Author Archives: Kate

Review: How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf by Molly Harper

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Mo is a Southern woman born to hippie parents and raised in Mississippi. She’s always lived close to home and her parents have always been a huge (and kind of overbearing) part of her life. Following on the heels of a breakup she decides to back up her life and move across the country to Grundy, Alaska. There’s a romantic element to that: striking out on one’s own, becoming self-reliant, living in the wilderness. Who hasn’t considered packing themselves up and going on an adventure? Mo rents a cabin in the woods and gets herself squared away. She finds a job cooking at the local tavern after the cook and co-owner injures himself. She makes friends with the co-owners wife. And, she runs afoul of the wife’s cousin Cooper Graham who hates outsiders. He’s sure that once the first snow sets in that she’ll pack up her stuff and move back to the lower 48.

While she’s settling into becoming a townie, she has some run-ins with the local wildlife. One night she awakens to a huge wolf with piercing eyes taking down an elk. She sees the wolf again within the town limits. And, there are a few hikers who go missing after what appears to be a wolf attack. Then one night she’s confronted with an unusual sight: Cooper Graham, naked, on her porch, caught in a bear a trap. I’d say spoilers, but if you saw the cover of the book and if you’ve ever read a romance novel you know who/what Cooper Graham is. He’s the werewolf love interest. He has to come clean about who and what he is while he’s healing from the bear trap on Moe’s rug. But, now there’s this mystery: Is he responsible for the missing hikers? Could he be a killer in wolf form? Also, will he ever stop being surly so that they can get this romance off the ground?

This was book was fun and it was also very funny. I immediately liked Mo and the other townies. I also liked surly and standoffish Cooper. The mystery unraveled a little slowly but it was a satisfying ending. This is the first book of a series set in Grundy, Alaska and I’m thinking about picking up the next one.

This Month in Reality…..Travel as a metaphor for personal growth!

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Let us rejoice in today, March 32nd! 

I am indeed back after a lovely vacation hanging out with my sister and our parents! And, let me tell you: not only do I love traveling, but I also love travel memoirs! Since I discovered the genre of travel memoir in college it has been a genre I’ve always been happy to come back to. So, it might surprise you to know that until this month I hadn’t read Eat, Pray, Love. Yes, I saw all the hype when the book came out and then when the book was optioned and made into a movie. I avoided it because it seemed like a travel memoir that was going to make me angry. I thought it was going to make me angry because here’s this woman who is making a good living and has a good job and a husband who loves her and she just throws it away and travels the world. I thought she’d make me angry or worse, that she wouldn’t be sympathetic at all and I’d be reading an entire memoir where I don’t care about the person at the center of the story. (Yes, that’s right, not being relatable is a bigger problem than making me angry.) On top of that, traveling and exploring other cultures while either talking about how cheap everything is or glossing over the problems and idealizing the not-problems really bothers me. I was concerned that Elizabeth Gilbert was going to go to an ashram in India and talk about how deep and spiritual all Indians are and not put this ashram in the context of a country with large populations of people who have different religions which are antagonistic to each other. Or, worse, I was worried her biggest concern would be about the dogs. (Note: I’m happy when people are worried about animal welfare. I’m not happy when they’re so worried about animal welfare that it affects how they feel about seeing poverty-stricken people. This is especially troubling when you also think those poverty-stricken people have the most beautiful culture. Anyway, that’s probably a hypocritical rant for another day.) So, I didn’t read the book when it came out. Or, when it was made into a movie. Plus, I didn’t see the movie. I picked it up hoping that I would hate it and that would make me feel vindicated for avoiding it up until now.

No such luck. (Spoilers behind the cut).
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Review: Blood and Absinthe by Chloe Hart

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These three novellas all packaged into one are your standard paranormal romance fluff that is the sort of mindless fun that you’d expect from anything that can be described as “standard paranormal romance fluff”. They weren’t really well written and I wasn’t in love with any of the characters but I didn’t hate any of them either. The novellas asked nothing of me and that was exactly what I was looking for.

Plus, I got them from a book bub blast for 99 cents.

