I’ve always enjoyed reading anthologies that are centered on one theme, because it’s always interesting how different authors deal with the topic given to them. Depending on the talent of the author, sometimes it works out really well, but other times you can see that the author saw the motif as an intrusion and was forced to work around it. The theme that bridges these three stories together is “second chances”, which is brought to our heroines by a magic painting called Midnight Magic. Supposedly, a tortured artist who had a shitty life created the thing with magic paint—where did he get this magic paint?—as a bridge to a place where he could be happy. Basically, the painting is composed of a bunch of dots—pointillism—and different people see different things in it, most specifically their destinies. I guess it’s one of those paintings you see at the mall that you stare at idiotically for a while until you see an image. Once my sister and I saw one of those things and I stared at it for fifteen minutes, but didn’t see anything. My sister stared at it for like… five seconds and saw a sailboat. What a liar. She so didn’t see anything. Anyway, Rebecca York is the only one who took the “second chance” thing literally and brought her heroine back to a time when she could have saved her beloved. Susan Kearney’s heroine goes hundreds of years into the future and does a cute little Green Acres thing. Both of those stories actually weren’t that bad. I was all set to give this anthology at least a B, but then I got to Jeannie London’s story. Not only does it feature a twitty, swooning child-heroine, but London totally pussies out on the threesome aspect of it. I didn’t even really read the thing. I just skimmed through it. If it weren’t for London’s contribution, this anthology would have been a keeper, but now it has to go back to the used bookstore where I found it. Way to drop the ball, Jeanie.

Second Chances by Rebecca York features an antiques dealer named Sara Drimmon. She was engaged to be married to a man named Matthew Tripplehorn, but he died when the building he was inspecting blew up and there wasn’t even enough of poor Matty left to fill a bucket. A year later, Sara is still a moping, sobbing mess. Well, duh. Her one true love blew up in a building. One day, Sara finds herself in a gallery where the weird gallery owner pushes her to look at a painting and tell him what she sees it in it. Just as Sara is about to see something, she gets sucked into the painting and travels back in time to the night she meets Matty-poo for the first time. On Sara and Matt’s first go around, the two of them have a whirlwind relationship and get engaged after like… a week of knowing each other, much to the dismay of Matt’s really rich grandma ’cause Sara’s poor. She’s poor! At first, Sara only wants to make out with Matt and relive the passion they once shared until she finds out that somebody wanted Matt to die on purpose. Now she has to figure out who wants Matt out of the picture while trying to prevent Matt from finding out that she’s Future Girl. Additionally, Sara has to constantly be careful of what she says or does because it might have an adverse effect in her future and Matt will die anyway. The story is good, but Sara is a character totally out of Romancelandia Central Casting and I couldn’t quite get a feel for Matt as a character. Mostly, he was just… there. Sara could have used some gumption, maybe some bad attitude, so she wasn’t this weepy, frail antiques dealer chick who immediately got on my nerves. As for Matt, I needed to be convinced that he was the kind of guy that a woman would go back in time for and Ms. York didn’t quite succeed with that.

Ulterior Motives by Susan Kearney takes place in the same world as her other futuristic romances. In fact, the starship captain who helps out our two leads is the heroine of The Quest. Boo. Anyway, this contribution to the anthology features Merline Sullivan, a famous singer who has recently lost her voice due to a side-effect of an anesthesia used on her during a routine wrist surgery (say what?). Anyway, she can’t sing as well as she used to anymore and doesn’t know what to do with herself, especially since she has spent all her life trying to be a big singing superstar. In short, she has nothing to live for. NOTHING! While ducking from the paparazzi, she ends up in a gallery owned by Sara Drimmond, the heroine from the previous novella. She shows Merline the painting and Merline ends up in a space station three hundred years into the future where she meets a guy named Tomm Jabal from the planet Siraz. You’d think Merline would be freaking out about getting sucked into a painting and ending up somewhere totally not on Earth, but she takes it all pretty well. Anyway, Merline is immediately attracted to Tomm, but suspects that he might want something else from her that he’s not telling her about, especially since he wants her to go back to his planet without telling her why. She also bumps into a guy named Dubaine, a super-rich dude who wants Merline to sing at a lounge act. Merline obliges him, much to Tomm’s dismay, and wows everyone at the space station. Dubaine turns out to be a psycho who collects people with “talent” like a zoo, but Tomm rescues her and sweeps her away to his planet.

