Review: In at the Deep End by Penelope Janu

3 stars

In at the Deep End was a quirky Aussie romance by debut author Penelope Janu. I'd really been looking forward to this one, but I'm left feeling ambivalent, because, while I enjoyed the second half, I didn't connect to the first half.

Harriet 'Harry' Scott grew up in the public eye as the daughter of two globe-trotting conservationist documentary-makers. But an accident in her childhood has left her petrified of water. When the ship she is captaining - which was once her parent's but is now owned by the charitable foundation they set up - goes down in Antarctic waters, Per Amundsen comes to her rescue. He's a Commander in the Norwegian Navy, on loan to the Australian Navy, and he's unimpressed by Harriet's plight. The sinking of the The Watch has damaged Harry's reputation, but Per has lost his chance to undertake his research on the Antarctic ice shelves. 

Harry has a plan to put things right: the Scott Foundation will buy a new ship, and Per can use that for his research. But the foundation doesn't have the money. Although Harry's high profile and Per's scientific connections would help fundraising efforts, Per wants no part of it. He thinks that Harriet is incompetent, irresponsible and a danger to herself and others. When it becomes clear that the only way he will get what he wants is by working with her, Per places a condition on his involvement: Harriet must learn to swim. And, when Per takes charge of Harry's swimming lessons himself, sparks fly. 

The whole novel is written from Harriet's perspective. This gives the reader an awareness her phobia - which I thought was portrayed realistically and sympathetically, as were the other psychological matters the book dealt with - but it also means that, until late in the piece, the reader sees Per as Harriet sees him: as an uptight, overbearing pain-in-her-ass. 

This lack of insight into the hero was critical to me, because I had trouble relating to Harriet. She doodles in high-stakes meetings with lawyers, even when people are talking directly to her. In her day-job as a geography teacher, she seems to spend more time drawing pictures on the whiteboard or talking to her students about her personal life than teaching the curriculum. She's also massively clumsy, which never sits well with me. Some of her irrationality and juvenility can be attributed to her phobia, but not all of it. For example, about mid-way through the book, Harry elbows Per in the stomach, because he's holding her arm and she's having a panic attack. That's perfectly acceptable. But then, towards the end, she punches him - 3 times - because he's "frustrating and intractable" (loc. 4409). Not acceptable. The romance between the two is a very slow-burn, which I usually love, but characterisation here meant that I had trouble even getting to the point where the romance began to warm up. 

However, the second half, when Per and Harriet worked through their enmity, was nuanced and engaging. As Harriet and Per opened up to each other - particularly he to her, since we're already inside her head - I was better able to invest in their relationship. Their growing closeness allowed Per to be the kind of hero that I love, caring and compassionate. In fact, there were a few moments that gave me butterflies, especially around the way he handled consent and safe sex. 

I also really enjoyed the fact that In at the Deep End was set in Sydney, where I live. I can't help but feel a connection to a book that references and describes familiar places like the Quadrangle at USyd, the HMAS Penguin at Balmoral and Royal North Shore Hospital, which I have always known like the back of my hand, first because it was my dad's workplace, and then because it was my own. 

Because of my background in health care (and my general pedantry), I was pulled out of the story several times because of the artistic license taken with medical matters. While there's nothing wrong with that, and I doubt it will bother anyone else, I can't help but issue a PSA: if someone has hypothermia, don't massage or rub or massage their body or extremities. Best case scenario, you'll send the patient into worse shock and severely chaff their skin. Worst case scenario, you've got a cardiac arrest on your hands. 

Harriet's reminiscences about her childhood travelling the world also made me quite uncomfortable, because they were continually exoticising and primitivising other cultures: 

When I was fifteen I spent weeks living with him in stilted huts on the banks of rivers in South-East Asia. The village women forced me to eat even though their own children were far skinnier than I was. The following year...we catalogued the wildebeest migration from the Serengeti in Kenya to the Masai-Mara in Kenya. A few months after that we spent the summer on horseback with Mongolian herdsmen on China's Silk Road. (loc. 317) 

There's a lot of footage of Drew and me dancing together--with Ghanaian drummers, North American boot-scooters, Turkish belly dancers. He used to say that he only got into trouble when I wasn't dancing with him, like the time he waltzed with a dictator's mistress in Cuba, and did the tango with a Geisha in Japan. (loc. 2079)

Paragraphs like these occur throughout the book, and I suppose their purpose is to highlight Harriet's experiences across the world growing up, but they brought nothing to the story. In fact, they often interrupted the narrative flow, and the way people and their lives are made into props in Harriet's 'adventurous' life left me feeling a little bit off. 

