healingmirth | That Wednesday reading thinger

Check me out, posting a thing on a schedule, sort of!

(I would definitely do more things if I enforced fewer stupid boundaries on myself. Like saying "I'll make an appointment to take my car in for service when it looks like we've got a few days between bad weather.")

What I've been reading (hint: all the romance novels)

Think of England - KJ Charles
I picked this up post-yuletide - I feel like the reccing of it swept through a fair chunk of western media fandom? Love the characters, love the relationship, love the setting, love the writing. A slightly more violent conclusion than my ideal romance novel, but nothing that would be out of place in an action movie, or frankly, most of the TV I'm watching these days.

The Heiress Effect - Courtney Milan
Finally getting back to Courtney Milan after I said I was going to read All the Things, back in August. I do enjoy romance novel series that meander through a group of friends or family. Also, it helps with how I am terrible at keeping track of character names for the supporting cast.

I'm beginning to think it's the case that I'm always going to be slightly put off with how all Courtney Milan's novels start out. There always seems to be one plot element or relationship that's juuuuust beyond my ideal romance novel setting - either it's a bit too harsh on a character, or needlessly ~mysterious~ - but thus far she's wrapped them up such that I've forgiven them by the end, and I can accept that it may be the price of having characters that are more than cardboard, but it's a problem that I haven't had within any of her novellas thus far.

Charm of Magpies series - KJ Charles
I'd downloaded a sample of A Flight of Magpies some time ago, well before Think of England, but never bothered with it because I am not super-duper into magic. But! The Magpie Lord is $0.99 in the Kindle Store (and other places) which was enough to get me to give it another chance. Well played, Samhain.

In The Magpie Lord, it took me for damn ever to internalize which character was which, by name rather than context. For some reason (long-dormant schooling coming back to haunt me?) my brain kept insisting that Stephen Crane was a single character.

I did really enjoy the book! But it wasn't quite as tightly written (or edited, perhaps) as Think of England, and lost me a little bit when it started to turn actiony. Suddenly there were a whole bunch of characters who I couldn't quite keep track of, and it wasn't clear to me if I needed to keep track of them.

A Case of Possession and A Flight of Magpies follow the entirely reasonable complications of Stephen and Lucien's relationship, and turn their sexual dynamic more explicitly D/s with a side of bondage somewhere in there. I really enjoyed the involvement of Stephen's friends and coworkers, had a much less difficult time keeping track of the baddies, and only got a little bit distracted by how Lord Crane is only, ever and always referred to as Crane - even within his PoV - despite the fact that he hated his family and only recently came into the title.

The Countess Conspiracy - Courtney Milan

I seem to remember seeing a critical review that there was too much science? That didn't bother me, but I could have done without the pointedly vague references to ~the past~. There are clearly ~secrets~ all over the place in this book, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the reader to be more informed than the characters, and no one here is suffering from amnesia. We already know they're going to end up together, can you not also trust us with some measure of the information that they're withholding from each other?

Provoked and Beguiled - Joanna Chambers
Provoked was not really to my taste. It felt, throughout, very much like a slightly bad touch romance novel - big brutish guy treats his waifish love interest in a slightly creepy manner with respect to boundaries, most particularly in bed.

Also, the series is written by a lawyer, and a lawyer who seems to like history. I don't know enough about the setting to enjoy either wallowing in or critiquing how it's presented, so there's a fair amount that I would have edited out. I just didn't feel like Beguiled did enough to really incorporate the setting with the romance plot, and I didn't care enough about the setting for its own sake. (Thinking about it now reminds me a bit of the experience of reading Outlander when I was a teenager. IDK.) So it was like, here's a story about a lawyer in Scotland. Also, there's some sex. The tracks do come together in the end?

If I hadn't known that it was, and been willing to commit to, a three book arc when I first picked it up, I don't think I would have stuck with it. Like, if I'd happened to read Provoked right when it was published, I don't think I would have come back for Beguiled. The first book, much more than the second, was overwhelmingly about... and here is when I realize that I have no idea what the PoV dude's name is. The brute is Murdo Balfour, Lord somethingorother. And the lawyer character is...maybe his name is Alex? Nope, David. Anyway, Provoked was too much just David's story to my taste, particularly compared to KJ Charles and Courtney Milan, and yet it wasn't like Murdo was static and waiting for David to catch up.

Beguiled, though, felt much more like a story of both Murdo and David, insofar as that's manageable in a single PoV. Blah de blah, David knows Murdo slightly better, and they're more open with each other, now in the second book. I do understand why, if I perceive the storytelling in Beguiled as an appropriate balance of character development between David and Murdo, that it would have been tough to deliver that balance earlier in their relationship. Doesn't mean I have to like it!

So, I legitimately enjoyed this Beguiled, rather than just deciding it was competently written enough to recommend with caveats. The historical events and elements of David's professional life that she chose to include intersected with the romance plot at several different points, as did the b-character plot. (tw: domestic abuse, largely but not entirely offscreen) And while, as the middle book, Beguiled clearly isn't meant to end with a happily ever after, it definitely ends on a note that I can work with if it turns out that I have to block the third book from my memory for some reason.

What I'm reading now:

Enlightened (Book 3) - Joanna Chambers. I'm hopeful that I'll enjoy this one as well? I'm only three scenes in, though.

What I'm reading next:

Jackdaw (KJ Charles's latest), probably. I've also already bought The Suffragette Scandal, but I got distracted between purchasing it and opening the file. I didn't fall in love with Free when she showed up as an adolescent in The Heiress Effect, but I trust I'll enjoy her story now that she's grown up.

I've also been staring at my copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude for a while now. I remembered that I owned it back whenever it was that I got all het up about magical realism tags in fandom, pulled it out of its box and moved it into a frequent line of sight, but I haven't gotten any further than that.

Based on Kindle store recommendations (which seem to be entirely Samhain books) I've also got a bunch of samples that didn't hook me but that I may revisit.
- The Reluctant Berserker - Alex Beecroft (I think no. I had about as much patience for the prose as I do for Ragnar's voice in Vikings.)
- A Minor Inconvenience - Sarah Granger (the sample does a great job of introducing one character, but doesn't get to a point where he interacts with whoever the other dude is.)

Also, I was going to rec Chiaroscuro (Jenna Jones, Torquere Press) to someone, but it's been a few years now since I read it, and I'd like to check back first.

I also opened up about twenty Harlequin blurbs in tabs while poking around for