"Guy in Real Life," by Steve Brezenoff

Okay, so I'm going to start this review with two warnings:

Warning the First: I had no interest in reading this book, no desire to pick it up at all, and the only reason I did was because it's FYA Book Club's April pick. So I may have gone into it with a bit of resentment at being "forced" to read it.

Warning the Second: I ended up skimming this novel sometime after the halfway mark.

But guys, this book sucked.

It starts out with an interesting idea - after black-clad metalhead Lesh gets grounded by his parents for coming home drunk from a concert, he gets suckered into signing up for a World of Warcraft-style MMO by his nerd friend, Greg.

Lesh initially signs up as a meathead orc warrior at Greg's behest, but is soon bored - until he decides to create a female elf healer because the avatar reminds him of a new girl at school that he can't get off his mind. Of course, it's not long before Lesh realizes that other players treat him differently when they think he's a girl. But for some reason, he really enjoys embodying a female character on a vast fantasy adventure.

Meanwhile, the girl he's crushing on, Svetlana, is an anti-social artist who's heavily invested in tabletop, Dungeons and Dragons gaming. She starts hanging out with him when she realizes he can help her shake an infuriatingly persistent (and unwanted) suitor, but starts realizing there's more to him than meets the eye.

Doesn't this sound good? Nope. I decided to make a list of the things that annoyed me - and it's a long one.

1. This book isn't finished. It throws out a bunch of ideas like so much spaghetti at a refrigerator, but it doesn't stick around to clean any of it up or explore it in any depth. Lesh's adventures as a female character, Svetlana's attempts to keep her D and D club at school from being disbanded, Lesh's fracturing relationship with his truly hateful "friend" Greg, and Svetlana's increasing disgust and frustration with unwanted male attention - none of it gets resolved in a meaningful way. Maybe the real ending will come out in a future DLC?

2. Svetlana is primarily treated as Obsession!Bait. Almost every major male character in the novel is obsessed with her. There's family friend Fry, who becomes increasingly violent and bullying towards her (and her friends!) when she refuses his advances. There's Abraham, who quits the D and D club because ... she dates someone else, thereby refusing his advances. There's a Creepy Online Stalker who targets her and sends her weird gifts because he confuses her for the character Lesh plays online (for reals). Her storyline is focused almost entirely on how all these dudes are obsessed with her and make decisions of varying levels of inappropriateness because she turns them down.

And...am I forgetting someone? Oh right - LESH, who's SO obsessed with her from the very first minute that he creates a lookalike avatar of her so he can pretend to be close to her. HOW IS THAT OKAY? The novel never explains this theme - if all these men are irrationally fixated on this one girl, what makes Lesh the "good" one? His plot line is like the G-rated online version of that Buffalo Bill dude from Silence of the Lambs.

Long story short - the most important female character is reduced to a damsel who's constantly beating off hordes of angry thwarted males with her 12-sided die.

3. The actual gamer characters in this book are almost uniformly awful, cliched, shallow, bigoted turds - and the book never explores or deals with it. Yes, some of them need to be turds. This novel's main (if poorly-handled) theme is on sexism in gaming. It's about a tough-looking rocker dude who enjoys playing as a delicate lady elf, but discovers that playing a female character inspires other gamers to behave like total asshats.

Except - Lesh never explores deeper than, "Man, that sucks." Take his "friendship" with Greg - a venomous douchenerd who spits homophobic slurs like a malfunctioning sprinkler. I would have liked to see Lesh actually internalize what Greg says and realize that it's not okay. I would have liked to see him tell Greg off, stand up for himself and reveal Greg for the bully he is. Except - it never happens. Greg throws a mild hissy fit when he finds out Lesh is a G.I.R.L. (Guy In Real Life - get it?) and then vanishes from the novel completely. No resolution. No exploration of theme.

And the depictions of almost all the gamers (with a few exceptions with Svetlana's D and D crew) are laughably stereotyped. They're nerds who are good at math who hunch over their screens with bad posture and bad skin, their hands poised like claws above their keyboards. The only thing missing is a pair of taped-up, thick-rimmed Coke bottle glasses to settle the depiction of gamers firmly back in the 1980s.

4. The description of the MMO itself makes no sense. First of all, the author inserts truly laughable attempts at epic fantasy to describe the world of the game. Brezenoff is no Tolkien. He's not even a Tracy Hickman. Moreover, there are a number of "questionable" events that happen in the game - for instance, poor Lesh gets molested and drenched in beer by a pack of dwarves and needs to be rescued. Um, I'm sorry - are there fantasy games out there where avatars are allowed to rape or sexually assault other player characters? Who would design a game like that?

I get the sense Brezenoff is attempting to highlight the sexism that female players often endure in gaming - but instead of focusing on the very real, very common ways girls are ostracized in games, he decides to make up some exaggerated, cartoonish bullshit that would NEVER HAPPEN in a popular MMO because no game dev in his right mind would put a rape feature in his game unless he wanted to endure a billion lawsuits.

5. Our two main protagonists barely spend any time together.
Seriously, even if the rest of the book had been fine, Guy in Real Life would still have fallen flat because its two romantic protagonists barely talk to each other. Sure, Lesh obsesses over Svetlana all the time, but Svetlana has her own life, and their scenes apart are far more numerous, important, and interesting than their scenes together. I still don't understand what they have in common or how their romance works - and ultimately the whole stalker storyline muddies the waters even further.

My opinion? Avoid this sloppily-plotted, creepy, and ultimately pointless novel in favour of novels that aim for a higher level (ha!) of story telling and theme structure.

C-

"Crazy Thing Called Love," By Molly O'Keefe

The Chick: Madelyn Cornish, a.k.a. Maddy Wilkins, a.k.a. Maddy Baumgarden. A popular daytime television host.
The Rub: When her show wants her to do a project with reviled hockey thug Billy Wilkins, she can't reveal that he used to be her husband without dredging up their painful history.
Dream Casting: Michelle Monaghan.

The Dude: Billy Wilkins. A violent, almost-washed-up hockey player who's lauded (and hated) for the fights he frequently starts on the ice.
The Rub: The opportunity to go on his ex-wife's show seems too good to be true - can he clean up his act and win her back?
Dream Casting: Jeremy Renner.

The Plot:

Billy: Violence solves everything! *starts hockey fight*

NHL: No it doesn't.

Maddy's show: Hey, want to do a makeover series?

Billy: Yay! Makeovers solve everything!

Maddy: NO THEY DON'T.

Surprise Niece and Nephew: Hey, our mother's dead and our aunt's abusive. Let's lie! Lying solves everything!

Billy: OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD--

Maddy: I find your total incompetence with life suddenly relatable.

Billy: HOORAY!

Romance Convention Checklist:

• 1 Pair of Reunited Exes
• 2 Angsty Plot Moppets
• 1 Evil TV Producer
• 1 Swarm of Paparazzi
• Several Flashbacks

The Word: It didn't take long for Molly O'Keefe to secure herself a spot as one of my favourite authors. Two books into her hockey-star (or hockey-star-adjacent) trilogy and I was hooked. Now we're onto the final book. Maddy Cornish, a daytime television host in Dallas, was a friend of the heroine from Can't Hurry Love, and freaked out when she ran into Billy Wilkins - a hockey friend of the hero of Can't Buy Me Love - at a party at the end of the last book.

Madelyn Cornish has spent the better part of a decade making a name for herself in daytime TV. She built her career from the ground up - losing weight, straightening her hair, and changing her name to distance herself as much as possible from her humiliating past.

Her humiliating past comes back to bite her in the ass when her show's producers suggest they do a "Makeover" segment on her show for Billy Wilkins, a washed-up hockey thug known more for his violence on the ice and time spent in the penalty box than his actual plays. The producers think the prospect of turning this burly, scarred toad into a burly, scarred prince could boost their ratings.

Unbeknownst to her employers, Maddy used to be Mrs. Billy Wilkins. She and Billy married extremely young, but Billy's exploding hockey career ended up sweeping all of Maddy's own emotions, goals, and ambitions under the rug in favour of Billy's. After a few miserable years of that, Maddy divorced him and fled with what little identity she had left. She's terrified that any resurgence of feelings towards Billy will destroy the independence she's gained.

Billy, meanwhile, has hit rock bottom. He's ruined his own reputation with his violent antics and now no one wants to play with him. The only light in his life is the miraculous opportunity to make things right with the only woman he's ever loved - his Maddy. Could he use this makeover to change himself into the husband she deserves?

Billy and Maddy make an interesting pair - Maddy's terrified of her feelings, while Billy is nothing but feelings - mostly rage and self-loathing. As Billy dives headfirst into the makeover segment in order to win his ex-wife back, he has to change how he sees himself (as someone worth loving rather than a human punching bag) in order to improve himself and impress Maddy. Meanwhile, Maddy has to learn how to love someone and invest in their life without sacrificing her own.

