Review: Game of Hearts by Cathy Yardley

3.5 stars
I received an ARC of this book from the author in response for an honest review. My opinion is my own. 

Game of Hearts is the third instalment in Cathy Yardley's Fandom Heart series, which began with one of my favourite books of 2016, Level Up. It was a cute, quick read with a great heroine, but I didn't love it quite as much as the two preceding books. 

After her brother falls and breaks his arm on one of his frequent holidays, mechanic Kyla hits breaking point with managing her family's auto shop alone. When an upcoming conventions provides her with the opportunity to get her dream costuming business off the ground, she makes the decision to bring in extra help for the auto shop: old family friend Jericho Salomon.

Jericho has no desire to come back to the home town that holds so many painful memories, but he owes Kyla's family a favour, so he tells the biker group he's a part of that he'll be away for a few weeks, and heads back to Snoqualmie. 

When I first read the blurb for Game of Hearts, I have to admit it made me nervous, since I'm not a big fan of the MC hero trope. But after the nuance of her last two books, I trusted Yardley to make it work, and she did. As a character, Jericho managed to embody the bad boy hero without comprising his moral integrity, which sits much better with me than the morally ambiguous hero. In fact, one of the major conflicts Jericho deals with is trying to suppress a revolt led by a member of the group wanting to move into more Sons of Anarchy territory.  

Yardley's previous heroines have been interesting, complex and independent women, and Kyla is no exception. As a female mechanic, she continually up against male customers who second-guess and patronise her as a female mechanic. Her way of handling this - being super chipper and doing Kegels - was both funny and relatable, and I think I might adopt it myself in my day-job, where Joe Bloggs frequently thinks he has a better handle on the healthcare system and medical stuff in general than a mere receptionist (read: a medical administrator who can work in over half a dozen capacities throughout the hospital, although there's nothing wrong with only being a receptionist). 

Another aspect of Kyla that I - and I suspect many other readers - found to be very realistic nuanced was her relationship with her brother. The lack of boundaries and continual giving on her side and taking is something that really closely and poignantly aped a lot of real-life familial relationships. Being my idealistic, total-HEA-craving self, I closed the book wishing we had seen a little bit more of a reckoning on this front, but on another level, I think that maybe that would take away from the realism of it. Maybe it's enough to know that - with Jericho as a support and circuit-breaker - Kyla and her brother will be able to achieve a more emotionally healthy relationship in the future.

Kyla and Jericho were both great, strong characters, and - while I was keen for them to get together - I didn't feel that the romantic arc was as strong as in the last two books. Some parts were as outstanding as always: the two are shown to be very sexually compatible (there are some hot sex scenes), and I liked the way Jericho supported and encouraged Kyla both with regards to her new business and her boundary setting. However, each was caught up with their individual conflict and character arc, which made it hard to see how they would actually function as a couple. This - together with the relatively late introduction of the romantic conflict and the Deus-ex-machina way it was solved - meant that I found the HEA less convincing or satisfying that in the other Fandom Hearts novels. 

As you can see, Yardley's previous work has left Game of Hearts with some pretty big shoes to fill. Even if I feel like it didn't quite achieve that, I still really enjoyed it, and I'd definitely recommend it, especially if geeky, funny and heart-warming contemporaries with great heroines are your thing. 

Review: Summer Skin by Kirsty Eagar

5 stars

Summer Skin by Kirsty Eagar lies somewhere between young adult and new adult romance. It's raw and unflinchingly honest, a feminist exploration of Australia in the social media age, where young, imperfect characters are both shaped by and fighting against the norms of their world. 

The synopsis says: 

Jess Gordon is out for revenge. Last year the jocks from Knights College tried to shame her best friend. This year she and a hand-picked college girl gang are going to get even. 

The lesson: don't mess with Unity girls.
The target: Blondie, a typical Knights stud, arrogant, cold . . . and smart enough to keep up with Jess. 

A neo-riot grrl with a penchant for fanning the flames meets a rugby-playing sexist pig - sworn enemies or two people who happen to find each other when they're at their most vulnerable? 

It's all Girl meets Boy, Girl steals from Boy, seduces Boy, ties Boy to a chair and burns Boy's stuff. Just your typical love story.

Basically, last year, Knights College had a challenge to see who could be the first to sleep with a Unity girl, and Jess' best friend Farren ended up having her sexual encounter with a Knights boy streamed to other members of the college. This year, Jess isn't going to let sleeping dogs lie. Behind Farren's back, she and her friends set up an alternate challenge: the first Unity girl to get a Knights boy back to her room and give him a "make-over" wins a defaced Knights jersey that Jess has stolen from a Knights boy. Her meet-cute with the hero, Mitch, is when she is in the process of stealing that jersey from the Knights laundry. Jess writes him off as just your average Knights-attending dick, and in some ways she's right, but Mitch is also dealing with the aftermath of a personal tragedy that made him take a year off uni and reevaluate his life. Despite the fact that Jess and Mitch are two very different people with two very different experiences of the world - reflected in their very different college choices - they just keep crossing paths at inopportune moments. Or are they really opportune moments?

