Sunday Soup - Happy Spring!

In The Soup This Week... Nalini Singh, Lynsay Sands, Jayne Ann Krentz -- some big hitters this week.

Soup Dish:
Hey guys, sorry about the silence there.  Shortly after my last post I came down with a cruddy cough that I'm still trying to kick. I've been doing the bare-minimum function thing to keep my job and maintain some level of civilization in my house just slightly above "feral". On the plus side, I did a bunch of reading, and a fair amount of wardrobe-planning for RT, which takes up a rather ridiculous amount of brain space for me. Related, I started this post last week and am just now finishing.
  
✽A nice write-up on the new Romance documentary, Love Between the Covers. I missed the Seattle screening a couple weeks ago because I was so sick. I'm hoping to get another chance to see it, maybe at RT.

✽Last week there was some buzz about RWA's stance with Pocket Books regarding diversity in their romance line.  RWA published an update on the issue, and Pocket responded. The interesting thing is that Pocket did not seem to respond meaningfully until RWA basically said, "Do you want to sever ties with RWA? because that could happen." I wish I had caught more of the discussion online, if anyone has good links or a Storyfy on it, I'd be interested.

✽#RT16 is less than 3 weeks away! Eeee! I have no plan this year. I have a few things picked out on the agenda but right now I'm just showing up and que sera, sera.

What I'm reading


✽Jayne Ann Krentz's Trust No One was really good. Creepy and believable, and no, I did not think that the hero was the bad guy at any point, which is implied a little bit by the blurb, I think. It's classic Krentz romantic suspense, and by now you probably know if you like her style or not. I do, and this was a great read.

✽Avon was kind enough to send me a copy of the recently-released Runaway Vampire by Lynsay Sands. I've read and enjoyed a few books from this series, but it's not one of my "must-read" series, if you know what I mean. Even so, this was a fun, satisfying vampire romance. There's a larger series arc going on, some bad guys that the hero was escaping from in the first scene, but this book is perhaps a bit of a detour on that arc. I thought the book stood alone just fine, relying on some basic, familiar vampire tropes which the reader is easily caught up on. The only thing that I thought was weird, that my my fellow Avon readers assured me is just normal for the series, is that the erotic scenes included the vampires sucking blood out of plastic bags. I don't know if this is supposed to be tongue in cheek or funny but it was written pretty straight, as though the characters were getting a sexual charge out of consuming blood from the bag, and it definitely threw me out of the erotic moment more than a little bit. Otherwise, a solid read.

✽I also got an email entitled "DROP EVERYTHING..." and I TOTALLY DID because it was an ARC for Nalini Singh's most recent Psy-Changeling book, Allegiance of Honor. I will be doing a full-length review for it closer to release date, but here's a spoiler: IT WAS AMAZING. So good. So incredibly good. Go ahead and pre-order right now, you won't be sorry.

✽Just before I came down with the coughing crud, I attended the Microsoft Women's conference, which was a pretty big deal. One of the best talks I went to was on "GenderSpeak" by Tammy Hughes. I got a copy of her book and zoomed through about 90% of it while I was hopped up on cough medicine. Much of the material was covered in her talk, perhaps more charismatically, but I'm glad to have the book on my shelf -- it has some really good insights. Hardball for Women: Winning at Business.

✽Otherwise, in reading,  I've started a few things that haven't really caught fire for me, but that could be the fact that I'm not feeling 100%.  I haven't declared anything a DNF, I just keep starting things and moving on to other things.  Meh.

Sunday Soup - December 6

In The Soup This Week... JR Ward, Ilona Andrews, Caroline Linden, Shelly Bell, and Jayne Ann Krentz

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽It's been a busy week. I'm getting a lot of holiday shopping done; a lot of reading, and a lot of thinking about the social and political happenings. There's a lot going on out there.

✽I've referred to Jayne Ann Krentz's Bowling Green speech a few times over the course of this blog, and at some point, sadly, it was taken down off the web.  In this week's interview, she alludes to some of the same material, about popular fiction celebrating heroic values (in the classical sense), and why that's the reason it's both popular and persistent.

✽Here's a pop-science approach to male characteristics that have been proven in studies to be attractive to (het) women.  Of course, none of these will surprise readers of romance, since pretty much all of them feature frequently in hero descriptions.  Although the "limbal ring" is some new vocabulary for me.

✽Book Riot always delivers, this time with some really lovely editions of classics for the young readers on your list

What I'm reading
✽JR Ward's Blood Kiss was.... ready?.... fan-freakin'-tastic.  Best thing she's written since before Phury.  I really really liked the "weed-out" scenes for the trainees.  If you're not up to speed, Blood Kiss is the first in a spinoff (that isn't really a spinoff?) series from the Black Dagger Brotherhood, that follows a younger generation of vampires who have signed up to be trained to help defend the race.  The characters are post-trans, unlike the early training days of John Matthew, Blaylock, Quinn, and Lash, which was a good choice IMO.  Some of the characters have a certain recycled feel, but overall I am very happy with this book. Great central couple, a secondary arc with Butch and Marissa, just the right amount of sequel-baiting, and a welcome lack of other multiple arcs.  A bit shorter than what we've gotten used to from JR Ward, but by no means skimpy at 350 pages or so.  Strong recommend.

