didn't love it; the characters could've been more engaging, mainly. The protagonist is interesting but the only person one really gets to know as a distinct personality. Still, the premise was cute and the clever stuff is delivered well. I'll give it an 8.

Courtney Milan, Hold Me

I have mixed feelings about this book.

Some of them are from the tropes used: "Enemies to Lovers" and "Secret Identities" are not my favorite tropes, although ironically I was writing a book that used both of them (The Sun Etherium) when I was reading this book. Apparently I only like those tropes when I'm the one writing them. -_- Anyway, if you like those tropes, you will enjoy this book more than I do.

Things I liked about it: the female protagonist, Maria, is a Hispanic transwoman, a fact which is not very plot relevant. It's nice to see trans protagonists just being people in the story as opposed to "This Is A Story About What It Is Like to Be Trans". In a similar vein, the male protagonist, Jay, is a bisexual Thai-American man and that's even less plot-relevant. This stuff informs the backstory of the characters, but it does so in much the way that characters being middle-class white cis American does. Maria does have some distant-past trauma rooted in being trans: her parents kicked her out when she was 12; she grew up with her grandmother, who was both loving and accepting. But it's not the focus of the book and, since Milan always gives her characters traumatic backstories*, it doesn't feel like a commentary on transness per se.

* No, really, she does. I like Courtney Milan's writing but I can't binge-read her books because ZOMG ALL THE TRAUMA. I think her theme is supposed to be "even broken people can find love" but after the third one in a row it feels more like "only people who have known TRUE HORROR AND DESPAIR can understand what love really means".

Anyway, Jay doesn't have a problem with Maria because she's trans. Jay is, however, a disrespectful elitist snob, and he takes and instant dislike to Maria because she's beautiful and well-dressed. He is not precisely a misogynist; he doesn't so much hate women as think that female-coded behaviors like "wearing makeup" and "liking pop music" indicate that a person is shallow and not worthy of being treated with common decency.

Jay exemplifies a certain kind of person, one who thinks that since he respects women who share his own interests, that means he is off the hook from treating people with respect when when they don't. Slowly, over the course of the novel, he pieces together that this is not actually how mature adults behave.

It's kind of exhausting. Like it really shouldn't be this hard to figure out "treat people decently" and "no, it's not okay to assume someone is shallow based on the way they look and also EVEN IF THEY ARE SHALLOW YOU SHOULD STILL TREAT THEM DECENTLY." Seriously. "Treated like a person" is not a thing people need to earn from anyone. It should be the default. Be polite. It won't kill you. Why is this so hard?

There are lots of things to like about Jay: he is smart, loyal to his friends, supportive, and hard-working. But the fact that he really has to work HARD at a thing like "basic politeness" which frankly even most outright bigots can manage better than him is just ... sigh. Okay, Jay.

Maria was much easier to like than Jay; her habit of baiting Jay got a little wearing, but (a) he deserved it and (b) it wasn't that big a part of the book. Also, Maria gave me nerd-like-me feels; she is studying to be an actuary and on the side writes an apocalypse-of-the-week blog, where she researches meticulously various possible ways forms of "the end of the world as we know it" and what the world would look like after it happened. Her blog has reasonable blog-like levels of success, which means it has lots and lots of readers and earns about as much as a good part-time job. It had a good plausible feel to it.

The last 40% or so of the book is mostly Jay trying to make it up to Maria for being such a jerk in the first 60% of the book. I admit I have always had a soft spot for that sort of thing, so this part worked for me.

Overall, I did not love this book nearly as much as the first in the series, Trade Me. But I did like it overall, and will give it an 8.

Alexis Hall, Pansies

This is a contemporary gay romance. Its basic premise is "man falls for the man he used to bully in school" with the bonus of "main axis of bullying was 'because weaker boy is gay'". Which, obviously, the bully turns out to be, too. There's another bonus bit where the victim used to fantasize about dating/making out with the bully.

That last bit was pretty hard for me to relate to; I can't imagine lusting after any of the people who bullied me. But aside from that piece, the book was a fun read and I enjoyed it overall. Not too much else to say about it. I'll give it an 8.

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The Nutmeg of Consolation and Clarissa Oakes, by Patrick O'Brian

2013-04-24T17:08:09Z

I've finished another two Aubrey-Maturin books. I liked them reasonably well and remain profoundly addicted to the series. Last night, I was thinking "I could read this YA book I checked out three weeks ago, or any of the several unread e-books languishing on my phone. Or I could start the next Aubrey-Maturin book." Guess what book is underneath my hands even as I type this up on my phone?