Summer Skin is set in Brisbane (implicitly at the Uni of Queensland), and, in some ways, it's quite Queensland-y, with lines like this: 

"Sugar mill, hates the smell of rum...You're not from Bundaberg, by any chance?" (p. 57)

However, it could just have easily been set in Sydney - where the University of Sydney's all-male St Paul's College is well-known for sexual assault, it's pro-rape Facebook pages, making young women drink toxic mixtures that see them hospitalised and, most recently, for refusing to comply with a University review into college culture - or any other major Australian city with an old-school university. 

I read Summer Skin in short increments, partly because it was one of the best books I have read this year and I wanted to savour it, but partly also because it was so close to home. I never went to college - one of the reasons I chose my uni is because it didn't have colleges -but this is the story of many of my friends and family members' college experiences. This is the story of my younger high school years, when I went to a private girls school, and our brother school had the exact same motto - and misogynistic mentality - as the Knights boys. Virgil Agitur; Do the manly thing. This is the story of my experience with some uni societies. I ended up massively conflicted by paragraphs like this:

At that moment, a stocky guy with curly hair...blocked Blondie's path, addressing him as 'Killer' and telling him it was the Paddington Tavern for afters, acting like he couldn't see Jess, tucked under Blondie's arm. He probably thought he was being subtle. And Blondie played right along: widening his stance as if experiencing a sudden and significant surge in ball size, speaking in the drawl used by guys who are fluent in Brah.

"Yeah, right, the Paddo. Not gonna make it, hey."  

At that, the other knight finally focused on Jess, and she decided she didn't like his eyes. "Roger that." He smirked. "Killer." (p. 45)

You can't help but smile and even laugh because it's so spot on; "guys who are fluent in Brah" is pure genius, and I will be adding that to my vocabulary, thank you very much. But at the same time, it's also a bit painful. This representation can only appear on the page because it reflects widespread attitudes and behaviours and that, frankly, is depressing. 

And it's not just the sexism that Jess is fighting - even, and especially, in Mitch - that resonates. In the same piercing way that Summer Skin deals with gender, Eagar also talks straight up about class in a country that supposedly has none. Mitch is a rugby-union player from a well-off background, and, as Jess describes her family to him: 

"My family are probably your family's worst nightmare. Self-educated rednecks. Bogans with books. Other people worry about climate change; we worry Ford will stop making V8s. I'll know I've arrived when I buy a jet-ski."  (p. 109)

All of these things are so specific to the Australian context, but stripped of its quintessentially Australian characterisation and writing, at Summer Skin's heart is a story about hook up culture and binge drinking, rape culture, objectification of women, male entitlement and feminist push back that could occur in any number of countries. A story about women developing a take-no-prisoners approach because the establishment is just so weighted against them. It's the same story that saw a Columbia student carry her mattress around with her in protest after the university dismissed three complaints against her rapist, the UK's National Union of Students call for a summit on 'lad culture' or protests at University of Sydney's Open Day against the university's handling of  campus sexual assault. 

If I've spent too much of this review talking about myself or society, it's only because Summer Skin is so unapologetic about being a book about - and for - a particular generation of Australians, from the music references to the public/private school divide to the use of Instagram to the game of Classic Catches. It tackles love, sexism, class, body image, men's right to women's bodies and a bazillion other relevant themes with wit, grace and strength. It's sex positive, subversive and thought-provoking, and it has wonderfully complicated characters - both male and female - who don't get written off for being morally grey (too often it's only the guys who get a free pass on this). 

But potential readers should rest assured that the romance between Jess and Mitch is smart and funny and sexy and poignant. I was going to say 'equally engaging as the rest of the book' but that is misleading: the romance between Mitch and Jess does not exist outside all of these themes that Summer Skin deals with, but is inherently a part of them, and I love it for that. There can be no true exploration of sexism and objectification without a hero who, at times, displays sexist and objectifying behaviours, and more power to Eagar for somehow managing to make Mitch a attractive and sympathetic hero, even when he's being a bit of a dick. And if somebody could please give me the strength to stand up for myself and call these things out as strongly and coherently as Jess and her friends do, that'd be super.

I don't think I've ever called a book a must-read on this blog - people have a right to read what they like without being prescribed to - but I genuinely think that if there ever was a must-read piece of fiction for Australians of my generation, Summer Skin is it. It's like looking in a mirror, and while we may not always like what we see, it's ultimately a hopeful portrayal of what love and our microcosm of society can look like if we - both guys and girls - take no shit and accept that, as Jess says, "being human isn't two different experiences" (p. 214). 

Review: That Potent Alchemy by Tess Bowery

4.5 stars

Regency romances bring to mind the racially homogeneous and strictly gendered world of the Ton, as portrayed by Heyer and so many of her successors. But That Potent Alchemy was a Regency romance in the new mould, featuring POC, working class and genderqueer characters. It was engaging and touching, and I really enjoyed it. 

When the Surrey Theatre finds out that a rival establishment is putting on the same comedy they were planning to perform for the Season, they have to stage another production at short notice, thrusting actress Grace into the world of ballet. As an child prodigy, she danced the stages of Europe to line her father's pockets, and strapping her pointe shoes brings that experience of male exploitation to the fore, along with feelings of wrongness about her female body. 

