Review: Then Comes Marriage by Roberta Kaplan

Posted on October 22, 2015October 22, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> book reviews

Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA by Roberta Kaplan, Lisa Dickey, Edie Windsor
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 336
Published by W. W. Norton & Company on October 5th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Roberta Kaplan’s gripping story of her defeat of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) before the Supreme Court.
Renowned litigator Roberta Kaplan knew from the beginning that it was the perfect case to bring down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer had been together as a couple, in sickness and in health, for more than forty years—enduring society’s homophobia as well as Spyer’s near total paralysis from multiple sclerosis. Although the couple was finally able to marry, when Spyer died the federal government refused to recognize their marriage, forcing Windsor to pay a huge estate tax bill.
In this gripping, definitive account of one of our nation’s most significant civil rights victories, Kaplan describes meeting Windsor and their journey together to defeat DOMA. She shares the behind-the-scenes highs and lows, the excitement and the worries, and provides intriguing insights into her historic argument before the Supreme Court. A critical and previously untold part of the narrative is Kaplan’s own personal story, including her struggle for self-acceptance in order to create a loving family of her own.
Then Comes Marriage tells this quintessentially American story with honesty, humor, and heart. It is the momentous yet intimate account of a thrilling victory for equality under the law for all Americans, gay or straight.

My Review:

This book, like yesterday’s review book, Grant Park, is about a day when the universe changed.

That book centered around the election of Barack Obama. This one concerns events that took place after Obama was elected, events that probably would have taken a lot longer under a different administration.

On March 27, 2013, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments concerning the case of United States V. Windsor, the case that struck down DOMA, the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, as unconstitutional. Windsor became the precedent that enabled courts across the U.S. to strike down state statutes that attempted to restrict marriage. This past summer, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, marriage equality became the law of the land.

Then Comes Marriage is the third book that I have read about this case and its aftermath. Last year’s Forcing the Spring (reviewed here) is an account of the other marriage equality case that came before the Supreme Court in 2013, the case against California’s Prop 8. In some ways, Then Comes Marriage feels like the other side of that story, as the reporter who wrote Forcing the Spring was embedded in the other legal team. And though she interviewed the principals in Windsor after the fact, her coverage of the Windsor case is naturally not as complete as it is for the case that she was personally involved with.

Speak Now by Kenji Yoshino (reviewed earlier this year) also covers the Prop. 8 case, but from the perspective of a married gay lawyer who was not professionally involved in the case but would be impacted by the result.

I found it interesting that both the Yoshino book and this one take their titles from ages old references to marriage and being married. The other title is a play on the part of the marriage ceremony where the officiant addresses the audience regarding whether anyone can show just cause to stop the impending marriage with the phrase “speak now or forever hold your peace”.

Then Comes Marriage is part of a childhood taunting rhyme, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes someone with a baby carriage.” Because after the recent rulings that someone could be a man and woman, two women, or two men. Love is love and marriage is finally marriage.

But this book, as written by the lawyer who argued the Windsor case, starts at the very beginning. And in this beginning are Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, two women who pledged their love to each other in 1967, at a time before the Stonewall Riots when they secretly hoped but never expected that the marriage that Thea proposed to Edie could ever be celebrated in the U.S. Although they were not able to marry in the U.S., Edie and a terminally ill Thea flew to Toronto in 2007 to get married.

The U.S. recognizes marriages conducted in Canada, but DOMA prevented the U.S. from recognizing Edie’s marriage to Thea. So when Thea died in 2009, the Federal government and New York State presented her with a whopping $600,000 bill for inheritance taxes. Taxes that Edie would not have had to pay if Thea had been Theo or Edie had been Eddie. But not, at that time, both.

Edie chose to fight. This was her case. But she won for everyone.

Reality Rating A-: It’s pretty clear to anyone who has read my reviews of Speak Now and Forcing the Spring that I am for marriage equality. So I was predisposed to like this book from the outset.

As a narrative of the case, it reads differently from Forcing the Spring. That was a legal thriller to rival anything by Grisham. It’s also different because the stars in the Prop 8 case were the two lawyers who argued the case.

In Then Comes Marriage, Edie Windsor is the center of the story. Unlike a lot of civil rights legislation, no one went shopping for a perfect set of plaintiffs to represent the spectrum of the case. Edie had a very specific grievance, and she wanted things to be set right. While the money was important, the real issue was that the government said her marriage did not exist, that her 40+ years of living with, loving, and supporting Thea did not count, that they were legally strangers to each other.

When the story of Edie’s life with Thea is portrayed, it is crystal clear to the reader just how wrong that was. Also the legal case was very clear and relatively simple. The marriage was legally conducted in Canada. The U.S. recognizes Canadian marriages as valid. What was the rational basis for treating Edie and Thea’s marriage differently? And the court came to the conclusion that there wasn’t one.

While the story of Edie’s life felt relevant, the book begins with a section on the lawyer’s life, and how and why she ended up arguing this case. While it seemed fitting that the author’s motives, thoughts and feelings were interjected into the story of the progress of the case at frequent intervals, I wasn’t sure that she was the place to start. The back-to-back biographical sections made the beginning of the book drag just a bit.

But once the case starts proceeding through the courts, the narrative tension mounts at a gripping pace. Even though we know how the story ends, the process of getting there still had me opening the book in unlikely places, just to see how things were going. I felt like the protagonists did while waiting to read the rulings, peeking at any interval just to get in a few more words.

The author’s description of the aftermath of the case reads like a victory lap. And so it should. Edie Windsor, and the author, made the universe change.

