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What Are You Reading Wednesday
May. 21st, 2014 09:41 amLife is tough so I've been reading fluff.
What Have You Just Fished Reading:
"Secrets of a Summer Night" by Lisa Kleypas.
Pure fluff that falls within my trope kinks : Victorian setting. Hero is the son of a butcher who through some luck and ingenuity got in on the ground floor of train production and thus has wound up filthy rich and infatuated with an impoverished aristocrat who no matter how desperate her situation won't consider marrying the son of a butcher (until, of course, she does).
Just fluff that falls into well worn 'across social strata' trope kink that usually works for me.
What Are You Reading Now:
I've been kicking around a series of Rose Gordon novels that, quite frankly, border on the out-and-out saccharine, but... yeah. I need fluff.
I started with the free Kindle one that was frankly unimpressive and contrived but... hey... free, right? (It really wasn't very good).
And yet somehow I have found my way through the majority of the novels of the Banks family. (Okay, i wanted to know the villain's motivation from the free book and saw that he had his own book later in the series. This is how hooks work. Even when you don't care for the initial story, you still want to find out the stuff the writer is witholding. So, of course, I read the villain's book and...well.. I've now read almost all of the books about the Banks family and now appear to be on to the Appletons, skipping only the ones whose heroes are ministers (Is this a display of prejudice on my part? It's just the books are already so confectionary on the sweet scale that I suspect the ones that actually feature ministers will go full-tilt diabetic coma.)
Huh, so not ringing praise, I guess.
And yet, again, she does write hooks that...erm... hook me. I like the 'happy endings for damaged people' bit and have thus far most enjoyed the story surrounding the Asberger and/or OCD guy who had been dumped at the altar three times.
Actually, I think that there have been two Asberger guys in the series. At least the first one seemed classic Asberger's. I'm still not sure that the later (more easily liked) lead guy wasn't simply OCD. Of course, in the early 1800s there wouldn't have been a diagnosis for either, so both are treated as though they are somewhere on the scale between very eccentric to antisocial to suspicions of being a little bit mad.
I also enjoyed the last book of the series where the widow of the villain in a previous book in the series arrives to 'take revenge' on the family for all that's happened in her life {And, honestly, from her POV, I can see where she's resentful}. Unsurprisingly the villain -- who was killed off in an earlier book -- wasn't just a villain to the main family of the novels but was an emotionally and physically abusive husband. Yet his death left his widow destitute, so the widow isn't really a villain herself (though she thinks of herself as one. Emotional abuse -- the gift that keeps on giving) so much as she's someone who has been hurt and abused for so long that she's incorporated it into her view of herself while striking out in desperation and pain.
Again, it's the 'happy endings for damaged people' aspect that I've liked despite the excessively sweet treatment of the stories.
Currently, I'm kicking around with the one where the protagonist was hypoxic at birth and thus was developmentally delayed. Banished from his aristocratic family for being noticeably 'damaged', he grew up believing his mother had abandoned him while his disappointed father overtly hated him and treated him excessively badly (ice baths 'to cast out the demons' badly, humiliating physical inspections and an arm broken by 'caretaking' nuns, badly. Because, sure, pain and humiliation will solve a child's developmental delays caused by having the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck during birth. Yeesh.) Only, the devlopmental issues were only part of his troubles with his late 'father.' Turned out he was illegitimate as well... which was a whole other reason that his 'father' hated his 'damaged heir'. (And this was why the mother was deliberatedly separated from child. She didn't abandon her son, she was being punished. Ah, 19th century custody practices.).
Comes with a bonus 'estranged brothers' trope subplot (I'm always a sucker for those).
I figure the estranged brother's story to be printed in the fall will contain the a full-fledged family reconcilliation. The damaged son appears to be reconciling with the biological father in this one, and I would anticipate a more full reconcilliation in the brother's story as that seems the most obvious dangling plot thread. (Though I would enjoy a story from the mother and biological father's POV because it seems they both love the son and the fate of their 'damaged' offspring must haunt them off screen as it were. Seems that it would hurt desperately to not have custody of a special needs child whose fate was left to an uncaring -- but powerful -- authority figure.)
Although I have to say, the Kindle formatting of this is ABYSMAL!
So badly formatted that I could see returning it due to text-formatting alone. There's random, nonsensical underlining under at least a third of the text!
Again, it's excessively sweet (the protagonist is very gentle and self-effacing). But...eh. I'm needing sweet fluff at the moment.
