Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Arden's Act, Elizabeth Thomas

 

Arden's Act by Elizabeth Thomas

Started: August 11, 2025
Completed: October 7, 2025
Recommendation: Mild recommendation
Recommended By: The Author

Review:

I am trying to enjoy the romance genre.  SPOILERS AHEAD.



This book looks at romance through the lens of rape.  Arden is almost gang raped at the outset of the book.  A flashback tells you she was abused.  As the book progresses, she is living with "kept women" most of the time.  She, herself, becomes a kept woman (and has sex with a lord in exchange for safety from her childhood abuser).  Later, she marries (in order to keep her child) a man with whom she is friends, but not a romantic interest.  She comes to love this man who faces an untimely death and she returns to her lord where she is more of a girl toy.  Eventually, she prostitutes herself to save her child and nurse maid (who, meanwhile, is raped).  Finally, she ends up marrying the lord who gives up his title to be with her.

As a result of the focus on rape, I found the sex scenes (even when conceptually mutually agreed) to be mildly unattractive.  The concept of the book as a whole put me off.  I will grant that at least the lord comes to realize he has effectively raped Arden though by the end she freely loves him.  I just didn't find this book romantic and, with the overtones of rape rife throughout, I did not find it pleasant.  I offer a mild recommendation because this book did not feel formulaic and some of the characters do change over the course of the book.  The plot was fairly straight forward with the exception of the step father who, of course, is raped in jail and comes to understand what he had done to his step daughter (I did not expect that nuance).

Saturday, October 4, 2025

Rosarita, Anita Desai

 

Rosarita by Anita Desai

Started: October 2, 2025
Completed: October 4, 2025
Recommendation: Mildly recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

The omnipotent narrator has an odd habit of addressing the protagonist as, "you."  It is an odd third person personal (?) form of story telling.  It was so incredibly distracting to be so directly addressed by the narrator in the persona of the protagonist as to constantly distract me from the story which unfolds from a series of descriptions and vignettes which feature people who are not present (most notably the protagonist's mother who has died). 

Desai is celebrated for her turn of phrase.  In this book I was captured by, "The bells ring unexpectedly at irregular times."  I like this sentence because it suggests that if there are bells, they should be ringing expectedly at regular times.  In the following paragraph there is a discussion, effectively, of unexpected memories intruding.  It is a nice link and something that I can appreciate.  I liked that the metaphor was implied by proximity.

Thursday, October 2, 2025

How To Be A Saint, Kate Sidley

 

How To Be A Saint:  An extremely weird and mildly sacrilegious history of the Catholic Church's biggest names by Kate Sidley

Started: October 1, 2025
Completed: October 2, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I am not a Catholic.  I did enjoy this book (it isn't the first time that I've found the stories of saints interesting).  This one is fun because author is funny.  So the turns of phrase had good timing and this tongue in cheek book was a quick and enjoyable read.

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Dominion, Addie E. Citchens

 

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

Started: September 28, 2025
Completed: October 1, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This was an interesting book.  The characters are rich for their ages and the story benefits from multiple perspectives.  While several of the characters are children, they are old beyond their years.  This was not a happy story, it was really a slow demise of a family and, with it, part of a community.  Sadness, heaped on sorrow, heaped on pain is the way that the Joker describes this Mississippi community and this exploration of that experience describes the effect of that environment more eloquently than spelling out the details of each piece.

Saturday, September 20, 2025

Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

Atmosphere:  A love story by Taylor Jenkins Reid was recommended by my wife after reading a review in the AARP magazine

Started: September 16, 2025
Completed: September 19, 2025
Recommendation: Mild recommendation
Recommended By: My wife

Review:

Eh.  This is a love story and I think it would be seen as an improbable love story.  A woman who thinks she is asexual falls for a woman.  Honestly, I think that Reid did a good job showing how love can sneak up on someone.  Other than that, I wasn't thrilled by the book.  The astronaut/astronomer angle was not compelling to me.  The closeted couple was, but I have no sense of how realistic it was in those times.  All in all, this wasn't a bad read, I just wasn't ever rushing to find out what happened next and I feel that the ending was telegraphed throughout the book, so the minor "maybe not" didn't go far.  The relationship after about half way through the book became flat.

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Started: August 26, 2025
Completed: September 5, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I think I have read enough of Tchaikovsky's books to start to discern a pattern.  He tells an adventure story.  In the process, he builds a world and explains how the main characters overcome the adversities uniquely presented by this world.  Pretty cool.  He is so smooth in his telling that it is easy to be sucked in and believe that this "other world" must exist and that the characters are real.  Wonderful.

Friday, August 29, 2025

Throne of Glass, Sarah J. Maas

 

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

Started: August 21, 2025
Completed: August 26, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended for Young Adults
Recommended by: My niece who insists this is not smut and she really enjoyed the story.

Review:

I am not particularly a fan of anti-heroes (one big exception is Covenant in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson) and the protagonist, Celaena Sardothien, in this book is such an anti-hero.  She is untrustworthy, abusive of relationships (both romantic and non-romantic), quick to insult (she would see it as being snappy, I guess), and quick to be insulted (she wears her feelings on her sleeve).  The context does matter.  Celaena is 17 and somehow renowned throughout the world as a first class assassin.  How this happens in the age of the horse is not described and she somehow has years of experience becoming an assassin and even more years to become famous.  So, OK, grant all of this.  Her inner dialog has her as a virtually unstoppable force, yet when it comes down to it, she is not quite all of that.  She, also, somehow has survived a year in a brutal mine known to be a death sentence, so she does have something.

Meanwhile, the captain of the guard and the crown prince are both hot for her.  In fairness, it seems like everyone who can get close enough to look her up and down is hot for her.  So, OK, grant all of this.  She had a secret boyfriend who died and that's about all you know.  She is also a piano virtuoso in case you thought she was one-sided.

The plot is not challenging and the characters are all flat.  For a young person, however, who is looking to model after a brash person who unexpectedly finds herself at the center of many levels of power, well this is your thing.

My niece is very up on this series, so I am likely to continue reading and the rest of the series.