Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Owner Of A Lonely Heart

By Eva Carter.

Gemma is a recent widow whose husband died of cancer. She's trying to get pregnant with his remaining embryos, and spends her time volunteering at the hospital with her dog, Bear.

Casey is a 12-year-old with a brain tumor who needs to move to Bristol for tumor zapping for the next month. Her mother, Angelica, has gotten totally paranoid about Casey's exposure to germs/chemicals/life/food/what have you. Needing a place to stay, she contacts the dad she's never met.

Dan is a handsome but uncommitted dude with job vagueness and no real commitments. He's known about his kid but stayed out of her life. Now, for various reasons, he feels like he needs to be there for her now. So he borrows a bigger/plusher flat from a friend and has Casey and Angelica (who's quite reasonably angry at Dan for never being there) move in. And go to the hospital, where they all run into Gemma and make friends.

Dan and Gemma have hormonal chemistry for each other right off, but Gemma's trying to get pregnant right now and Dan has his own issues, along with trying to be a good dad for Casey after all these years. Casey's just trying to survive, sneak some bacon to eat and get her hair dyed and meet a cute guy. 

Turns out that Dan has a hell of a backstory explaining his previously not-very-good actions in a lot of ways, which are foreshadowed a bit here and there and then slowly come into "ohhhhh, so THAT's why" realism/focus. This is a well thought out book in that Dan has a crappy past and hasn't behaved the best in the past. He certainly does seem to have improved, but you can get why Angelica's mad as hell and why anyone would have doubts. And yet, the author makes all of this work, and I really enjoyed reading this. Four stars. 

Love and Other Words

By Christina Lauren.

I do not know what to make of this book.

Macy lost her mom at a young age and she and her dad lived in Berkeley during the week and had  this vacation home in Healdsburg, where she fell in perfect soulmate love with the neighbor kid next door, Elliot. However, it's been eleven years since they last saw each other, and by the time they meet again, Macy's gotten herself quickie-engaged to a guy named Sean who has a kid. The book alternates back and forth between Macy and Elliot's sweet, innocent teen love story and how they are whammy-back-into-each-other-again immediately in the current timeline. Like Elliot IMMEDIATELY breaks up with whoever the heck he was dating after running into Macy again because nobody compares to her. Smart move, Elliot, let's not drag that shit out.  Macy, on the other hand, has yet another Disposable Fiance (a trope I am truly, truly sick of) to eventually break up with. Sean lost his wife to drugs years ago and while he's blandly nice, both of them are clearly in Settle For Me, I won't be hurt if this breaks up mode. Yawn. Okay, fine, break up already. This is even more pain-free than the breakup in Sleepless in Seattle because of their mutual "well, you're a warm body, that's cool" meh. It kind of makes me feel bad for the kid, but the kid probably won't super care either?

I will not deny that the adorable teen romance of Macy and Elliot is super sweet. There's pages and pages of their understood love and their slow creeping up on sexual activity together and Elliot wanting to be with her forever.  However, you spend the entire book waiting around to find out what tore this perfect soulmate couple asunder. As a person who doesn't have a soulmate and never will, I just wanted to yell WHY DID YOU MESS THIS UP so many times. Like if you KNOW, why aren't you? What was SO BAD that it wrecked these two so much? I will note that it's pretty much the most typical reason ever that you can guess (I'll discuss in the spoiler section below the cut), while also being SO out of character for Elliot that I hated it. I know stories like this you have to have some good reason for the breakup, but frankly, I wish the breakup impetus had been something else. Anything else. 

It's also handled confusingly because while one girl is foreshadowed as being a possible issue between the two in their teen years, in modern times some entirely different ex girl from their interregnum is invited to Thanksgiving for...some reason, and even though Macy hasn't been in touch with Elliot in eleven years, somehow she knows to Red Flag this particular girl's name and have things Get Weird at the holiday over it. Like I started wondering, did the authors write down the wrong name at some point and nobody caught it in editing? And in the end, girl #2 doesn't even seem to be involved? I'm so confused. 