Review: Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Posted on October 21, 2015October 20, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> A+ Reviews> book reviews

Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr.
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 400
Published by Agate Bolden on October 13th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Grant Park is a page-turning and provocative look at black and white relations in contemporary America, blending the absurd and the poignant in a powerfully well-crafted narrative that showcases Pitts's gift for telling emotionally wrenching stories.
Grant Park begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts between the two eras as it unfolds. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint, fueled by yet another report of unarmed black men killed by police, hacks into his newspaper's server to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's publication.
While a furious Carson tries to find Toussaint—at the same time dealing with the reappearance of a lost love from his days as a 60s activist—Toussaint is abducted by two improbable but still-dangerous white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Obama's planned rally in Grant Park. Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as idealistic, impatient young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement.

My Review:

Grant Park is a story about looking back and looking forward. It’s about staring into the future with the eyes of the past, and wondering if the world that you hoped for is going to be anything close to the world that you get.

It’s about hope, and it’s about change. And it’s also about fear. Not just about what you fear, but what everyone else fears about you.

Two men’s careers are at the same crossroads. Malcolm Toussaint, an opinion columnist for the fictional Chicago Post, writes a column that his editor, Ben Carson, believes is too incendiary to publish. After being turned down by every person up the chain of command, in the middle of the night Malcolm uses Ben’s computer and Ben’s password to insert his column into the next morning’s front page.

Malcolm’s column appears on the morning of November 4, 2008. It is Election Day, and Malcolm’s column is a venting of his anger, but mostly his exhaustion. He is tired of all the platitudes that white people use to cover their hidden racism, and he firmly believes that in spite of all the polls, Barack Obama will lose the election because white people will not vote for a black president in the privacy of the voting booth, no matter what they tell pollsters.

He is tired of the countless indignities that have been visited upon him all of his life, and he is overwhelmingly sad that the hopeful future he saw during the protest years of the late 1960’s seems to be dead. He’s pushing 60, and when he looks back at himself in 1968, he sees a young man full of hope that was ultimately defeated.

Malcolm knows that publishing that column will kill his formerly Pulitzer Prize winning career. What he doesn’t know is that his newspaper, failing slowly as all newspapers were failing in 2008, will use his editor Ben Carson as their scapegoat, and fire him too.

When Malcolm disappears on the morning of November 4, Ben Carson finds himself questioning who and what he is. He protested in 1968 too. He marched with Martin Luther King, too, coincidentally at the same march that Malcolm did. But as the scapegoat, Ben is bitter and blames his problems on Malcolm, wondering whether in his blame of the one man, he has become the racist that he always feared lurked under his skin.

As the day progresses, Malcolm and Ben both relive their very separate versions of 1968. A year when Malcolm went back to college at King’s urging, and Ben lost the love of his life over their differint reactions to the color line their relationship had attempted to bridge.

But while they look back, they are sitting in very different positions. Malcolm has been kidnapped by a couple of crazed white supremacists with a big agenda and almost no sense whatsoever. And Ben finds himself pursuing Malcolm and his story, because the woman he loved and lost has returned to him, and been kidnapped by those same crazies.

It’s all supposed to come together, or fall apart, at the Obama victory rally that Malcolm hoped for but never expected to happen and that has captors fear above all else.

Escape Rating A+: This story kept me up all night. Seriously. I read it until I finished and then couldn’t stop thinking about it. I still can’t.

It feels like there are at least three threads moving through this story. One is the current event of 2008. A second is the past, specifically the events leading up to April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. And the third is how Malcolm, Ben and even Janeka, the woman who broke Ben’s heart all those years ago, feel and think when they look back and remember.

The kidnapping plot seems insane from beginning to end, at least in practical terms. The kidnappers are not the most ept criminals on the face of the planet, or even in the city of Chicago. However, and it is a huge however, the white supremacist mantras that they spout are very, very frighteningly real. We’ve all heard them, straight out of the conservative corners of the internet and the media. These nuts believe that Blacks, Jews, homosexuals, Muslims, Hispanics and every other group have somehow “stolen” the country from white Christian men like themselves and that they need to rise up in violence to get it back. And they intend to strike the first blow at Obama’s victory rally. They are all the more frightening because they seem all too plausible, even downright possible, in their hate and desperate need to act on that hate.

As the present day events unfold, the Malcolm and Ben look back at their almost-shared past. They are both around 60, they were both college students in 1968, and they are reflecting back on who they were then, what they hoped for, and how different the future is that they got. They also look back at how much more hopeful the world seemed back then. The question is, was it more hopeful because they were young, with their future all before them, or did things really seem more possible than was actually achieved?

This is fiction that feels all too real. I remember that night, watching the election results come in and realize that we as a country had made a step forwards, but also wondering at the time what the backlash would be. We’re living in that backlash now, and it’s ugly. The author hints at the end that the characters fear something like this is coming, even though they can’t see the details from where they are. They just know that this kind of movement forwards never comes without a price.

The story ends with a sense of resigned hope. We have to find a way to make things better for everyone, together, because all of the alternatives are unthinkable. The frightening part, for those reader at least, is that there are some people thinking them.

Review: Forever Your Earl by Eva Leigh + Giveaway

Posted on October 20, 2015October 19, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways

Forever Your Earl (The Wicked Quills of London, #1) by Eva Leigh
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Wicked Quills of London #1
Pages: 384
Published by Avon on September 29th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Eleanor Hawke loves a good scandal. And readers of her successful gossip rag live for the exploits of her favorite subject: Daniel Balfour, the notorious Earl of Ashford. So when the earl himself marches into her office one day and invites her to experience his illicit pursuits firsthand, Eleanor is stunned. Gambling hells, phaeton races, masquerades…What more could a scandal writer want than a secret look into the life of this devilishly handsome rake?
Daniel has secrets and if The Hawk’s Eye gets wind of them, a man’s life could be at stake. And what better way to distract a gossip than by feeding her the scandal she desperately craves? But Daniel never expected the sharp mind and biting wit of the beautiful writer, and their desire for each other threatens even his best laid plans.
But when Eleanor learns the truth of his deception, Daniel will do anything to prove a romance between a commoner and an earl could really last forever.