Because I did have such disparate feelings about different parts of this book, I've been struggling with this review for a long time. I've had trouble putting everything into words, so this isn't a particularly eloquent or coherent review. It's very rant-y for something that I ended up giving 3 stars to, but I was just so damn ambivalent about everything. I'd think of something I disliked and lower my rating, then remember something that worked for me and bump it back up. In the end, I went with 3 stars, but it's one of those cases where I think people should make up their own minds. Almost all other reviews have been favourable, so if it sounds like something that's up your alley, give it a go. Maybe it's just me, and you'll have an easier time with it.

Review: Stealing Mr. Right by Tamara Morgan

4 stars
Release Date: 7/3/16
I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. My opinion is my own.

Tamara Morgan's website describes Stealing Mr. Right as "Ocean's Eleven meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith", and that's pretty spot-on. The synopsis says:

I'm a wanted jewel thief. He's FBI.What's that saying? Keep your friends close...and your husband closer.   Being married to a federal agent certainly has its perks.

1. I just love the way that man looks in a suit.
2. This way I always know what the enemy is up to.

Spending my days lifting jewels and my nights tracking the Bureau should have been a genius plan. But the closer I get to Grant Emerson, the more dangerous this feels. With two million dollars' worth of diamonds on the line, I can't afford to fall for my own husband.  

It turns out that the only thing worse than having a mortal enemy is being married to one. Because in our game of theft and seduction, only one of us will come out on top. Good thing a cat burglar always lands on her feet.

One thing the blurb doesn't make clear - and that really reminded me of Mr. and Mrs. Smith - is that the narrator, Penelope Blue, and her husband Grant both entered their relationship knowing the other's identity but unaware of their motives. It's an elaborate game of bluff and double bluff, where they both maintain the fiction that Penelope is a dance teacher, and that the close bonds she has with her fellow thieves are more than friendship.

I loved Penelope as a character. Her humour and flexible morals reminded me of Stephanie Plum or Isabel Spellman, heroines from other romantic comedy series that deal with the criminal world. But Penelope differs in that she falls firmly on the wrong side of the law. She's a wonderful antiheroine, she's undoubtedly strong, but her upbringing and ambiguous relationship with Grant also mean that she is emotionally vulnerable. 

Somehow, despite the moral ambiguity surrounding his relationship with Penelope, Grant comes across as a stand-up guy and swoonworthy hero. He's the kind of hero that's my catnip: honourable, but just dishonourable enough. 

His courtship with Penelope - courtship is an old-fashioned word, but it somehow seems appropriate, given the way Grant restrains himself and declares his intentions - is told through flashbacks that are interspersed with what is happening in their present-day marriage. Because of this, Stealing Mr. Right simultaneously feels like a romance novel, where the hero and heroine are feeling each other out, and long-running romantic comedy series with established love interests, like the ones I mentioned earlier. 

From the next book in the series, currently available for pre-order on Amazon, I gather that there will be two more books about Grant and Penelope. It would have been nice to know this going in - or even to have some confirmation that this is indeed the case - but Stealing Mr. Right still functions well as a standalone and has a HFN. 

If I had to name the one thing that I loved best about Stealing Mr. Right, it would be the all-round depth of emotion Morgan manages to convey, the kind that makes your chest feel tight. Partly, this is because the relationships she has crafted between the characters are so messily real and evoke so much emotion. I've read four or five of Morgan's books now, and, as I said in my review of The Derby Girl, this seems to be a consistent strength of hers, as is the acerbic wit she gives her heroines. These similarities mean that, while Stealing Mr. Right might seem to be a change of direction, it will still appeal to fans of her comedic contemporary romances, while also drawing in news readers of romantic suspense, chick-lit and serialised romantic comedies.

Review: The First Star I See Tonight by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

1 star
*SPOILER ALERT*
TW: Islamophobia, rape accusations

I feel deeply ambivalent about First Star I See Tonight, to be honest. The central romance was okay (until the end when everything went massively screwy), but there was an Orientalist subplot and some other elements that I quite disliked and was uncomfortable with. 

