Monday, December 17, 2012
Followers..
Friday, December 7, 2012
Under Construction
Book Review: The Seduction of the Crimson Rose by Lauren Willig
Determined to secure
another London season without assistance from her new brother-in-law,
Mary Alsworthy accepts a secret assignment from Lord Vaughn on behalf of
the Pink Carnation. She must infiltrate the ranks of the dreaded French
spy, the Black Tulip, before he and his master can stage their planned
invasion of England. Every spy has a weakness and for the Black Tulip
that weakness is beautiful black-haired women his petals of the Tulip.
A natural at the art of seduction, Mary easily catches the attention of
the French spy, but Lord Vaughn never anticipated that his own heart
would be caught as well. Fighting their growing attraction, impediments
from their past, and, of course, the French, Mary and Vaughn find
themselves lost in a treacherous garden of lies.And as our modern-day heroine, Eloise Kelly, digs deeper into England's Napoleonic-era espionage, she becomes even more entwined with Colin Selwick, the descendant of her spy subjects.
Mary and Vaughn are my favorite couple (so far). I think it's because they both don't claim to be heros. They acknowledge that they are self-motivated and everyone believes that of them (including readers).
But as the story unravels, they are not as conceited as everyone thinks, even to themselves. Willig really put them through the ringer in this book (like no other couple before or after). To date, they are the only characters who have been shot at (well, Vaughn was...Mary had the un-Mary-like task of cleaning him up and saving his life) and blown up.
Nothing like an explosion to profess their undying love for each other. Yes, Mary all beautiful with blood down the side of her face from a piece of shrapnel and Vaughn with a reopened bullet wound through his side chest. Both their faces blackened with ashes. Yet, still sarcastic as ever.
That has go to be one of my favorite "love declaration" scenes in any the book.
Book Review: Lucinda, Darkly (Demon Princess Chronicles #1) by Sunny
For centuries, Lucinda
has endured her agonizing reality. As daughter of the High Lord of
Hell,she rules over nothing, retrieving the occasional wayward demon and
feeding off of the savage Mon�re-of whom she was a member before she
died. Then she encounters the Monre warrior Stefan, who offers himself to her. She is moved beyond measure by her desire for him-and soon finds herself drawn back into the heady eroticism of the Monre. There, she must carve out a home between the jealousy of the dead and the violence of the living, if she is to keep her newfound love-and life..
This book was disappointing. Sunny's world is derivative to begin with, reading like cross-over fanfiction between Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry and Anne Bishop's Black Jewels, with some original concepts and quasi-original characters. The Mona Lisa books were at least an entertaining read, if I didn't think too much about the ethical quandry behind lifting so much of other authors' work (which she all but admits to in one of her acknowledgments) ... this one, frankly, bored me. I couldn't care about Lucinda, and her "males" were uninteresting at best. I'm not sure why I finished it.
It's not the worst book I ever read, but there are many others on my TBR that I would've read first had I known it wouldn't hold my interest.
Book Review: Finding Laura Buggs by Stanley Gordon West
Surrounded by juicy and wacky characters, and without the support of her adoptive parents, her devil-may-care friends, or the boy she desperately loves, she summons the courage to doggedly follow where the faint trail leads. When she stumbles upon the buried past and long-hidden treachery, she is confronted by an evil that knows her by name and is drawn into a darkness she never knew existed. Tenaciously refusing to quit, she discovers a heartbreaking heroism and an extraordinary triumph that changes her life forever.
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