My Review:

Forever Your Earl is a terrific start to a rather unconventional Regency romance series. And it is all the better for that wide streak of unconventionality.

Eva Leigh is the pen name that Zoe Archer is using for this historical romance series. The romances that Zoe writes under her real name have fairly large helpings of action/adventure and sometimes even alternate or science fictional worlds mixed in with the romance. And I especially love her Blades of the Rose, 8th Wing and Ether Chronicles series for those elements.

In her first outing as Eva Leigh, the element that sets this story apart from more traditional Regency romances is her heroine and the attitude reversal between the hero and heroine.

Eleanor Hawke is a woman in a man’s world. Even more important, she is a woman making her way independently in a world where women are usually relegated to roles as either drudges or ornaments, as the heroine calls it. Eleanor is neither. She owns her own business, admittedly a slightly unconventional one. Eleanor, as E. Hawke, publishes a scandal-sheet newspaper. She is also one of her own investigative reporters and the editor. But the business is Eleanor’s from beginning to end, she owns it, she runs it, she lives and dies with it every day the miracle occurs and an issue goes to press. It’s her life and her livelihood in an era when women weren’t supposed to have either.

She is also neither a virgin nor a prude. She lives her life by her terms, and has no intentions of marrying. And, unusual for her time and place, she knows perfectly well how to prevent pregnancy and disease when she chooses to take a lover. She’s not profligate, and she is discreet. But it is her life and she lives it on her own terms.

Daniel Balfour, the Earl of Ashwood, is one of The Hawke’s Eye’s most frequent targets. He is a rake and a reprobate, but also a rich and titled man. He seemingly has everything he wants or needs, but has begun to find his life in pursuit of pleasure dull and empty. His best friend has disappeared into the stews of London, suffering from what we would label PTSD, after his return from the Napoleonic Wars.

Daniel used to envy his friend for getting to be aa Army officer, but now all he wants is to find the haunted man and bring him home. Jonathan is the heir to a dukedom, and the scandal if his current situation is discovered will threaten his family’s standing, especially as it concerns the marriageability of his sister Catherine. He’s the one in trouble, but with society as it is, she is the one who will pay the price if he isn’t found.

Daniel needs The Hawke’s Eye to stop focusing its gaze upon his activities, so that he can hunt for his friend in secret. He expects to bribe, bully or cow a man, but instead finds that E. Hawke is a woman who attracts him. Not just because she is beautiful, but because she shines with a purpose and a passion for living that he has found lacking in himself.

They come to an agreement. He will let her accompany him into the revels of the aristocracy, into places that she, either as a woman or as a middle-class plebe, would never get to go. In return, she will write articles about their escapades, leaving his identity a mystery. He thinks that by controlling what she sees, he can keep her focus away from his search. With the added bonus that everyone else in the ton will be too busy watching those very public activities to look too deeply into his private ones.

What neither of them expects is that they will be drawn to each other like a magnet and iron filings. Or that in the process of falling in love, they will reveal to each other secrets that they never meant to share.

But no matter how much they come to love each other, there is no future for an aristo and a plebe. If they defy convention and marry, they will be ostracized and their children will be cut from society. In the end, the social opprobrium will kill their love and their marriage. It’s happened before. It’s inevitable that it will happen to them.

Or is it?

Escape Rating B: There are two parts to this story. The first part is the developing relationship between Eleanor and Daniel. They have a long way to go from respected adversaries to cautious friends to lovers. The second part is Daniel’s search for his friend.

While that relationship is growing, Daniel is forced to put his search for his friend into the background, because he is afraid to expose the secret to someone he initially sees as a snooping, untrustworthy journalist. It is Eleanor’s job to ferret out secrets just like the one that Daniel is keeping.

But the closer they become, the harder it is to hide their true selves from each other, including the truth about why Daniel was willing to expose his life in the first place.

The most interesting aspect of the first part of their story is the way that Eleanor thinks. When she dresses as a man to attend a gaming hell, she doesn’t just change her clothes, she observes who she is and what she is, and what it means to be a man striding boldly through the world instead of a woman who has been trained since birth to take up as little space as possible. As she voices her thoughts, it makes Daniel examine himself as well, and what it means to be a man. He also is forced to think about how privileged he is and how different life is for women, not because it is natural as he originally believed, but because they have been trained to act a certain way.

Throughout their relationship, Eleanor is often the one who thinks, while Daniel is the one who acts. She is more coolly analytical, while he rushes in with his emotions on display and sometimes his fists swinging wildly. She is also much more realistic about their relationship than he is, because she is the one who will pay the price for it.

One of the questions that has dogged me after reading this book is a question of just how realistic or anachronistic Daniel and especially Eleanor are. He shows much more feeling from the outset than the alpha heroes we usually see in Regency and historical romance. And she owns her own business and acts like a businesswoman, albeit one who is aware of the restrictions on women’s behavior, even when she consciously sets those restrictions aside.

The way that her situation is setup, Eleanor feels just barely plausible. Not terribly likely, but plausible. It’s enough to allow the willing suspension of disbelief to sweep the reader into the story. Her attitudes come out of her situation in a way that holds the reader in the story. Or at least, this reader.

In that second part of the story, Daniel’s search for his friend, now with Eleanor’s assistance, adds that touch of action and adventure that is the hallmark of this author’s romance. At the same time, it also adds a bit to that unconventionality. We are all to aware of PTSD today, but the question of what Daniel and Eleanor’s contemporaries would have thought about Jonathan’s condition was probably more than a bit different. But Daniel’s unconventional empathy is part of his charm.