Like I said, the reason why they broke up isn't told until the very end of the book, and I wish (a) it had been something else and (b) had been revealed sooner because it felt way too long to drag out that depressing mystery and not explain. And finally, (c) SOMETHING COMPLETELY HORRIBLE AND WHAMMYING (note: it's not quite out of nowhere, but suffice it to say I'd forgotten about the other outstanding mystery of the book by the time it's told) finally happens in the past that just gutted me to have it revealed at that moment in time. I'll discuss this below the spoiler cut as well, but partnering two disasters together at once just ...oh god, it hurt. Again, I rather wish all of this had crept out sooner in the novel's plotline rather than smashing the reader in the face at the end. Sure, there's a happy ending, but I was so wrecked reading "oh dear god, THAT happened?!" that I found it hard to recover and be all "oh, everything's great now!" after that.

So...basically this is good except for the too-long dragout of why they broke up, and throwing the excruciating double whammy at the end as well, and the reason for the breakup also is blech. It came out problematic for me, I'm afraid. I have been trying to talk myself into giving it a higher review because the romance itself is sweet, but overall I don't think I can recommend it for the stuff that made it problematic for me. Two and a half stars. 

What You Wish For

By Katherine Center.

This book is amazing.

Backstory: Librarian Samantha Casey has epilepsy, which literally made her father decide to ditch her forever. She basically lost her family over this.. Later, she worked at a school in California and fell madly in love with Duncan Carpenter, a totally wacky, happy, enthusiastic guy who was always wearing crazy outfits and doing amazing things in the classroom. (He sounds like great fun, I gotta say.) But she never got up the nerve to really interact with him, someone else asked him out. The one time they had any interaction, he asked her to cat-sit and when she found herself reading through a notebook of his, she was all, "This is Too Much," and she got another job in Galveston, Texas. 

The new job in Galveston has been heavenly. It's a little patch of hippies in the middle of Texas, and Sam lives in the carriage house of the school founders, Max and Babette Kempner. She adores Max and Babette and feels like she's a second daughter/found a new family with them--even if their actual daughter Tina hates her for this. (I note that Tina is married to Kent, a complete jerk who runs the school board, and has a sweet kid named Clay who thankfully takes after his grandfather.) Everything there is really great.

And then Max drops dead while dancing at his party. Everyone is devastated. And it's even worse when Kent takes over and hires a new principal.... which turns out to be Duncan. At first Sam is delighted--he'd be a new Max all over again!--except Duncan HAS CHANGED. He's now a boring suit guy. He's no fun at all. He's completely obsessed with safety above all else. And he pulls out a painted squirt gun in the middle of a meeting to scare the shit out of everybody. THE FUCK?!? AT A SCHOOL?!?!

Soon everyone hates him and his memos about firing the security guard, canceling all field trips forever, canceling the playground, and painting all walls gray. On the one hand, this sure helps Sam get over that crush she had. On the other hand, this guy has turned hella awful and she openly declares him her enemy and the rest of the school feels the same way.

So what happened to Duncan? You the reader will have long since figured it out before Sam does as to what happened to him to make him suddenly change into a guy who's literally all about nothing but school security--I can only assume that's Idiot Ball sort of logic to put off a big reveal. That said, I did really enjoy HOW it came about, i.e. Duncan needs someone to give him a ride/watch him after surgery that gets him high and amnesiac about everything he blabs about liking Sam, as well as what happened to him.

After finding that information out, that changes the plans, and Sam and Babette and company come up with a plan to improve Duncan/get him to have fun again/get him into therapy, not get his ass fired, and it's all very sweet. 

The relationship between Sam and Duncan is pretty damn adorable, even if the whole "you shouldn't be dating your boss" thing is utterly ignored in this one. (I guess private schools...don't care?) You definitely feel they are Meant To Be, even if it took some time. And I love how Sam came out of her shell after being a boring dresser when she originally worked with Duncan--after her epilepsy came back, Max encouraged her to do things that made her happy, like dressing colorfully and having pink bangs. (I don't have pink bangs, but did have pink hair for awhile.) Though even though Sam seems like she mostly is over her own stuff, she does get triggered about her epilepsy and whether or not it will drive someone away like it did in the past. 

Anyway, I found this sweet and adorable and inspirational and four and a half stars. I got it as a library book, I may need to purchase it to keep. 

