Library Loot - Heroes and Research

So, y'all, I finally finished my work in progress novel! Whoohoo! Submitted for a few contests, even. Anyhoo, now that I'm in the process of submitting The Duke of Snow and Apples piece by piece to my critique group (and looking for a critique partner other than my mum - although I do love my mum), I'm also starting preliminary research for the next book in my series about the Seven Dowagers - Lord of Dreams. Which means looking for books at the library because they are free and now that I'm currently between jobs free is awesome. Which also means that when I find another good book at the library, I better grab it.


I'm annoyed by anachronistically feminist heroines in historicals. I really am. Maybe it's because I'm third wave feminist (i.e. the "I can stay in the kitchen and make babies and cookies if I damn well want to because it's my choice!" feminist), but I often hate the cutesy hoyden heroines who run around in pants for no reason and just plain ignore the world they are currently living in.

But there were feminists and and women's rights crusaders in 18th and 19th century England! So for my next book, Lord of Dreams, I focused on the idea - what if my heroine is the daughter of a feminist radical, and actually wants to dance and wear beautiful gowns and have a Blooming (my fantasy setting's version of a season)? So I'm researching real-life feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley) with this biography to see what narrative details I can uncover.

Hero is next. I've wanted to read it for a while, but I had such a huge TBR that I wasn't too crazy about reading it. However, I finally decided to bite the bullet and order it, at around the same time The Booksmugglers gave it a glowing review, so now I'm pretty excited to read it!











And lastly is What Angels Fear by C.S. Harris, another "why not? It's free" request from the library that finally came in. I read a good review of a later book in the series over at Dear Author, so I thought I would start with the first novel in this mystery series set during the Regency. And you know I loves me some Regency.

Library Loot: Requests Come Rushing In

Wow, today's a busy day - a new review, a monthly round-up, and as I suddenly just remembered - I totally got library loot this week!









First up, is The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The Booksmugglers went crazy over this book early on (it came out in the UK first) and good thing they did because I ended up being only 4th in line when I requested a hold on it. I love me some epic fantasy (and am planning an equally epic re-read of some of my favourites after my RITA challenge), and let me tell you I am already knee-deep in this book. Holy crap. SO GOOD.








Second on the Loot list is The Duchess, the biography by Amanda Foreman that inspired the Keira Knightley movie. I loved the movie, even though Knightley is clearly sixty pounds too thin to play the Duchess of Devonshire but who CARES. The costumes, the scandal! I love reading history and wanted to boost my own historical research with some biographies so I thought I'd start with this. If any of you know some really interesting biographies of Georgian/Regency figures, please drop me a comment.

That's about it for now, folks!

Library Loot: Made to Order

Another week, another Library Loot post. It's so not fair. I have a huge enough TBR as it is, but not only is my library improving its inventory in the library, but it's also improving its catalogues, so that some romance paperbacks are actually available to order (usually they're not, on the basis that paperbacks endure fewer circulations than hardcovers). Also, I saw a teaser for a movie that looked both interesting/terrible, and found out it was based on a book so I just had to get that too!

First off, though, let's start with the literary fish I decided to throw back:
Sorry, With Seduction In Mind. I know you're about writers and writers' block and sexy fun artistic times, but Secret Desires of a Gentleman really drained the Gurhke-Goodwill-Well. Not enough to scare me off the books I've already got of hers on the TBR (Guilty Pleasures, The Marriage Bed, She's No Princess), but enough to make me send you, already thrice-renewed, back to the public shelves.

It's just too soon. Secret Desires of a Gentleman really annoyed me and my attempt to read your first two pages didn't help - really? A feisty red-headed heroine who just can't keep a job because she's so unbelievably sexy that her evil bosses can't keep their hands off her? Um, no. Not yet. Give me a chance to recover from Gentleman's "strong" culinary heroine giving up her life's work after three months because buttering her hero's baguette takes up all of her time.

Now, this week's haul:
Pieces of Sky by Kaki Warner has been garnering buzz and reviews all over the place as an excellent Western historical epic romance, and lo and behold! Since it's a trade paperback it can be searched and put on hold from my library's online catalogue!

It's practically new since I placed a hold on it while it was still ON ORDER (I was #2 in line!). People sometimes complain when authors, particularly the big ones, have hardcover releases - but readers, LISTEN. You can order hardcovers much more easily from libraries, and reading it in hardcover will make it easier to wait the additional 6-months-to-a-year to buy it cheaply in paperback if you liked it, and if you don't end up liking it, you haven't wasted $30 - or even $10.

Stop complaining about romance in hardcover, for the love of Balogh!



What really surprised me was finding an actual, and not utterly recent romance paperback on the online catalogue - but that's exactly what I found when I searched "Marjorie M. Liu" on a lark, expecting to find hardcovers and large print editions.

