Review: The Derby Girl by Tamara Morgan

4 stars

The Derby Girl  is the third book by Morgan I've read, and I've come to realise that she's is exceptional at creating emotionally complex and realistic characters and plots. 

Gretchen, roller derby player and perpetual student, has been giving Dr. Jared Fine, local plastic surgeon and national hero, his coffee for months, but he doesn't recognise her when she stops to help him with his broken-down car orr when he asks her out a few minutes later. Jared is fascinated by Gretchen's her tough-girl demeanour, but Gretchen is playing a role and holding herself back, worried that Jared only wants the fantasy of the tattooed derby girl. 

The interplay between Jared and Gretchen was great. They snipe away at each other, and Gretchen doesn't take any shit, calling Jared out when he's being a selfish prick. He's a classic messed-up anti-hero (although a very nuanced one), and much of the book's conflict comes from Gretchen's concern that his relationship with her might be emotionally unhealthy. Having said that, we also have an excellent sub-plot surrounding Gretchen's aging grandmother, with whom she lives. 

Although Jared had a tendency towards dickishness, Morgan constructs this in such a way that, for the most part, you can't really hold it against him. Jared's sensitiveness, his upbringing and career, and his growing awareness his male privilege, meant that I didn't have any problems with him as a hero, at least until the final chapters. Up until then, there was never any doubt in my mind that Gretchen would reform him, in the great tradition of romance heroines everywhere.

Except that, I kind of felt that, in the end, she didn't. And, even though I suppose that was in line with the complex emotional realism that I value from Morgan, it also is the reason I shaved the rating down to 4 stars, even though I decided about halfway through that it was definitely a 4.5. 

In short, the ending let me down. Throughout the book, Jared has a complicated relationship with his father, and fights against the thought of becoming an uncaring, manipulative bastard like his old man. Without giving too much away, the ending sees him manipulate his friends to get what he wants, and, for me, this played into the fatalistic belief that he would become like his father, and took away from the hopeful note that his relationship with Gretchen could somehow 'save' him. 

Even though it may not sound like it from the way I've presented Jared and Gretchen's relationship, the traditional idea of a woman being responsible for her male partner's wellbeing and behaviour is one that is challenged throughout The Derby Girl. It does concern Gretchen that this is what Jared expects of her, and they discuss her concerns in the final pages of the book:

"...that's the problem. I can't be responsible for your actions or lack thereof. That's not a relationship. That's a jail sentence."

 "You're wrong." When she opened her mouth to protest, Jared grabbed her hands, unwilling and unable to let her go. "The problem with that scenario isn't that I'm asking you to be my reality check--It's that you haven't asked me to yours in return."

This is also where Gretchen's strength of character is important, in that it gives the reader peace of mind that the dynamic will always be that of equals, because she isn't afraid to draw boundaries and stick to them.

On the whole, The Derby Girl was a funny and enjoyable read with good emotional depth. I came away loving it, and it was only packing the dishwasher afterward that I started to have reservations about the ending. So, really, the take-away here is to never to do housework. It gives you to much time to think stuff over. 

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!

Review: Switch by Janelle Stalder

3 stars

Maybe it's my secret desire for a catastrophic event that mysteriously wipes out people who can't queue, but I've developed some strange need for dystopic romances during these last few weeks of travel. Switch by Janelle Stalder was my most recent indulgence, read while navigating the Peruvian rail system. It was a mixed bag (Switch, that is; the Peruvian trains have actually been very nice), but it was intriguing enough overall that I instantly downloaded the sequel, despite having the wave my Kindle around to get the necessary bars of 3G. 

Switch take place in 2035, after some guy called Ludwig has taken over the world (or at least Europe). Mind-reading Charlotte-slash-Dinah is drawn into the politics of it all at sixteen, when her house is raided on the suspicion that her father is involved in the resistance movement. She accidentally lets Ludwig's second in command know about the whole being able to hear thoughts thing, and when we flash forward a few years, she's become the autocrat's mysterious and feared 'Weapon X'. 

Ludwig sends Dinah to spy on a rebel faction, because we know that always works out a treat. Sure enough, she meets Pete McKay, a rebel leader with secrets. Pete was a decent hero, but it was hard for me to get past the most overdone Cockney accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Seriously, the guy referred to everyone - even his brothers - as 'mate'. 

