Book 95: Keeper's Pledge by JL Merrow

This is a sequel to Poacher's Fall which is closer in scope and length to a novel, but isn't quite long enough to manage all of the different elements it contains, in the end.

Four years after the events of Poacher's Fall, Danny has been the groundskeeper for Philip's lands while also continuing to have a relationship with him, basically in the plain sight of all the servants. Philip's cousin, who will inherit his estate at Philip's death, comes to stay for Christmas, bringing along his wife, her sister and his younger brother, who is a fairly obvious fop at Cambridge. Meanwhile, Danny's younger brother is acting out and is quite suspicious of Danny's relationship with Philip.

The book is torn between being a novel of country manners and almost melodrama, with Danny and Philip both misunderstanding each other's intentions multiple times, and a couple of decisions that ignore pragmatism in favor of 'romance' in a way that I found both hard to believe and hard to sympathize with, oddly. I still enjoyed it, but I kept wanting the narrative to zig when it would zag.

Grade: B

Book 94: Poacher's Fall by JL Merrow

Another historical novella set in the post-WWI era, this story has so many things I like: class differences, someone getting injured and being nursed back to health (wrong time period, but it made me think of Austen), a young man drawing another man out of his melancholy shell. Philip had been the withdrawn and unhappy lord of his manor ever since his 'close friend' from Oxford had died of the flu after having survived the war. He's forced to engage with someone beyond his servants when Danny falls out of a tree after poaching rabbits on Philip's estate in order to feed his mother and four siblings.

There isn't a lot to this story beyond the setup, which I actually liked - it's not that complicated, and neither of them need to have long drawn out arcs. They're two people who needed to find one another for very different reasons, and it's lovely to see them make each other happy.

Grade: B

Book 93: To Love a Traitor by JL Merrow

I bought this book because it takes place during the Christmas season, I really liked a contemporary m/m romance by the same author, and it's a post-WWI novel and for some reason that setting is really hitting the spot for me right now. I understand why a lot of people find the parallels between now and various terrible points in history to be frightening, but for me there's something oddly comforting about recognizing the fact that humanity has always been a work in progress.

Anyway! This book is about a young man whose brother was killed on the front in potentially suspicious circumstances, and he rents a room in a house under a fake name because the main person he suspects was at the root of it all lives there. George (real name Roger, although the narration never refers to him as that) had been a conscientious objector before being moved into intelligence work due to his knowledge of German, and his post-war mission gets a bit complicated when he starts to fall for Matthew, who makes it quite clear that he returns his affections.

I loved the developing relationship between George and Matthew, and the world they lived in together, and the grief and underlying tension of George's actual aims built up and then resolved in a very satisfying way. I would have liked a bit more passion and emotion expressed in the actual consummation of their romantic relationship; it didn't quite live up to the emotional connection between the two of them. I felt it could have used perhaps another chapter or two to really settle into the resolution. But overall I enjoyed this book very much.

Grade: B 

Book 92: My True Love Gave To Me by Ava March

Yet another m/m Christmas book, but this one is a Regency! It was fine, although I have to say that I want more Christmas flavor from my holiday-themed romances than this one provided. Thomas and Alexander meet at Oxford and begin a secret affair. It isn't Alexander's first experience with another man, but Thomas is new to it all, and having a hard time coming to terms with his desires for me. Alexander sets up a special night for the two of them at his father's empty hunting lodge, but at the last moment Thomas panics and leaves Alexander there and then flees to New York for four years. Now he's back in London and hoping for a second chance.

This book is fine for what it is, which is basically a long drawn out question of "can Alexander forgive Thomas for hurting him deeply over something that is a rational concern and dilemma for a gay man in the early 19th century?" There's no misunderstanding or explanation that can make it hurt less, or be less understandable in many ways, so it's just a matter of seeing how and why Alexander can forgive him, and whether they've both matured in ways that make a second chance seem plausible. The book mostly succeeds, in that I'm happy enough as a reader to believe that this time these two crazy kids will make it, but the resolution winds up feeling just a bit too easy, in the end.

Grade: B

Book 91: Winter Knights by Harper Fox

This book was like if you took contemporary gay romance and put it into a blender with A Christmas Carol-type ghosts who Teach Someone Important Life Lessons and also Arthurian myth. Given that I'm a fan of all three of those things, I enjoyed it, even though none of the individual themes or plot devices worked quite the way I wanted.

Gavin and his partner Piers had been dating for three years when Gavin decided it was time they spent Christmas together as a couple. But Piers is devoutly Catholic and hadn't reconciled his faith and his sexuality, and when it came time to tell his family he was in love with a man, he instead broke up with Gavin. Gavin took that extremely well and decided to go out into the snow to search for a clue for his thesis on a historical basis for King Arthur while out of his head on migraine medication. He gets rescued by Art and Lance, two hot gay guys who also bear a striking resemblance to the mythical figures Gavin is trying to ground in fact, and well. They teach him a valuable life lesson about himself and also gay sex because why not.

I don't know! I enjoyed this book in the same way I've enjoyed a couple of other books by the same author: while I read the story I'm all in, but as soon as I can take a step back from it I have no idea how or if any of it works. There's a confidence about the writing that just makes it easy to go along with stuff that in the hands of a weaker writer would fall completely flat, which is definitely a compliment, but also Gavin and Piers never really feel like a real couple to me, so their eventual reunion and new appreciation for each other doesn't quite land. But at the end of the day, it was a satisfying gay Christmas romance for me, so it did its job.