Isaac, the stage machinist, is fascinated by Grace, who switches between breeches and dresses, and who has no patron. But, for him, the stakes on the new production are higher than ever: he's bet a month's wages against his counterpart at the other theatre as to who can come up with the most spectacular effects for his production. As the Surrey's production of Macbeth (complete with ballet!) gets closer to opening night, Isaac knows that he wants nothing more than to be at Grace's side, but first he'll have to prove to Grace that she can trust him. 

That Potent Alchemy was very much about trust and boundaries, and both themes were written in such an affecting and beautiful way. I was a bit wary of Isaac at first, because of his persistence in pursuing Grace, but the way that he respected Grace's needs and boundaries quickly won me over, as did other little things that demonstrated his lack of toxic masculinity, like this exchange: 

“Ask your sister how half-grown I am,” Thilby leered, and the very notion of Thilby ever getting within arm’s reach of Isaac’s sister, never mind having the chance to despoil her, was so absurd that Isaac laughed along with him. 

“She already told me—how d’you think I know?” (9%)

But this doesn't mean he's an infallible feminist man. He stuffs up, but when he does, he either addresses his mistake immediately and corrects it:

"...you complete me.” She recoiled, as though his answer offended her.  

"No, never say that! I’m not a rib, to be put back into place in someone else’s chest.”  Oops.

“A fair point,” he conceded. “You are certainly no one’s spare parts.” Isaac sat for a minute, rethought the words he had been going to say. (98%)

Or he apologies, grovels and says the right things when the misguided nature of his actions become clear to him (no example here, just read the book!). Marriage brings up conflicted feelings for Grace because of her gender fluidity, but Isaac gives her enough space to sift through them, saying that he'll wait, or if she doesn't want to get married, then that's fine too. For her part, Grace was a very relatable heroine, with whom I could empathise. Her experiences of being a workhorse for her father at such a young age, and losing her family when she broke ties with him, has made her strong, no-nonsense and assertive, but also vulnerable and starved for affection. 

Grace's gender fluidity was neither gratuitous plot-point nor put aside in any way. Consistently, throughout the book, the reader is reminded of the way that Grace relates to her body and her birth-assigned gender: 

A man’s face had looked back at her in the mirror this morning (3%)

“Some days the world is only right if I move through it as a man.” And some days it seemed just as wrong. Those were days when frills and silks were called for, setting her curls with pale ribbons and taking long walks with Meg. (34%)

There would be no escape from the wrongness with a child inside; no way to see anything but a swollen belly and breasts that didn’t belong to her. (39%) 

It was hard to see where his body ended and hers began, his cock rising from the space between them. It could be hers, this way, a missing limb slotted back where it should have been. (43%) 

Half the time she wasn’t a girl inside at all, and that certainly wasn’t what your average fellow was searching for. (97%)

However, some reviewers on Goodreads - some of them genderqueer - felt like Grace's gender identity was not acknowledged enough. I'm reading from a non-queer perspective, so my judgement here is not the soundest, and should be taken as secondary. One or two reviewers speak of a lack of internal understanding or insight from Grace about her gender identity, but I wonder if some were also referring to something that I thought was odd: Grace - to my memory - never outright expresses her gender fluidity to Isaac. He accepts that, some days, she is going to wear breeches, and that she doesn't want children, but I don't think they ever discuss it directly at any length. I will admit to being unsure about how to regard this. On one hand, it seems as though Grace is omitting a essential part of herself when she shouldn't have to, but on the other, no-one should have to explain or justify their gender identity except of their own volition, and perhaps it is enough for Grace that Isaac has promised to love and accept her as she is. 

I've said before that I'm a sucker for a well-drawn setting, and That Potent Alchemy was a real treat. Through the cast and crew of the Surrey, the reader is immersed in the world of the Georgian theatre - of Royal patronage, The Scottish Play, primitive stage effects and ghost-lights - while the characters' lives outside the theatre provide insight into a broader working-man's London. Isaac lives with his inn-keeping parents, who were my favourite secondary characters for the way they take Grace under their wing. Isaac's father is the descendant of freedmen from Scotland, while his mother is a white Englishwoman, and their interracial marriage and past in the abolition movement are subtly woven in.

Despite all that I loved about this book, I did find that some of the descriptive writing was not to my taste, particularly at the beginning, with passages like this:

The tent itself seemed to draw closer around them, get smaller, though the furniture didn’t shift at all. Lucy and Raiza’s voices seemed to soften and come from very far away, as though they had gone in to a cave. Grace’s head swam. A moment later (only a moment? It felt longer), Lucy was standing and heading for the tent flap, and Raiza was pinching out the candle wick with long-nailed fingers.

However, this either got more to my taste as the book progressed, or I became more used to Bowery's style (probably the latter). Towards the end, there were some descriptive passages that I thought were beautifully written, and I always connected with the dialogue (the banter between Isaac and Grace was wonderful!) and the characters' introspection. 

This has been a long and quote-heavy review, but consider yourselves lucky, because I highlighted 72 passages on my kindle, which is about 3 or 4 times what I normally do. Between the characters, the setting, the romance arc and the plot (which I haven't even spoken about, but it's good), there was just so much in That Potent Alchemy. 