As it turns out, Tomm is a spices dealer who owns land that is harvested by these weird sheep creatures; the sheep creatures won’t work until someone sings to them and Tomm figures out that Merline has the perfect voice to get the animals cranking. Now Merline has to decide if she wants to do the Green Acres thing with Tomm or start over from scratch three hundred years into the future and get her career back. As much as I enjoyed this novella, however, there were a couple of nitpicky things that really bothered me. If Merline lost her voice, how was she able to sing to the animals or sing at all? Was there a special surgery performed on her that I just missed or something? Secondly, when Tomm rescues Merline from a psycho, he does a bunch of secret agent shit and Angel, the starship captain who helps them, implies that Tomm knows all sorts of hacker tricks and stuff, since he was able to disable their computers, but we never get to find out his background. Supposedly, he’s just a simple farmer from Siraz, but Kearney hints that there’s something more to him, but she doesn’t reveal what it is. If the author was trying to be coy, she succeeded more in making the Tomm thing seem like a loose thread.

Temptation by Jeannie London was just boring. It takes place in 1713 and features an eighteen year old girl named Nina de Lacy who is a psychic. She can see the deaths of people she touches and if she sees something bad, is able to influence their “souls” into making a change for the better. Sounds interesting, right? Yeah, it doesn’t really go anywhere. Nina’s parents were killed by a bunch of zealots in England who wanted to roast Nina for being a witch. With her guardian Gray Talbot, the Earl of Westbury and a widower, she flees to Maryland to escape her former life. She and Gray have this weird sexual thing, which is kind of icky because Gray acts like a father to her. Anyway, for her eighteenth birthday, Gray commissions a Dutch painter to create Nina’s portrait. The Dutch guy shows the two of them Midnight Magic and they see a guy named Damian Hart, the Dutch guy’s apprentice. The Dutch guy also shows them a drawing that Damian did after he saw the magic painting and it is a picture of Nina and Gray. Nina is compelled to see this Damian guy because she is convinced that he has something to do with their destiny and though Gray initially has misgivings, he goes with her, anyway. There are immediate sparks between Nina and Damian, but Damian realizes that Nina is also in love with Gray. And then I stopped reading for real and skimmed the rest of the way through. I couldn’t get into it because I kept picturing that boring-ass skeleton Keira Knightley in place of Nina and I was just really skeeved out that both Damian and Gray were considerably older than Nina who, by the way, acts like a child. She speaks in a breathy voice, she hyperventilates, she swoons. As if that’s not enough, London also throws in a bullshit ending where we don’t really know what happens to the three of them. It just felt like the author got lazy at the end and didn’t want to take the time to resolve Nina’s feelings in regards to the two men. It just felt like she just totally bailed out on us. I was also very disappointed that this contribution to the anthology didn’t tell us more about the stupid magic painting.

The only anthology really worth reading here is Kearney’s. Her heroine is gutsy, intelligent, and fun and I just really found her writing style engaging. I wished she had written a novella that was totally new and not something out of her established universe, but the story stands fine on its own. Rebecca York’s contribution, on the other hand, was fine, but I wish her characters didn’t feel so by-the-numbers. As for Jeanie London’s novella, it just really pissed me off because of the bullshit ending and I was irritated that it came right after Kearney’s novella because it essentially made the anthology leave a bad taste in my mouth. In short, this baby is just so-so. Nothing to see here, kids. Move along.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: C, Romance: Anthology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.