In some ways, the whole thing was vintage SEP, which is not surprising since it's the latest installment in her long-running Chicago Stars series. In others, it was SEP trying to fit herself to today's readers, market and society. If this had been a vintage SEP book, I might have written some things off as a product of the time, but I can't do that here, especially when she seems to have almost gone out of her way to make it 'current', including diverse characters and expounding on rape culture, Islam and other random things (even when her writing and characters didn't actually hold up to her throwaway political statements).

But, first, let me back up a bit. First Star I See Tonight features Piper Dove, a down-on-her-luck detective, who has been assigned to follow ex-NFL player Cooper Graham, now the proprietor of a hot new nightclub. He twigs pretty quickly, and eventually offers Piper an alternate arrangement: she'll work for him at the club instead, since she's noticed some things that don't seem quite right. 

SEP has always been the master of the redeemable alpha-hole hero, and Coop is walks the line well. His back-and-forth with Piper was priceless, but he wasn't too much of a jerk. He was also reflecting well on his behaviour and how that might come across to women, with a self-awareness I would personally like to romance heroes display more often. 

However, his 'save the cat' moment was a subplot that involved him using his influence to 'rescue' a Pakistani woman, Faiza, from her indentured servitude to a Middle Eastern Royal Family presumably based on that of Saudi Arabia. He does so by basically buying her, giving the prince the impression he is going to use her as a sex slave. The whole thing - from the white saviour element to the representation of the degenerate Arab prince - just left a bad taste in my mouth. Frankly, I just wish the whole subplot hadn't existed. 

To make matters worse, there was one really horrible incident of Islamophobia by the heroine, which was just so not okay:

Piper asked if she would consider taking off her headscarf until they went through [the US/Canada border crossing]. "We're an odd-looking group," she said, "Even though all our papers are in order, it would make the crossing easier." 

I'll paraphrase that in case those of you in the back didn't catch it the first time 'round: 

Please compromise your deeply held religious beliefs, so that Coop and I don't have to be inconvenienced if the border guards are racist fuckwits. 

That also came on the back of another uncomfortable - and frankly bizarre - exchange, where the author finishes recounting a conversation between Coop and Faiza like this: 

Only when he ventured into politics did Faiza grow fiery. "The word Islam means 'peace, purity, submission, and obedience," she said. "What has terrorism to do with any of those things?"  

It's just weirdly dropped in, and then normal conversation resumes. I can't see the point of it at all, and none of the reasons I can think of for so blatantly and randomly making such a statement in the middle of people apolitically living their lives (right after this, they get lunch from Burger King) are flattering. Does she think that her readers are going to associate Islam with terrorism and, if so, that this will dissuade them? Does she, in some way, feel that she needs to establish that her Muslim character is not a terrorist? I don't even know what to think about it, and after those two incidents, I skim-read the parts relating to that subplot. 

Overall, I think First Star I See Tonight is a powerful example of just because you can handle something in your writing, it doesn't necessarily mean you should. There's the use of Faiza to demonstrate Coop and Piper's compassion and to force them to work and spend time together, which belittles and erases the experiences of real maids in similar (or worse) situations. In the vast majority of cases, no-one is coming to save foreign maids, and even if they do escape or are injured so badly that someone intervenes, justice is scarce. 

But, unfortunately, it wasn't just that subplot; there's also a false rape accusation against Coop. He makes a statement acknowledging the damage false accusations do, but I still felt icky about it. I don't have the strength to go more in depth, but this review by Amanda on Goodreads explains it well (in actual fact, it explains everything, though I should probably issue another spoiler warning). (EDIT 28/11: Ditto with this review by Gabby and Rudi at Book Thingo, which draws out the weird gender dynamic and toxic masculinity of this book.)

Then there was the end. Pretty much everything I liked about this book - Piper as a resourceful woman, the way Coop avoided pulling rank over Piper, the lighthearted nature of their interactions - got obliterated. First, Piper got wishy-washy and ran away from her fears, but I could deal with that. What I couldn't deal with was when everyone drank the Koolaid and agreed with Cooper's insane idea that the only way to prove himself to Piper and remove her fears was for them to randomly get married. That is not a unilateral decision, or something woman should enter into reluctantly. 

