Book 30: The Salisbury Key by Harper Fox

I finished reading this yesterday and I still don't really know how to grapple with it.

The book starts out with Daniel Logan, a 25 year old grad student, on an archaeological field trip with his advisor, 55 year old Jason Ross, whom Daniel is in love with. Within the space of the prologue the two of them have had sex and gotten together as a couple. The first chapter is three years later to the day, on their anniversary, and Jason is behaving a bit oddly, asking Daniel to leave their home and university jobs and run off together. The following morning, Daniel finds Jason's body after Jason has committed suicide, leaving no note.

The rest of the book is a cross between a mystery and a more typical romance, except that most romances don't start with the traumatic death of the main character's partner. Daniel finds both the answer behind Jason's suicide and love again with the aid of Lt. Rayne, who helps Daniel at an excavation site that contains the key. And then things get really wacky.

This book is baffling and I have no idea how it worked, but on the other hand it kept me reading and invested all the way until the end. The answers and resolutions and plot twists are totally absurd, and it's another book in which the two main characters are so isolated in their lives it defies belief, but I still really enjoyed reading it. I don't know if I'd call it a good book, but I also couldn't stop reading it. I don't know. It's a mystery.

Grade: B

Book 29: Scrap Metal by Harper Fox

This book is basically everything I could have wanted from a contemporary m/m romance about a lonely Scottish sheep farmer recovering from loss and finding love again in the form of a mysterious late night trespasser.

Years after Nichol Seacliff escaped his family's sheep farm on the Isle of Arran for university and a career as a translator, he returns to help his grandfather run the farm after the death of his mother and brother in a bus crash. Still numb from grief, it takes a young man breaking into the barn one night to breathe some life back into him. Cameron stays on the farm to help Nichol and his grandfather through the lambing season, but he has secrets in his own past, of course.

This is the second book by this author I've read, and I find her style to be so incredibly readable. This story does basically exactly what you would think a book with this premise would do, but there's a depth to her writing that doesn't always go along with these stories. I can get frustrated with romance novels that focus on two people who seem to exist totally independent of any other real people in their lives except for each other, but in this case it works exactly the way I want it to. It's  not revolutionary, and some of the plot twists and revelations go pretty hard on the melodrama, but it delivers just the way a book like this should. I mean it's gay sheep farmers finding love. I am in.

Grade: A 

Book 28: Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

I've owned this book for so long I have no memory of when I bought this. When I finally read it this week, I was amazed that I hadn't read it when it came out in 1992, because I was both the right age for it and exactly the sort of 12-year-old who would have read it. But I know I didn't, because this story would have stayed with me if I had.

Briar Rose is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale through the horrors of the Holocaust and the hope, however faint, found through survival. The main character is Becca, whose beloved grandmother dies and leaves behind the mystery of her past for her granddaughter to solve.

The writing and pacing and overall structure of this book is masterful. There is not a word or a moment out of place, the entire story rolling out with the sort of inevitability that reflects its meticulous crafting. The ending is beautiful and contains just the right amount of joy before the Author's Note smashes your heart in a way I can't recall any Author's Note ever having done before. It is a beautiful, haunting book. One I will not forget.

Grade: A