If you like your romances with a bit of adventure and a big dollop of unconventionality along with your pursuit of a happily ever after, Forever Your Earl is the lovely opening to what looks to be a terrific series.

TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY

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Review: The Determined Heart by Antoinette May + Giveaway

Posted on October 19, 2015October 18, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | blog tours> book reviews> C Reviews> Giveaways

The Determined Heart: The Tale of Mary Shelley and Her Frankenstein by Antoinette May
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 410
Published by Lake Union Publishing on September 29th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The Determined Heart reveals the life of Mary Shelley in a story of love and obsession, betrayal and redemption.
The daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley had an unconventional childhood populated with the most talented and eccentric personalities of the time. After losing her mother at an early age, she finds herself in constant conflict with a resentful stepmother and a jealous stepsister. When she meets the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she falls deeply in love, and they elope with disastrous consequences. Soon she finds herself destitute and embroiled in a torturous love triangle as Percy takes Mary’s stepsister as a lover. Over the next several years, Mary struggles to write while she and Percy face ostracism, constant debt, and the heartbreaking deaths of three children. Ultimately, she achieves great acclaim for Frankenstein, but at what cost?

My Review:

One of the enduring tales about Mary Shelley is the story of the dark, stormy and miserable night in 1816 when Lord Byron challenged all of his guests to write a ghost story. Out of that challenge came the foundation of two branches of fiction – John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the precursor to Bram Stoker’s more famous Dracula, which is the basis for vampire fantasy and the fiction of the paranormal; and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is the foundational work of science fiction.

Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, was first published in 1818. Her post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man, was published in 1826. Those two works predate everything else we think of as science fiction. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells came later, writing at the end of the 19th century.

Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell c. 1840

But what about Mary Shelley herself? Who was this woman? What shaped her into a woman who could invent this iconic story of a lonely man and his equally lonely monster, forever tied together and forever separate from the rest of mankind?

The Determined Heart is an attempt to tell Mary’s story from Mary’s point of view. It’s an interesting idea, but runs into a few, actually more than a few, problems in the execution.

We all know the bare bones of her life. Her father was a radical philosopher. and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But Mary Wollstonecraft died not long after her daughter was born, so the shaping of Mary Shelley was left to others.

Mary Shelley was married to one of the most famous poets of the early 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley. But the story of their elopement and eventual marriage is only the stuff that dreams are made of if those dreams include a lot of poverty and an incredible amount of selfish self-absorption on all sides.

Their story, Mary Shelley’s story, reads more like tragedy than romance, with occasional forays into farce. It’s not a pretty story, but then, neither is Frankenstein.

Escape Rating C: This was a story that gave me fits. While on the one hand, I wanted to learn more about Mary Shelley, on the other hand, the way that this story was told made me want to shake every single one of the participants. But I definitely got caught up in the story. The more I wanted to slap some sense into most of them, the more engaged I got.

This is not a likable bunch of people. Some of that has to do with their own behavior, and some of it I’ll confess with my 21st century perspective. I kept having to remind myself that women in the 19th century had no political identity, potentially very little personal freedom, and very few respectable or even economically reasonable ways to make a living. Which meant that they more than occasionally acted like doormats or attached themselves to men who could support them whether there was any love or even respect involved or not.

Just the same, most of the behavior of most of the participants in Mary’s story come off as downright appalling. Another factor, and one we forget, is that they were all so incredibly young during these events, and quite often exceedingly immature with it.

Mary’s stepmother Jane Clairmont is portrayed as the quintessential evil stepmother. And it is not just that she favored her own daughter over Mary and her half-sister Fanny, but that she treated Fanny like Cinderella, with no handsome prince on the horizon. Fanny became a drudge while Claire Clairmont got spoiled rotten. Very rotten.

Percy Bysshe Shelley by Alfred Clint (1819)

When Percy Bysshe Shelley seduced Mary into leaving with him, Mary is 17, Bysshe is 21, and 17-year-old Claire invites herself along because she’s bored and wants to steal Bysshe from Mary. Bysshe is meanwhile leaving his pregnant wife behind to run off with Mary and Claire. He also at least half-heartedly flirted with poor Fanny, so she ends up alone, overworked and desperately depressed.

As people, they don’t improve. Fanny eventually commits suicide, as does Bysshe’s poor estranged wife, finally allowing him to marry Mary and acquire a thin veneer of respectability. We see this strange menage travel from one escapade to another, with Bysshe having affairs with every woman who catches his fancy while Mary gets pregnant and loses three children.

One of the ongoing themes in the story is the way that Mary continues to let Claire push her around. Claire has an extremely forceful personality, but Mary seems to lose all self-respect when Claire is in the picture. Or Mary keeps giving into Bysshe who always wants another woman around for inspiration, no matter how much he loves Mary. This is the part that sent me furthest round the bend. I found it difficult to believe that the intelligent woman who later managed to make a living with her writing couldn’t find a way of getting the odious Claire out of her life.

We see all the characters, including their charismatic friend Lord Byron, as petulant, impulsive, self-indulgent and very, very young. If this were a complete fabrication instead of historical fiction we would still know that it won’t end well. Which it didn’t.

That Mary finally grows into herself upon Bysshe’s death is the redemption of her story, but the parts that detail her life after his accidental drowning at age 29 are given woefully short shrift.

Frankenstein is a work of towering genius. Unfortunately, this fictionalized biography of its creator reads as if it were intended as a new adult romance, and stops just when she gets to be the mistress of her own fate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with new adult romance, but I expected more from this book and especially from these people as characters in it. Which doesn’t make this portrait less true, but does make the characters more infuriating.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. As a fictionalized introduction to the life and times of its creator, The Determined Heart is flawed but interesting. I hope that there will be more treatments of Shelley’s life and work as the anniversary moves closer.