Nutmeg felt more like a bridge than a book in its own right. Aubrey & Maturin were sent en route to a mission in South America back in The Letter of Marque, and they still haven't made it there four books later. I still liked it: there's a particularly stirring fight between Aubrey's Surprise and a French ship where Aubrey knows (and likes) one of the lieutenants, giving an additional personal note to a very tricky and compelling battle.

Clarissa Oakes was named "The Truelove" in USbeditions, persumably because US publishers think readers are too sexist and/or stupid to buy a naval-historical book named for a woman. 9_9. It's all aout Clarissa, though. I don't know how I feel about the book. Clarissa is a deeply problematic character in terms of background and situation, and I don't know hat P'OB was competent to write this kind of person: female characters are not his strong suit. It works, more or less, and I enjoyed the read overall. I do feel kind of conflicted about it, though.

Still, on with the series! Gosh, I only have 5 full books left in it now. D:

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The Thirteen Gun Salute, by Patrick O'Brian

2013-04-06T00:51:41Z

Someday I will learn where the good break points in reading the Aubrey/Maturin books are, because the end of a book is never one. Wait, that's not true, because the end of the the previous book, The Letter of Marque was a good stopping point.

So this book took me nearly three weeks to finish, and I read four other books in the meantime. It took me a while to get into it, but once I was halfway through it rolled along smoothly. The book is a parallel of HMS Surprise, in a way, because it is once again about sending an envoy to Malay (the title is a reference to the salute due to a royal envoy). There's a wonderful if brief section where Maturin -- a naturalist by inclination -- visits a Buddhist temple located in a crater in Kumai, quite arduous to get to and almost magical on arrival: the Buddhists don't allow animals to be killed there, and there are few predators, so the local animals are all quite unafraid. I will give the book an 8 overall, and now I'm going to discuss a bunch of spoilers because I want to write about the content.
( SPOILERY! )

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Captain's Surrender, by Alex Beecroft

2013-04-02T01:46:25Z

The poly-romance story I've been writing lately includes a prominent male/male relationship. As it happens, this is a genre I've never actually read*, although I've written scenes in it before. I am not really determined to find a poly-romance -- I am sure they exist, but it's so niche that I don't know that I would enjoy anything I found. But I figured I could at least read some m/m romance.

I remembered that HaikuJaguar had recommended some Age-of-Sail m/m romance a while back, and the magic of LJ tags let me find the review entry again, so I decided last night to pick up this one.

I was a little hesitant to start it, because let me just begin with what a horrible, horrible time-and-place the British Navy in the late 18th century was for two men to fall in love. This is a time period when sodomy was a hanging offense, and ships offered zero privacy. Welcome to Crapsack Universe, please do not enjoy your stay. But I was in the mood for reading a romance and annoyed trying to craft the one I've been writing, so I started it this morning anyway.

And omigosh it has some wonderful romance. Chapter eleven! ♥ Incredibly sweet.

After twelve Aubrey/Maturin books, the naval scenes in Captain's Surrender felt plausible but lightweight by comparison. Beeson does convey the sense of the time and period well -- I never got the feeling she glossed over things because she didn't know them. More a sense that the book was written for romance readers rather than to appeal to Age-of-Sail buffs, and accordingly Beeson explained more when she did put in details, and left out a lot. Some things felt a little off, history-wise: for instance, when the characters in Captain's Surrender talk about prizes, they invariably mean pirates and arms-smugglers. In the Aubrey/Maturin books, the vast majority of prizes are the merchant ships of enemy nations. This struck me as an effort to make the characters appeal more to modern sensibilities, and rubbed me the wrong way. Other things are horrifyingly right -- the impact a tyrannical captain can have on a ship, for example.

At points, events felt seriously contrived in the name of creating dramatic tension, which also annoyed me. And as Haikujaguar pointed out in her review, the typical romance-novel happy ending (which the book does provide) does not feel convincing in the setting. I don't know if it "needs a sequel" so much as I am still worried for these poor characters trapped in their crapsack universe.