Of course, O'Keefe doesn't make this easy and drops a number of bombshell plot lines that force our couple through the emotional wringer in a number of delicious ways, slathering on the angst and the high drama with skill and gusto. The reason I continue to gobble up her books like catnip even as I lose patience with other romance writers is because of her continued commitment to meticulously-developed characters. With her gorgeous turns of phrase, she give her protagonists colourful inner lives that reveal their neuroses and fears without becoming boring and navel-gazey. So when melodramatic things happen, I find myself turning the pages faster and faster because I need to know how her characters will react.

Crazy Thing Called Love is no different. A marvellous addition to Molly O'Keefe's growing canon.
A

"The Naturals," by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Protagonist: Cassie Hobbes. A teenage girl with an astounding ability to profile people who is recruited by the FBI to help solve cold cases.

Her Angst: Her mother was murdered and the killer was never found - could the FBI help her find out who did it?

Secondary Cast:

Michael: A preppy trust fund kid capable of reading people's emotions.

Lia: A bratty Asian punk girl who's a human lie detector.

Sloane: A hyperactive blond capable of memorizing data and analyzing patterns.

Dean: A brooding loner who, like Cassie, is an expert profiler.

Agent Locke: One of the FBI agents who helps train the Naturals in reinterpreting evidence.

Agent Briggs: The head of the Naturals Program.

Angst Checklist:

• Dead parents
• Overprotective Italian families
• Child neglect
• Child exploitation
• Child abuse
• Serial killers
• Victimization of women
• I embody serial killers for a living - but, like, not in a creepy way

The Word: Cassie has a gift. Thanks to her mother's training, she can look at people, assess their details, and successfully determine their backgrounds and guess their future decisions. Cassie also has a curse. Her mother - who travelled the country using her profiling skills to pose as a psychic - was brutally murdered by an unknown assailant when Cassie was twelve, and she's never truly gotten over it. 

Now seventeen, Cassie's approached by a mysterious boy who leaves a business card from the FBI. The FBI has started an experimental program that involves recruiting teenagers with raw, miraculous crime-solving gifts (dubbed Naturals) to help solve cold cases. A human lie detector and an emotion reader count among their recent recruits. Cassie agrees to join the program - partly to help people, but also to look for a chance to use FBI resources to find her mother's killer. 

As Cassie starts practicing her abilities and getting to know the deeply weird, deeply troubled fellow Naturals in the program, a mysterious serial killer with ties to Cassie's past starts stalking prey closer and closer to the Naturals' home base, making it difficult for Cassie and her pals to stay uninvolved.

I was hooked on The Naturals from beginning to end. It has an original and highly interesting concept (teenagers hired by the FBI to solve cold cases) that's backed up with a well-developed setting, entertaining background details, and razor-sharp pacing. The nature of the "Naturals" (teenagers with preternatural detection skills) also provides oodles of angst and dark pasts to go around. None of these teenagers developed their abilities in the happiest of environments, but it is incredibly fun to watch how Cassie and Dean determine a stranger's personality just by looking at her parked car.

That being said, the author doesn't spend time developing all these characters equally. Cassie is a wonderful and unusual protagonist. Despite being taken in by her father's loud and affectionate clan, she has trouble connecting to people, always feeling one step removed from the ability to return the love they lavish on her. She worries that she's too broken by her tragedy to love anyone back. Michael and Dean, the two other points of the novel's standard-issue Love Triangle, also get some backstories, but the other members of the team don't get much more than an introduction and a few scenes to air out their unique quirks. But there's every chance we'll get to learn more in the sequel.

There's also some pretty graphic violence - and sadly, it's all directed against women. Women are constantly victimized in this book. And while I realize that it's common enough in serial killer narratives to be a cliche, I wish the author had tried something different. Finally, while the big reveal is a nice surprise, it doesn't really hold up when put to severe questioning.

All told, however, The Naturals is a whip-smart, incredibly fun and original YA mystery.
A

"The Truth about Alice," by Jennifer Mathieu

The Main Cast:

Alice: A sorta-kinda-popular girl who is outcast when she's accused of promiscuity and blamed for a popular quarterback's death. Who is the real girl behind the rumours?

Elaine: The most popular girl in school, who believes and happily spreads the rumours about Alice.

Josh: The best friend of the dead quarterback who is the only one who really knows what went on in that car before it crashed.

Kurt: The class nerd who has longed after Alice for years.

Kelsie: Alice's former best friend, who decides to use the scandal to enact her long-repressed desire for vengeance.

Angst Checklist:

• Slut-shaming
• Repressed sexuality
• Bullying
• Being a Lying Liar who Lies, YOU LIAR (KELSIE!)
• Best Friends
• Absolutely Failing At Being a Best Friend (KELSIE)
• Grief
• Perception
• Male privilege

The Word: This novel is what 13 Reasons Why tried and ultimately failed to be: a novel about perception and rumour and how a mixture of malice from a few and ambivalent enabling from many can completely assassinate a normal person's character.

There are two major "truths" about Alice Franklin. The first is that she slept with two guys at a high school party - college boy Tommy and popular quarterback Brandon. The second is that she was sexting Brandon the night he lost control of his car and fatally crashed. All the characters live in Healy, a small Texas football town, and with the loss of its Golden Boy Football Hero, everyone is quick to blame the loner slut from a broken home, turning Alice into a despised outcast.

This novel is told from five alternating viewpoints (with Alice's concluding the book). Each perspective is skewed in its own way, and reveals more about the perceiver than it does the perceived.  I found this storytelling device incredibly effective, as each character's examination of Alice's situation gives them insight into their own lives and problems.

First, there's Elaine, the Queen Bee whose party Alice allegedly double-dipped at, and my favourite character. Her personal history with Alice gives her plenty of reasons to believe the rumours and few reasons to care if they're not true. She's also honest about pretty much everything, even herself and her own blind spots, privileges, and limitations. She's the town Mean Girl and she's pretty happy with her lot in life, and I kind of loved her acceptance of herself.

Next is Kurt, the socially ostracized nerd who's worshipped Alice from afar, and only really gets the courage to reach out to her after she's been tarred and feathered by the rest of the town. Kurt's obsessiveness about her is a little creepy, but his perspective is interesting. He thinks Alice is the closest humanity will ever come to producing a Perfect Human Being, but by actually hanging out with her, he discovers she's more than a fantasy or an Unattainable Hot Girl to stare at.

We also get the perspective of Josh, Brandon's best friend who was in the passenger seat when Brandon crashed his car. While Elaine's and Kurt's POVs paint Brandon in a pretty asstastic light, Josh helps show the other side of that. Brandon still comes across as an entitled, privileged asshole, but he was human. He had friends that he liked and family that he loved - friends and family who are legitimately devastated that he's gone. Of course, Josh is also the source of the story that Alice sexted Brandon the night he was killed - and getting to the heart of that whole mess is the other point of Josh's POV.

Last, and certainly least, we get Kelsie. Formerly Alice's best friend, she abandons her once the scandal breaks to avoid losing her coveted spot at the popular table. That, in itself, would be understandable enough. High school can be a jungle. The further in we get, the more we realize that Kelsie is a spineless, hypocritical, obsessive, venomous little parasite who has secretly resented Alice for over a year for wildly irrational reasons.

If anyone deserves to be the outright antagonist of this novel (other than Brandon, RIP) it's her. Elaine is an enabler, Kurt is blinded by lust/adoration, Josh lies to cover up his own tangled feelings of love and guilt - but Kelsie is really the only one of the four who intentionally hurts Alice out of a desire to hurt Alice. And I kind of wanted her to suffer some really heinous karmic punishment. She doesn't (that's not really the novel's point), but I hated her enough to wish that she did. Hell, I'd read a sequel if it was all about how everyone found out what a toxic social remora she is and shunned her forever.

OTHER THAN THAT, however, The Truth About Alice was an intense, quick read with some excellent characterization.
B+

"We Were Liars," by E. Lockhart

The Protagonist: Cadence "Cady" Sinclair Eastman. The eldest grandchild of wealthy tycoon Harris Sinclair, she spends every summer on a private island with her grandfather, aunts, and cousins until an accident occurs during her fifteenth summer.
Her Angst: Now seventeen, she returns to the island to find out the truth. Too bad she belongs to a family of liars.

The Secondary Cast:

Johnny: Cady's cousin and the eldest Sinclair grandson. Wacky and humorous.

Mirren: Another cousin - sweet and supportive. Still, after the accident, she doesn't return Cady's e-mails.

Gat: Cady's crush and the nephew of Johnny's stepdad. Ambitious and angry, he loves her but also challenges her to look beyond her narrow worldview.

Harris Sinclair: Cady's wealthy grandfather who owns the island. Determined to teach his descendants how to uphold the Sinclair family name.