Instead, I had the incredible good fortune to find the Dark Dreamers anthology, which has the novella that tells what actually happened to The Wild Road's Lannes and his brothers when they were turned to stone by an evil witch. Yes, technically it's Charlie's story (his presence in The Wild Road is restricted to the occasional phone call with his stepdaughter's Disney movies blaring in the background), but still! It explains more about Lannes!

And, last but not least,
we have Beastly, by Alex Flinn. Confession: I saw the teaser and info for the upcoming movie adaptation (out in July) and I was kind of hypnotized. Mary Kate Olsen as a teen witch! Neil Patrick Harris as a blind tutor! That Disney Actress Who Unlike Hannah Montana Never Learned to Keep Her Bra On When Taking Sexy Photos Of Herself and Mailing Them to Untrustworthy People (Twice!)!

Yeah, this modern take on Beauty and the Beast looks like it has every chance to be huge success or a massively entertaining and campy failure. I'll admit to a certain weakness towards Beauty and the Beast stories in romance novels - and I mean the real stories where the dude is actually hideously scarred/deformed/cursed, not the silly knockoffs where the hero is considered beastly because he acts like an asshole or doesn't know/care about using the correct salad fork at dinner. Or worse - he's just "romance ugly," which usually means he has craggy bone structure a la Liam Neeson. Very quickly the heroines of those stories learn that "romance ugly" is just another code word for "I don't have to squint or check the inseam of his pants to see that he is a dude." I suppose the convenience of that sort of appearance appeals to these feisty historical heroines, since they have a large tendency to want to prance about in breeches themselves and wouldn't want to unintentionally bat for the other team and make doe-eyes at a fellow, er, doe in buckskins.

But I digress! I like Beauty and the Beast stories and Beastly is an interesting modern take - both the book and the movie deal with a spoiled, rich teenage boywho has everything - money, status, hawtness, and then he loses everything when he decides to bully and humiliate the one Goth girl in school who actually does practice the Dark Arts! How could this not be awesome? Or at least awesomely bad?

Here's to good reading!

Library Loot: Temptation Awaits

Another week, yet another opportunity for Library Loot. It seems I just can't help myself - I go to the library to return books and end up finding even more books that I actually want to read! What is up, public library? How did you suddenly get so much better at stocking romance? Oh well. The loot:






A Bride in the Bargain, by Deeanne Gist. I've never read inspirational romance before, but I was interested in this book because Gist hosted a very illuminating workshop at RWA 2009 about how book covers come to be, and this book was featured. Yup - Bethany House has some gorgeous covers y'all. FUN FACT: that girl on the cover is actually Gist's daughter! Anyhoo, the story sounds pretty good - hero needs a wife in order to keep his land. Heroine thinks she's being hired as a cook. Hilarity ensues!



The Courtesan's Daughter, by Claudia Dain. Where better to go for a lucky author dip than a place where you don't have to pay for a book? I've heard some good things about Claudia Dain's Courtesan series, and since this is the first book, I thought I would give it a try.

From the blurb, it sounds like the heroine's having a tough time getting a husband because her mum used to be a courtesan, so Mummie Ho agrees to clear the hero's debts in return for marrying her lovely daughter.

Hilarity - and presumably, financial transactions - ensues!


Just as I thought I was on my way out the library door, I caught sight of Victoria Dahl's One Week As Lovers, the sequel to A Rake's Guide to Pleasure that stars Emma's hot-but-poverty-stricken BFF Lancaster. Not only was it there - it was a new library copy. The spine of the paperback wasn't even creased! None of the pages were bent!

So yeah, I caved. A Rake's Guide to Pleasure was a lovely book, and this novel has a gorgeously romantic cover - that for once depicts something tender and sweet and not one of those hair-in-the-wind, O-face, riding-the-hero's-muscular-thighs cover.

Library Loot, The Sequel

Yes, yes, bad me. I haven't even finished reading some of the books I took out on my last Library Loot (I just keep renewing, LOL), but on Monday, as I took the train to the concert hall where my mixed chorus was having a rehearsal for our big Christmas Concert, I couldn't help but notice that the concert hall is just kitty-corner to my city's central downtown library.

And, naturally, as I'd arrived 45 minutes early, I didn't see the harm in giving the romance shelves a little peek, seeing as how the downtown library is so much better stocked then my neighbourhood one.

My bad! It's so easy to make impulse grabs when books are free, eh?

First loot was A Rake's Guide to Pleasure by Victoria Dahl. I have her contemporary, Start Me Up, on my TBR (snatched a copy at RWA!), but I've heard such good things about her historicals - particularly her beautiful language, which is always a draw for me.