But overall, I found the story compelling, the protagonists likable if occasionally bastards, and the romantic sequences heart-melting. I had a great time with this book, and if there'd been fewer contrivances in the events leading up to the ending, I would give it a 9. As it is, more of an 8. If you like romance (and do not object to it being m/m), a delightful read. If you want historical Age of Sail fiction -- well, you really should read the Aubrey/Maturin books -- but this was surprisingly good on the historical fiction count too. Far better than the typical Regency romance in terms of grounding the characters in a realistic depiction of the period. There is some semi-explicit erotica (generally in the romance-novel tradition of avoiding explicit language) and swearing, but not a great deal.

* I lie! I lie like a rug. How could I forget The Heritage of Hastur and chapter twenty-three, which I read approximately two thousand times as a kid? Not technically a romance, I suppose, but I loved it for the romance. But I actually had forgotten about it until I started writing this review. There may've been some other m/m romance subplots in books I read a a kid.

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Diplomatic Immunity and Cryoburn by Lois McMasters Bujold

2013-03-19T16:17:47Z

Diplomatic Immunity is the last of the re-reads; I'd never read Cryoburn before. I enjoyed DI; one of the advantages to forgetting almost everything about a book is that the twists still take you by surprise. The climax of DI has some very well-executed twists in it.

Cryoburn is pretty good, although like too many Vorkosigan novels it relies heavily on coincidence, which kind of bugs me. I didn't like it as well as DI overall, though it has its moments. It has two children as significant characters, and one of the nice things is that they are believably children, with childlike interests and without the precocious brilliance of too many kids in fiction. Both books are primarily investigation-mystery sf, with some action thrown in. I do like the way Miles now generally has the authority to do the stuff that he does and isn't constantly doing an end run around his own command. I'll give diplomatic Immunity/u> an 8 and Cryoburn a 7.

I only have Captain Vorpatril's Alliance left to read after this. I may look for a romance of some kind next after that. Ajd of course the eight more Aubrey/Maturin books.

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Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold, and books 10-12 of the Aubrey/Maturin series

2013-03-04T17:19:28Z

I haven't been reviewing books lately, although really reviewing books as widely-known as these seems redundant anyway.

I enjoyed Memory quite a bit. In some ways it echoed Mirrordance to me, in that both books have a long section of contemplative time in the middle, between action. Memory's worked better for me, because there was less of a sense of looming disaster about it. I particularly liked watching Miles and Simon go fishing. One thing I miss in fantasy and sf is scenes of the characters just enjoying themselves. It gets overridden by an authorial compulsion to make everything super-tense and exciting. As if good things can't be interesting. Anyway, still plenty of tension and excitement in this one. I am giving it a 9.

Books 10-12 in the Aubreyad did a good job of wrapping up most of the dangling threads from book 9. I read 9-12 as part of the omnibus collection, so all printed as one book. Curiously, it felt a lot like one boook. I am kind of jonesing for more Aubreyad already, on the one hand, and on the other the end of book 12 is

( Error: Irreparable invalid markup in entry. Raw contents behind the cut. )

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Treason's Harbour, by Patrick O'Brian

2013-01-29T21:25:36Z

Book 9 of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, and the least 'complete' in feeling of the books I've read so far. Seriously, this book introduced like three major plot threads, none of which are resolved by the end. I was thinking I'd finish one of these and then another Vorkosigan, but with this kind of non-ending I might as well just stop in the middle of the next one. It will be just as satisfying.

This aside, it did have some delightful humorous moments, like Jack's rescue of the dog and the canine's ensuing reaction, or Killick's bold defense of Jack's possessions. The naval actions were unpredictable and gripping. Lots of fun moments, even if there didn't really seem to be a cohesive overall plot to hold them all together. Not my favorite of the series, but a solid 7.

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Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold

2013-01-25T21:00:34Z

This is an enormously painful book; unlike most of the Vorkosigan books, I remembered significant sections of it with uncomfortable clarity. It's not so a matter of implausibility or coincidence in the action, but just that a lot of the events are agonizing. Even knowing how it would resolve was not enough to buffer against the rawness of it. It's an important book, but I was tempted to skip it just for it being so full of horror. I read it again anyway, and it does have a nicely satisfying denoument, so there's that. I am only giving this one a 5, though. I don't think I'll be reading it again.

Next up is Memory, which I don't particularly recall. I think I'll finish the ninth Aubrey/Maturin novel first, Treason's Harbour, first -- I'm around halfway through it already.