Angst Checklist:

• Privilege
• Brain Injury
• Racism
• Divorce
• Amnesia
• Family Secrets

The Word: Once upon a time, there was a rich man named Harris Sinclair, and he had three daughters. This man was rich enough to buy himself his own private island by Martha's Vineyard, and rich enough to build a house for each of his grown daughters so that they and their children could come and live together on the island every summer.

Of those grandchildren, the oldest three formed a club called the Liars, comprised of Cady, Johnny, Mirren - and Gat, the nephew of Johnny's stepdad. Every summer, they congregate on the island to play tennis, go snorkelling, make homemade ice cream, and eat big gourmet dinners out on the deck, the whole Sinclair family together. It's loving and idyllic, and even Cady's angst over her growing affection for Gat can't strip the magic from the place.

Until the summer when the Liars are all fifteen, and something goes wrong.

Cady sustains a brain injury and nearly drowns - only she can't remember how it happened. Two years later, she still suffers from horrific migraines that have ruined her grades and caused her to withdraw from sports and clubs. She hasn't been back to the island since Summer Fifteen, and she misses the Liars, none of whom have ever been good about staying in touch beyond the summer months. Despite her mother's misgivings, she begs to return to the island to spend a normal summer with her granddad, her aunts, and her cousins.

Yes, part of her wants to return to the summers she missed, when she was normal and pain-med free. But part of her also wants to find out what really happened during Summer Fifteen, and why her family refuses to tell her the truth.

This novel is as slender, sharp, and effective as a stiletto. With a few efficient brushstrokes, Lockhart creates a gorgeous and evocative setting that appears, at first, like heaven. Imagine spending the summer with your family on your own sunny private island - with tennis courts, board games, family movie nights in front of the flatscreen, and an efficient staff of cooks and housekeepers to clean up after you.

But nothing is perfect. We Were Liars is about the unreliability of memory - especially nostalgia and its tendency to gloss over flaws and arguments. Unwittingly rendered an outsider due to her illness and her amnesia regarding her accident, Cady starts to see her family from the outside in, and her interpretations of the events of Summer Fifteen begin to unravel as she uncovers a darker side to the Sinclair family's manipulative dynamic.

We Were Liars is also a novel about privilege. Cady starts to learn more about what it means to be privileged through her interactions with Gat. Gat and Johnny's stepdad are Indian - a fact which hasn't (and has never) gone unnoticed by the other (white, beautiful, blond) Sinclairs. Cady and the other Liars have always considered Gat one of them, so it's a shock to learn that Gat has not always felt the same way - and with good reason.

Finally, We Were Liars is about innocence that, once lost, can never be regained. About truths that, once learned, cannot be unlearned. The characterization in this novel is superb. This is a novel without villains - only antagonists. And no one in the Sinclair family is the antagonist. Rather, its their combined flaws - their fear, their grief, their greed, their pride, their prejudice, their entitlement - that rise up to destroy themselves and the people around them. It's mesmerizing.

This powerful, layered novel is not to be missed.
A+

"Nowhere But Home," by Liza Palmer

The Protagonist: Queen Elizabeth "Queenie" Wake. A shiftless chef whose temper has gotten her fired from more jobs than she can count
Her Angst: When her latest termination leaves her with no job or home, she's forced to return to the insular, gossipy Texas small town of her childhood to regroup. The same town that was happy to tar her and her sister with the same slutty brush.

Secondary Cast:

Merry Carole: Queenie's sister, who remained in North Star after getting knocked up and abandoned at 17 by Wes, one of North Star's privileged sons. She runs a hair salon, and her son is quarterback of the football team.

Cal: Merry Carole's adorable and big-hearted 15-year-old son. He's earned the town's approval for his football skills, but struggles with how his loving mother is still slandered as the town whore.

Everett: Son of one of the ruling families of North Star, and the love of Queenie's life. However, he never acknowledged their relationship in public and chose to marry a girl from a "suitable" family instead. He still loves Queenie, but his oh-so-important "responsibilities" prevent him from making it public.

Laurel: North Star's resident Mean Girl and the woman Everett married (then divorced!) instead of Queenie. Has an understandable dislike of Queenie.

Whitney: Another Mean Girl who wound up marrying Wes. She has never stopped tormenting Merry Carole - for a secretly painful and personal reason.

Wes: A member of one of North Star's better families, he and Whitney seem like the perfect couple - although their mutual dark secret prevents them from being truly happy.

Piggy Peggy: A vicious and obsequious bully who runs the North Star gossip mill at the behest of Laurel and Whitney.

The Word: Reading Nowhere But Home was like eating a donut. Maybe a whole box of donuts - I scarfed my way through the warm, delicious sweetness, even though I knew while I was reading it that it wasn't very good. Even then, I couldn't quit until I licked the last trace of glaze off my fingers.

Queen Elizabeth Wake ("Queenie" for short) has spent the last ten years living out of a suitcase, moving from town to town, cooking at restaurant after restaurant, until her smart mouth gets her fired and she has to move on. She loses her latest job because she yelled at a customer who put ketchup on his eggs. A frustrated and defeated Queenie moves back in with her sister Merry Carole in their hometown of North Star, Texas, to get her bearings and rethink her future.

North Star holds nothing but bad memories for Queenie - as the daughters of the town slut, she and Merry Carole were labelled as little better than trash. For Queenie, the last straw came when the love of her life, North Star royalty Everett Coburn, chose to marry the girl his parents picked out rather than acknowledge their secret affair. Everett is still there when she returns - good news? He's divorced and still loves her. Bad news? He still wants to keep it on the down-low.

Nowhere But Home works, I think, because of a potent (if imperfectly-mixed) combination of past scandal, present drama, and climatic build-up. For instance, Queenie's sister Merry Carole finds herself in an awkward position when the illegitimate son the town shunned her for becomes North Star's star quarterback. Will the Church of Texas Football force townsfolk to accept Merry Carole again?

Or how about Queenie's new job? In order to pad her savings as she works things out, she accepts a gig at a local prison cooking last meals for death row inmates. In so doing, she regains her faith in southern comfort food (smoked brisket! Chicken fried steak!), even though she's never comfortable with who she's actually cooking for.

It's all juicy, fizzy drama. So what's the downside? Well, the writing isn't that exceptional - quite the opposite, actually. The writing is simple, workmanlike and often repetitive. You can't turn a page without a character flushing, dabbing at their mascara-black tears with a handkerchief, or collapsing into sobs at the drop of a hat.

As well, for all the deliciously tense build up Palmer develops with the multitude of secret sins bubbling beneath North Star's surface, the novel stumbles with the ultimate pay off. I felt a lot of the conflict resolved itself disappointingly easily. In fact, the majority of those Big Secret Reveals end with, "Oh that? Everyone's known for years!" Thanks, Small Town Hive Mind stereotype. Way to suck the wind out of a dramatic moment.

And finally - I couldn't sympathize very much with Queenie's love interest, Everett - the Poor Little Rich Boy whose family honour is just soooo important that he can't be with her in public. There's a revelation towards the end that sort of explains why he behaved that way towards Queenie as a teen, but it doesn't explain his preference for secrecy as an adult. His "be my secret mistress, boo hoo you don't understand my responsibilities" bit at the novel's start cast him down several pegs in my estimation, pegs he never really makes back. I kept hoping Queenie would toss him over and find someone better.

So the novel doesn't really stick the landing, and the writing (or at least the writing that doesn't involve lovingly-described fried Southern food) isn't anything to shake a stick at, but I suppose this is one of those novels where the addictively enjoyable journey is worth the sub-par destination.
B+

"Can't Hurry Love," by Molly O'Keefe

The Chick: Victoria Schulman. A penniless (and notorious) widow with a young son, she hopes to use the cattle ranch she's just inherited to rebuild their lives.
The Rub: After being an emotionally fragile failure all her life, does she have what it takes to follow through on her dreams?
Dream Casting: Sandra Bullock.

The Dude: Eli Turnbull. Generations ago, the cattle ranch used to belong to his family, until Victoria's ancestors took it away. He's grown up trying to follow through on the family grudge.
The Rub: He should hate Victoria for getting the land that should be his - but could she be worth giving up decades' worth of enmity?
Dream Casting: Jake Gyllenhaal.

The Plot:

Victoria: I know you wish this land was yours and not mine, but can we work together?

Eli: LOL NO. *sells cattle*

Victoria: Fine! You're fired!

Eli: ...I am strangely okay with that decision. We should make out some time.

Victoria: Sure! So long as you don't mind that I'm turning the ranch you wanted into a spa!

Eli: Wait what?

Victoria: And for the architect, I've hired the mother who abandoned you to the tender mercies of your drunk father when you were eight!

Eli: I AM THE OPPOSITE OF OKAY WITH THAT.