Oh, and one more thing: the epilogue. Piper had stated throughout that she didn't want kids. In the epilogue, we find out that she "negotiated" with Cooper to have one child, provided he is the primary carer. There's nothing wrong with women not wanting children, so why do we always get these epilogues where they renounce on their decisions so we can see them play happy families? I'm so over it, especially since there are few enough heroines who don't want children in the first place. 

Writing this review has been exhausting and I don't know if I've been able to convey everything that I intended. I'm publishing it anyway because I think this is about as coherent as it's going to get; the book itself was just too much of a tangled hot mess. It had some okay moments, but it had major problems with representation, and I'm in no rush to have another similar reading experience any time soon. 

EDIT 28/11: A few weeks ago, I was shocked to see a Favourite Books of 2016 post, in which 6 of the 8 well-known romance authors asked rated this First Star I See Tonight as one of their favourite contemporary romances for the year, because all I remembered about it was its sickening racism and misogyny. Then, today, I read this all-encompassing and damning review of at Book Thingo and, since I couldn't remember what, precisely, I had written in my review, I revisited it, and I was shocked to discover that I had given it a 2.5. I think I was trying to be 'balanced' and 'fair' and was swayed by SEP's star power, so the occasional moments that didn't involve majorly problematic representation got built up into 'this book has some okay parts' in my mind. This was an unacceptable expression of my  privilege, and I apologise unreservedly for anyone who may have been harmed by it. I have changed my rating to 1 star to better reflect how I regard this book in retrospect, and to respect the fact that being wishy-washy about calling out a book for bad representation - especially from a industry stalwart such as SEP - is probably just as bad as staying silent. 

Review: Antonia Barclay and Her Scottish Claymore by Jane Carter Barrett

3.5 stars

Release Date: 9th February 2016

I received a free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinion is my own. 

The first thing I’ll say about Antonia Barclay and her Scottish Claymore is that if your pedantry for historical accuracy has no ‘off’ switch, this probably isn’t the book for you. It’s intentionally anachronistic, with references to modern cultural touchstones, practices and scientific understandings overlayed on a setting of 16th century Scotland. 

The heroine, the eponymous Antonia Barclay, has grown up as the daughter of Lord and Lady Barclay in the Scottish border region, but at nineteen discovers that she’s actually the legitimate daughter of Mary, Queen of Scots and her third husband. Unfortunately, Basil Throckmorton, evil slimy Englishman, has also discovered Antonia’s true heritage and hopes to secure the Scottish throne for himself by marrying her. When Antonia sets out to rescue her mother from house arrest in England, she is kidnapped by Basil and his even slimier son Rex. Luckily, Antonia's suitor – Mr Claymore, creator of Claymore Swords (TM) – is hot in pursuit, determined to save his beloved. 

If it sounds overblown, that’s because it is, but a light-hearted awareness of its own incredibility made it funny instead of eye-rollingly stupid. Stylistically, the only comparisons I can make are to George MacDonald Fraser’s old comic novels and The Princess Bride (which might well be an influence, since it is referenced several times).

As a whole, Antonia Barclay and Her Scottish Claymore is a humorous breath of fresh air, but I still found it overcooked in some areas and underdone in others. In the overcooked column was some of the action, plot devices and descriptions. As much as the novel uses its OTT nature to send up some common tropes of both historical and contemporary romance, it also sometimes falls victim to its own hyperbole. Having made the point that a particular character is fashionably dressed or extremely stupid, the author can't help but reiterate this point ad nauseum.

On the other hand, the relationships between the characters were underdone. The reader doesn't meet Mr Claymore until 11% of the way through the book, at which point he instantly falls in love with Antonia, and she with him, despite the fact that she (or the reader) knows nothing about him except the fact that he has nice blue eyes. I don't mind that he's a bit of a mystery – after all, the story isn't really about him – but I was unable to suspend reality enough to believe that he'd go to all this trouble to rescue Antonia when he's had about two conversations with her. As for the other characters, their interactions often came across as one-dimensional. 

However, despite my criticisms, kudos must go out to Carter Barrett for such an original debut, because the book's synopsis was right when it said that "readers of historical romances will enjoy the feisty heroine, her outrageous adventures, and the humorous take on a well-loved genre".