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Lois McMaster Bujold's Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos and Borders of Infinity

2013-01-17T21:49:17Z

I'm still working my way through Vorkosigan novels. Cetaganda is my least favorite on re-read so far. It's got Miles' characteristic inability-to-subordinate problem on even more display than usual -- typically his superiors are not around to be duped and misled anew every single day like he's doing in this novel. Also, the ridiculously beautiful haut-women got on my nerves this time. Maybe my middle-aged self is having trouble buying just how much influence beauty exerts on men. Setting that aside, there are some good clever moments and funny scenes, and I did enjoy it, but it's only getting a 6.

I'd been thinking of skipping Ethan of Athos because I remembered not much liking Ethan the first time, but it also has Elli Quinn and I decided to read it for her.

Weirdly, I ended up being quite fond of Ethan this time and disliking Quinn, whose cavalier attitude towards endangering others grated. Ethan is passive or ineffectual for the first half of the book, which is not a great thing in a viewpoint character, but he grows into his role and eventually does a good job. And his doctor's-perspective is endearing.

On an unrelated note: Athos, the planet Ethan is from, has been all-male since colonization two hundred years ago: they reproduce through ovarian cultures, in vitro fertilization, and uterine replicators. Their cultural attitude towards women is a weird mix of terror, ignorance, and condenscension. But the striking thing is that it's not really something noticeable while on Athos. It's just a planet full of people who treat each other equally and are isolationist. Ethan has a lot of absurd misconceptions and superstitions about women that are striking when he's finally exposed to them, so there's a chunk of misogyny there. And of course it seems weird viewed from the outside to exclude women from your entire planet.

And yet ... there's something queerly egalitarian about it. Because if you've only got one gender, you can't have gender-based discrimination. No gender stereotypes. No 'men aren't like that' because, well, there's just people.

Bujold's conceit is that some portion of Athos society is celibate and the rest gay; probably sensibly, she avoids assigning numbers to those proportions. It is an odd question, how many humans would be attracted to the same sex given favorable cultural norms and no opposite sex at all. Anyway, I'll give this one an 8.

Borders of Infinity collects three Vorkosigan novellas into one volume, with a frame story to tie them together. I liked all of them; "Labyrinths" struck me as silly/implausible at several points, but I enjoyed it in a guilty-pleasure way. I had been dreading the grim opening of the final titular story, but fortunately the horrible part didn't last as long as I'd remembered, and the tale rolled along well once it got going. I'll give this an 8 too.

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Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, and The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson

2013-01-09T21:09:10Z

I've been re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan stories lately, partly because they're good books, and partly because there's a least one new one I've not read and I want to refresh my memory of the series before I do.

I've re-read the two Cordelia books (and one short from between them, all compiled into Cordelia's Honor) and the first two Miles books, The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game so far. Now I have to chase down the short stories that are from around this time in the timeline -- Lut has them in e-form if not paperback, somewhere. I'm not bothering with the library because Lut's got multiple copies of all of them. Oh, and I need to decide if I want to read Ethan of Athos, which I remember as being okay but not one of my favorites. Also, not technically about a Vorkosigan, so not that important to later continuity.

I haven't been reviewing these, because (a) I've read them before and (b) it's a series so there's practically nothing I can say about them that isn't a spoiler for later books. But I highly recommend the Vorkosigan series -- in fact, it struck me that these are the one series prior to the Aubrey/Maturin books where I've read a lot of books about the same protagonist.

The Vorkosigan books are comparatively short -- most of the adult fiction I've been reading lately is 400+ pages (in some cases, 1000+), and the Vorkosigan stuff has mostly been around 300 so far. It is striking to me that it takes me maybe a day and a half to read a 300 page novel, but a week to read a 700 page one. I don't really know why that is.

Reading them again is fun and I still like the books, but they rely more upon coincidence and improbable events than I remembered. I am putting them at an 8 so far instead of a 9.

I read The Emperor's Soul today, Yet Another Brandon Sanderson story. This one is a novella weighing in at a mere 157 pages. It's the shortest work I've ever read by Sanderson, whose adult fiction tends to page counts of 500+. It's an interesting take on the con-job story, with a fantasy setting and a counterfeit artist being held hostage to pull off a counterfeit at an empire-wide level. The characters are sketched briefly but affectionately: as is not infrequent with Sanderson's work, one often feels that the grand messes people make are less a function of evil than incompetence, too lazy or inept or lacking the foresight to do better. I will give this one a 8 too. I seem to be running into a lot of 8s lately.

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