What Are You Reading Next:
New Harry Dresden novel is due out, yay!
What Have You Just Fished Reading:
"Secrets of a Summer Night" by Lisa Kleypas.
Pure fluff that falls within my trope kinks : Victorian setting. Hero is the son of a butcher who through some luck and ingenuity got in on the ground floor of train production and thus has wound up filthy rich and infatuated with an impoverished aristocrat who no matter how desperate her situation won't consider marrying the son of a butcher (until, of course, she does).
Just fluff that falls into well worn 'across social strata' trope kink that usually works for me.
What Are You Reading Now:
I've been kicking around a series of Rose Gordon novels that, quite frankly, border on the out-and-out saccharine, but... yeah. I need fluff.
I started with the free Kindle one that was frankly unimpressive and contrived but... hey... free, right? (It really wasn't very good).
And yet somehow I have found my way through the majority of the novels of the Banks family. (Okay, i wanted to know the villain's motivation from the free book and saw that he had his own book later in the series. This is how hooks work. Even when you don't care for the initial story, you still want to find out the stuff the writer is witholding. So, of course, I read the villain's book and...well.. I've now read almost all of the books about the Banks family and now appear to be on to the Appletons, skipping only the ones whose heroes are ministers (Is this a display of prejudice on my part? It's just the books are already so confectionary on the sweet scale that I suspect the ones that actually feature ministers will go full-tilt diabetic coma.)
Huh, so not ringing praise, I guess.
And yet, again, she does write hooks that...erm... hook me. I like the 'happy endings for damaged people' bit and have thus far most enjoyed the story surrounding the Asberger and/or OCD guy who had been dumped at the altar three times.
Actually, I think that there have been two Asberger guys in the series. At least the first one seemed classic Asberger's. I'm still not sure that the later (more easily liked) lead guy wasn't simply OCD. Of course, in the early 1800s there wouldn't have been a diagnosis for either, so both are treated as though they are somewhere on the scale between very eccentric to antisocial to suspicions of being a little bit mad.
I also enjoyed the last book of the series where the widow of the villain in a previous book in the series arrives to 'take revenge' on the family for all that's happened in her life {And, honestly, from her POV, I can see where she's resentful}. Unsurprisingly the villain -- who was killed off in an earlier book -- wasn't just a villain to the main family of the novels but was an emotionally and physically abusive husband. Yet his death left his widow destitute, so the widow isn't really a villain herself (though she thinks of herself as one. Emotional abuse -- the gift that keeps on giving) so much as she's someone who has been hurt and abused for so long that she's incorporated it into her view of herself while striking out in desperation and pain.
Again, it's the 'happy endings for damaged people' aspect that I've liked despite the excessively sweet treatment of the stories.
Currently, I'm kicking around with the one where the protagonist was hypoxic at birth and thus was developmentally delayed. Banished from his aristocratic family for being noticeably 'damaged', he grew up believing his mother had abandoned him while his disappointed father overtly hated him and treated him excessively badly (ice baths 'to cast out the demons' badly, humiliating physical inspections and an arm broken by 'caretaking' nuns, badly. Because, sure, pain and humiliation will solve a child's developmental delays caused by having the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck during birth. Yeesh.) Only, the devlopmental issues were only part of his troubles with his late 'father.' Turned out he was illegitimate as well... which was a whole other reason that his 'father' hated his 'damaged heir'. (And this was why the mother was deliberatedly separated from child. She didn't abandon her son, she was being punished. Ah, 19th century custody practices.).
Comes with a bonus 'estranged brothers' trope subplot (I'm always a sucker for those).
I figure the estranged brother's story to be printed in the fall will contain the a full-fledged family reconcilliation. The damaged son appears to be reconciling with the biological father in this one, and I would anticipate a more full reconcilliation in the brother's story as that seems the most obvious dangling plot thread. (Though I would enjoy a story from the mother and biological father's POV because it seems they both love the son and the fate of their 'damaged' offspring must haunt them off screen as it were. Seems that it would hurt desperately to not have custody of a special needs child whose fate was left to an uncaring -- but powerful -- authority figure.)
Although I have to say, the Kindle formatting of this is ABYSMAL!
So badly formatted that I could see returning it due to text-formatting alone. There's random, nonsensical underlining under at least a third of the text!
Again, it's excessively sweet (the protagonist is very gentle and self-effacing). But...eh. I'm needing sweet fluff at the moment.
What Are You Reading Next:
New Harry Dresden novel is due out, yay!
