![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Wednesday
May. 12th, 2021 11:50 pmI can try climbing again tomorrow night, woo hoo. I've also had 2 doses of Pfizer COVID vaccine; the first gave me a sore arm and a wave of fatigue that evening, the second gave me a very sore arm and a vague sense of tiredness, which I will definitely take as evidence that my immune system is doing something.
Emotional Female, Yumiko Kadota (as audiobook read by the author). Yumiko grew up in Singapore and England before moving to Australia for the last bit of high school and medical school; she always worked hard, made friends, was smart, kind, and responsible, and ticked off one career box after another until she ran headlong into the Australian surgical training scheme, which systematically exploits all would-be surgeons and is not remotely hesitant in discriminating against any one outside the white male Australian norm. Yumiko wrote a blog post about her experiences that went viral, and it’s a useful shorthand for the book; what the book adds is more context, sexual assault by superiors in training (she changes the names but it’s not hard to work out who she’s talking about), and a prolonged and difficult recovery. The writing tends towards restating the obvious, and – oddly – she never seems to have made a mistake in her medical career – but it’s compelling.
Hot Money, Dick Francis. Ian’s estranged father Malcolm is immensely wealthy and has five ex-wives and an assortment of bickering adult children; when the most recent wife is murdered and someone tries to kill Malcolm, he asks Ian (an amateur jockey, natch) to protect him. It’s competent enough, but in order to keep the field of suspects open Francis makes most of the extended family rather unpleasant. The incredibly wealthy tour of international horsey bits is fun.
The Duke of Shadows, Meredith Duran. Emmaline survives the shipwreck that kills her parents on her trip out to India to meet a fiancé, who as so often in these cases turns out to be a rotter, while the British Raj society consider Emma tarnished irretrievably due to her rescue by passing sailors; Julian is an heir to a dukedom and part Indian, an outside and one of the few people who can see – if not stop – the coming uprising (it’s 1857). It’s Duran’s first novel, and it’s good – it doesn’t have the feel for India that MM Kaye’s books have, but she’s strong on character and Emma, in particular, gets to be angry and destructive in a way that romance heroines often don’t show.
The Sins of Lord Lockwood, Meredith Duran. Liam Lockwood disappears on his wedding night to Anna, who holds Scottish lands in her own right and thinks that the deal she made with Liam in order to keep these means that he must havenever had any feelings for her beyond convenience. However, rather than sporting on the Continent Liam was kidnapped by his evil cousin and sent to a hellish prison colony, and his return is part of his plan to trap his cousin – but he wasn’t expecting Anna to find out and interfere. It’s an interesting set-up and Duran gives both characters depth and authority. There are also some great bits with the convicts Lockwood has brought back with him, but Anna isn't as convincing a character as her other female leads.
Auē, Becky Manawatu. Domestic violence, gangs, child abuse, interwoven into the stories of two (and a bit) generations of Māori living in the South Island. It’s won lots of awards and the writing is great. I personally didn’t think keeping the timeline opaque added anything to the story and it does have that “of course they’ll shoot the dog” feel to it. It may be a generational thing but for me the bone people will always be my touchstone for Aotearoa/NZ writing about domestic violence and it's the book where I find the violence most disturbing.
It might sound cliché, Jessie G. All-too-appropriately titled short. Rocco can’t forgive his lover Nino for torching their family restaurant, even as he works himself to the bone to rebuild it; he heads out of town to a snowbound cabin to relax and, naturally, finds Nino there, along with the news of what really happened. Forgettable.
The Covert Captain, Jeannelle M Ferreira. This took me quite a few goes to get into, not because it’s not good but because it’s a very elliptical read, focussed very tightly on period-specific setting and dialogue and leaving a lot of the conventional emotional work to the reader, as well as much of the usual narrative interstitium. I liked Eleanor/Nathaniel a lot, Harriet less so, and would happily have read many more bits with horses; I think I’d prefer more historical to more romance by the author.
Fall Out, Lisa Henry and M Caspian. M/M romance. Former highschool boyfriends reunite at college – then Bastian is in a car smash and ends up struggling with chronic pain and feelings of inadequacy. A camping/research trip (Jack is doing a PhD in environmental science) looks like a possible chance for them to get back together – until there’s an ugly incident with a motorcycle gang and then volcanic ash starts falling from the sky. I was not expecting volcanic eruption and the really rather rapid decay of society, along with lots of rape and murder, and although the (sympathetic) characters are well done, it’s tense, and the volcanic eruption is a fantastic complication, I really prefer Henry’s more conventional romances. Haven’t read anything else of Caspian’s.
Chase in Shadow, Amy Lane. First in a series about the guys who work at Johnnies, a gay-for-pay porn video company. Chase has a terrible father and blames himself for his mother’s suicide; he is also deeply in the closet and engaged (to a woman), but once he takes the job (telling his fiancée it’s in construction) he falls for another guy, and everything begins to unravel. The set-up works really well for Lane and it’s a competently handled cast of characters, with a lot of interesting hints at the next books. The ending lurches into sentiment, as her books tend to do, but I cheerfully downloaded the next one.