Victoria: And my cute fatherless boy also looks up to you!

Eli: AAAAUGH! MY ISSUES! MY PRECIOUS MANPAINFUL ISSUES!

Victoria's Bitchy City Friends: Hey did someone order Last Minute Antagonists?

Victoria: Eep.

Eli: Hot Cowboy to the Rescue!

Victoria: HOORAY!

Romance Convention Checklist:

• 1 Widow Heroine with Low Self-Esteeem
• 1 Angry Cowboy
• 1 Generations-Long Grudge
• 1 Romance-Enabling Child
• 3 Pregnant Mares
• 1 Bad Mum Turned Good
• 1 Secondary Romance (between Celeste and a hot Viking contractor!)
• 1 Questionable Uncle
• 3 Vicious Frenemies

The Word: I've discovered I haven't burned out on romance. I've just burned out on bad romance, on unoriginal romance, on so-so romance.

Because from the very first page of Molly O'Keefe's second novel, Can't Hurry Love, I fell right into the best parts of enjoying romance - the drama, the tension, the banter, the emotion, and the writing.

The sequel to Can't Buy Me Love (which is equally awesome sauce), this novel centres on Luc's achingly desperate sister Victoria. She was the leader of New York high society - until her husband committed suicide rather than face the consequences of his Bernie-Madoff-style embezzlement. Penniless, friendless, jobless, hopeless, Victoria crawled back to Texas with her young son in order to build a better life with the cattle ranch her father, Lyle Baker, left her in his will.

The only problem? She owns the ranch, but Eli Turnbull, the ranch foreman, was willed the cattle - and he's furious. After working under Lyle Baker for years, he expected to inherit the land that used to belong to his family before the Bakers bought it up. Having his ancestors' land pass into the hands of yet another Baker is just another log on the fire of the Turnbull/Baker feud so he repays the favour by selling the cattle - rendering Victoria's property useless (no cows = no income to support the ranch).

When Victoria confronts him on this, he impulsively kisses her and when he takes it too far, she fires him. Unfortunately, this does nothing to douse their passionate mutual attraction.

Both characters are so nuanced and real that their fears and insecurities bleed across the pages. I love me some drama, and O'Keefe dishes up the best kind - the drama that springs from vividly realized characters confronting powerful conflict. Victoria spent her life being abused, punished, and lied to by the people who were supposed to protect her, and she internalized it all. It's delicious to read her come into her own as she decides to turn her ranch into a first-class spa - but she has to struggle every step of the way against her instinctual mistrust in herself. Eli is a little more grounded - until the mother who abandoned him when he was eight years old shows up in his life again, hoping to rebuild the maternal bridge she burned, splinter by charred, damaged splinter.

The past is a weighty thing in Can't Hurry Love - almost physically weighty. Victoria's spent the last couple of years bowed near to breaking beneath the strain of her guilt and self-hatred. Eli, meanwhile, has struggled beneath the pressure of his family's anger. As Victoria decides to turn the ranch into a spa, and Eli uses his newfound freedom to pursue horse breeding, it looks like they might be able to leave their heavy baggage behind. But when they give into lust and engage in an affair, their fear of history repeating itself threatens their attempts to strengthen the relationship.

See what I mean? Drama. These are vibrant, visceral characters and Molly O'Keefe's gorgeous writing draws out their pain with lavish, layered brushstrokes. But it hurts so good.
A+

"The Rook," by Daniel O'Malley

The Protagonist: Myfanwy Thomas. Possessed of paranormal body-altering powers, she works as a "Rook" for the Chequy - a secret organization bent on keeping Britain safe from magical threats.
Her Angst: This Myfanwy Thomas has absolutely no memory of who she is or was - thanks to a betrayal from someone in the Chequy. Is she capable of impersonating, well, herself, to find out who put a hit out on her?

The Secondary Cast:

Heretic: A friendly member of the Chequy court (Chevalier, to be exact) who can contort himself into impossible shapes.

Gestalt: Myfanwy's fellow Rook, who is a single soul born into four bodies and can operate each one independently and simultaneously. Not the easiest person to relate to.

Lady Farrier: The Lady of the Chequy, who can enter and control people through their dreams. She is the only one who knows of Myfanwy's amnesia, and she keeps it quiet to settle an old debt.

Grantchester: A Bishop of the Chequy who can emit gaseous chemicals from his pores. A swinging ladies' man and diplomat.

Alrich: The Chequy's other Bishop, who can only come out after sundown, is ridiculously gorgeous, and doesn't age. He's pretty much exactly what you think he is.

Eckhart: A former soldier who discovered his abilities in adulthood, he's a Chevalier of the Chequy and capable of manipulating metal into different forms.

Shantay: A Bishop from Croatoan (the US version of the Chequy), who can turn her body into metal and becomes an instant BFF with Myfanwy.

The Word: Reading has always been pleasant for me, but there have occasionally been times where, while I've enjoyed and appreciated what I've read, nothing has really connected with me in a way that makes me want to remember it and read it again and again.

I'm kind of grateful for my recent change of reviewing policy (i.e deciding to review only books that I've loved or hated - no more wasting time reviewing "blah" or "m'eh" books) because, well, there have been a lot of "m'eh" books lately. Most of them have been decent, but none of them really "grabbed" me. I miss being grabbed by books.

So it's always a pleasure to read something that absolutely abducts me from normal life so quickly and completely as Daniel O'Malley's The Rook.

At the start of the book, our heroine opens her eyes and finds herself surrounded by dead bodies wearing latex gloves. She has absolutely no memory of who she is. The only clue comes from two envelopes in the pocket of her coat, addressed to her and signed by - herself.

As it turns out, her name is Myfanwy (pronounced "Miffany") Thomas, someone stole her memories deliberately, and her previous self knew it was going to happen and prepared accordingly. As the new Myfanwy learns in the letters, she has two choices: she can go to the bank and open safety deposit box number one and find the money and instructions necessary to live the rest of her life anonymously and in comfort. Or she can open safety deposit box number two, find out more about who her body used to belong to, and impersonate the old Myfanwy long enough to find out who put a hit out on her.

After encountering more murderous glove-wearing goons and eliminating them with her just-discovered paranormal powers, Myfanwy chooses Box Number Two. And discovers the old Myfanwy belonged to a secret organization of super-powered people dedicated to protecting Britain from supernatural threats.

AWESOME.

Oh, and someone within that organization (known as the Chequy) betrayed her. Neither Myfanwy knows who. Less awesome.

There is seriously so much to love about this book that I almost don't know where to start. Actually - let's start with Myfanwy. Both Myfanwys. Old Myfanwy leaves New Myfanwy a suitcase full of letters explaining her life, the people around her, and the inner working of the Chequy. Old Myfanwy's voice is still very much present in New Myfanwy's life - even if they don't always agree. Old Myfanwy was taken from her parents by the Chequy the moment her powers manifested - and developed serious issues as a result. She was extremely shy, preferred administration to fieldwork, hated using her powers, and was generally looked down upon by the rest of the Chequy as a disappointment.

Thanks to New Myfanwy having no memories of old experiences, she doesn't have the same anxieties and fears - and develops into a far more active, take-charge character, to the astonishment of her coworkers. The interplay between Old and New Myfanwy is fascinating and an excellent examination of how environment and experience can shape a person's personality.

But then there's also the super-secret, super-rich organization of the Chequy with its near infinite resources and the many talents of its employees. Myfanwy is an administrator, which gives her a detailed and hilarious point of view into how everything works - yes, we get the cool details about brute squads and incident containment, but we also get all the red tape, bureaucracy and other highly entertaining mundanities of running a super-secret superhero organization. So there's a lot of action and gruesome deaths - but also a lot of everyday problems like dealing with snarky rookies and awkward Christmas parties. The balance between the mundane and the absurd, the human and the superhuman, is perfect.

O'Malley never falls back on the stereotypical "super-strength, flight, invisibility" standard powers for the Chequy folks, either, instead going for the weird and interesting. My favourites are Myfanwy's ability to alter the bodily functions of others and Gestalt's ability to share a single mind and identity among four siblings.

While this novel can be found in the Fantasy section of your bookstore, this book succeeds by refusing to restrict itself to any one genre. It's got action - but also mystery, with the suspense of an impersonation thriller as Myfanwy struggles to fit in without revealing her amnesia. It's got hilariously awkward office humour, along with supernatural creatures, a dash of political commentary and a skinless Belgian in a fish tank.

The Rook is pretty much an all-you-can-eat literary buffet and I encourage you to dive in, face-first.
A+

"Ask the Passengers," by A.S. King

The Protagonist: Astrid Jones. As the outsider in a close-knit small-town, she's never been one of the crowd.
Her Angst: When she realizes she's in love with a girl, she fears becoming even more of an outcast.