But back to the storyline. Or the would-be storyline, since the constant changes between four different narrators mean it's not apparent that Dinah and Pete are the protagonists for the first third of the book. Neither was this slow start filled in by detailed world-building; I still have no clue how or why Ludwig decided to take over the world, for example. 

If it's becoming clear that I have a bee in my bonnet about this whole world domination thing, it not just because it was all very flimsy.  It really pissed me off that, in the absence of any overt motive for Ludwig or any explanations of his ethnic or national affiliations, London had been renamed 'New Berlin'. Because using Germans as inexplicable and one-dimensional villians is not at all a lazy trope-tastic cop-out! I hope that Ludwig will be fleshed out in the second book, which features the other two narrators from Switch, who actually captured my interest more than Dinah and Pete. 

However, I was drawn into the book as it gained momentum, and it ultimately found its feet in the moral ambiguities of the second half. Ironically, however, the reason I liked it is also the reason I come down so harshly on Ludwig as a villian; his charisma was supposed to contribute to the moral confusion of it all, but in the absence of detail, it actually detracted from it.

Review: Trancing the Tiger by Rachael Slate

3 stars

Trancing the Tiger by Rachael Slate is a paranormal romance with a unique premise. It's set in an alternate modern day or near future, where the earth - particularly North America - has been ravaged by the Red Plague. Having lost her parents to the disease, Lucy Yeoh comes from her home in the US to her father's birthplace of Penang, Malaysia to meet her uncle. Unbeknownst to her, she's also walking into Ground Zero of the divine war that unleashed the plague. And fighting on the frontline is Li Sheng, who seems to think that he, Lucy and some other misfits are the hosts of the spirits of animals of the Chinese Zodiac, bestowed on them by the mythical Jade Emperor. To Lucy, it soon doesn't sound as crazy as it seems. But as her relationship with Sheng (and his resident Tiger) heats up, so too does the fight against the rival Kongsi, the Council of Elders, and the agents of the Plague God.

The world of Trancing the Tiger, particularly the setting of Penang and use of Chinese mythology, was well-done, as was the character of Lucy. When Sheng kept trying to convince Lucy that she was one of 'The Chosen' who bear an animal Zodiac, my inner geek started reciting "Into each generation, there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness...". And even though she wasn't a Slayer, Lucy actually was a Buffy-esque heroine. She was a good combination of diffidence and strength, given she was facing life in a strage place after the death of her parents. It was Sheng who I wasn't so keen on as a character. I didn't really get a sense of him; it seemed like he had almost no character traits outside of his alpha-male Tiger-ness, his desire for Lucy, and his sense of duty to the Chosen who made up his Kongsi.

There were also some other elements I felt didn't work so well. Perhaps it's because I'm not a big reader of paranormals, but there were several things that happened that I found quite weird, such as Lucy's Rabbit randomly deciding to fling herself all the way to the ceiling of a room, where she hung in a manner more befitting a gecko than a rabbit. And although I enjoyed the ending, I felt like there was something of a lull and then a great flurry of action, as opposed to a gradual build toward a denouement. 

On the whole, though, Trancing the Tiger was a solid read, and I'll probably read the next in the series for the freshness of the premise.

Review: Kulti by Mariana Zapata

5 stars

All Sal Casillas wants to do is play soccer. It's her life, and if she works hard enough, she can help her team to the top of the Women's Premier League. The last thing she wants is a distraction, especially when it takes the form of Reiner Kulti, retired soccer icon and Sal's new assistant coach. As a girl, Sal plastered her room with his pictures, but the man who watches her from the side of the field each day is nothing like her childish imaginings.  He is, in short, a bit of a bastard. On the rare occasions he speaks, it's to put someone down. Sal's the only one brave enough to tear a strip off him, and when she does, a tentative friendship emerges. As Sal gets to know the man beneath the tight-lipped and intimidating exterior, she realises he might be an egotistical, arrogant, stubborn pain in the ass, but he's also vulnerable and alone.  

Mariana Zapata's Kulti was atypical; longer than most romance novels, and with protagonists who had a platonic relationship for the majority of the book.  But the pay off was definitely worth it. Watching Sal and Kulti circle around each other was an engaging and refreshing change from compressed storylines and insta-love.

