Book 3: Wanted, A Gentleman by KJ Charles

Oh look, it's a KJ Charles book that I really enjoyed, imagine that!

This is a standalone regency romance with a framing device I found quite clever - one of the two main characters, Theo, is a writer of romantic melodramas, and the story itself fits within that genre. The characters have an awareness of that at times, but it never collapses under the weight of the meta, and the central love story is charming and compelling.

In addition to writing novels, Theo also runs the equivalent of a personal ads publication. One of the people using his service is the daughter of the former master of Martin St. Vincent, a black man who had been freed by his owner at the age of eighteen. His former master asked him to put a stop to the romance between his daughter and an unknown man, and Martin then enlists Theo's assistance in this matter.

One of the things I love about KJ Charles's books is that she writes historical romances that don't gloss over the realities of an earlier era in order to give the reader a nice romance. Instead she works within that reality to show us a more complete picture while also giving characters we don't often focus on - a free black man and a working class white man in a big financial bind - a chance for a believable and satisfying happy ending. All this while crafting a romance that's well-explored and very sexy. I always feel like I'm getting the chance to read something brand new from her that also scratches the romance itch. I am already looking forward to my first reread of this book.

Grade: A 

Book 2: The Long Road Home by Sarah Granger

Sarah Granger wrote one of my favorite m/m historical romance novels (A Minor Inconvenience), so last night I decided to check to see if she'd published any other historical romances that I had missed. This one is more of a novella, and it's kind of a quintessential early book - I can see the foundation for what made A Minor Inconvenience such a delightful book, but The Long Road Home is lacking both the depth and the conflict that made her later book so wonderful.

The story is set in a non-specific historical era, with ruling princes and horses and wars fought and won with bows and arrows and swords, but there's no attempt to actually ground it anyplace or time. Basically, a visiting prince stays at Sir Andrew's estate, and he takes a fancy to the groom, who's wonderful with horses and also is a veteran of the same war the prince himself fought in. There are allusions to secret traumatic pasts for both of them, but we never really get into their backstories, and while the banter between the two of them is readable enough, I never got a sense of why they were supposed to be in love rather than just enjoying a tumble in the hay. The dangers of rummaging through an author's back catalog, I suppose.

Grade: C 

Book 1: The Summer Palace by CS Pacat

Man, I really wanted to love this post-series short story for the Captive Prince books, but I did not. Spoilers for the series and thoughts on what didn't work for me and why under the cut.

2017 Master List

Here is my list of books to read in 2017! There are currently 55 books on the list, which compared with the 132 that I was trying to read last year seems VERY SHORT. However, I can add more books to this list, unlike last year's, when I was deliberately not acquiring new books to read. There are other books that I'm interested in reading this year that I don't own yet (or have requested from the library), like the Rivers of London series and Six of Crows, but I'm not going to add them to the list until I actually have a copy of them. It's so strange, I really do feel like I should be able to just knock all of these books out, but given that we're nine days into 2017 and I've only read one novella so far, my reading pace will have to pick up a lot for that to be the case! Let's see how it goes.

Book 98: A Private Miscellany by KJ Charles

What a lovely little post-series short story this is. A free download for subscribers to her newsletter, this is just a delightful epilogue of sorts to the Society of Gentlemen books. One of my favorite aspects of it is that it's told via letters and newspaper postings interwoven with straightforward prose, which really made me appreciate again how strong her voices are - there's a specificity to all of her characters' voices that is especially wonderful in historical romance.

The story focuses on all four of the main couples to some extent, but the relationship that really gets the chance to shine in my opinion is Silas and Dom. I love the future that she's created for them, and I loved how the scene we get with them (along with bits of correspondence between the two of them and other characters) furthers our understanding of who they are and how they work together, while also being insanely hot. It made me want to go back and reread the entire series again, starting with the short story that kicks it all off. Hers is a newsletter well worth subscribing for, no question.

Grade: A

Book 97: Ghost by Jason Reynolds

I read this book for my YA book club. It's actually a middle grade book, but it definitely is a story that straddles the gap between grade school chapter books and YA in terms of themes. It's about a young black boy named Ghost, who is slipping through life undetected, and running from his circumstances until he stumbles upon a track team with a coach who can teach him how to just run.

This story hit a lot of similar notes as the movie Moonlight did for me, although the intended audience for the two works are obviously different, but there's an overlap and a common resonance in the two stories. One of the things that I really liked about Ghost was that it took a situation that we hear about often - a black boy being raised by a single mother, his father out of the picture under traumatic circumstances, no sense of community or connection he can grasp onto - and the story brings elements and people into his life that can help fill in those gaps. At times it feels almost too easy, but that's true of lots of stories for kids in this age range, with the difference being that usually a kid like Ghost never gets that happy ending, even in fiction.

At times I had that feeling of identifying far more with the adults that I did with Ghost, or wishing that he wouldn't do the not-great things that a kid would do, but obviously in some ways that's the sign of a book that's actually written for a kid and not for their parents. It's the first book in a series, with each subsequent book focusing on a different kid on the track team, and I would definitely recommend it to middle grade readers.

Grade: B

Book 96: Pompeii by Robert Harris

I had seen this book on one of my parents' bookshelves for at least a decade, and it had always intrigued me, because I didn't quite know how a book about a historical volcanic eruption could manage to have suspense and intrigue and all that since, well, we know what happens. But it was also mentioned in Nick Hornby's book (the author of Pompeii is his brother-in-law), and that plus my curiosity about just how this story could work was enough to make me finally pick up and read it.

The answer to the question of how do you build in suspense for a natural disaster is, apparently, aqueducts. The main character is Marcus, an engineer who has just arrived in nearby Misenum after the engineer in charge of the aqueduct supplying the string of cities including Pompeii has disappeared. He's surrounded by corruption and incompetence, and I'll admit that I spent the first half of the book wondering what possible relevance any of this intrigue could have given the eruption the reader knows is coming. But it all ties together beautifully, and both the historical description and the lives of these invented characters are compelling enough to pull you along through the story. This book was exactly what I wanted to read in the first month or so post-election, for whatever reason, and I really enjoyed it.

Grade: A