Review: The Gossip by Jenny Holiday

4.5 stars
Release Date: 4 October 2016
I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. My opinion is my own.
*SPOILER ALERT*

Romance novels where there is a imbalance of power between the two main characters can very easily go wrong. But this one didn't. In fact, The Gossip went very, very right, thanks to Holiday's customary lovable characters, plus a funky 1980s setting. 

Dawn Hathaway garners social power and popularity through her popular gossip column in the university newspaper. Maybe, if she breaks a few college-level Watergates, her media mogul father will finally take an interest in her. 

In the meanwhile, someone else has taken an interest in Dawn: Arturo Perez, well-liked campus cop. He sees Dawn's vulnerability and isolation, and keeps a close eye on her over the course of her university career. With eight years between them in age, as well as the cop-student divide, he knows that nothing can ever come of it, but when Dawn is caught up in a tragic series of events, Art can't stop himself from stepping forward and offering his support. 

It's been a while since I read any Jenny Holiday and I'd forgotten how much I loved her. Her heroes are consistent favourites for the feminist ways they relate to their heroines, and Art is no exception. He's all too aware of how his position could potentially affect their relationship. When he realises trying to stay away from Dawn isn't going to work, and she insistent on being physically intimate, he gets creative: 

"This is how this is going to work," he said, using his teeth to gently scrape down to my collarbone, where he started pressing urgent, openmouthed kisses. "I require not just consent, but continuous consent."  (loc. 1276)

With this policy in place, Dawn must explicitly ask for anything she wants Art to do, or he won't proceed. Later, he explain his reasoning:  

I'd been so over-the-top with the consent thing because I was so wary of the age and power differentials between us and of the emotional wringer she'd been through this past fall. So many people in Dawn's life had let her down, had "not seen her". I wasn't ever going to be one of those people. (loc. 1382)

And he isn't. Art is caring, considerate, sweet and honest. His yearning from afar and his interactions with Dawn both gave me butterflies. Dawn, on the other hand, is a much more ambiguous character. She trades in gossip and values social acceptance and popularity, but it soon becomes clear that she has her reasons, and she isn't shallow or malicious. Holiday builds her up well over the course of the story, so that the reader becomes extremely fond of and sympathetic toward a character who initially seemed like an anti-heroine. 

The novella follows Dawn and Arturo's encounters over several years. At the beginning, there are their infrequent encounters as campus cop and student. Slowly, their odd repartee develops into an odder friendship, and then, from there, the romance. The plot similarly weaves throughout these time periods, before reaching a denouement in the final months. 

Readers should be aware that the plot does include a suicide, which also had the potential to be a deal-breaker. It was - in my opinion - handled with appropriate delicacy and gravitas, so that while it was affecting, it was never overwhelming. But that is, of course, a very personal judgement, and one that each person must make themselves, given their own circumstances and the circumstances of those around them. 

The Gossip won't be released until October 4, but you can pre-order it at Amazon now. Alternatively, you can read the preceding novella in the New Wave Newsroom series, The Fixer, which features Dawn's editor Jenny and her attempts to enlist art student Matthew in her crusade to save the college's historic art building. I didn't love it quite as much as The Gossip, but I still liked it a lot. 

Review: The Infamous Miss Rodriguez by Lydia San Andres

4 stars

In The Infamous Miss Rodriguez, Lydia San Andres has delivered another delightful story, set on the same fictional island in the Spanish Caribbean as her previous two books. It's a novella, but it's very well done, meaty enough to make for great reading, but not too meaty that it founders within a novella format. 

Nobody will listen to Graciela Rodriguez when she says that she doesn't want to marry Alvaro Medina, so she's taking matters into her own hands. She hopes that, if she creates a scandal, her well-to-do fiance will break the engagement. The sticking point is that none of her shocking acts are making their way through the grapevine. Unbeknownst to Graciela, that's due to Vincente Aguirre, who has been working with her guardian to prevent Graciela from sabotaging her engagement. But the more time Vincente spends with Graciela, the less inclined he is perform his role and ensure the wedding goes ahead. 

San Andres has such a strength for conveying the struggles and strictures of gender and class with extreme nuance. For Graciela, there's the sense that she's powerless to control her own life, and anger and annoyance at the microaggressions her fiance is constantly committing. As Vincente notes, Alvaro treats Graciela "as if she were a puppy yipping at his heels - tiresome, but too inconsequential to bother with" (loc. 300), and yet he doesn't treat her badly, so she doesn't have any cause to break the engagement. 

Graciela's experiences were so vividly and emotively written that it felt heart-achingly familiar. The part of me that is sick of the male microaggressions wishes that the horrible, dismissive fiance had received more comeuppance for his classism and sexism. But that's rarely achieved today, let alone in 1911, and anyway, probably the best comeuppance Vincente and Graciela can provide is to happily live their life. And I feel sure that they will do just that, because they were so good together. 

Review: Fly In Fly Out by Georgina Penney

4 stars

Georgina Penney's Fly In Fly Out (previously titled Unforgettable You) was a solid romance, made extraordinary by its nuanced portrayal of Australia and her dichotomies: rural and urban, old and new, good and bad. It's set in Perth and the Margaret River region, as well as on an oil rig off the coast of Mauritania, where the heroine works as an engineer.