Secondary Characters:

Kristina: Astrid's best friend, one of the most popular girls in Unity Valley, and a closet lesbian. While she pushes Astrid to be open about herself, she's more in love with the small-town limelight than she's let on.

Justin: Astrid's other best friend and Kristina's beard boyfriend. He and Kristina try to involve Astrid in more activities.

Dee: An open lesbian from another school district, she works with Astrid at a catering company and is love with her - although she wants to get more physical than Astrid is comfortable with.

Ellis: Astrid's little sister, who has totally glommed on to small-town life - including the bigoted aspects.

Astrid's Mum (because she's not worthy of a first name right now): A vain, superficial, gossip-obsessed agoraphobe who cares more about what other people think than how her daughters feel.

Astrid's Dad (ditto): A loser deadbeat who's decided he'd rather "secretly" smoke pot in the attic than be a parent to his kids.

Angst Checklist:

• Sexuality
• Peer Pressure
• Small Town Values
• Homophobia
• Racism
• The First Amendment Right to be a Homophobic Racist Holocaust Denier
• Gossip

The Word: Although I'd been asked to read this as the March Book for the Forever Young Adult Book Club, this book had already been on my TBR for a while thanks to the feverishly positive reviews from several bloggers I respect. 

When Astrid was nine, she and her her family moved from New York City to Unity Valley - a small town that is small in All Of The Ways - including small-minded. In such a deeply-conservative town glued together by malicious gossip and dusty tradition, Astrid has never truly fit in - even without revealing the secret she's been hiding from everyone. 

And her family is useless - her little sister Ellis has firmly embedded herself in townie life and her superficial, unloving mother Claire is too busy attempting (and failing) to do the same thing to involve herself with Astrid's problems. Astrid's father, meanwhile, has decided to check out of being a father and husband by developing a drug habit. The last thing Astrid wants is to trust any of them with her secret - "tolerant" is how they want to be perceived, not how they really are. 

You see, Astrid's secret is that she is love with a girl - a feisty hockey player named Dee.

Astrid's not exactly scared of being gay - rather, she's scared of being shoved into the "Gay Box."  She's scared of having other people decide who she is and what that means before she has a chance to, which is why she still hasn't told her best friends Kristina and Justin, even though they've been each other's mutual beards as Unity Valley's Homecoming Couple for years. She's scared that "coming out" will irrevocably label and define her before she's really sure who and what she is. Does being in love with one girl make you gay? What if you don't feel this way forever? What if you change you mind? And shouldn't people care that there's more to you than who you're in love with? 

It's a fascinating argument that reminds me strongly of Openly Straight - only I think Ask the Passengers handles the angst of your identity being defined entirely by your sexuality in a much more nuanced way. A.S. King is a master at showing both sides of Astrid's insecurity - on the one hand, she's scared of people making decisions for her. On the other, she's just as terrified of making decisions for herself. 

She'd much rather coast along in limbo with her head down and let the cards fall where they may, but that's just a decision to not decide, and it comes with consequences the same as any other choice. So when Dee pressures Astrid to come out - I can see that she's pushing Astrid on something that should be Astrid's choice, but I also understand that Astrid's unwillingness to commit is hurtful. 

It's really a testament to A.S. King's characterization that Astrid never comes across as wishy-washy or passive as she slowly grows brave enough to decide to decide. Part of that, I think is Astrid's habit of "asking the passengers." To fight her own feelings of being unloved and judged, her favourite pastime is lying on the picnic table in her backyard and sending love to the passengers in the planes that pass by. Her attempt to fight indifference with intentional feelings of love says so much about her, especially when she silently sends love to her family even after they humiliate or ignore her. 

All in all, this was a thoroughly insightful book with an intriguing protagonist.

B+

Re-Read Rollout: "Welcome to Temptation," by Jennifer Crusie

Coming off the disappointment of rereading Sing the Four Quarters, I was overjoyed to discover that time (five years, to be exact) has not dulled my enjoyment of Welcome to Temptation, one of Jennifer Crusie's best novels and one of my favourite contemporary romances ever.

There's not much more I express in this reread review that my original review didn't, although I can reiterate the aspects of this novel that made it one of my absolute favourites.

First of all, I loved the sheer number of subplots packed into one novel. Of course, we have the wonderful romance between Sophie, the sole white sheep in a family of con artists, and Temptation's mayor Phineas T. Tucker. But we also have Sophie's changing relationship with her manipulative sister Amy, the suspicious death of Phin's wife, the murder of a blackmailing TV anchor, the filming of a movie that inexorably turns into porn, the election shenanigans between Phin and his hypocritical opponent Stephen Garvey, and various love triangles, secrets, adulteries, and secondary romances. There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel, and reading it a second time really brought home the amount of skill Jennifer Crusie must have had to organize all these narratives into something cohesive and enjoyable.

Second of all, I loved Phin. I liked Sophie, too, but Phin really is one of the most adorable romance heroes ever. He's confident, he's assertive - but he's also really mellow and laid-back, which is unusual for the heroes in the novels I read. Most of the heroes I've come across in romance lately are perpetually drowning in angst or stressed out by how controlling they are or risking an aneurysm by how hard they have to fight to keep it in their pants.

But Phin? He's mellow. When he wants something, he goes after it, but he's a charmer, not an enforcer. He solves his problems with charisma and dialogue. Really, really good dialogue. Some of the best hero-heroine banter I've ever read comes from this very book.

This is going to be a fairly short review because honestly, my opinion of this novel hasn't changed much from when I first read it five years ago. It's an astoundingly detailed and hilarious small-town romance with great staging, an enormous but well-organized cast of characters, more subplots than you can shake a stick at - and a phenomenal romance between two likeable characters. At no point was I bored, annoyed, or anything less than enjoyably entertained while reading this novel.

If you haven't read it already, do so. It's a classic.
A+

Re-Read Rollout: "Gentlemen and Players," by Joanne Harris

Principle Cast:

Roy Straightley: An aging professor of Latin who worries the new school reforms will force him into retirement before he completes his 100th term of teaching.

Snyde: A secret intruder who's invaded the hallowed halls of St. Oswald's in order to destroy the institution for its stagnant exclusivity.

Secondary Cast:

Pat Bishop: The genial, compassionate Second Head who's aces at managing students but terrible at managing scandals.

The New Head: The progressive headmaster who's more focused on the school's reputation and cost-cutting measures than the students themselves.

Colin Knight: A resentful school outcast who becomes an unwitting pawn in Snyde's plots against the school.

Marlene: The mother of a former student, she now works as St. Oswald's ultra-competent receptionist.

Mr. Keane: A new teacher to St. Oswald's, he hopes his adventures in teaching will give him plenty of material for a novel he's writing.

Ms. Dare: Another new teacher who displays a remarkable gift for dealing with students, but tries to stay out of the increasingly toxic office politics.

Leon: A student at St. Oswald's 15 years ago whom Snyde befriended while disguised as a fellow student.

The Word: 
I was a little bit afraid to reread Gentleman and Players for my annual Re-Read Rollout. When I first read this way, way back in February 2010, it utterly destroyed me - but I was so determined at the time to be a "romance-only blog" that I didn't review it.

But this book was so good. Almost too good - I was afraid to re-read it because I was worried the experience of reading it a second time wouldn't measure up to the first. That I'd suddenly notice all these flaws and mistakes and ruin my memory of that One Perfect Read.

Because Gentleman and Players was one of those Perfect Reads. I love a lot of books, but Perfect Reads are rare. The type of book I would grab if my house was on fire. The type of book that keeps me voraciously reading through my TBR in order to fine another one like it.

Gentleman and Players takes place at St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, a posh private school for the best and brightest of England's young male elite - provided their parents can afford six thousand pounds a year for tuition. It is a school steeped in prestige and tradition.

For Roy Straightley, a Latin professor at St. Oswald's, he could do with a little more tradition. Sixty-five years old and a term away from his Century (his 100th term teaching at St. Oswald's), he continually frustrates St. Oswald's administration by refusing to adapt to their educational reforms. He relies on ancient chalkboards, dusty black robes, and common sense when dealing with his pupils, even though he knows the more progressive Head and his cronies are losing patience with him.

However, for a mysterious figure known simply as Snyde, St. Oswald's relies far too much on tradition.  Snyde's father worked as a porter and groundskeeper for St. Oswald's - a porter whose termination was completely hushed up by the powerful administration. After spending a childhood living in St. Oswald's shadow, longing after the privileged lifestyle of its entitled students, Snyde has returned, disguised as a teacher, to destroy the corrupt and stagnant school from the inside out.

I loved Gentleman and Players because the story is all about conflict - good versus evil, progress versus tradition, hands-on educators versus detached administrators, rich versus poor, parents versus teachers, Straightley versus Snyde. There is so much detail and drama and scandal - and yet very little direct confrontation in the novel.