GIVEAWAY

I am giving away a copy of The Determined Heart to one interested U.S. or Canadian commenter.

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The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 10-18-15

Posted on October 18, 2015October 18, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Giveaways> The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand> Winner announcement

It’s not often that I have a week where every single book is awesome. It means that I was up until at least 3 every night because I couldn’t put something down, but it was so worth it. If you are in the mood for historical fiction set in England in the Middle Ages, or a bit later, get thee to a bookstore and pick up either (or even better, both) Candace Robb’s Owen Archer series or almost anything by C.C. Humphreys. I only say almost all on the Humphreys’ books not because they are not all utterly marvelous, but because they aren’t all set in England. If you’re picky, that might matter. If you just want some great historical fiction, start any of his series.

I was sorry to see Delilah S. Dawson’s Blud series end. Her alternate steampunkish-vampirish England is a marvelous invention. But I was glad to see Tish and Criminy’s story come to a happy ending at last in the oh-so-appropriately titled Wicked Ever After.

There’s still plenty of time to enter the Spooktacular Giveaway Hop. Tis the season to have blog hops. Next month is the annual Gratitude Giveaways Hop! And the Black Friday Book Bonanza! YAY!

Coming Next Week:

The Determined Heart by Antoinette May (blog tour review)
Forever Your Earl by Eva Leigh (blog tour review)
Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr. (review)
Then Comes Marriage by Roberta Kaplan (review)
Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal (review)

Stacking the Shelves (156)

Posted on October 17, 2015October 16, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Stacking the Shelves

This feels like a bigger stack than last week, but the numbers tell me no. It’s not like I NEED any more books! Although…

You would think that ereaders would make it more difficult for the cat to interfere, but no. If I have a print book, LaZorra just sits on the book. But when I put my iPad up on the table, she starts rubbing her cheek against the corner until it folds and closes. I love the little witch, but there are times when she can be a little kitty nuisance. Actually, a lot of times. Sometimes I call her the “omninuisance”. As a superpower, its awesomely destructive. Or intrusive. Or all of the above.

I couldn’t resist the Candace Robb book bundle. After becoming reacquainted with her work in The Guilt of Innocents and A Vigil of Spies, I saw this bundle and wondered if I had read them before. Yes and no. I read the first one, A Trust Betrayed a while back. I still have my paperback on the shelves. But it looks like books 2 and 3 were never released in the States. Now I just have to find time to read them!

between a vamp and a hard place by jessica sims

For Review:
Abigail’s Christmas by Blair McDowell
Anything for You (Blue Heron #5) by Kristan Higgins
Between a Vamp and a Hard Place (Midnight Liaisons #5) by Jessica Sims
Chains of the Heretic (Bloodsounder’s Arc #3) by Jeff Salyards
Fish Stick Fridays (Half Moon Bay #1) by Rhys Ford
Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Lady’s Command (Adventurers Quartet #1) by Stephanie Laurens
Make Me Stay (Hope #5) by Jaci Burton
Noah (Hell Squad #6) by Anna Hackett
Sisi by Allison Pataki

Purchased from Amazon:
A Cruel Courtship (Margaret Kerr #3) by Candace Robb
The Fire in the Flint (Margaret Kerr #2) by Candace Robb
A Trust Betrayed (Margaret Kerr #1) by Candace Robb

Review: Shakespeare’s Rebel by C.C. Humphreys + Giveaway

Posted on October 16, 2015October 15, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways

Shakespeare's Rebel by C.C. Humphreys
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Pages: 400
on October 6th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

To be (or not to be) the man to save England
England’s finest swordsman and fight choreographer at the magnificent new Globe Theatre has hit rock bottom. John Lawley just wants to win back his beloved, become a decent father to his son, and help his friend William Shakespeare finish The Tragedy of Hamlet, the play that threatens to destroy him.
But all is not fair in love and war. Dogged by his three devils—whiskey, women, and Mad Robbie Deveraux—John is dragged by Queen Elizabeth herself into a dangerous game of politics, conspiracy, and rebellion. Will the hapless swordsman figure out how to save England before it’s too late?
Brimming with vivid periodic detail, Shakespearean drama, and irresistible wit, Shakespeare’s Rebel is a thrilling romp through the romantic, revolutionary times of Elizabethan England that will delight historical fiction fans and Shakespeare enthusiasts alike.

My Review:

Shakespeare’s Rebel is the most fun I have had with William Shakespeare since I read Elizabeth Bear’s Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth.

The books are nothing alike. Bear’s Promethean Age is urban fantasy, while Shakespeare’s Rebel is historical fiction, but the use of Shakespeare and his playwriting as setting, motivation and sometimes “magical” impetus, for certain select uses of the word magic, has the same feel.

Shakespeare’s Rebel is the story of John Lawley, someone who did not exist but should have. Lawley is a player in Shakespeare’s company. In the story, Lawley is the person who coordinates the fight scenes for all of the plays. But he’s also one of the preeminent swordsmen of his times. In the story, he has also had the fortune to be a boon companion of the Earl of Essex during his famous victories, and unfortunately for Lawley, along for the ride during Essex’ most infamous defeats.

Lawley even sailed with Sir Francis Drake as a translator on Drake’s famous voyage around the world. But that was due to the other salient fact about Lawley – he is half native American. For those of us who have read the author’s French Executioner (reviewed here), Lawley is the grandson of Jean Rombaud, the French executioner who killed Anne Boleyn.

