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Feb. 10th, 2014
Reading Binge
Feb. 10th, 2014 01:11 pmStill 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. ( Read more... )
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. ( Read more... )
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.