Yes, you read that right: the heroine, Jo, is an engineer. She's a FIFO; someone who flies in and out of their job in mining, petroleum extraction or another insanely profitable natural resources industry. But Jo's migratory lifestyle means that her sister and her best friend, Scott, are left to look after her cat. When Scott's cousin Stephen needs a place to live, Jo's empty apartment seems like a good idea.

Stephen and Jo knew each other as children, and Stephen still feels bad about something that happened when they were teenagers, something that caused Jo to leave their hometown in the Margaret River and move to Perth. He's keen to make amends, and he feels like looking after her apartment is the way to go about it. After a rough start, they settle into a tenant-landlord relationship, which grows into something more. But, even then, Stephen's attempts to delve into their shared past are rebuffed.

Whereas normally we have the closed-off hero, and the coaxing heroine, here it is the other way around. Jo is emotionally closed off, having learnt the hard way to keep her problems to herself. Stephen, on the other hand, is so scarred by this defining incident of their youth that he is hesitant when it comes to women, careful not to push too hard. This made him a really interesting hero, just as Jo's down-to-earth nature made for great heroine material. All of the characters, right down to Jo's cat, Boomba, are well-rendered.

Without wanting to give to much away, the characters came together in a particularly nuanced portrayal of Australia's problem with alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Old attitudes of "don't talk about it" are contrasted with new, more open understandings. In a similar way, the old, rural Australia acts as a foil for the new Australia, where disposable incomes have risen on the back of the mining boom.

In Fly In Fly Out, Penney brought to life one aspect of new Australia I've never known much about: the mysterious world of oil rigs. Until now, my only point of reference has been that line from Cold Chisel's Khe Sanh: "I held a job on an oil rig, flying choppers when I could, but the nightlife nearly drove me 'round the bend". Studying that song in high school history classes about the Vietnam War, I never understood if it was a lack or surplus of nightlife that drove the song's narrator 'round the bend. But now I think I know: it was the lack thereof. It sounds like gruelling work: long shifts interspersed with bad food and sleep.

Weirdly enough, while writing this, I flicked over to Twitter, only to find Yassmin Abdel-Magied, well-known social activist and little-known mechanical engineer, talking on Radio National about her experience on oil rigs. According to her, there are usually only three to four women out of the 150 workers on a rig, but she also says that the dynamic can be different than those numbers suggest.

Regardless of what the reality might be, I liked the way Penney constructed Jo's work environment. She's friendly with the guys, but she'll never be one of the boys, and with an incompetent junior engineer and Stephen playing house in Perth, she becomes increasingly discontented with her job.

I picked up Fly In Fly Out the day after having my wisdom teeth removed. I guess I thought that, since it seemed light and had a familiar setting, I could read it through the fog of industrial-strength painkillers. If it had been a lesser book, I think I'd probably have mostly forgotten it by now, but the emotion of Fly In Fly Out is hard to forget. All those feels could have been the result of the oxycodone, but I'm pretty sure it was just good writing. 

Review: Level Up by Cathy Yardley

5 stars

Level Up is a self-proclaimed "Geek Romance". The hero and heroine are flatmates and colleagues at a company that develops video games, but Adam is in the cadre of game engineers while Tessa's stuck in a dead-end audio job. They aren't close, but Tessa needs Adam's help to code a project for some potential friends of hers, and to crack her work's bloke-y culture so she's considered for an upcoming promotion. 

When I stumbled across Level Up, the reviews were remarkably consistent: words like fun, light-hearted and cute popped up again and again. All of those adjectives are applicable, but they seem like lukewarm praise, and they certainly don't accurately cover the depth of my feeling for this book. It's a delight on so many levels.

First, there's Tessa and her struggles with the sexist structures at her workplace, which will resonate with any woman who has ever come up against an Old Boys' Club. But, in Tessa, Yardley has also created a compassionate and masterful portrait of introversion and social anxiety; it's not just Tessa's gender that's holding her back, it's also that she keeps to herself.

Adam is an excellent hero, striving to find a balance between sticking up for Tessa, and respecting her desire to fight her own battles. He doesn't always get it right, but he's thoughtful and has a growing awareness of precisely what it is his female colleagues are up against.

The secondary characters were also great, and I really appreciated the portrayal of the game engineers who were Adam's friends but Tessa's adversaries. Despite their latent sexism, they weren't misogynistic trolls who bore women conscious ill-will. They were just guys who hadn't really challenged their worldviews, and had quasi-rational justifications for why they weren't sexist, and why Tessa's problem wasn't their problem. To me, their nuances really reinforced how insidious this stuff is: with the horrifying open aggression of Gamergate still fresh in people's minds, it's sometimes hard to remember that the fight can be sometimes be against something as a benign as a lack of awareness.

I was a tad worried that I'd be put off by constant pop culture references, because while I know my Doctor Who as much as the next gal, I'm not into all the fandoms. But such references were skilfully managed so that they never alienated someone who didn't understand them, or took away from the story at large.

  

I've focused on gender throughout this review, but it's not pushed as strongly as I've probably implied. As Adam and Tessa's romance heats up, it fades into the background, and that brings me to my last (and most important) point: the sexual tension between the two of them was off the charts! Sometimes, when characters use the "oh, but we work together so we shouldn't sleep together" thing, I find it a bit contrived, but here it worked. Oh boy, did it work!