Emotional Female, Yumiko Kadota (as audiobook read by the author). Yumiko grew up in Singapore and England before moving to Australia for the last bit of high school and medical school; she always worked hard, made friends, was smart, kind, and responsible, and ticked off one career box after another until she ran headlong into the Australian surgical training scheme, which systematically exploits all would-be surgeons and is not remotely hesitant in discriminating against any one outside the white male Australian norm. Yumiko wrote a blog post about her experiences that went viral, and it’s a useful shorthand for the book; what the book adds is more context, sexual assault by superiors in training (she changes the names but it’s not hard to work out who she’s talking about), and a prolonged and difficult recovery. The writing tends towards restating the obvious, and – oddly – she never seems to have made a mistake in her medical career – but it’s compelling.
Hot Money, Dick Francis. Ian’s estranged father Malcolm is immensely wealthy and has five ex-wives and an assortment of bickering adult children; when the most recent wife is murdered and someone tries to kill Malcolm, he asks Ian (an amateur jockey, natch) to protect him. It’s competent enough, but in order to keep the field of suspects open Francis makes most of the extended family rather unpleasant. The incredibly wealthy tour of international horsey bits is fun.
The Duke of Shadows, Meredith Duran. Emmaline survives the shipwreck that kills her parents on her trip out to India to meet a fiancé, who as so often in these cases turns out to be a rotter, while the British Raj society consider Emma tarnished irretrievably due to her rescue by passing sailors; Julian is an heir to a dukedom and part Indian, an outside and one of the few people who can see – if not stop – the coming uprising (it’s 1857). It’s Duran’s first novel, and it’s good – it doesn’t have the feel for India that MM Kaye’s books have, but she’s strong on character and Emma, in particular, gets to be angry and destructive in a way that romance heroines often don’t show.
The Sins of Lord Lockwood, Meredith Duran. Liam Lockwood disappears on his wedding night to Anna, who holds Scottish lands in her own right and thinks that the deal she made with Liam in order to keep these means that he must havenever had any feelings for her beyond convenience. However, rather than sporting on the Continent Liam was kidnapped by his evil cousin and sent to a hellish prison colony, and his return is part of his plan to trap his cousin – but he wasn’t expecting Anna to find out and interfere. It’s an interesting set-up and Duran gives both characters depth and authority. There are also some great bits with the convicts Lockwood has brought back with him, but Anna isn't as convincing a character as her other female leads.
Auē, Becky Manawatu. Domestic violence, gangs, child abuse, interwoven into the stories of two (and a bit) generations of Māori living in the South Island. It’s won lots of awards and the writing is great. I personally didn’t think keeping the timeline opaque added anything to the story and it does have that “of course they’ll shoot the dog” feel to it. It may be a generational thing but for me the bone people will always be my touchstone for Aotearoa/NZ writing about domestic violence and it's the book where I find the violence most disturbing.
It might sound cliché, Jessie G. All-too-appropriately titled short. Rocco can’t forgive his lover Nino for torching their family restaurant, even as he works himself to the bone to rebuild it; he heads out of town to a snowbound cabin to relax and, naturally, finds Nino there, along with the news of what really happened. Forgettable.
The Covert Captain, Jeannelle M Ferreira. This took me quite a few goes to get into, not because it’s not good but because it’s a very elliptical read, focussed very tightly on period-specific setting and dialogue and leaving a lot of the conventional emotional work to the reader, as well as much of the usual narrative interstitium. I liked Eleanor/Nathaniel a lot, Harriet less so, and would happily have read many more bits with horses; I think I’d prefer more historical to more romance by the author.
Fall Out, Lisa Henry and M Caspian. M/M romance. Former highschool boyfriends reunite at college – then Bastian is in a car smash and ends up struggling with chronic pain and feelings of inadequacy. A camping/research trip (Jack is doing a PhD in environmental science) looks like a possible chance for them to get back together – until there’s an ugly incident with a motorcycle gang and then volcanic ash starts falling from the sky. I was not expecting volcanic eruption and the really rather rapid decay of society, along with lots of rape and murder, and although the (sympathetic) characters are well done, it’s tense, and the volcanic eruption is a fantastic complication, I really prefer Henry’s more conventional romances. Haven’t read anything else of Caspian’s.
Chase in Shadow, Amy Lane. First in a series about the guys who work at Johnnies, a gay-for-pay porn video company. Chase has a terrible father and blames himself for his mother’s suicide; he is also deeply in the closet and engaged (to a woman), but once he takes the job (telling his fiancée it’s in construction) he falls for another guy, and everything begins to unravel. The set-up works really well for Lane and it’s a competently handled cast of characters, with a lot of interesting hints at the next books. The ending lurches into sentiment, as her books tend to do, but I cheerfully downloaded the next one.