Everything about Lawley’s past has an influence on the two years of his life riotously explored in Shakespeare’s Rebel. The year is 1599. Queen Elizabeth I, sometimes known as Gloriana, is still on the throne of England, but her reign and her life are coming to their natural end. Plots and counterplots are swirling, as men vie to make their place in the next government, even though talking about that future is considered treason. Elizabeth is dying, but mentioning that aloud in the wrong company is enough to put one’s head on a pike at Traitor’s Gate.

220px-Robert_Devereux,_2nd_Earl_of_Essex_by_Marcus_Gheeraerts_the_Younger — Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex

In 1599 Elizabeth is involved in what will be her last romantic relationship, her indulgence of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. In the story, it is mostly romance of the chivalric sort, where a knight worships a lady fair who is unattainable and unobtainable. What their relationship was in real life is anyone’s guess. But in real life, Elizabeth’s favor for “her Robin” set Essex in rivalry with Robert Cecil, her privy secretary and prime minister. That rivalry pushes our hero, John Lawley, hither and thither as multiple factions attempt to use his friendship with Essex. And eventually, it makes the beginning of his fortune.

So we start with John Lawley, who is a soldier, a sailor, a translator, a player (read actor) and an alcoholic of the binge-drinking type. We begin our story with him as he starts drinking himself sober after a month-long debauch that has him ending up in the worst part of London, bitten by fleas and about to have his last remaining possession get stolen.

He pretty much has nowhere to go but up from here. Following him as he rises and sinks and rises again takes us on a rollicking adventure through the stews of London, the intrigues of the palace, the wilds of Ireland, and back again to Shakespeare’s famous Globe Theatre.

All John Lawley wants to is to survive with his skin intact, his love at his side, and their son happily following the acting profession they both love. And every faction on every side, as well as his own constant need for a drink, seems determined to pull him down before he wins through.

The adventure is glorious!

Escape Rating A+: I didn’t think I would finish this in one night. It’s 400+ pages long! But once I settled in, I couldn’t stop, because the story doesn’t either. It trips fantastically from one wild adventure to the next, with barely a stop for breath – either the reader’s or Lawley’s.

Like his grandfather before him, John Lawley has more lives than a cat, and seemingly uses them all up. He is also, like most players, much, much cleverer than the high-and-mighty lords give him credit for.

Lawley is caught between two friendships – William Shakespeare and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. He’s known both men 20 years or so, and they are both subject to fits of extreme melancholy. In modern terms, they both seem manic-depressive. And Lawley has a knack for getting them each out of their depressions, a knack which everyone wants to use.

With Essex, it is a matter of pointing the man in the direction of something that can be done, and then helping to make it happen. So many things go wrong when Essex is left to his own devices, which is what finally does him in.

Shakespeare suffers from depression after each play is complete, until another fever of inspiration takes hold in his brain. And the play that he is writing in fits and starts during this entire book is Hamlet, a play based on a story guaranteed to depress everyone.

250px-Robert_Cecil,_1st_Earl_of_Salisbury_by_John_De_Critz_the_Elder_(2) — Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury

Lawley has been reacting his whole life. He lets Essex sweep him along in multiple adventures, many of which have resulted in Essex swanning away while Lawley rots in prison. He reacts by falling into a binge all too often. At least with Shakespeare, their using of each other is somewhat mutual, Shakespeare gets a good actor, Lawley gets a good play to act in. Also Shakespeare doesn’t want anything more than a friend, where Essex requires a sycophant.

But the part of the story that keeps the reader on the edge of their figurative seat is the way that the insane politics of the time keep messing up Lawley’s life. Essex wants his good luck charm, but Cecil wants to find a way to bring Essex down. The Queen wants to maintain her illusions of beauty and immortality.

Everyone wants to use Shakespeare and his company of players to sway the crowd to their point of view. And all the players on every side, both political and theatrical, think that Lawley is the person they need to pressure someone into doing things their way.

All Lawley wants is the life he should have had, marriage to his beloved Tess and helping their son Ned grow into an actor. As the story goes along, the reader wonders if it is just a pipe dream, or how many will have to die to make it happen. That we think Lawley has a chance of achieving his desires, in spite of his own failures, makes him a fascinating character to follow.

I loved every minute of his journey. If you love raucous, riotous, swashbuckling historical adventure, you will too.

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As a reader, I am eternally grateful to Sourcebooks Landmarks for bringing C.C. Humphreys’ books to the U.S. I’ve read many, and loved every one of them. For your chance to share the adventure with an awesome C.C. Humphreys’ book bundle, just fill out the rafflecopter below.

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Review: The Kill Box by Nichole Christoff

Posted on October 15, 2015October 14, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

The Kill Box (Jamie Sinclair, #3) by Nichole Christoff
Formats available: ebook
Series: Jamie Sinclair #3
Pages: 283
Published by Alibi on October 20th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Hardworking Jamie Sinclair can’t wait for the weekend. She plans to be off the clock and on the road to wine country with handsome military police officer Adam Barrett. But when a strung-out soldier takes an innocent woman hostage and forces his way into Jamie’s bedroom, everything changes. Jamie’s never seen the soldier before. But he’s no stranger to Barrett—and with one word he persuades Barrett to pack a duffel and leave Jamie in the lurch.

Jamie cannot fathom why Barrett would abandon her without explanation. But as the consequences of an unsolved crime threaten to catch up with him, a late-night phone call sends Jamie racing to Barrett’s hometown in upstate New York. In a tinderbox of shattered trust and long-buried secrets, Jamie must fight to uncover the truth about what really occurred one terrible night twenty years ago. And the secrets she discovers deep in Barrett’s past not only threaten their future together—they just might get her killed.

My Review:

This one kept me on the edge of my seat the whole way. Now that I’ve finished, the feel of the book reminds me of a small-town romance, if it were written by a horror writer. It’s not that there is horror per se, but that everything about small town stories and small town romances has been twisted to minus 11. Something like that.