Rather, most of the conflict involves the points of view of Straightley and Snyde. Straightley is an Old Boy who has dedicated the greater part of his life to the school, and from him we get a highly entertaining, satirical look into the politics of private school administration and the private lives of teachers. While Straightley isn't blind to St. Oswald's imperfections, nor to the emptiness of the parts of his life that don't involve the school, he is fiercely loyal to it and its boys.

However, Straightley is mainly an observer. It is Snyde who sets most of the plot in motion - oftentimes by using St. Oswald's traditions against itself and brewing dissent amidst the envious townies, the dissatisfied parents, and the disgruntled students of St. Oswald's. Snyde exposes and exploits the hidden resentments over class differences, favouritism, money, and privilege that have been weakening the "impervious" foundations of the school for generations. At the same time, we get frequent flashbacks to the last year Snyde's father was porter, the year the teenaged Snyde decided to impersonate a student and experience the St. Oswald's experience firsthand - with disastrous results.

So did it hold up upon re-reading? Yes indeed. Perception plays a very large part in my enjoyment of Gentleman and Players - the characters' points of view and their respective blind spots thanks to their own privileges and prejudices, the way outsiders perceive St. Oswald's versus the way St. Oswald's fights to be perceived, and how a few carefully-revealed secrets can change one's perception of several major characters. Without going into too much detail, there is a delightful twist at the end of the novel that added an extra layer of enjoyment to this particular reread.

Simply put, Gentlemen and Players is a fiendishly clever, insightful, and entertaining novel about education, revenge, and privilege.
A+

"Someone Else's Love Story," by Joshilyn Jackson (William Morrow, 2013)

The Primary Cast:

Shandi Pierce: A young woman with a 3-year-old son who decides to finally find out the truth behind her son's conception.

William Ashe: A brilliant, autistic chemist who is still is mourning his lost family thanks to a car accident.

The Secondary Cast:

Natty: Shandi's genius-level son, and the love of her life, regardless of how he came into the world.

Walcott: Shandi's childhood best friend who's a little too White Knight for Shandi's liking.

Paula: William's bitchy and AWESOME attorney BFF - who does not like Shandi or the moves she's been putting on William.

Stevie: The hopeless loser who tries to rob a Circle K and winds up holding everyone hostage.

Mimmy: Shandi's protective but exasperating mother.

Bethany: Shandi's awful stepmonster.

Bridget: William's wife. Was planning to become a nun before he wooed her away with his autistic charm.

The Word: In Joshilyn Jackson's engaging and unconventional romantic story, our hero and heroine meet during a robbery at a Circle K. Shandi is a single mother who's spent the last four years repressing the fact that her beloved son Natty was conceived from rape. William is a brilliant chemist with high-functioning autism who's still struggling to recover from the loss of his wife and infant daughter a year after their car accident.

When William ends the hostage crisis by incapacitating the gunman, taking a bullet in the process, Shandi becomes convinced that their meeting is destiny. She insinuates herself into William's life by asking him to help find the man who fathered Natty (with SCIENCE! Just roll with it), all the while taking care of him, getting to know him, and showering him with good ol' southern hospitality. Unfortunately, she faces fierce opposition from William's best friend Paula, her own BFF Walcott, and William's own fixation on his lost wife.

With this novel, expectations are not your friend. Jackson builds the novel on well-written but instantly-recognizable cliches - the jealous best friend, the over-critical mother, the chirpy female protagonist who flutters about in frilly sundresses dispensing home cooked meals to the reclusive male protagonist. However, just when you think the narrative is about to turn left, it veers right. Without giving too much away, the novel is about Shandi, William, and why destiny brought them together - but not in the way you think.

I really enjoyed how the novel establishes a thematic conflict between logic and faith, elements both our protagonists consistently struggle with. For Shandi, this is internal as she relinquishes her irrational belief in Natty's immaculate conception in favour of confronting what really happened. William explores this theme as he reminisces on his marriage to a woman who almost became a nun. William, thanks to his autism, is extremely literal and finds his wife's deep religious faith difficult to reconcile. And yet, despite this, William is just as guilty as Shandi of retreating from painful truths.

Joshilyn Jackson crafts an incredibly empathetic, warm-hearted novel that satisfies on an emotional level without being overtly manipulative (except perhaps at the end). While I'll admit I wasn't entirely happy with the too-sudden swerve at the end, by that time, I'd come to love the characters too much to abandon ship. I'll be keeping this one on my shelf for a while - I suspect it will improve upon repeated readings.
A-

"Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock," by Matthew Quick (Little, Brown; 2013)

The Protagonist: Leonard Peacock. Today is his birthday, and he plans to go out the same way he came in - with a lot of blood and screaming as he shoots the boy who abused him and then himself.
His Angst: Um, see above.

Secondary Characters:

Asher Beal: Leonard's childhood best friend who then became his abuser and tormentor. Leonard plans to cap off his birthday by blowing a hole in Asher's head.

Walt: Leonard's kindly, elderly neighbour who often likes to watch old Humphrey Bogart movies with him.

Baback: A violin prodigy whom Leonard defends from bullies in return for listening to him make beautiful music.

Lauren: An evangelical, homeschooled Christian girl whom Leonard develops a crush on.

Herr Silverman: An inspiring teacher of Holocaust Studies, whom Leonard idolizes and looks up to.

Linda Peacock: Leonard's awful, oblivious, neglectful, utterly self-absorbed and useless mother.

Angst Checklist

• Bullying
• Sexual Abuse
• Terrible Parenting
• Humphrey Bogart
• Religion
• Suicide
• Homophobia
• Depression and Mental Illness

The Word: December's a great month - full of twinkling lights and wishes and cookies and family. So what better thing to read for the Forever Young Adult Book Club than a novel about suicide?

Yaaaay….

It's Leonard Peacock's 18th birthday, and how does he plan on celebrating? By taking his P-38 pistol to school and shooting his high school abuser, Asher Beal, and then himself. First, however, he's got four presents to hand out to the four people who at least tried to make his life bearable. 

Jay Asher (the author of Thirteen Reasons Why) blurbed this book, and I can see why, as the narratives are superficially similar. Both plots follow the viewpoint of an abused, vengeful outsider explaining the reasons they've decided to end their life. Both books explore the myriad ways in which parents, friends, and educators can (and do) fail the children they're supposed to be protecting. 

However, while I couldn't quite connect with Leonard Peacock, it was nowhere near as hateful as Thirteen Reasons Why. For one thing, Leonard's pain doesn't beatify him or excuse his intentions the way Hannah's premeditated psychological torture of her "tormentors" was. 

Leonard's intentions are gruesome - but the narrative acknowledges the monster he's planning on becoming even as it examines how he got to this point from an empathetic standpoint. There's also an element of suspense that keeps one reading - each gift that Leonard gives evokes memories and flashbacks, but also serves as a countdown to Leonard's murder-suicide. Will he go through with it as planned, or will someone finally be able to talk him out of it?

Reading Leonard Peacock was similar in a lot of ways to Catcher in the Rye. The narrative, told from the outsider's point of view, keeps the rest of the world at a distance. Everyone is a poser and a phoney. Our protagonist reaches out for help but at the same time resists it, distrusting other people's intentions. Leonard has no hope for the future because he can't find a single adult in his life who demonstrates that adulthood is any less miserable than adolescence. 

There are some bright spots in the never-ending misery, but they are toned down and often bittersweet, such as the post-apocalyptic "letters from the future" that Leonard writes to himself. There are no magical happy endings or solutions.

At the same time, however, I reacted to Leonard Peacock in the same way I reacted to Catcher in the Rye. I couldn't really connect to Leonard. I empathized with his pain but at the same time felt removed from it. As a result, while the reading experience of this book was pleasant I didn't take anything away from it. It was just a story that existed. I'm also not sure the story argued its point very well, but to be fair it's a subject that is pretty murky and miserable.

In the end, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock gets the "m'eh" reaction from me. I never really felt for Leonard the way the author probably wanted me to. Still, the novel does have some insightful and clever moments and is an interesting look at an unusual point of view.
B-

"First Comes Love," by Christie Ridgway (Avon, 2002)

The Chick: Kitty Wilder. Tired of living in the slutty shadow of her brothel-owning ancestors, she's planning on leaving her hometown of Hot Water just as soon as she earns enough money.
The Rub: Her plans are upended when her husband - who's only just realized their marriage is legal - returns to town. And he's not happy.
Dream Casting: Kristen Bell.

The Dude: Dylan Matthews. An FBI agent who's slaved away for the last eight years trying to atone for a teenage mistake that may have cost a woman her life.
The Rub: Finding out he's married forces him to return to a town he's desperately missed - but it's too full of excruciating memories of his failure for him to stay.
Dream Casting: Brett Dalton.

The Plot: 

Kitty: Just because I play a hooker in my town's re-enactments doesn't mean I'm one in real life! Wish my town could see it!

