Grade: B-

Dear Bam,

Am I a glutton for punishment? Some might definitely say so. Others might say I’m only an amateur since I’ve never subjected myself to LKH’s Anita Blake. But hey, I read every Sherrilyn Kenyon Dark-Hunter book except for the last two or three (I stopped keeping count). Why? Ummm… because I like to poke myself in the eye with a fork. I also realized that J. R. Ward did the whole alpha vampire-series with sex way better. But for some reason, when a series starts off right, I keep trying the next one… and the next one, always thinking that the author will find the brilliance, the plot turn, the characterization that grabbed me in the first place. Well, Anne Stuart is back! I can’t say that she’s back with all of the strength that drew me to Bastien in Black Ice, but this book was significantly more enjoyable than Cold As Ice.
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Grade: B

When it came time to grade this book, I wavered a lot. There were things I loved about it. There were also things that worked my last nerve. I’ll address both presently. In the end, it averaged to a solid “B” because she managed to make me cry once before the story was done. Rock Star offers a better than average showing from a freshman author, so I’ll be watching her.

What worked for me:

Callie. I loved Callie. She’s strong and smart, funny, and she totally has her shit together. This is a heroine with a game plan and knows what she wants out of life. It was refreshing to find a heroine who’s not looking for a man to complete her. Books and So Forth, the name of her store, is the love of her life, and she hasn’t had time to mess around with men since she hit the ground running out of college and started her own business.

Rock Star is set in Maple Fork, Alabama, and Ms. Holcomb writes with authority about living in a small Southern town. The setting pops, and is populated with a charming secondary cast. Granny rocked my world. I laughed out loud more than once at the wise but funny homilies she dispensed toward the end of the book. Likewise, I enjoyed Callie’s mom, who is afflicted with “little woman” syndrome. This means she’s no bigger than a minute but somehow manages to boss everybody in a mile radius. Her father comes down hard on Callie for dating a white man. At first, as a white reader, this bothered me some, but as the book went on, I came to see it more as a father simply trying to protect his daughter. It makes me sad that we live in a world where color matters, but maybe our kids will live in a world where it doesn’t.
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Grade: B-
I was not supposed to like this book. As I was reading it, I found myself getting annoyed by a bunch of little things: the overly martyred heroine who just also happens to be an empath, the overly alpha male who wouldn’t know reason if it took up a shovel and bashed his face in, the seemingly obligatory anal and threesome scene (seriously, what’s with that?), and a bunch of meddling secondary characters who are basically nothing more than advertisement for the previous books in the series. Yes, it’s a series and it’s about a bunch of overly alpha males who are Cyborgs from the planet… *deep breath*… Karn’al. *crickets* Ahem. Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah… I liked it. Heh. That’s funny. As soon as I typed that, Crazy by Gnarls Barkley started playing in the background. Does that make me crazy? Does that make me craaaaazy? Probably! No, seriously, I did. It’s immensely readable. Sure, I wanted to strangle the heroine with her long, silky, black hair… but I liked her too. And Logan, the hero? He deserved to have a catheter stuck up his peehole with no anesthesia only to have it yanked out without warning seconds later, but… I actually got him. Sure, these two dummies could have sat down and resolved the whole thing in five minutes, but hey… did I mention the threesome scene seemingly tacked on at the end to please the smut gods?
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Grade: B+

Well, once again L.E. Bryce has done it. I started this book with an overwhelming sense of disgust and loathing, despite the gorgeous, evocative writing. By the end, I have yielded to the pervasive wonder of her imagination.

You see, Erred is a taleve to the Lady of the Waters. This is something like being a priest, except he’s a shapeshifter who can turn into a sea creature that I imagine as a cross between a dolphin and a seal. He’s sacred and Goddess-touched, entitled to a life of privilege and reverence. The Goddess exacts high payment for her favor, though, as Erred is unable to marry, father children, and he suffers from a reduced lifespan. The oldest taleve at the temple is thirty-nine.

The reason for my hate and horror — at the start of the book, Erred is kidnapped and enslaved. Make no mistake, this isn’t a sweet Stockholm syndrome story where he falls in love with his captor because the man treats him tenderly. No, Erred has everything stolen from him: his honor, his dignity, his purity and even his name. I nearly threw up over the way they torture and degrade him. In some regards Dead to the World strikes me as akin to an adaptation of the story of Job, an elegy that explores the nature of faith and the resilience of the human spirit.

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Grade: B+

I was not planning on reading Laura Kinsale again. While the one book of hers that I’ve read, Flowers from the Storm was well-written and poignant, it… slayed me. It was so emotionally exhausting that I wasn’t able to read anything with romance in it for weeks. I picked up this book because I was fascinated by the plot: two people fall in love through letters, but when they finally meet, he turns out to be a batshit crazy bastard (take note, online Lotharios!). Kinsale is one of those authors who can give you a truly unlikable hero with little or no redeeming qualities, such as Sheridan Drake from Seize the Fire, but is somehow able to make them sympathetic and sexy. But it was not the hero that had me turning the pages this time. It was the heroine. The hero, while totally hot, was kind of… meh. The heroine, on the other hand, is a hoot! She’s smart, practical, and in the end, ends up saving his butt from the sling. Her sarcastic and clever quips come a mile a minute and she doesn’t let the hero push her around. It’s really too bad that this book loses steam about halfway through. Not that it sucked or anything, but the first half of the book is so tightly plotted and poignant that when the external plots are introduced later on, the whole thing just kind of… meanders and staggers under its own weight. Kinsale introduces so many subplots (some of which were left unresolved) that they totally interrupted the development of the romance between the two leads! Ugh.
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