This is the third story in the Jamie Sinclair series. While it probably helps a bit with background if you’ve read the first two, The Kill List and The Kill Shot, it isn’t strictly necessary. The Kill Box takes place in a completely different setting and under totally different circumstances than the first two books. In Jamie’s head space we see enough of her background to know where she’s coming from and why she acts the way she does.

We don’t see in Adam Barrett’s headspace at all, but then, neither does Jamie. This is her story and her perspective on events. And since she is pretty much a fish out of water during this story, we get introduced to all the players the same way that she does.

Jamie is a private investigator and security specialist, so when a man breaks into her condo holding her housekeeper at gunpoint, she knows exactly how to get the situation under control. But the results completely throw her.

Army MP Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett, who has been recovering from a multiply broken leg in her DC condo, leaves with the assailant. While still wearing a cast on one leg from toes to crotch. The crazy dude is one of Adam’s high school pals, and his message to Adam is that one of their best friends is in big trouble back home.

So Adam hobbles off, leaving Jamie emotionally wounded and terribly confused. Also frustrated as hell, since Adam’s buddy interrupted what was supposed to have been their long-awaited first night together.

Jamie and Adam have had really lousy luck in their attempts at a relationship. They met while she was investigating his commanding officer, who also happened to be her ex (The Kill List) and he broke his leg protecting her after her Father-the-Senator sent them both to Europe on a secret mission where Senator-Daddy needed plausible deniability (The Kill Shot).

Their relationship should be over. And it nearly is at multiple points in this story. But when Jamie gets a call from Adam’s grandmother, asking Jamie to come to Adam’s hometown of Fallowfield, NY and get him out of jail, Jamie jumps into her car and takes off for upstate New York apple country.

Adam doesn’t want Jamie’s help. He doesn’t even want Jamie’s presence, to the point where he breaks up with her rather than letting her any further into the mess that is Adam’s home town. But his grandmother, Miranda, wants Jamie to stay and get to the bottom of that mess. Jamie is all too willing to help Adam in spite of himself. And she can’t resist the possibility of solving a mystery.

Twenty years ago, a 14-year-old girl was raped and murdered. Everyone in town believes that then-18-year-old Adam Barrett committed the crime but was never punished. Jamie is sure that the murderer is still out there, and that she can fix all of Adam’s problems if she can just figure out who that murderer really is.

She doesn’t count on a new string of murders, a new witch hunt for Adam, and someone who has a deadly desire to add Jamie to his list of victims. Or that her hunt for a killer will run smack into an undercover DEA investigation of small town drug trafficking, with Fallowfield at its center.

So many big crimes, all in the same little place. Is it too much of a coincidence to think that they are all connected?

Escape Rating A-: Some ARCs are better than other. I mean in the sense of typos and other stray oddities. This ARC had more of those types of problems than the usual. However, the story was so riveting that I was able to completely ignore the typos and be completely immersed in the story. I couldn’t put this down and I was reading at any moment possible just to find out what happened.

This is a story where the small town hides a multitude of secrets. And where a multitude of seemingly minor misdeeds gets covered up because no one wants to rock the boat with their neighbors. Everyone’s ties to everyone else run deep.

That’s the problem at the heart of this case, both the long ago death and the current string of murders. Everyone involved grew up together, went to high school together, and now forms the backbone of the town together. And when Adam returns to Fallowfield, he seems to slip right back into his old patterns from way back when, and they are not all good ones.

But because Adam used to be so close to everyone else, he can’t see their problems or the way that they have changed. And he can’t take off the blinders that prevent him from seeing that one or more of his friends is not completely on the up and up.

Jamie’s job is to recognize patterns. And she’s an outsider. She starts to put the pieces together, and someone wants to make sure that she leaves or dies before she completes her investigation.

And Adam is an idiot. I say this in the best alpha hero tradition. Adam doesn’t want Jamie involved in his old shit, he feels horribly guilty about things that happened long ago, even though he isn’t responsible, and her wants her far away so that she won’t think less of him. He falls into that infuriating tradition of pushing her away for her own good, without asking her what she wants. I’ll admit that this isn’t my favorite trope.

But in spite of, and admittedly sometimes because of, Adam’s continuing to push Jamie away, I could help but be caught up in Jamie’s desperate search to figure out whodunnit way back when, and who was continuing to do it, and why they were doing it, right now.

And when she finally puts the pieces together, the result is downright explosive.

Spooktacular Giveaway Hop

Posted on October 15, 2015October 13, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Blog Hops> Giveaways> Spooktacular Giveaway Hop

It’s that time again. What time is that? Time for the annual Spooktacular Giveaway Hop, hosted by I am a Reader, Not a Writer!

I think the scariest thing I’ve seen this year is the mass proliferation of “Pumpkin Spice Everything” in every single store. While I’m grateful that the Pumpkin Spice Brigade is holding the too early Christmas Decoration Horde at bay, I think I’ve smelled enough pumpkin spice to last a lifetime. And the month is only half over.

This is my favorite recipe for pumpkin beer. Or pumpkin anything except pie.

If the endless promotion of pumpkin spice everything isn’t scary enough, there are plenty of books to make you shiver. I’m reading Broadcast Hysteria for Halloween. It’s about a real-life scare that should still be fascinating. On Halloween in 1938, CBS Radio broadcast Orson Welles adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. And thousands of people got hysteric believing that Martians really were invading New York City.

What scary books are you reading for Halloween? Or what’s your favorite scary book? Let us know in the Rafflecopter for your chance at a $10 Gift Card or $10 Book.