Dylan: WHY THE HELL ARE WE MARRIED? THIS IS NOT OKAY.

Kitty: Eep! Let me distract you with my cutesy shenanigans and pratfalls and adorably perky boobs for the next fifty pages!

Dylan: Curse your adorably perky boobs! But you're going to have to answer the question some time!

Kitty: Noooooope! Time for more pratfalls!

Dylan: Seriously, though.

Kitty: Oh, it was just that I've been secretly in love with you this whole time and never slept with another person because cheating is wrong! But I forgive you for doing it!

Dylan: … I inexplicably find your delusional stalkery behaviour appealing!

Kitty: HOORAY!

Romance Convention Checklist:

• 1 Hardened (heh) FBI Agent
• 1 Bad Reputation
• Several Hooker Dresses
• 1 Defiled Minivan
• 1 Terrrrrrrible Vagina Euphemism
• 1 Legalized Marriage Certificate
• 1 Small Town Murder
• 1 Secondary Parental Romance

The Word:

In First Comes Love, Christie Ridgway creates one of the most well-realized and metaphorically clever settings I've ever come across in romance. Hot Water is a former Gold Rush town that's devoted to the past - in more ways then one. Not only does the bulk of its tourism revenue come from its historical reenactment district (called Old Town), but its social stratification is also based on your ancestors' history. 

And Kitty Wilder is sick of it. Her family is descended from Rose Wilder, the town's first ho and proprietor of The Burning Rose brothel. Since then, every woman in the Wilder family has lived under (and up to!) that reputation - including Kitty's mother, who abandoned her as a baby. Kitty is nevertheless devoted to the town and works herself to the bone to crawl out from under her family's licentious history - but, in a hilarious paradox, she does so by dressing as a madame and reenacting that history every weekend for tourists. I loved this concept.

Kitty longs for conventionality, and deeply resents how the town continues to tar her with the same harlot brush despite her nun-like existence. And now that her scandalous mother has unexpectedly returned to town, revving up the Wilder rumour mill once again, she believes the only way to escape her past is to leave Hot Water for good - once she pays off her college debt to her great-aunt Cat.

All her plans come crashing down when the last man she expected to return to town interrupts one of her tours - Dylan Matthews, her husband of eight years. Who has only just realized this fact.

Dylan Matthews is a workaholic FBI agent made famous by his numerous high-profile rescues of women and children. Son of the town judge, descendant of Hot Water's first sheriff, and destined for law school, he was Hot Water's Golden Boy until he attempted to intervene in a carjacking. While he managed to rescue the children in the car, the driver (his best friend's wife) was killed. Haunted by this failure, he left Hot Water to join the FBI and never looked back.

He is furious that Kitty's legalization of the joke marriage certificate they got as teens has forced him to return to a town whose hero-worship of him wracks him with guilt.

Unfortunately, a quickie divorce is not in the cards. Kitty, in order to pay off her college debt, forces Dylan to become Old Town's reenactment sheriff for the summer (in return for his divorce) in order to boost Old Town's sales and get her enough money to leave town guilt-free.

Yeah. Outside of the whole "secret nonconsensual marriage thing" and the "extorting a man by refusing to end said nonconsensual marriage thing," Kitty is a very empathetic character.

BUT - that "nonconsensual marriage thing" is a pretty huge flaw to swallow, and one I continually struggled with throughout the novel. Did Kitty seriously never consider how her actions might affect Dylan later on? Did she never wonder what would have happened if Dylan had wanted to marry somebody else? And the "secret reason" she did it is meant to be romantic (she was in love with him the whole time!) but in reality is just really creepy. Especially once we learn she's remained chaste this entire time because she was remaining "true to her marriage vows." Honestly, I just heard the Psycho soundtrack in my head whenever she brought it up. That's not a healthy mindset.

It's interesting to read this romance after Nobody's Baby But Mine. Both romances are about heroines who intentionally do something that monumentally affects their heroes' lives without their consent or knowledge - and both of them do it for stupid reasons. However, while I still think Kitty is bonkers, she doesn't possess that same obnoxious entitlement and privilege that Jane does. Kitty's upbringing was lonely and difficult, and she's worked so hard to be the Perfect Upstanding Citizen to people who only see her mother's actions, so her bonkers decision is - WHILE STILL NOT OKAY - easier to interpret as a misguided teenage mistake, rather than a selfish, privileged decision.

Besides, Kitty and Dylan have good chemistry and are generally good people (extortion and obsessive behaviour aside), and the setting is well-realized and ultimately positive without being a corny and idealized small town. There are some definite drawbacks to living in Hot Water and Kitty endures pretty much all of them.

I was a little squicked out by the secondary romance because it's between Dylan's father D.B. and Kitty's neglectful mother Samantha. It's just a kind of pseudo-incest scenario that bothers me. However, I really appreciated how Kitty and her mother eventually obtain an adult reconciliation but never become close. Once we got Samantha's viewpoint, I was afraid there'd be some dialogue or explanation about how Kitty "owes" Samantha forgiveness, love and understanding simply on account of their shared genes. But that's not true - Samantha dumped Kitty as a baby, and Kitty's over it, but Samantha doesn't suddenly regain her "mother" role. I liked that.

All in all, despite a bonkers premise, First Comes Love is an enjoyable (and often very funny) romance with a great setting.
B+

"Nobody's Baby But Mine," by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (HarperCollins, 1997)

The Chick: Dr. Jane Darlington. A brilliant super-genius who longs to have a baby of her own.
The Rub: In order for her baby to be "normal," she has to bang a stupid guy in order to even out her offspring's IQ - and who better than a football player? They're all dumb, right?
Dream Casting: Claire Coffee.

The Dude: Cal Bonner. A star quarterback for the Chicago Stars who's in denial over the end of his football career.
The Rub: He finds out some random lady made a baby with him without his knowledge - oh noes! Commitment!
Dream Casting: Josh Duhamel.

The Plot: I am just too damn tired. Try reading my LiveTweets about it instead!

Romance Convention Checklist:

• 1 Commitment-Phobe Hero
• 1 Book-Smart, Literally-Everything-Else-Dumb Heroine
• 3 Misogynist Good Ol' Boy Friends
• Several Boxes of Tampered Lucky Charms
• 1 Kooky Grandma
• 1 Secondary Romance
• 1 Greedy, Soulless Lawyer

The Word:
It's no secret that I'm a fan of Susan Elizabeth Phillips. She's consistently entertained me with her books - and even surprised me with the depth of her characterization as well as her excellent use of drama.

However, every time I raved about one of her books, there'd be a ghostly echo on the edge of my Twitter feed - a haunted whisper, thick with regret and despair, "Wait until Nobody's Baby But Miiiiiiine!"

At first I thought, "Challenge accepted!" But in reality, I was so not ready for this jelly. This Completely-Divorced-From-Reality Jelly. Served on a Traditional Gender Roll. With a side order of Offensive Stereotypes. Drenched in a hefty serving of Crazysauce.

So really, the only way to help this bad medicine go down is a good ol' Drinking Game! Our first rule - chug whenever an offensively stale stereotype rears its ugly head.

Dr. Jane Darlington is our "heroine." She is a "brilliant" award-winning physicist who Doogie Howser'd her way to a Ph.D. We know this, because she talks about quarks. A lot - take a chug every time she mentions a quark. Thankfully, she's also a knockout - once you convince her to let her hair down and take off her glasses (drink!).

Of course, none of her accomplishments matter because she's 34 and babyless. Unfortunately, she can't go to a sperm bank, because medical and science students are the primary donors. In this detailed fantasy world that SEP has created, all male scientists are misogynist nerds with bad haircuts who wear black socks to bed (drink!).

More importantly, Jane wants a dumb baby. No, really. Her ~*terrible childhood*~ as a Super Genius scarred her so completely, she refuses to "subject" her unborn child to that type of First World White Privileged Suffering. So let's drink to her pain whenever she mentions her "terrible childhood" of being better than everyone else.

Jane thinks she needs to score some love gravy from a Forrest Gump-type that will even out her child's intelligence to a more "reasonable" level. Because that is exactly how science works. And our heroine is a "brilliant" "scientist." If I could add more quotation marks without violating the laws of grammar, I would. Instead, I'll just drink whenever the heroine gleefully imagines her child's IQ dropping a couple of points. No, really.

Cal Bonnor is our "hero," a 36-year-old quarterback for the Chicago Stars who's in denial of the impending end of his football career. He refuses to date women older than 22, because dating older women implies he's old, which means commitment (drink)! And nagging wives (drink)! And the stale laughter of a live studio audience, since Cal appears to derive his understanding of gender politics from old reruns of According to Jim.