Grade: B

Book 90: A Midnight Clear by Emma Barry

I bought this book assuming that it was set in 19th century Britain, and in fact it was set in post-WWII Annapolis. Apparently when I see the words 'naval romance' I jump to conclusions. However, there was a lot I enjoyed about this romance between Frances, the Admiral's daughter, and Joe, a midshipman who flies planes and may be the only man in Maryland who isn't chasing Frances to curry favor with her father.

I don't usually like stories about men who fall in love from a distance and then do everything they can to pursue a woman, even when she says she isn't interested, because she's saying no for the 'wrong' reasons. But this one is written with a very light touch, and Joe is both so likeable and clearly a good match for Frances in a lot of ways, so it grew on me. Unfortunately, the one major problem is that Frances is quite clear from the beginning that she doesn't want to be a Navy wife - she saw what her mother went through living that life, and after her mother died, she ended up performing many of the same duties for her father. Given that Joe is committed to being a naval man, that's a fundamental incompatibility between them in terms of what they want from their lives and what they're willing to sacrifice, and while the book convinced me of their love for each other, it didn't really convince me that Frances didn't end up sacrificing her own desires to accommodate her desire to marry Joe. It felt like the kind of romance novel conflict that just ends up being magically resolved, which is the same thing as saying it wasn't resolved at all, and so either it wasn't truly the dealbreaker the character said it was, or a happily ever after is much harder to believe. I still liked the story, and I want Frances and Joe to have a wonderful marriage, etc., but it felt a bit too pat for me.

Grade: B

Book 89: A Pint of Beer, a Bag of Chips, and Thou by JL Merrow

I bought this book because it's set during Christmas and is by the author of Muscling Through, which I really enjoyed. I wasn't disappointed by the quality of the writing, or by how charming I found all of the characters (including a mom and three aunts who are all busybody matchmakers), but it's much more of a short story than it is even a novella, and what I wanted most from this story was more. It felt like the beginning of a story between the young hot punk busker and his financial district silver fox rather than a complete arc, and I wanted to know where things would take them after their Christmas Eve tryst. Definitely planning on checking out a couple of other books by this same author this month, and hopefully they'll be a bit more satisfying.

Grade: B

Book 88: Due South by Tamsen Parker

This is one of those books that is clearly going to work really well for some readers, but oh boy, it did not work for me. It's about a crazy office affair between two employees who end up stuck working over Christmas, and it involves lots of things I like reading about: voyeurism and exhibitionism! sexual self-discovery! the interplay between fantasy and real life desire! But for me at least, it felt unrealistic while also missing the mark on being pure fantasy, and as a result it didn't work for me. Lucy and Evans are supposed to be having this wild sex adventure together, but they both feel too aware of why having sex in the office kitchen or in the copy room is a terrible plan for me to believe that they would do that. I kept wondering why on earth they didn't just go someplace with a bed and sleep together there.

Add in the fact that I found their backstories fairly uncompelling and this book was a miss for me, unfortunately. I enjoyed a standalone book by this author, but I'm going to give the rest of this series a pass, I think.

Grade: C

A Reboot of Sorts

Hi internet. Since the last time I posted on this blog, some things have happened. Specifically, the thing that I had been afraid of (and had started this whole reading project in response to) actually happened. And as it turns out, I'm very bad at focusing on unknown narratives when it feels like the real world is collapsing around me, so I spent five weeks mostly rereading Dunnett and classic fics from fandoms that felt like they would never hurt me.

I am probably going to need to retreat to old fandom favorites a lot in the foreseeable future, and I'm definitely planning on spending a lot of the Christmas seasons rereading my favorite Merlin and Harry Potter holiday fics, along with the annual Yuletide bounty. But this past week, I also wanted to read a bunch of Christmas romance novels, and so I did, and that reminded me that as much as I want to keep diving into fic for narrative comfort, I also want to read new stories about new characters, too. And I don't want to track my reading in exactly the way I did for most of this year, not least because at the moment I don't have the same kind of naive faith that at some point in the future Everything Will Be Okay if I can just distract myself until we get to some arbitrary date. Which I think is actually a good thing, overall, and not because I'm now convinced that the future holds nothing but pain and suffering and everything is pointless. It's more that life has always been some level of bad, and it will continue to be some level of bad, and the only thing I can do is work for the things I believe in with my time and money and energy, while also enjoying the things I love and making life at least a bit better for the people in my life, to the best of my ability. And part of that is reading books and learning and discovering new things, because for me that's one of the best parts of being alive. I don't want to try to use reading as a means of counting down to a potential moment in the future again; I just want to focus more on doing what I can each individual day, and less on what might or might not happen later, for better or for worse.

Having said all that, another thing that I love is having a goal, and I also really love numbers and tracking things. So I am maintaining one key aspect of this blog: I'm still keeping track of how many books I'm reading, and I still have an overall goal -- two, actually. The first goal is to read 100 books by the end of 2016, and my second goal is to read 104 books in 2017 and to be all caught up with books I own by that point as well. I currently have 48 books left on my to-read list, and I'll probably get at least 4 books as Christmas presents, which means that in 2017 I can also buy a new book a week and still potentially reach both the 104 books read goal and be completely caught up by 2017. And an average of 2 new books a week is both far more reasonable in general and also means that I'll have enough time to reread old favorites when I want to. This plan also makes it easier to dive into reading some of my remaining 48 books that are the start of series, because now if I read the first book and am then desperate to read the next one, I can without feeling like I'm messing up the plan by adding new books to the list!!! Most importantly, I feel excited about reading again, and like I have a project that's just about doing a thing I love. 

So! I've read five Christmas novels/novellas/short stories this week, and posts about them will go up later today. I have enough time off over the next two weeks that I should be able to read eight more books by the end of 2016, and then I can start 2017 with a much more reasonable goal of reading two books per week. Here we go.