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For more great scary bookish prizes, be sure to visit the other stops on the hop:

Review: Otter Chaos by P.D. Singer

Posted on October 14, 2015October 16, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> book reviews

Otter Chaos (Includes Tail Slide) by P.D. Singer
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Pages: 276
Published by Rocky Ridge Books on October 9th, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Lon Ewing snowboarded in and turned economist Corey Levigne’s life upside down, introducing him to a world he didn’t know existed. Corey’s still adjusting to a boyfriend who shifts into an otter and raids the koi pond—and now Lon says Corey’s department chair is a werewolf?
Wolves at the university, wolves in the bank—across Lon’s desk sits Professor Melvin Vadas and his hench-wolves, demanding a construction loan for the pack’s new lodge in the mountains. There’s just one little problem: the proposed building site is home to a breeding population of rare fish.
What do wolves care for stupid human rules, an otter who’d barely make a good snack, or one pesky human determined to protect the environment? Once they’re snout to snout with Corey and Lon, there’s more than silverscale dace on the Endangered Species List.
Includes Tail Slide, the short story that launched Otter Chaos.
Fresh powder snow and running water in the Colorado back country call Lon like the moon calls the wolves. Belly-sliding to a good time on the weekends makes up for a workweek at a desk, and meeting Corey adds a whole new level of fun to snowboarding.
It’s easy to slip away for time alone in the woods without raising suspicion, but how’s Lon to entertain himself when bad snow and a worse spill force them off the mountain too early?
Never give an otter a box of Cheerios.

My Review:

What would you do if you found out your boyfriend was an otter?

Not all the time. But what if you discovered that your new love had to “put on his fur” for at least an hour every week and quite literally turn into an otter? How freaked would you be?

Now, let’s make life even more confusing. Say that you are a relatively freshly-minted Ph.D. on the tenure track at your college. And your new otter-boyfriend lets you know that your department chair, the man who will decide whether or not you get tenure and remain gainfully employed, is a werewolf?

It should be time for a complete freak out. But Corey takes things mostly in stride, unless Lon comes back in the house with raw koi on his formerly otter-breath. And even that is mostly because the koi he just ate is from the koi pond in their backyard, that they spent hours digging out. And koi seem to cost $1 per inch.

It looks like catching your own sushi is more expensive than anyone thought!

The short story Tail Slide, included with Otter Chaos, tells the story of Corey and Lon’s first meeting and the beginning of their relationship. Including the moment when things almost go completely off the rails, when Lon puts his fur on in the shower, and Corey discovers that the otter-version of his lover thinks that Cheerios are the BEST TOY EVER!

Tail Slide is adorably cute (so is Lon) and it does a good job of setting up the much more serious situation in Otter Chaos.

It’s not just that Corey’s department chair is a werewolf, but also that he is the leader of a pack of werewolves that plans to build a werewolf sanctuary out in the middle of an endangered species habitat. Werewolves are apex predators, and they are all-too-used to getting what they want just because they want it. Those werewolves expect to get a loan from the bank to build their sanctuary, but Lon is their loan officer, and he stands in their way.

For the sake of his two-footed job, Lon needs all the paperwork filled out properly, including the environmental impact statement and some idea of where on earth they will be getting the money to pay back the loan. That Lon didn’t just roll over and play dead shows the werewolves, as if they couldn’t already smell, that Lon is a shifter who knows just what they are.

Corey is researching economic effects of endangered species preservation, and he knows that there is a not-very-cute-or-photogenic species of endangered fish living on the proposed preserve. So he and Lon both stand in the way of werewolf progress. Or at least werewolf recreation.

When they try to investigate on their own, Corey and Lon find themselves caught in the middle of a werewolf dominance struggle, and it looks like everyone is going to lose.

Melvin, Corey’s boss, may lose his life. Lon is forced to remain in otter-form for too long, and he may lose his humanity. And Corey could lose the love of his life.

Escape Rating A-: Tail Slide is just plain fun, but Otter Chaos takes a dip into very serious. There are a lot of mixed agendas here. Corey wants to keep Lon and his job. It shouldn’t be difficult.

Except…werewolves.

For someone whose view of the universe has taken a giant cosmic shift, Corey is surprisingly laid back about the whole thing, at least until Lon gets himself trapped in an aquarium for a day and has a very, very hard time switching all the way back from “fur on” to “fur off”. It’s pretty obvious that this episode is a foreshadowing of something terrible that will happen later.

The werewolves, even in their human form, are deliberately scary. They expect people to roll over without knowing what they are – they just kind of ooze predator. And it mostly works, but only if you are not conscious of what’s going on. And once you know, you can’t pretend the reaction, because it’s just too instinctive.

Corey is afraid of Melvin, and rightfully so. Melvin is threatening his job and his lover, and isn’t being at all subtle about it. Corey stands up to Melvin because not showing fear is the only way to survive. Their interactions carry just the right amount of fear and menace, without it seeming completely foolish that Corey refuses to bow.

I found Corey and Lon to be cute as a couple, but the way that Lon’s otterish behavior carries into his human life on a daily basis would make him a challenge in the long term. Otters seem to have relatively poor impulse control, and that affects Lon as a human in ways that sometimes make him seem irresponsible. But when he loses his human side altogether, it is horribly frightening.

If you have a friend who isn’t sure about male/male romances, Otter Chaos is probably a great story to introduce them to the genre, especially if they like a touch of paranormal in their romances. This could have been a male/female, or female/female, romance with very little change. The issue in the relationship between Corey and Lon, or between Corey and Lon and the rest of the world, after all, isn’t that they are gay. It’s that Corey turns into a small furry animal at least once a week! That has a huge potential to freak anyone, and everyone, out.

I’m not sure that most of us would handle things half as well as Corey does. Especially when Lon’s mother tells him that she wants grandotters.

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