Recommendations: Suffragette Romances

Today, it is 122 years to the day since the women of New Zealand walked into to polling stations to place their vote in a parliamentary election. This might seem like a very small anniversary, but it was the first time any self-governing nation had allowed women to vote. The next day, Elizabeth Yates became the first female in the British Empire to be invested as a mayor. 

Today, the New Zealand's suffragette movement is immortalised in the wonderful pedestrian lights of downtown Wellington, which feature the outline of a woman in late Victorian dress. Similarly, prominent suffragette Kate Sheppard is depicted on New Zealand's ten dollar notes. 

Source: New Zealand Parliment

But there is another element to the story of New Zealand's fight for suffrage: thanks to the work of lesser-known Maori suffragettes like Meri Te Tai Mangakahia, Pakeha (white) and Maori women received suffrage simultaneously. To put this in perspective, New Zealand's neighbour, Australia, did not relent and give Aboriginal Australians - male or female - the vote until the mid 1960s,.

To commemorate this turning point in world history, the day it was definitively proven that the sky would not fall in if women voted, I give you some of my favourite romances featuring suffragettes.

The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan
If you haven't read this yet, then I seriously question your life choices. Set in the late Victorian era, it's about Frederica 'Free' Marshall, who runs a suffragette newspaper and is facing off against mounting opposition. She's also a key part of the hero's revenge plan. The hero, Edward, is the ultimate swoon-worthy beta hero, and the two share some of the best dialogue ever written. 

My Dearest Enemy by Connie Brockway

A sweet and fun romance featuring that old trope, the will with the unfair clause. Avery Thorne's uncle has stopped him from inheriting the small property he was expecting, instead leaving it to one Miss Lillian Bede. Avery will only inherit if the determined women's rights activist cannot make the property turn a profit within five years. But since a woman couldn't possibly be successful at managing a property, all Avery has to do is whittle away five years. Except that no matter where he travels, Miss Bede's letters find him, and he can't quite bring himself to hate her. 

The Likelihood of Lucy by Jenny Holiday

When Lucy Greenleaf's employer finds out she's been teaching his daughters about that unnatural woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, she's turned out without a reference. Desperate, she turns to her childhood friend Trevor Bailey. Trevor's fought tooth and nail to leave behind his destitute childhood in the rookery, and he's about to cement his position in London society by opening a fashionable hotel. He wants to help Lucy, but he can't have radical women's groups taking place in his hotel! The Likelihood of Lucy's emphasis on the theoretical basis of the suffragette movement is different to the way most authors approach it, and Trevor and Lucy's battles for supremacy are super hot. 

The Firebrand by Susan Wiggs

*Sigh* It's another woman who just wants to run her business in peace but can't because the misogynists feel threatened. During the Great Fire of Chicago, Lucy Hathaway caught a baby someone threw from the window of a burning building. For the last five years, she's raised the girl as her daughter. She meets financier Rand Higgins because she needs a loan for her ladies' bookshop, but quickly realises that he is the child's father, who believes that his daughter perished in the fire. They have to reach an agreement regarding custody, but Rand's position at the bank means he can't be seen to have anything to do with those pesky suffragettes, and Lucy's not about to give up her cause, especially not when she's being pressured to do so by powerful me. The Firebrand suffers a little from precocious child syndrome, but other than that it's a sweet story. 

A Summer for Scandal by Lydia San Andres

Emilia Cruz is a thoroughly modern woman; member of the Women's Suffrage Alliance and writer of salacious stories under a pseudonym. When visiting author Ruben Torres disparages the work of one 'Miss Del Valle', Emilia can't help but defend her work, and Ruben can't help but respond to her passion. The setting of the Caribbean in 1911 and the debate surrounding romance literature and its relationship to feminism makes A Summer for Scandal a stand-out. This was a last-minute addition to this list, since I only finished it last night, but I expect a full review will follow.

Review: Sleeping with Her Enemy by Jenny Holiday

4 stars

In a review several months ago, I blasted the current trend in contemporary romances to a) have a power imbalance between hero and heroine, with the hero often being the heroine's boss, and b) construct these so there is an element of coercion or non-consent. I was so fed up with this that I stopped reading contemporaries all together. 

I'd bought Sleeping with Her Enemy by Jenny Holiday at the same time as I bought That Other Book, and it has sat on unopened my Kindle ever since, tainted by association, and by my concern at the implications of the last few lines of its synopsis. Dax and Amy are office enemies until one day Dax comes across Amy weeping because she's just been left at the altar. The blurb ends:

Dax can't help but feel badly when he sees Amy mid-meltdown. Next thing he knows, he's gotten her good and drunk, and they're making out like two teenagers. And since neither of them want anything serious, why shouldn't they be frenemies-with-benefits?

After I lost my patience with contemporaries, I looked at this and I was like "Umm, because she JUST GOT JILTED AND SHE'S DRUNK". Then yesterday, I was doing some Kindle spring-cleaning and, having forgotten my initial objections, started to read. 