The first of the three novellas follows Liz, a faery warrior whose job it is to keep dark paranormal things out of the world. She is forced to work with her nemesis Jack (who is a vampire) to fight a particularly awful demon. It turns out that they both are crushing on each other. The next sentence is a little spoilery in account of this story was kind of formulaic. It also turns out that Jack can lend Liz his super vamp strength so that she can kill the demon if they spend one night of passion together.

The second story follows Celia, Liz’s friend, who is a mage faery and a vampire named Grant. Celia makes a discovery about the faery absinthe that all of the fae use occasionally to up their strength and connect them to their magic. She goes to Grant for protection when she realizes someone is trying to kill her. Intrigue, mayhem and romance ensue. Fun times.

The final story follows Jessica, a faery princess and Vampire assassin Hawk as they try to save magic and keep the human world from being overrun with demons and other evil faeries. There was a lot of hotness early on in this one but I’ll admit that I didn’t finish it because I was kind of bored with the whole world by this point.

I do have one bone to pick with these stories (and in romance novels in general). Sometimes, the sexy bits of these books are problematic in that they show sexual encounters that should not be considered consensual (even though we, as readers with access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters know that that the encounters are consensual). This happened at least once in these novellas: a character was under the influence of a spell or some kind of drug or was having a waking dream and got all hot and heavy with another character. In the worst of these instances, when the non-magicked/drugged/dreaming character realized that they were having sexy times with an incapacitated person they chose to pretend like the incident never happened. This led the other character to wake up and realize that it had happened and to be confused about how to go forward. When I read the novella, I found it enjoyable. But, after I had finished reading it, I felt very uncomfortable with how this had played out. I was uncomfortable because this was a terrible modeling of how people should treat each other in relationships. If you accidentally have magical faery sex with someone who thinks they’re asleep and dreaming your reaction to realizing they thought they were dreaming shouldn’t be, “Well, I’ll just pretend like this didn’t happen.” At the very least, you should make sure that they are physically and emotionally okay. (Or, you know, turn yourself in for sexual assault.) This has been an issue that has been discussed a lot recently with the release of 50 Shades of Grey. It is an important topic to critique and discuss because literature and art allow us to explore our world in a safe space. If the representations that we encounter are problematic, we need to talk about why they are problematic and how they could have been made better. I’m not saying that Chloe Hart should have written any of her scenes differently. They were hot and they served the story and the reader even if they didn’t serve the characters. But, these novellas don’t exist in a vacuum, so it is worth discussing things that make us uncomfortable.

These novellas were fine and they were quick reads but I won’t be reading anything else in the series. Meh.

Update: Mime Order

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The Mime Order

So, I have finished The Mime Order. And, everything, everything, everything in this post is going to be full of spoilers for both The Mime Order and the first book in the series The Bone Season.

If you have read the books, please join us for discussion and wild speculation in the comments! Some of my thoughts about the book after the cut.

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Review: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

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Under Heaven

This was a really different tale than I typically read. Set in what is a fantasy-version of Medieval China, it follows the lives of a number different people who have a huge impact on the course of the empire. The tale starts with Shen Dai who is spending his official mourning period following the death of his father at the site of his father’s worst memory, a battle field at the edge of the empire which was so devastating that many of the slain weren’t even able to be buried. He spends the mourning period burying as many of the dead as he can. This ends up having tremendous consequences for him because he is honored for his work with a gift of 200 of the strongest and most beautiful horses. This is cause for some alarm. He’ll probably be killed for these horses. So, he has to figure out how to navigate the world he’s been out of for two years without getting killed.

Meanwhile, his lover in the capitol has been taken as a concubine by a rival. That rival has moved up in the Palace ranks and is a hugely influential adviser to the king and his brother is that rival’s most trusted adviser. Additionally, his sister has been raised to a princess and has been sent to marry a border tribe leader to cement a treaty.

And, that’s not even half of it. The story follows the lives of Shen Dai, the rival, his brother, his sister, the concubine, an assassin, the heir to the throne, army leaders, border leaders and outcasts and the Emperor’s favorite wife. All of these threads weave in and out of each other in a personal tale about a crisis within the whole empire.