✽What could possibly follow that act? Why, Ilona Andrews' Sweep In Peace, of course. I really loved the first book and this one was just wonderful. The magic is just so intriguing. I'd say this stands alone reasonably well, but they're both so good, if you haven't read Clean Sweep, you won't regret picking it up.   And while we're on the topic, Andrews' has an excerpt from the upcoming Kate Daniels novella posted on their site -- Chapter 1, Magic Stars.

✽Written in My Heart, by Caroline Linden, was a sweet little short. At 33 pages, it's more of a vignette than a fully-realized story, as there is no real conflict other than distance. It's full of longing and sweet, innocent love and made a wonderful palate cleanser between darker more intense stories.

✽I also read last week's featured author, Shelly Bell's, first installment in her White-Collared serial. I've been avoiding serials in general, because I'm not a big fan of cliff-hangers and the pricing can be a little off-putting when you add everything up.  I might be coming around though.  Mercy has good characters, great sexual tension, and while the ending does make you want to read on, the story itself had a satisfying resolution, even though there is an open series arc. So like everything else that I sometimes avoid or sometime seek out based on a format or trope, it [almost] always boils down to how well the author executes. I'm not exactly sure how the whole series is structured, but the first installment opens with a graphic torture/murder scene and kicks off an arc regarding the husband of the victim, his lawyer, and his legal intern.

That's it for me this week. Hope you are enjoying the holiday season!

Series Review - Jayne Ann Krentz's Dreamlight Trilogy

This seems like an opportune moment to publish this review, since I'm hoping to swing by a signing tomorrow at the Seattle Mystery Bookstore. This is extra fun because the contemporary part of the trilogy takes place in the same historic Pioneer Square neighborhood.

I'm not sure why the stars aligned just right for me with this trilogy, but the first one caught my eye shortly before the third one came out, so I got to read them all pretty close together, which I think is really fun.

Krentz has always been one of the really innovative authors in romance, in my opinion, and manages her career with the steely resolve of one of her contemporary Titans of Industry that were the popular Alpha Heroes of the late 90s (and still are, sometimes). She writes and writes and writes and rarely disappoints. She writes historicals, contemporaries, and is one of the few and one of the first romance authors to venture into futuristic sci-fi romance. She started writing paranormal before "everyone" was doing it, with heroines who had mild paranormal powers (well, mild compared to say, turning into a werewolf or sprouting the wings of a guardian angel, or what have you). Her Arcane series is the first of its kind, as far as I know, that weaves back and forth among her three pen-names and corresponding three subgenres: Amanda Quick in historical, Jayne Ann Krentz in contemporary, and Jayne Castle in futuristic. I think of her as Jayne Ann Krentz, and I believe that's her most successful persona, but her real name is Jayne Castle. I just can't think of her that way, heh.

She's also something of a hero of mine for being among the first to point out the hypocrisy of critics who "worry" that romance readers are giving themselves false expectations of their own lovelives, while apparently having no concerns that readers of Steven King or Robert Ludlum will suddenly start attempting to solve outlandish murders outside the law or setting fires with their minds. If you haven't read Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, you really should. Then, more recently, I heard her give this gem of a speech about the genre.

OK, but none of that tells you about the trilogy, right? Well, to cut to the chase, I liked it a lot. Moreover, Krentz succeeds brilliantly at tying the stories together without making them dependent on each other, so if you only like one of the subgenres, you can still enjoy the series. However, it can get a bit confusing if you actually want to follow the books in the order published. I recommend you check the website and maybe keep a spreadsheet. (That's a joke. Sort of.)

So the Dreamlight Trilogy is a subset of the Arcane series, following the past, present, and future of an artifact of paranormal power. The futuristic one, Midnight Crystal, is the first Arcane book to also be a Harmony (set in the future on the planet Harmony) book, but it fits pretty seamlessly into the Harmony worldbuilding.

How do I know that? Well, actually I've only read a novella from the Harmony books, other than this one, so maybe there are contradictions all over the place, but knowing Krentz, I doubt it. The paranormal elements of the two different worlds are nicely complimentary and work together just fine. I can't say that Harmony is my favorite paranormal world -- it's a lot like 21st century earth, for reasons that are explained, down to email, cell phones, and motorcycles, powered by an eerie green grid. Sort of like Tron, I guess.

It was interesting to read the trilogy all together. I'm not sure I've ever seen one done quite this way -- the plot for all three was pretty much exactly the same, but with very different settings and different villains, getting in the way for their own reasons. I enjoyed each book, but I'm not really sure how I feel about how very very similar the plots were, if that makes sense. I felt like the women characters were more differentiated than the heroes, but there were still a lot of similarities, especially between Chloe and Marlowe.  I have to admit being completely charmed by Adelaide's sketchy backstory as a fortune teller in a Wild West show.  I kind of wanted to read that book. 

