Sherry Thomas "Private Arrangements"

Lady and Lord Tremaine have the perfect English aristocratic marriage, he lives in New York and she lives in London. But for some reason after ten years of perfect harmony, she wishes to divorce and marry another. He returns to London to respond to her divorce petition and to extract an heir before he lets her go. Yes, well.

Ms. Thomas has a wonderfully ironic writing voice which is amusing and appropriate to our intelligent, ironic heroine and to a hero that appreciates this aspect of her personality. I especially appreciated how her writing voice shifted when we moved to our heroine's mother's story. There were things I could quibble with; our heroine's mother's shift from scheming to strangely honest is abrupt and feels disjointed; but overall the characters are witty and interesting and believably tortured. The plot turns are not typical historical romance fodder which is refreshing and the sex is engaging and believable. Even the historical context of the novel, although not entirely central to the story, works.

I will be looking for more Sherry Thomas books soon.

Historical Romance 2008: 4.5 of 5 contraceptive caps.

The Benefits of the Flu

Yes! I finally got a little reading done. The downside, achy delirium for two days, upside, two romance novels completed in two recovery days. Throw in a little strep throat and six year old with croup and it all makes for an eventful Thanksgiving week. Hope yours was both more fun and less exciting.

Laura Lee Guhrke is back with the girl bachelors, With Seduction In Mind. This time it's Daisy who keeps getting fired from all her jobs. She's a little impetuous. She's got red hair. She really believes in people. You know where this is going. Fine, call it a prejudice but I have a problem with the spunky red head trope. My mother has red hair, I seriously considered dyeing my kid's hair red when it started to fade to brown, I LOVE red hair. I am not a red hair hater!

Here's the real problem, I didn't like him either. Red hair impulsive girl who sees the best in everybody and recovering cocaine addict neurotic writer. Um. Look. Let's face it, romance is fantasy, anything can work if you can write the hell out of it. Ms. Guhrke gave herself a pretty tough task with this one and it just didn't work for me. What can I say. Maybe I was just annoyed it took them so long to get down to business.

Historical Romance 2009: 2 out of 5 killed off dogs.

This image has absolutely nothing to do with the book or impetuous red-heads. It is Miss Gertrude Crocker of Illinois, the treasurer of the National Woman's Party ca. 1916. Cool huh? Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party, Library of Congress.

Lois McMaster Bujold "The Sharing Knife"

Okay, I'll admit I have been sneaking in a bit of reading around all my school work. Shhh! Don't tell my husband. For the record, I have never done pleasure reading while he has had the kids by himself to give me time to study, I swear.

Okay, guilty admissions out of the way, I'll try to recap what I've made it through recently (from memory). Tess Dare's Goddess of the Hunt was very enjoyable and who can dislike a book with such a good title, really. I also picked up a Lois McMaster Bujold's book called Beguilement: The Sharing Knife Book 1. I saw it at my library (pictured here for Wendy Super Librarian) and like most of my reading, I picked it for the cover and the title. :) I was unfamiliar with Bujold's other books, apparently she writes mostly fantasy/sci-fi and this was an attempt at a book where romance was more central to the story. Works for me. It's just a terrific cross cultural love story between (dare I say it) a spunky heroine and a war weary hero. The world is typical "pseudo-medieval with supernatural elements" fantasy which I enjoy. But in the end it's the two main characters who pull the whole thing together.

In the second and the third books (I'm half way through number 3) the tension of "are they going to get together" is missing since they get their happy ending in book one. The question then shifts to "can they make a space for their relationship within their different societies who don't want to accept them together." So for me (have I mentioned I'm addicted to sexual tension) these two books are much slower, but I love these characters so much, it's still fun to follow them around. If you like fantasy and like some romance in your fantasy, try this one out. Highly recommend it.

Fantasy Romance 2006: 4 out of 5 sharing knives (duh!).

Beowulf Not Bad

So this coming week is already (hopefully) the worst of this semester. But since last week was the second worst week of the semester I officially took Saturday off to spend with my family and recharge my brain. The end of the day I topped off with a movie, Beowulf and Grendel. It's recently come to my better half's notice that Gerard Butler seems to come up a lot in the movies on our Netflix list. Um, er, well, yes. And as I was pretty certain this movie was going to be really bad, I was unusually apologetic and embarrassed.

I'm here to tell you, this movie wasn't bad at all! Low production value, sure, but with a famous text to butcher and a lot of historical stereotypes to overcome, I was expecting the worst. Okay, so they threw in a love interest which was completely gratuitous, but overall it was entirely surprisingly decent. So hubby couldn't laugh at me too much. He even allowed me to watch Gerry host SNL. Again, I was pleasantly surprised. How about you?

Oh man. Thanks Jessica. I read this, read it again, looked at the picture and was suddenly snorting Sunkist out of my nose. Not a good idea in front of your computer.

Image stolen from this brilliant website.