I have also heard that Dahl tends to get really graphic with her sex scenes. I don't intend this to mean anything against her as a writer - it's just that, speaking of my personal tastes, graphic sex scenes tend to make me very uncomfortable, and/or bored (which is why I avoid erotica and erotic romance). However, as writers like Courtney Milan have demonstrated, beautiful, original writing makes up for many sins.


Next up is Laura Lee Guhrke's With Seduction in Mind, the latest in her Girl-Bachelors series. The first book (And Then He Kissed Her) impressed, the second (The Wicked Ways of a Duke) - eh, not so much. I have The Secret Desires of a Gentleman on my TBR, so maybe I'll see if I can squeeze that in before reading this one - just because I tend to be kind of OCD about reading series in perfect order.

That being said, the idea behind this story sounds interesting - the characters are both writers. It's fun to read stories about writers, because you can totally see how the author goes about her own process. Gurhke's a particular inspiration of mine because, I discovered at RWA 2009, she is a "pantser" (i.e. one who writes and plots by the seat of her pants, rather than a "plotter" who plans everything to the last letter) whose books are fabulous, which makes me very hopeful, because I am a pantser who desperately hopes my novels aren't rambling, disorganized messes.

Another new author lucky dip here - Connie Brockway's So Enchanting. Never read Connie Brockway (although I've heard good things), but this one has the hint of the paranormal along with the historical: A woman with peculiar powers against a man determined to expose her as a fraud. Sounds delightful.







Last, but certainly not least, I picked up Karma Girl by Jennifer Estep. I love superhero movies and comics. I've kept all my issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, I love Spider-Man 2 and Unbreakable, I continue to give Heroes the benefit of a doubt (Zachary Quinto's eyebrows alone compensate for many of the narrative flaws).

I've seen other books in this series drifting around my local library (Hot Mama and Jinx, in particular), but I really wanted to start with the first book but couldn't find it. Well, now I did! The plot sounds hilarious - our heroine discovers her fiance's a superhero ... when she catches him banging his supervillainess nemesis. On her wedding day. Classy.

That's all for now!

For the First Time: Library Loot

I discovered the weekly event Library Loot from Marg over at Reading Adventures, where once a week bloggers announce what they've checked out from the library. While a fabulous idea, it's not one I've participated in because I haven't had a lot of incentive to go to my local library. Not only because I already have a ginormous TBR pile, but because the romance selection at library closest to my house sucks hardcore.

My library doesn't catalogue paperbacks in the same way it does hardcovers. You can't search for them and reserve them, for one thing - you just have to be satisfied with the random selection of the particular branch you happen to be in. They do pick up new books, but it's just not worth it to stop in every day to see. Mostly I give the shelves a once-over every month or so - I find a couple of books that are interesting, but not enough to get me to tear away from my slow decimation of my TBR.

That is, until a couple of days ago, where I found a veritable bounty of interesting books, so I thought this week I actually could participate in Library Loot! Huzzah! First thing out of my loot bag:
The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie. This has been on my Wishlist for a while - thanks in part to glowing reviews and the intriguingly original notion of a romantic hero with Asperger's Syndrome (a mild form of autism). And now I can check it out for free! While I am a bit iffy about the fact that the hero (and his sequel-baiting bros) are Scottish (Sir Walter Scott has instilled in me a fiery hatred of phonetically-spelled brogue in dialogue), who knows? It could still be good!





I also found Scandal, by Carolyn Jewel. I haven't read anything of hers, but the Internets have been positively afire for her recently, with many of my blogger friends declaring that she is a fabulous writer. This the first book of hers that caught my attention thanks to its explosion over the Internet, although Indiscreet is now making the rounds as well, with positive reviews.

I believe this novel's story is about a rake who makes an ass out of himself in front of the married woman he loves and now that she's a widow he has to make less of an ass of himself. Yay redemption!







Despite my disdain for the unwarranted proliferation of Nathan Camp covers (he has and always will look like Prince Humperdink to me), I was intrigued by the notion of The Christmas Countess. First of all, after I finish another trio of romance reviews I will be doing reviews of Christmas romances and anthologies for the upcoming season, and I figured this would be an excellent addition to my event that won't take away from my Gift Budget.

Second, the plot really interested me - a woman discovers her illegitimate child wasn't stillborn after all and is being raised by a very distant (but very handsome) male relation. So, despite the fact that the people on the cover look like they've fallen asleep standing up, I decided to give this one a shot.

This is yet another addition to AnimeJune's Big Christmas Review - because it's winter-themed. Yes. That's the excuse I'm going with. While I wasn't totally impressed by my first novel of Sabrina Jeffries', and my first attempt at Jane Feather (Almost a Lady) resulted in a DNF (this was before I was reviewing on my blog, sorry), I really enjoyed my shot at Julia London. Plus, the reviews I've been reading about this anthology seemed pretty high, and besides, it's from a library and is free. What can I lose?