Cal prefers younger women because they still have that "smell of newness" about them, a "dewy sparkle" - and shudders at women thirty and older because he thinks they're "already turning brown at the edges." Dude, this wouldn't happen if you just dipped them in lemon juice first! Take a drink whenever Cal expresses his desire for sparkly teenagers and his revulsion for "elderly" women over the age of twenty four. 

His birthday's coming up, and his Totally Not Offensive Football Bros decide to buy him a hooker as a birthday present. But a super-classy hooker. And they make her wear a big pink bow just to hammer home the point that she's his gift. Of course, this blatant objectification of women is completely okay because They're Dumb Football Players Who Don't Know Any Better (drink!).

Thanks to shenanigans I'm frankly too tired to explain at length, the "Classy Birthday Hooker" is really Jane in disguise, armed with a sabotaged condom. You see, after seeing one interview with Cal on the television, our "brilliant" heroine has already deduced that he must be an idiot because a) he's a football player (drink!) and b) he's Southern (drink!).

But one look at him convinces her that he's a hardened warrior, and genetically perfect for her baby. Because an "ancient, wise" female voice in her head tells her so. So drink whenever Jane refers to Cal as a warrior (or maybe just sip, she says it a LOT), and also whenever Psychic Judi Dench gives Jane romantic advice.

Despite the fact that Jane is terrible at sex, doesn't finish, and doesn't remove any of her clothes (this is the same heroine who complained about her ex wearing socks to bed, by the way), Cal is so inexplicably besotted with her that he bones her again when she comes back for seconds a month later. Both sex scenes are awkward and unpleasant - but, to be fair, incredibly fascinating. Both the hero and the heroine treat the other as a sex object. Cal initially refuses Jane and wants to "pass her along" to one of his friends, while Jane refers to Cal as a mere "device" to give her a baby. There actually is some real potential for nuance and discussion in this scenario - if only the protagonists were less punchable.

(For a less punchable version of this scenario, I recommend A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant.)

Long story longer, Cal finds out about the baby, throws his money around threatening to ruin Jane's career, and forces her into marriage, because doggone it if his baby won't be legitimate because he's an Old School Man with Old School Values (drink!). Of course, he plans to divorce Jane as soon as the cord is cut, but those nine months of matrimony will magically make all the difference. I can't say I understand Cal's logic in this scenario. Neither can Jane.

Of course, the gossip gets out so Cal has to pack up Jane and drive them both down to his small, southern hometown of Salvation, North Carolina, in order to evade reporters until the baby's birth and the return of football season. However, Cal gives Jane some specific instructions:

1. She can't talk to his family or friends without his knowledge.
2. If a scenario arises in which she's forced to meet his family or friends, she has to act as Terrible As Possible so his family won't grow attached to her.
3. She can't leave the house or own her own car to leave said house without his consent. 
4. If anyone asks, she's twenty-five years old - because Cal can't bear the shame of people knowing he married a woman as old as twenty-eight. People will think he's poor! (drink!)

To her credit, Jane ignores and defies most of these super-stalkery rules, and that's when we get a better picture of what Jane and Cal's romantic dynamic is supposed to be like, once they've stopped trying to be The Worst People Ever. Cal describes himself as a "yeller" - he was never truly satisfied with his dewy, sparkly, overly-moisturized college girls because he could never be his Awful Shouting Self around them without them bursting into tears. Um, okay. So Jane is his perfect match because she can put up with his Dominating Caveman Bullshit.

Maybe you could just stop being a Dominating Caveman? No? Okay then.

Once we get to Salvation, we get a host of dull, silly secondary subplots - the worst of which is a romantic one with Cal's estranged parents. His dad's flaw is that he's a privileged, emotionally abusive asshole going through a midlife crisis. His mum's flaw is … um, she's apparently unable to psychically detect that her husband's abuse comes from a place of love. Right.

Honestly, the narrative slows down and gets kind of boring around this point. There's less crazy, but there's no emotional substance to fill the void. The rest of the book is just squabbling that seems aimless and petty after the Seed-Stealing-Super-Genius plot of the first half.

Ultimately, it all comes down to the poorly-realized characters. Gonzo stories aren't a romantic deal breaker - just read some of the plots of Laura Kinsale's awesome books - but they still need grounded, realistic characters, and neither of these goons fit the bill.

Jane Darlington is a monstrously privileged character who jumps to hugely prejudiced conclusions about just about everyone. She believes Cal is a moron for a huge chunk of the book based solely on his southern accent (drink!), colloquial dialect (drink!), and his love of comic books (drink!). She is so horrified to discover Cal graduated summa cum laude that she threatens to take her child to Africa, where it's "primitive" (finish the whole damn bottle). Seriously. I guess the only way to escape the problems of White Privilege is to take the child away from white people.

And despite all this, her desperate desire to have a "normal" baby thanks to her "freakish" childhood, a desire that fuels the majority of her actions, is solved with one line in the epilogue.

Cal, meanwhile, is a cartoon. His actions and thought processes are just too exaggerated to believe or empathize with. His "old school values" that make no sense, his disgustingly hypocritical dismissal of women over twenty-five, his narrow-minded idea of what makes a man a "real man." He's built out of cliches - and not even positive ones. It's impossible to view his actions and decisions on a human spectrum because he's essentially a plot device/fantasy object. Although definitely not my fantasy.

It's interesting to compare this book to the other SEP novels I've read and loved - how could this one book hit so many wrong notes and fail to grasp realistic human behaviour on such a basic level? No idea. Even amid the awfulness, a few sparks of SEP's skillful humour slip through (like a hilarious scene where the heroine tries to sexy-dance to classical music - which winds up being "Flight of the Bumblebee"), but it's like reading a human story written by aliens who decided to watch old family sitcoms instead of doing research.

I'm far from giving SEP up completely, but this book is definitely the odd one out.
D-

"Good Omens," by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (HarperTorch, 2006)

The Primary Cast:

Crowley: A Fallen Angel who wears dark glasses and drives a Bentley.

Aziraphale: An Angel (unfallen), who collects antique books and wears a bow tie. Friends with Crowley.

The Secondary Cast:

Anathema Device: A young witch, and descendent of a woman whose book of prophesies has accurately predicted every major event in her life.

Newt Pulsifer: An apprentice witchfinder, for no particular reason than he has nothing better to do with his life.

Adam Young: The 11-year-old Antichrist, who's more concerned with climbing trees and playing games in the hedge than de

Fantasy Convention Checklist:

• 1 Inexplicably-Empowered Child With World-Destroying Powers
• 1 Bigoted Witchfinder
• 1 Rather Open-Minded Witchfinder
• 1 Book of Entirely Accurate Prophesies
• 4 Bad Little Kids
• 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse
• 4 More (Albeit Less Effective) Horsemen of the Apocalypse
• 1 Talkative Nun

The Word: I'm not the hugest fan of Terry Pratchett - I read one of his Rincewind books and thought the humour was just too over-the-top for my taste. Neil Gaiman has also been hit or miss for me. Loved 1602, Stardust and Coraline - disliked American Gods. 

So what would it be like to read a book written by both of them together? Amazingly, rather pleasant. Gaiman tones down Pratchett's goofball humour and Pratchett lightens up Gaiman's moody navel-gazing, and the result is a pleasant, often funny, if a bit overlong novel.

So the end of the world is apparently nigh - the Antichrist has just been born, which means in a few years' time the world will come to an end as the armies of Heaven and Hell duke it out for Best Afterlife Ever. However, two small, insignificant peons in these supernatural armies are not as excited for this splendid event. Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a Fallen angel) have become friends during their petty squabbling over the souls of humanity, and they've rather come to like the human world. 

On top of that, thanks to the incompetent machinations of a group of Satanic nuns, the infant World-Destroyer is accidentally switched with another baby and sent home with the wrong family, where he grows up without any supernatural influence, Good or Evil. However, the Apocalypse waits for no one, and as events ratchet up towards the end of the world, Crowley and Aziraphale - with the help of some kooky characters and a book of disturbingly accurate prophesies - have to keep the world in one piece as much as possible. 

Good Omens is extremely cleverly written, with almost non-stop humour from start to finish. For the most part, the novel trots along at a nice clip as the narrative lightly tip toes along, across, and around weighty issues such as Free Will versus Fate, Good versus Evil, Human Nature, and the catchiness of Queen songs. The plot is rather slow-moving (the whole story takes about a week, all told) and is more of an excuse to cleverly skewer pop culture, religion, politics, and other subjects inappropriate for the dinner table.

That being said, the novel does begin to overstay its welcome about three quarters in. I actually found it difficult to keep track of some of the characters, since many of them (Anathema and Newt, to name a few) are almost entirely superfluous to the plot. The pacing could have been tightened in many places, and around the end a lot of the humour feels more like padding than plot. 

All in all, though, Good Omens is a quirky, funny read with a great deal of imagination and wit - even if it's a little short on story.

B