July 24, 2011, Author: BookDyke, Comments Off

Wild

Categories: Reviews
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Wild Cover

Wild by Meghan O'Brien

Wild by Meghan O’Brien
ISBN 9781602822276
Bold Strokes Books
★★★★★★

The only thing that frightens shapeshifter Selene Rhodes more than the full moon is the idea of falling in love.

Selene Rhodes has lived her whole life with a terrible secret: not only can she take the form of any animal at will, but once a month the full moon transforms her into a fierce wolf-creature without a human conscience. Managing her condition means living by a strict routine, and more importantly, abstaining from intimate relationships with human beings. Selene is convinced that love and friendship can only bring her pain.

Forensic pathologist Eve Thomas is well-acquainted with the pain of romantic love. Swearing off relationships after having her heart broken by a cheating ex, Eve throws herself into her work: catching murderers. When Selene comes to her aid after an attack by a masked man in Golden Gate Park, Eve is shocked by how powerfully she is drawn to her mysterious savior.

Shaken by her own feelings for Eve, Selene is even more terrified to realize she isn’t even close to being the scariest monster stalking San Francisco. There is someone out in the city who is killing for pleasure, and his next target is the one woman he thinks might be able to stop him: Eve.

In the eternal struggle between vampires and werewolves, I am in the fang camp. Yes, I prefer the undead to the furry. This often leads me to quickly pass on most lycanthrope stories, but this one was by Meghan O’Brien so I had to give it a chance.

I love Meghan’s take on shapeshifters. Rather than the typical uber-tough alpha thug werewolves, Selene is intriguingly different. Conflicted and frightened she condemns herself to solitude, dreading every lunar cycle… until Eve. Selene has a “deep empathetic connection” to Eve that drives the couple to rubber band between fierce overwhelming emotional seduction and anxiety driven fear. Whatever chemistry that’s between them is beyond their comprehension; and mine. Once I suspended my disbelief at the whole supernatural destined love, I enjoyed the push-pull dynamic more. Their frequent and incredibly hot sex helped too.

Beyond the ‘hooking up’ story, there is a serial killer murder mystery to be solved and my new favorite shapeshifter and forensic pathologist couple is up to their necks in solving the crime before it finds them.

The story has great pacing and keeps you on the edge of your seat until it’s heart pounding end. I can’t wait for sequel.

July 24, 2011, Author: BookDyke, Comments Off

Storms

Categories: Reviews
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Storms by Gerri Hill Cover

Storms by Gerri Hill
ISBN 9781594932496
Bella Books
★★★★★★

Estranged for years from her father and four brothers after her mother’s death, Carson Cartwright is surprised when she gets a phone call from her twin brother, urging a reconciliation before their father succumbs to his final illness. Though she has spent more than a decade trying to forget her family existed, she is suddenly pulled back to the Montana ranch where she grew up.

Carson discovers her brothers divided over plans to change their working ranch into a guest ranch, and their consultant, Kerry Elder, doesn’t seem above using her wiles to get her way. Kerry finds that while she may have her clients right where she wants them, it’s the wayward sister that may be awakening something she has long denied.

The big Montana sky crackles with thunder and lightning as emotions twist in unbidden directions. Neither Carson nor Kerry is prepared for the wild storms of summer.

My pre-ordered copy of Gerri Hill’s “Storms” arrived last week and was a relief from the rather bad batch of fiction I’ve read lately. Gerri has a knack for characterization and setting, interesting story lines and steamy sex. “Storms”… three outta four ain’t bad I guess.

The main characters are interesting; Carson with her older wealthy quasi-predatory anti-love lesbian BFF and Kerry’s determination to make her new start-up successful using faux charm and her whole clueless-to-being-a-lesbian thing. Carson and Kerry have chemistry, they have moments of fear and idiocy that everyone in lust and flirtation can relate to. Kerry’s epiphany and evolution from unsatisfied straight girl to confident lesbian was very well done.

Once again Gerri did an amazing job of turning the location/setting into a character. I grew up in the Rockies and her description of the ranch and the mountains made me a little homesick.

The sex did not disappoint, and neither did the romance. I’ve always appreciated that Gerri Hill doesn’t end the book 10 pages after the sex because she doesn’t know how to handle the afterward. She knows how to write a next day and a next week too.

Beyond the main characters there was the requisite busybody/matchmaker, played by a thoroughly charming (even if she was pretty one-dimensional) housekeeper/cook at the ranch. The supporting cast of family comprising: the indifferent brother(s), the evil brother, the good brother and the formerly evil asshole father now trying to reconcile because he’s days from death. If it wasn’t integral to the plot, I would have said “ehh just dump the dad dying thread”. Carson’s family dynamic was pretty unimaginative, I’m not sure if Gerri Hill just doesn’t have a grasp on how to write men (or brothers) or if she’s just not interested in making them more than black and white stereotypes. Honestly, for this book it probably doesn’t matter, it’s not like the story was an exploration of a male-dominated family. If the brothers helped move the plot that got Carson and Kerry together, they served their purpose.

Overall, a fun way to spend my morning. Not my favorite by Gerri Hill but worthy of her and worthy of my bookshelf.

