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Reading Binge
Still on my reading binge, and was awake entirely too late last night to finish a novel.
It was another Courtney Milan, so I guess I got my wind back up for angst again after having read several novels of the bubbly variety. At this point I think I'm going to have to say that I like the way this woman writes. It's not that her novels are without flaws. They are quite flawed. There are weak points in plotting and places where she is too aligned with genre tropes. And in the novel that I just finished (Unveiled) there are problems with both. It particularly had the soap opera problem of "For god's sake FINISH WHAT YOU ARE SAYING!!!" Secret interuptus. Time and time again, the heroine was going to confess her secret only for her to either chicken out or to be interupted or by the hero refusing to shut the hell up to allow her to finish her confession. Very frustrating, and a weakness in plot. Also a weakness was the heroine doggedly remaining loyal to people who did not deserve her loyalty (though on that score, I can see that as being a legitimate psychological flaw. It's frustrating as hell, but it is quite common for people to become so focused on gaining love from an abuser (and her family qualified as emotionally abusive IMHO) that they keep focusing on the love denied them while undervaluing the love someone else offers freely. It's a perverse psychological quirk, but one that happens too often in real life to outright dismiss.
And yet, despite the flaws, Milan manages to place a scene or two that hits so hard, and works for me so well emotionally that I'm willing to forgive even blatant plot flaws (and, in general, I'm a plot-loving kind of gal).
Unveiled had a scene that worked so perfectly for me that I want to go back and examine exactly how she pulled off the trick. She made me spontaneously -- and unexpectedly -- gasp then begin crying. Imean, it's one thing when it's The Hunger Games making me cry over a dead child or the WWII novel The Lost Wife making me cry over a Nazi death camp. It's hard not to cry over over the scope and scale of such injustice and tragedy. It's much more difficult to pull the heartstrings over something infinitely small scale, etching the pain of something personal treated so cavalierly that it takes you by surpise and makes you well up with tears of empathy. The scene made me love the hero (who wasn't even in the scene) and the heroine (because she, like myself, was blazingly furious with the perpetrators of it). It was about such a small thing in one respect, just the salutation of a letter and some brotherly teasing, and yet the way it was handled made my eyes suddenly well up with ushed tears and created a desire to bitchslap the hero's relatives while cheering the heroine for wanting the exact same thing.
Like Duchess War some of the best scenes are not the romantic scenes but familial. In Unveiled the scene that made me cry and love the leads was a scene between the heroine and the hero's brothers, where the brothers exhibit a profound lack of understanding of their sibling while the heroine's heart is breaking for him, all with her being unable to explain to the brothers just how incredibly hurtful their cavalier dismissal of something so small but precious (a simple letter salutation) might be.
Despite a slow start and some quibbles about what were most probably publisher guidelines, as well as trope problems of secrets not told when they damn well should have been told and characters sticking to plans that should have long been abandoned, that heartwrenching mid-book scene made the book a keeper for me. It made me love the leads despite their flaws (of which there were many) and their moments of willfuly blind stupidity (Seriously, if the heroine's secret had been any more obvious, the hero would have been buried under a pile of anvils. That said, I believe it's intended to come off as Buffy Summers-like levels of Herculean denial rather than outright stupidity. They know the truth, they just don't want to admit it to themselves (the scene where one brother asks the other doesn't he WANT to know and the hero says "only when she tells me" is the tip off to that, I think). So the hero willfully ignores every anvil that drops directly on his head (hell, it's not just him. I think every character in the book has serious issues with denial. That was my read anyway.) But because it read as the emtional hang-ups of the characters, I accept these problems not as evidence of a lack of intelligence but of employment of psychological coping mechanisms... probably because the characters made me love them (while wanting to shake them.).
The novel also did the job of making me go ahead and buy the sequel with the youngest brother that I would not have read otherwise (don't care for the blurb.) I want to know more about the family.
It was another Courtney Milan, so I guess I got my wind back up for angst again after having read several novels of the bubbly variety. At this point I think I'm going to have to say that I like the way this woman writes. It's not that her novels are without flaws. They are quite flawed. There are weak points in plotting and places where she is too aligned with genre tropes. And in the novel that I just finished (Unveiled) there are problems with both. It particularly had the soap opera problem of "For god's sake FINISH WHAT YOU ARE SAYING!!!" Secret interuptus. Time and time again, the heroine was going to confess her secret only for her to either chicken out or to be interupted or by the hero refusing to shut the hell up to allow her to finish her confession. Very frustrating, and a weakness in plot. Also a weakness was the heroine doggedly remaining loyal to people who did not deserve her loyalty (though on that score, I can see that as being a legitimate psychological flaw. It's frustrating as hell, but it is quite common for people to become so focused on gaining love from an abuser (and her family qualified as emotionally abusive IMHO) that they keep focusing on the love denied them while undervaluing the love someone else offers freely. It's a perverse psychological quirk, but one that happens too often in real life to outright dismiss.