One of the things I like about the Arcane world is how the paranormal powers are just known and accepted by the characters. While it's sort of the parallel, hidden world that's common in urban fantasy, there is less of the "no one must ever know!" undercurrent that you get with vampires and shifters; and even less of the fear that others will think they're crazy if they acknowledge or use their powers. That isn't bad in and of itself, but it can get tedious, so the matter-of-fact approach is really refreshing to me. I like that the h/h can just talk to each other about their talents without dancing around it for an extended near-big-mis.

The Dreamlight Trilogy delivers Krentz's trademark fast pace and engaging characters.  Read just the ones you want or all three, it will still work for you -- although I think the Midnight Crystal probably references the prior stories the most.  I think the similarity of the stories is overall slightly disappointing, although in a way, it's an interesting experiment in exploring how setting matters.  This might be a case where the sum isn't greater than the whole and the books might be more enjoyable on their own.

ps, I have a post percolating on the plotting pitfalls of the paranormal proficiencies... but it would make this post too long.

Fangirl Moment

So I'm in the Seattle Barnes & Noble at lunch today, perusing the new releases in romance, minding my own business, when these two women stroll by behind me, discussing their options, pulling books off the shelf, saying things like "How about this one?" and "Oh, I like that one.  That's a good one."

Now, the part about minding my own business?  That's not really my forte.  So I turn around and strike up a conversation about Karen Marie Moening's Highlander series.  "Did you like it?" the lady asks me.  "Well," I said, "yes, although it's one where you have to have a heavily reinforced suspension of disbelief."  I'm trying to find a nice way to say that I liked it but didn't love it, but if you like a certain kind of light fantasy, it's just right.  And then I really look at the person I'm talking to.

She looks a lot like this:

And I blink and I say [brilliantly], "You look like Jayne Ann Krentz!"  And she very graciously replied, "I am," and introduced me to her friend, Stella Cameron.

And then we had a very nice 15 or 20 minute conversation about cover art.  Ms. Cameron was looking for inspiration for her next release, which will be a paranormal set on (I think she said) Whidby Island.

We talked a little bit about babyfaced models versus the more rugged look.  I mentioned that I liked the matte covers that are popular right now, and the ones that were sort of veiled or muted, like the Kresley Cole/Gena Showalter Deep Kiss of Winter cover, but we all agreed that Gena Showalter's name looked a little like an afterthought:

Now, this image shows Gena's name in gold, the same color as Kresley Cole's, but I would have said that it was red in the store.

*hunts down own copy*

OK, so the ink is kind of iridescent and its location on the shelf made it look like a different color.  Mystery solved.  Against the darker section of the background, it definitely doesn't pop as much.


We considered whether Christine Warren's cover for Prince Charming Doesn't Live Here was too busy.  Ms. Cameron thought maybe so.  I thought, it's busy, yes, but not too busy, because I kind of like that it shows the multiple elements of the story.  Ms. Krentz, who is really Ms. Castle (Krentz is her best-known pen name) suggested that it works because of the monochrome aspect.


In the trade paperback section of the new romances, there were lots of offerings from Ellora's Cave and Spice.  (Debbie Macomber's demure floral cover for her most recent offering looked wildly out of place).  Ms. Cameron disliked the skin-tastic photo-real covers, but agreed that it was appropriate for the material.  I picked up Victoria Janssen's The Duke and the Pirate Queen and thought the cover was pretty (I would have picked it up in mass market, but not at $15).


The only one I where I couldn't really articulate what I was thinking was JR Ward's Crave.  I think the image is just fine, but something about the font/lettering bugs me a little.  I think it's too big, or the white is too stark, or something.  It's nothing catastrophic, but on further reflection it seems a little, I dunno, shiny-magaziney or something.  I did say that I know many of her fans thought it was stunning.


Other than that, I mentioned that I had seen both of them at author events, and complimented Ms. Castle/Krentz on her speech about heroic values and managed not to babble too much.

And that is the story of my Fangirl Lunch at Barnes & Noble!

Ciara Scoops Me

I went to the same RWA event that Ciara debriefs in her post yesterday. I've said before that she and I share much the same taste, and apparently that extends to the kind of things that get us excited about the genre. She zeroed in on almost exactly the same comments from Jayne Ann Krentz a/k/a Jayne Castle a/k/a Amanda Quick that I did. Still, I can't resist editorializing a little bit, so I'm going to cover the same ground here anyway.

Slightly paraphrased, Ms. Castle (her birthname, but probably her least known penname) made a statement that just stunned me: Popular fiction, especially romance, is rooted in the ancient heroic epics -- why did I never see that before? Of course it is. It's all about the hero, baby.

More so, it's about values. Popular fiction, Castle maintains, values ancient heroic virtues of courage, honor, integrity, and love. These kind of tales have been popular throughout history because, among other things, they have enormous survival value -- I have to admit, I never thought of it in these terms before, but yes! Although often dismissed as "escapism," which implies cowardice or an unwillingness to face reality, happily-ever-after books promote optimism.

She boils down contemporary literary fiction as deriving from modern psychology, existential philosophy, political theory [and some other stuff!], in a "masculine style that abhors sentimentality and strong emotion."

Castle says further, we need both kinds of literature in our lives, but which we prefer has more to do with our values and beliefs than our intelligence or education.

*wild applause*