I'm glad I gave it a shot, because Sleeping with Her Enemy was sweet and funny and hot. Not only were my suspicions about the hero unjustified, Dax is up there with Rafe from The Shameless Hour as one of the most upstanding romance novel blokes ever. Example A is in the exact scene that is described above, where Amy is drunk and trying to get Dax to take her home for her (not) wedding night:

Although she'd never believe it, he did have some principles. Well, one: consent was essential, and since consent couldn't reliably be given when under the influence, he made it a practice to deflect the advances of any woman more than a little tipsy.

*feminist swoon* 

In short, Dax was a gem and I have a serious case of lovelust. But us mere mortal girls never had a chance, because Amy was a snarky red-lipped, vintage fashion-loving babe. She was a bit of a hot mess - but never too much - and she and Dax shared a wicked sense of humour, which is not as common as I'd like it to be in contemporaries. I also related to the fact that Amy's grief was at losing the life she had planned for herself, rather than at losing her fiancee. This made her desire to have a fling with Dax much more understandable. They declare a temporary ceasefire, but the heat starts rising and they find themselves circling closer and closer to a relationship. However, it was not until the final pages of the book that they formally became a couple, and I would have liked to see an epilogue that provided a glimpse into their lives together. 

After finishing Sleeping with Her Enemy, I looked at the other two books in the same series. Neither stood out very much, but I am certain, like Sleeping with Her Enemy, the blurbs don't do them justice. So I'll read them, because I've learnt from my mistake and now trust Jenny Holiday's ability to spin gold from straw.

How could I not when she writes so wonderfully, and her alter ego on Twitter is the hilarious Trope Heroine, who thumbs her nose at (unimaginative) romance novels? And who also thinks the whole emotionally unstable boss-hero thing has gone a bit far: 

Seeking: a man at the helm of a large company who has trouble regulating his emotions.

— Trope Heroine (@TropeHeroine) September 30, 2015

I can heal you. The only thing I ask in return is that you be a billionaire.

— Trope Heroine (@TropeHeroine) April 16, 2015

Review: Mistress Firebrand by Donna Thorland

4.5 stars

Set during the American War of Independence, Donna Thorland's Mistress Firebrand is a historical romance, with stress on the 'historical'. This is the first book by Donna Thorland I have read, but her detail-rich style is reminiscent of Joanna Bourne, whom I love. Except instead of Revolutionary France, we have Revolutionary New York, where Jenny Leighton is a playwright and bit-part actress at the only theatre still operating in Manhattan. She's desperate to exchange the America's provincial theatre scene for the bright lights of Drury Lane, and when she finds out that the British Army general and dramatist Johnny Burgoyne is anchored in the Hudson River, she is determined to secure his patronage.

Severin Devere is one of the Loyalists' best spies, but he's on babysitting duty, trying to keep General Burgoyne focussed on the war and away from pretty young things.  But the irrepressible Jenny makes his assignment more complicated than anticipated and then, the next time they cross paths things become even more difficult: Severin is under pressure to prove his loyalty to the British, while Jenny has made her way onto the British's hanging list for writing seditious plays.

As a reader and as a reviewer, I often stress character development over plot. I find that good characterisation covers a multitude of sins, but Mistress Firebrand made me remember how invested one can become in a good plot. It was extremely refreshing that, unlike so many more romance-y historicals, the hero and heroine didn't cause themselves unnecessary angst. When they were forced apart, it was a result of genuine, insurmountable external conflict, instead of their general blockheadedness or A Big Misunderstanding. On the flip side, this meant I needed to do some googling here and there, because a solid understanding of the War of Independence is key if you want to understand what is going on. I can't complain though, because, as I said, the depth of historical detail was something I really enjoyed about the book.

So too was Severin as a character. He was witty, thoughtful and kind. Although it doesn't mention this in any of the blurbs (it's actually quite nice that it's not being touted to sell books), he was also half-Mohawk. Displaced to England as a child, he's spent his whole life having to be "more English than the English" to disprove people's assumptions about him. Despite this, he is still frequently on the receiving end of casual racism and prejudice, and perhaps this plays a role in how he is extremely understanding of the precarious position Jenny and the other female characters are in. 

In fact, Thorland did an all-round superb job of capturing the nuances of the 1770s, in terms of both race and gender. There is no disdain for the actresses - including Jenny's Aunt Frances - who are regarded by society as little more than prostitutes. After Jenny realises that Aunt Frances sent her to Burgoyne with the intent that she would become his mistress, she bears her little ill-will, stating that it her aunt's way of trying to secure her future, and it was society who gave a woman the measly choice between being married or selling herself, with no other ways to make her own way in the world.  

With its stand-out plot, original and interesting hero and feminist undertones, Mistress Firebrand far exceeded my expectations and 75% of literature in the genre, and I'm so pleased that Donna Thorland's 3 books in this series are currently making their way across the Pacific Ocean to me. (Crazily, the kindle versions are so expensive it was cheaper to get the paperbacks shipped to Australia).

