Please consider this is less of a review and more of an advertisement. So, a kind of quirky feature of the romance genre is that typically each set of protagonists only gets one book. (There is an exception known as the ‘slow burn’ where it takes several books for the leads to finally get together, but even then, they aren’t actively in a relationship during all those books). More likely, if you are reading a series, you can hold out the hope that you get […]
… and Featuring the World’s Largest Plot Moppet
A follow-up to the new adult romance Him, Us follows up five months later with Ryan “Wes” Wesley and Jamie Canning. Living together in Toronto as Wes skates through a stellar NHL rookie season (doomed to failure and disappointment as the Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup since the year I was born) and Jamie is establishing his career as a coach. They don’t get to spend enough time together and when they do, the are constrained by the need to mask their relationship. Wes just […]
Frantic Avoidance
As a piece of art, I have to give it to Dave Eggers. AHBWOSG is carefully composed, wonderfully constructed, funny, poignant, and moving. But it’s also a pile of emotional bullshit that took me ages to read, and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough once I had inhaled the last intentionally-breakneck run-on paragraph. I have now moved on, immediately and purposefully, to “Men Explain Things to Me.” But back to the “Staggering Genius,” which is a memoir, slightly fictionalized, as Eggers explains […]
Another bearded hero, anyone?
Deep is the fourth (final? Probably not?) book in the Stage Dive series, a light and entertaining collection of contemporary rock star romances by Kylie Scott. My favorite is the second, Play, and that’s just because each book in the series features a different hero archetype and I liked him the best. YMMV. Ben, the hero in Deep, is a reformed hipster manchild who accidentally knocks up the heroine, Liz, during a one night stand. Though he promises to be there for her, his definition […]