Reading Wednesday
Apr. 1st, 2015 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Dangerous Joy by Jo Beverly. The fourth in the Company of Rogues series, this one is set in Mystical Ireland. And it definitely is ~Mystical Ireland~. Barely a page goes by without the narration describing a character's brogue, dialogue featuring Gaelic phrases like "cailin" or "a muirnin", or someone comparing an event or person to an ancient Irish legend. Also there are lots of magical cat guardians (is that a Mystical Irish thing? If so, it's a cliche I was previously unfamiliar with. Actually I think Beverly was just going through a phase). Cats that help the characters resist temptation, cats that give advice, cats that defeat the villain. Even cats that come back to life.
Okay, on to the actual plot: Miles, despite being in his early twenties himself, inherits the guardianship of Felicity, a heiress just a few weeks shy of coming of age. Felicity is absolutely determined to marry her neighbor, despite the fact that he's a total dick and obviously a gold-digger. This is because he's father of the child she had as a young teenager (every one else thinks the kid is the son of the neighbor's now-deceased wife) and marrying him is the only hope she has of raising her son. Miles, of course, doesn't know this, and so tries to prevent Felicity from what seems to him to be a terrible decision. This book suffers from the characters refusing to have an informative conversation with one another even more than most tropey romances, and the whole premise of "the hero has legal power over the heroine" is not my id, but the cat thing is weird enough that it's almost worth reading just for that.
Open Waters by Valerie Mores. I see a lot of cheesy gay and lesbian romances go by on NetGalley, and I finally got curious enough to try one (I see a lot of cheesy straight romances go by too, but I'm less intrigued by them). This turned out not to really be a novel, exactly; it's only about 25k words long, or 50 pages. Still, it's a cute enough story: Jane is the captain of her own pirate ship; Cecily is a whore picked up when they sink a merchant ship. Together, they fight the British Navy! If I had written it, I might have cut out one of the five battle scenes and instead included a single sex scene, but hey. It's lesbian pirate romance! I can't really complain.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith. I'm about halfway through, and SO GOOD YOU GUYS. Evil plants and teenagers with super powers in a post-apocalyptic world. It's pretty refreshing to read a relatively cheerful post-apocalypse; I don't remember the last time I saw that.
The Demon's Mistress by Jo Beverly. And one more for the Company of Rogues series! This one is actually very good (older woman pays younger man to pretend to be her husband as an extremely convoluted way of preventing his suicide), but I think this might be my last of the series for a while; I'm getting tired of romances.
Dangerous Joy by Jo Beverly. The fourth in the Company of Rogues series, this one is set in Mystical Ireland. And it definitely is ~Mystical Ireland~. Barely a page goes by without the narration describing a character's brogue, dialogue featuring Gaelic phrases like "cailin" or "a muirnin", or someone comparing an event or person to an ancient Irish legend. Also there are lots of magical cat guardians (is that a Mystical Irish thing? If so, it's a cliche I was previously unfamiliar with. Actually I think Beverly was just going through a phase). Cats that help the characters resist temptation, cats that give advice, cats that defeat the villain. Even cats that come back to life.
Okay, on to the actual plot: Miles, despite being in his early twenties himself, inherits the guardianship of Felicity, a heiress just a few weeks shy of coming of age. Felicity is absolutely determined to marry her neighbor, despite the fact that he's a total dick and obviously a gold-digger. This is because he's father of the child she had as a young teenager (every one else thinks the kid is the son of the neighbor's now-deceased wife) and marrying him is the only hope she has of raising her son. Miles, of course, doesn't know this, and so tries to prevent Felicity from what seems to him to be a terrible decision. This book suffers from the characters refusing to have an informative conversation with one another even more than most tropey romances, and the whole premise of "the hero has legal power over the heroine" is not my id, but the cat thing is weird enough that it's almost worth reading just for that.
Open Waters by Valerie Mores. I see a lot of cheesy gay and lesbian romances go by on NetGalley, and I finally got curious enough to try one (I see a lot of cheesy straight romances go by too, but I'm less intrigued by them). This turned out not to really be a novel, exactly; it's only about 25k words long, or 50 pages. Still, it's a cute enough story: Jane is the captain of her own pirate ship; Cecily is a whore picked up when they sink a merchant ship. Together, they fight the British Navy! If I had written it, I might have cut out one of the five battle scenes and instead included a single sex scene, but hey. It's lesbian pirate romance! I can't really complain.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith. I'm about halfway through, and SO GOOD YOU GUYS. Evil plants and teenagers with super powers in a post-apocalyptic world. It's pretty refreshing to read a relatively cheerful post-apocalypse; I don't remember the last time I saw that.
The Demon's Mistress by Jo Beverly. And one more for the Company of Rogues series! This one is actually very good (older woman pays younger man to pretend to be her husband as an extremely convoluted way of preventing his suicide), but I think this might be my last of the series for a while; I'm getting tired of romances.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-04-02 10:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-02 12:53 pm (UTC)hah, you oversaturated on romance earlier than me! i only have two unread books left in the series.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-02 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-02 04:29 pm (UTC)And yeah, I dunno. I might come back to it before too long, but I felt like reading something else for a little while.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-02 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-04 01:03 am (UTC)