This was an immensely fun listen and I am happy to have read it. Although, it is full of an incredible amount of detail so I ended up listening to some parts of it more than once. (As it turns out, when it snows heavily during your evening commute, you have a lot of time for listening and re-listening to audio books.) If you’re looking for a break from teen romance, I recommend this!

This Month in Reality…and the Oscar Goes to…

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When Beth and I talked about what to do for this month, I got really excited about travel memoirs. But, then, everyone in the Northeast is probably dreaming of warm beaches and sunny locales. (Although, it has been sunny this week. I love the look of the sun on clean, white snow. It makes the world so bright and beautiful. Of course, this beauty has also been accompanied by dangerously cold temperatures and wind. Win some, lose some.) But, then we got to talking about something that has always been a fun night for us: The Oscars. It is fun to watch people win, the speculate and to discuss the films that we saw (and didn’t see). We’ve been known in the past to drink a lot of wine, make and eat a lot of food and be pretty irreverent in our cheering and jeering (which, this year, we’ll be doing over FaceTime.)

In honor of this glorious night of fancy dresses and finger food, I give you the low-down on three books that inspired Oscar-nominated films. All of these books I listened to rather than read and all of them came from the Buffalo and Erie County Public libraries. Go, Library Card!

12 Years a Slave

This is the tale of Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Written by Northup after he was rescued and returned home this memoir is a painful inside look into the institution of slavery. It is every bit as harrowing as you expect it to be but that is what makes this such an important piece of history. Slavery was very real and it destroyed many, many lives and we still live with its legacy. The audio book was read by Louis Gossett, Jr. Northup’s strength and courage are inspiring but the situation that he finds himself in is utterly despicable. This book is totally worth the read.

A Beautiful Mind

I wasn’t sure I was going to like this when I picked it up because I remember being only a little into the film. This biography follows the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a brilliant mathematician who had a promising career ahead of him until he fell ill with schizophrenia. The first part of the book details his early life and schooling. He’s great at math, he gets scholarships and it becomes apparent that he’s good enough that he has a serious shot at a prestigious academic career in mathematics full of groundbreaking research and accolades. He works for the Rand corporation. He fathers a child. He has homosexual encounters that cause some upset in McCarthy era America. He gets married and fathers a second child. He holds a position and almost receives tenure at MIT. He is, like most geniuses, a lot a bit arrogant and kind of a dick. He’s a possible candidate for the Fields medal ( which is like the Nobel of math). And then his illness strikes. Much of the rest of the book chronicles the harrowing struggle that is schizophrenia and how he, and the people around him, worked to manage it, manage him, or sometimes, failed to manage either. This was a terrible tale of losing ground, gaining ground and then losing it again. Towards the end of the book, when Nash’s work in game theory was being considered for a Nobel prize, it was also a tale of how people tried to use his illness as an excuse to not give him the prize. This was a harrowing picture of mental illness and how the mentally ill are perceived. It did have a small light at the end of the tunnel, though. Nash seems to have had a long remission from schizophrenia later in life which allowed him to return to his work and he did receive the Nobel memorial prize for Economics in 1994. This is an important book for how it sheds light on schizophrenia and perceptions of the mentally ill.

Wild

This book broke me open put me back together and then broke me again. A memoir of Cheryl Strayed’s 20s in which she gets married, loses her mother, graduates from college, does a lot of drugs, gets a divorce and hikes the Pacific Crest Trail had me laughing and sobbing and laughing again. I spent a lot of time texting and calling my mother after reading this book, so grateful I was to have that opportunity. I like hiking memoirs (and travel books in general) so I enjoyed the descriptions of the hike and her monster backpack. This story was beautiful and poignant and I’m so happy to have read it. Unlike the two previous books, I feel like I can say that I enjoyed this one. (The other two I’m happy to have read but I can’t really say that I enjoyed them.)

We hope that if you have Oscar plans that they are enjoyable and that your favorites win!