Pulling off a book of this length wouldn't have been possible without excellent characterisation. Sal was wonderfully developed, kind but assertive. Perhaps more importantly, she was witty and funny, a necessary foil to the taciturn Kulti. I also really appreciated that Sal wasn't reduced to a zero-sum tomboy stereotype.  She played soccer and worked in landscaping, but also loved 'feminine' stuff like face masks.  

And Kulti.  I didn't want to like him, I really didn't. He could be insensitive, but he was also a little bit like a lost puppy who followed a child home from the park and refused to leave. He was an enticing and interesting mix of contradictions and in the end, his dedication to Sal and her career won me over. I try to keep my reviews from being too fan-girly, but honestly, the way Kulti called Sal Schnecke got me every time.  Gotta love a good German endearment.

In fact, in light of the effect this book had on me, I'm going to issue a caveat emptor: if you buy Kulti, you may find yourself daydreaming your way through the morning commute and end up using your data allowance to google the German soccer team.  It was a sacrifice I was more than willing to make, but if you are looking to invest minimal time and effort in a book, save Kulti for another day.

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.

Review: Ember by Bettie Sharpe

5 stars 

"I know you think you've heard this story before, but you're wrong. Some would have it that this story begins with a virtuous virgin, a young woman of honesty and integrity sucker punched by cruel fortune and forced to sleep among the cinders while her moral inferiors lived the which was meant to be hers. Bullshit. This is no fairytale." 

That's the first paragraph of Ember by Bettie Sharpe, and it's certainly not the last time the heroine, Ember, breaks the fourth wall to warn the reader not to glorify her. For all it has the same first-person narration and fantastic setting as the fairytale retellings of my childhood, it's no starry-eyed Ella Enchanted. In fact, it's completely different from anything I've ever read before.

The main character, Ember, is a witch. Not a sanitised bubbles-and-rainbows type of witch (I'm looking at you, Glinda the Good), but a legitimate witch, the kind that makes blood sacrifices and gets her revenge on those who've wronged her.  Her love interest is equally unconventional. At birth, Prince Adrian Juste was blessed with the universal regard of his subjects; men respect him, women want him, and neither can deny him anything. As much as he craves a life where he's not surrounded by sycophants, he's not above using his curse to get what he wants. And he wants Ember, the one woman who isn't affected by his unnatural charm.  

Ember is unburdened by conventional morality, and it makes her an unpredictable and memorable character. As a snarky anti-heroine, she's eminently relatable. Sharpe treads the tightrope between amorality and likability well, keeping the reader onside through Ember's loyalty to her step-mother and -sisters. In this adaptation, Ember's step-family are whores, forced to escape their homeland and make a new life with Ember and her father.  Once again, Sharpe deals with this sensitively, and provides the reader with a raft of great secondary characters at the same time.  One of the things I really loved about this novel was that all of its characters were well-developed, independent of gendered stereotypes. There was no cookie-cutter hero, or same-same good-girl heroine; each and every character was unique and interesting. This in-depth characterisation was countered by a realtively simple plot, but this too was well-executed. 

Potenital readers should be aware that there are a few more swearwords thrown around than usual. I didn't feel like they were gratuitous - Ember's character wouldn't have been half as bad-ass without them, that's for sure - but we each have differing levels of tolerance for these things. Ditto the level of sexuality. While Ember doesn't have any more sex scenes than your average romance novel, Ember and those around her are all overtly sexual beings. Frankly, it would have been weird if this hadn't been the case, given her stepfamily's profession and the Prince's curse!

If I had to critique one thing about Ember, it would be that it was sometimes scarce on details. This occasionally drew me out of the narrative, as I'd have to flick back a page or two to remember where a particular conversation was taking place or some other such thing that had been mentioned, but not reinforced through detailed description. However, I don't feel like this came at the expense of the characterisation or plot, and it didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the book.

Ember was a great read and, at the moment, it's $0.79 on kindle. THAT'S SEVENTY-NINE CENTS, GUYS. You can't even buy a Ghost Drop for 79 cents these days. And unlike many cheap reads on Kindle, there's not a spelling or formatting mistake in sight, in addition to a good plot and excellent characterisation. It's the mythical needle in a haystack, the hen's tooth, the black cat in the coal cellar. I'm getting overly poetic now so I'll stop, but if it sounds like your thing, go get it!