July 5, 2011, Author: BookDyke, 1 Comment

A bad couple of weeks for girl smut

Categories: Rants
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After reading a couple of pretty good books (reviews to come I swear!) I had the misfortune of reading a couple really really bad titles. Frankly I’m not sure whether it’s right for me to post reviews of books I found difficult to finish due to my impulse to throw them down in disgust. Is it actually helpful to point out the gaping plot holes, completely unbelievable dialog or sadly unsexy sex? As someone who writes, I try to take criticism well, but lets face it who likes it?! I can pretend that my 1 star (don’t bother reading it) review is beneficial to the author should they read it; they will see which parts didn’t work for the reader. They can see where to improve… but let’s face it, that’s what an editor is for. No, I think hearing from readers who would prefer their $14.95 and 3 hours of their life back is probably just hurtful.

With that in mind here are a couple of humble suggestions for authors:

1) Don’t pander to U.S. readers by trying to change the language. You’re British, using American slang (badly) sounds clunky and ruins the flow of the novel. Use your own language, the one your characters speak, we’ll catch up! Even if we don’t know what it means we can figure it out by context and feel that much hipper that we now know.

2) Don’t give us 100+ pages of flirtation and foreplay only to have the first sex scene ruined by introducing the memory of a vicious beating the main character suffered.

3) Don’t write dialog for children, unless it’s minimal or unless you have any clue how children speak, otherwise it’s just eye-rollingly painful.

4) Try to give us a hint of reality; just a hint is all I ask!  High-power professional type falls for waitress (or barista, surf instructor, or nanny) is barely believable, however you really need to give a reason beyond ‘they’re hot’. If you want to settle them down together they’ll need something in common more than hot sex.

5) Please don’t ever follow a suicide attempt (followed by forced vomiting to expel the pills taken) with sex. Worse yet the first sex scene.

That’s it for now, good reading.

June 20, 2011, Author: BookDyke, 3 Comments

How I discovered lesbian fiction

Categories: Rants
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When I came out there was nothing it seemed for lesbians beyond dry books you’d find in a Women’s Studies class. There were of course the “classics” of lesbian literature, books I found preachy and decidedly un-sexy. Somewhere around the second year my girlfriend and I were together she kept wanting to watch Xena. I was reluctant, not because I wasn’t all swoony over Xena, but because the show seemed so hokey I didn’t know if I could enjoy it. As with most things, what the girl wants… so we watched Xena. Being the good computer nerd I was, I was all over the internet finding Xena information (ok mostly looking for hot wallpaper of Xena and Gabrielle) and I came across something I’d never heard of… Xena fan fiction. I was intrigued. Some stories were weak, most were at least worth the time it took to read them, and I think I fell in love with Xena more through the fiction than I ever did the TV show. I quickly found this wasn’t a new phenomenon; slash, it had been around for ages. For those who may not know, slash fiction is a story written where one fictional character is paired with another, the / slash signifies the pairing. Xena / Gabrielle stories were my favorites, but I also found hundreds of stores featuring other female heroines paired up. Femslash is the general term for female pairings.

One of my other obsessions in the mid 1990′s was the X-Files. Pairing up the smart and sexy Agent Dana Scully with someone other than Mulder was my dream. It was at this point I became aware of an author on the Scully Slash email list known as Radclyffe. Now of course she’s famous for her dozens of novels and Bold Strokes Books, but then she was simply the brilliant mind who gave Dana Scully the girlfriend she deserved.

In the years following I’ve read just about every lesbian novel published, The good, the bad and everything in between. I believe that to a certain extent lesbian fiction exists in its own vacuum, that it’s an insulated community where the rules are slightly different. By this I mean that to judge lesbian fiction against mainstream fiction is unfair, certain allowances and concessions must be made. By the same token, if the entire story line is two characters falling in love, the criteria for building a relationship that’s believable to the audience must be more stringent than a thriller novel. With lesbian fiction, you need to make the reader “feel” it.

Mostly I love that lesbian fiction exists, that we are publishing stories for us, by us. Stories of strong women in love. For the next generation of lesbians I hope you appreciate how fortunate you are to see yourselves and your friends reflected in the pages of a book, we weren’t always this lucky.

Enjoy!

June 20, 2011, Author: BookDyke, 1 Comment

Darkness Embraced

Categories: Reviews
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Darkness Embraced by Winter Pennington

ISBN: 9781602822214

Bold Strokes Books

★★★★★★

Two hundred years ago, Epiphany was reborn a vampire. Sired by Renata, the Queen of the Rosso Lussuria, Epiphany willingly played the role of the queen’s beloved pet—until she was cast from Renata’s bed and lost her protection from the Elder vampires.

Epiphany has done her best not to become a target, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible, like a long-forgotten memory huddling beneath the mantle of Vasco’s power, her one true friend among the Rosso Lussuria. Now Renata has called Epiphany forth to face the challenges ahead that could elevate her clan status to the ranks of an Elder. But Epiphany has few friends and many enemies, and the chances of surviving the challenges are slim.

Surrounded by harsh vampire politics and secret ambitions, Epiphany learns that an old enemy is plotting treason against the woman she once loved, and to save all she holds dear, she must embrace and form an alliance with the dark.

 

I will admit I have a peculiar fondness for vampires. It’s been difficult is seeing the genre devolve into sparkly teen morality stories. Writing about vampires is hard, there’s a line between deadly-sexy and gruesome-unsexy and it seems everyone’s boundary is different. This story won’t be for everyone, but I liked this story quite a bit. It created a back story, not just for the character but for the existence of vampires without smothering us with ancient history. It gave us peeks at the politicking and power struggle and wrapped it into a nice sexy violent package. I can’t wait for the sequel.

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