Review: Special Interests by Emma Barry

4.5 stars

Normally, the taglines on romance novels are one of my least favourite parts of Romancelandia - they're either overblown, twee, misleading or play into stereotypes about the genre (on some memorable occasions, they manage to be all at once). But the one for Emma Barry's Special Interests is an example of what happens when taglines go right:

In fact, Special Interests as a whole is an example of what happens when things go right. We open in Washington D.C. some time after union organiser Millie Frank was involved in a hostage situation.  In retrospect, it's farcical, given the hostage-taker was wearing a chicken costume and only had a fake gun, but that doesn't mean she's not having a hard time getting over it. Especially since she's now a household name in DC. When she bumps into Parker Beckett - literally - she's so sick of all the attention that she uncharacteristically asks him home with her. She's mortified when he declines, but the two of them just keep crossing paths; budget negotiations are in full swing and Millie's trying to get Parker's Democrat Senator boss not to throw the working class under a bus by giving into the Republicans' proposed budget compromises. As for Parker, he's finding it hard to maintain a moral compass, and harder still to ignore an idealistic union representative who still uses the term 'working people' unironically and suffers from night terrors.

If Special Interests has a theme, it's balancing idealism and cynicism. Both Millie and Parker have long since realised that working in D.C. is not all it's cracked up to be, but they've dealt with this realisation in different ways; Millie's clung to her faith in organised labour as a cure to the ills of the political system, while Parker's become jaded and fatalistic. As characters, they are almost unparalleled. At the outset, Millie comes across as whiny and slightly irrational, but that's fair enough given the whole hostage thing. It also led to some good tension with Parker, who, in Millie's words, was "conceited, presumptuous and paternal". Barry skillfully peels back layer after layer from two seemingly self-absorbed characters, revealing them to be extremely complex and allowing them to evolve as each challenges the others' worldview. 

And the plot, as I mentioned, is about US politics budget negotiations, which perennially pop up in the news but that I've never really understood before now. So, if you have an interest in American politics, but don't want to follow the primaries too closely lest Donald Trump makes you lose faith in humanity, try Special Interests!

Review: The Shameless Hour by Sarina Bowen

5 stars

Sarina Bowen's The Shameless Hour popped up on my Amazon in the 'New for You' section, and I was instantly drawn in by the beautiful cover:

Even more intriguing was the fact that, out of 16 reviews, there was only one person who hadn't given it 5 stars. I bought it to find out what kind of super-book could manage that, and stayed up waaay too late to finish it. The madness continued when I mass-downloaded the rest of the Ivy Years series, which I devoured during Sydney's so-called Storm of the Century. (Coincidentally, a century is also the estimated time before my teleco gets my internet working again. I think they must be using hairdryers to get the water out of the cables or something.)

But moving away from my #firstworldproblems and back the the topic at hand, I think it's fair to say that I was very impressed with The Shameless Hour. The last time I remember being this engrossed in a New Adult book was Trade Me, which was the not only the first review I posted on this blog, but also the impetus for starting it. As with Trade Me, it was the layers of the characters - and the way these embodied the struggle of the modern, diverse world - that I really loved.

The protagonists, Rafe and Bella, live in the same building at the prestigious (but fictional) Harkness College. The night they meet properly, Bella invites Rafe - devastated and drunk after finding out his girlfriend has been cheating on him with some Rolex-wearing jerk - into her room. One one-night stand later, Rafe's lost his virginity. Bella, not understanding why he's so awkward after their encounter, decides to avoid him. And she does a pretty good job, until Rafe's the person who discovers her at the lowest point in her life. She's been drugged by a frat and had profanities written across every inch of her skin in permanent marker. Even worse, it's all across the internet.  Realising Bella has no-one else, Rafe steps up, refusing to let her live out the rest of the semester from beneath her duvet cover.

As that brief rundown of the plot suggests, The Shameless Hour was refreshingly different from the bulk of romances, New Adult or otherwise. For one, Bella's no shrinking violet of a heroine. She goes after what she wants and her transformation from sex-positive feminist to reclusive hermit and back again is supremely affecting. Rafe is such a caring and thoughtful hero, there's a jaded part of me that wonders if he's more closely related to leprechauns and unicorns than your average college-aged guy.

Rafe is not actually descended from little green men; he's of Dominican extraction, and no one ever heard of a Dominican leprechaun.  But his ethnic background isn't just a sop thrown in to appeal to a wider market. It's integral to his character, the reason he's still a virgin at twenty.  His mother, having being knocked up and then abandoned by Rafe's dad at the tender age of nineteen, brought him up with the old tenet of if-you-don't-want-children-don't-have-sex, as well as a healthy respect for women.  It is partly Rafe's experience of what happens to good Catholic girls who fall on hard times that makes him so compassionate toward Bella.  The result is an interesting reversal of one of romance's most long-standing and pervasive tropes: the sexually experienced man and virginal woman.

The Shameless Hour was a truly 21st century novel. It tackles some serious social issues, but does so in a way that is remarkably un-judgemental and keeps the reader engaged. Even as the slut-shaming Bella was put through made my heart break, another part of me was going 'yes, finally someone's talking about this stuff, making it clear that we don't bring it on ourselves, that it's a problem and not just our cross to bear'.  I honestly can't stress enough how much it meant to me to read about a heroine who was as sure of herself and her beliefs, and in a stunning example of why we need these characters who challenge the assumption that women who are not 'pure' have no worth, the very day I read this book Avengers actors Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans called another (female) character in the movie a 'slut' and a 'whore'.  They were, of course, called out and both issued 'apologies' which basically told everyone offended that they needed to learn to take a joke. 

Such is life, but maybe one day - if we have more great books like The Shameless Hour - things will be different.