And yet, despite the flaws, Milan manages to place a scene or two that hits so hard, and works for me so well emotionally that I'm willing to forgive even blatant plot flaws (and, in general, I'm a plot-loving kind of gal).
Unveiled had a scene that worked so perfectly for me that I want to go back and examine exactly how she pulled off the trick. She made me spontaneously -- and unexpectedly -- gasp then begin crying. Imean, it's one thing when it's The Hunger Games making me cry over a dead child or the WWII novel The Lost Wife making me cry over a Nazi death camp. It's hard not to cry over over the scope and scale of such injustice and tragedy. It's much more difficult to pull the heartstrings over something infinitely small scale, etching the pain of something personal treated so cavalierly that it takes you by surpise and makes you well up with tears of empathy. The scene made me love the hero (who wasn't even in the scene) and the heroine (because she, like myself, was blazingly furious with the perpetrators of it). It was about such a small thing in one respect, just the salutation of a letter and some brotherly teasing, and yet the way it was handled made my eyes suddenly well up with ushed tears and created a desire to bitchslap the hero's relatives while cheering the heroine for wanting the exact same thing.
Like Duchess War some of the best scenes are not the romantic scenes but familial. In Unveiled the scene that made me cry and love the leads was a scene between the heroine and the hero's brothers, where the brothers exhibit a profound lack of understanding of their sibling while the heroine's heart is breaking for him, all with her being unable to explain to the brothers just how incredibly hurtful their cavalier dismissal of something so small but precious (a simple letter salutation) might be.
Despite a slow start and some quibbles about what were most probably publisher guidelines, as well as trope problems of secrets not told when they damn well should have been told and characters sticking to plans that should have long been abandoned, that heartwrenching mid-book scene made the book a keeper for me. It made me love the leads despite their flaws (of which there were many) and their moments of willfuly blind stupidity (Seriously, if the heroine's secret had been any more obvious, the hero would have been buried under a pile of anvils. That said, I believe it's intended to come off as Buffy Summers-like levels of Herculean denial rather than outright stupidity. They know the truth, they just don't want to admit it to themselves (the scene where one brother asks the other doesn't he WANT to know and the hero says "only when she tells me" is the tip off to that, I think). So the hero willfully ignores every anvil that drops directly on his head (hell, it's not just him. I think every character in the book has serious issues with denial. That was my read anyway.) But because it read as the emtional hang-ups of the characters, I accept these problems not as evidence of a lack of intelligence but of employment of psychological coping mechanisms... probably because the characters made me love them (while wanting to shake them.).
The novel also did the job of making me go ahead and buy the sequel with the youngest brother that I would not have read otherwise (don't care for the blurb.) I want to know more about the family.
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I do. And thanks! But I need to wait until I finish reading the book. ;-)
But you've sparked my curiousity for Beast by Judith Ivory. Which is a wee bit controversial on Good Reads. But then so too was Beguiling the Beauty.
Nuance is, I've found, lost on a lot of Good Reads reviewers. And Thomas is a subtle, clever writer.
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(Books are really getting me through February that has no TV and is all Olympics. It's actually more enjoyable.)
And Good Reads savaged "The Proposition" also, which I found to be a really fun romp (with a wonderful alley love scene. I found it hilarious how the hero kept telling himself "I'll stop. I have to stop. I can't make love to her in an alley. You don't take a girls virginity in an alley. Especially if you love the girl. But...um... okay, one more sec. Just one more thing first..." Until he finally confesses to the heroine how close he is to doing just that with her saying, "No, you won't. I won't let you." and his being doubtful with "er... yeah, I kind of think you would" (she totally would've too.) Very funny and yet sexy scene. Because when ...er.. push comes to shove, she's the one who convinced him to finally make love to her.
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A couple of readers really could not deal with the strong female character, and a male hero who was not...what they were used to. (They were really turned off by his background.)
Smartbitches a while back, in one of their podcasts, discussed Good Reads Reviews and how they aren't really indicative of the readership at large, and that the reviewers there are geared towards certain novels.
Okay, I think I may read the Proposition first. Let me know what you think of "Beast" - it got weird reviews on both sites. I did find one decent review of it - that made it sound rather appealing. The heroine is smart.
(I require smart heroines, stupid heroines grate on my nerves.)