Quotes:

• "One flower hat can't fix all my problems." "No, but it can sure help." -Sam and Max
• "The point is to be happy anyway. As often as you can." -Max
• "I might never drive, but dammit--I had a fun wardrobe." -Sam
• "Fuck lunch duty." -Sam
• "I bite and scratch and claw my way toward happiness every day." -Sam

Royal

By Danielle Steel.

This has a great premise, but frankly doesn't do as much with it as one could. 

The whole idea of it is "what if there was a long lost member of the British royal family who didn't know she was royal?" So about 150 pages of the book sets up the premise. The BRF in this story are thinly veiled fictional versions of the original bunch during WW2, with the "dutiful" oldest sister Alexandra and the "rebel" (re: obnoxious) younger one Victoria--and then we have the third daughter, Charlotte. Charlotte is 17, tiny, asthmatic, and a diehard horse rider. Charlotte's parents decide to send her away during the war to live in the countryside under a fake name (somehow nobody recognizes her?) with a noble family. Because of the war and security, they can't do phone calls and Charlotte doesn't tell her parents anything about what's REALLY going on with her life, nor do her guardians. So the royals have no idea of the following:

Charlotte falls in love with the son, gets pregnant, gets married, the son goes to war and dies, Charlotte dies soon after the birth and how she died is lied about on the death certificate, his parents die within the year...it's just a yearlong chain of death, and the only household survivor is another girl living in the house, Lucy. This is about the first 150 pages, right there.

Lucy falls in love with baby Annie (Anne Louise) and adopts her since nobody else is left to want her, and later finds a trove of royal letters and the like proving Charlotte's true identity. However, at this point she loves the kid and keeps her, figuring she'll tell eventually. Lucy gets married, has twins, and the entire family's happy until Lucy gets cancer and dies, telling her husband Jonathan on her deathbed about the whole thing. 

After Lucy's dead, Jonathan does his duty and lets the royal family know what went on, they prove Annie's identity and....honestly, there's not much drama about this? The family is nice, accepts her right off, even Victoria is nice to her, it's all very chill and stress free. Okay, so maybe the media might have been slightly less insane in the late 1950's/1960's when Annie's all grown up, but seriously, there's just not much going on with "Oh hey, I'm a princess!" Now, it's nice for Annie that the fictional BRF is a lot nicer than the original people inspiring the plot--I presume the real BRF would be complete jerks about finding another family member. 

But really, by the time we get to the reveal for Annie that she's royal, it feels like the author lost interest in the royal plot. What she REALLY wants to write about is how Annie wants to be the first female horse jockey. Great, but I kinda wish that the author had decided to either (a) just write a book about being surprise royal or (b) just write a book about being a horse jockey. The two combined together just don't get enough attention/juice for me to super care, I guess?

I also didn't really like Annie's love interest Anthony. He's kind of vaguely jerky. I also didn't like how he started harping on about marriage and babies and Annie is all "I really don't care about having kids, I just wanna ride horses." (I'll note that since Annie's bio-mom died right after childbirth and it seems to be blamed on Charlotte being "small," wouldn't Annie be more concerned about possible death by baby?) 

I do give Annie credit for breaking up with Anthony once he starts in on the whole "I don't want the mother of my babies to die in a horseback riding accident" thing, and they don't speak for a year, and her career takes off and I was all GOOD FOR HER! Sadly, this is (very tokenly) a romance novel and thus they have to get back together again, with Anthony tokenly apologizing and saying they can wait 10 years to have kids (well, that'd be fine, but....) and Annie being all "it's okay, I got my horseback riding ya-yas out, I only wanted to do it for a year!" Sigh.

I have a lot to critique about this book, but really it's a solid three star, not that memorable read. Not terrible but not exciting either. Which is a shame, because it really could have been something with the potential plot ideas. I also felt like it was so busy narrating all the different deaths/plot details that we don't get that much character development for anybody to feel attached to them. Everyone who isn't Anthony is pleasant enough, but I won't remember this book a few months from now. Oh well. 

Big Stone Gap

By Adriana Trigiani.

This was originally written as a screenplay, then turned into a book, then turned into a movie. Just thought I'd mention that.

"I have spent my entire life trying to give everybody else what they want. I'm not complaining. I like to be of service. I find great purpose in it. And no one was more surprised than me when my old routines didn't work for me any more. Somewhere along the way, I got sucked dry and started feeling like the mountain mother with sixteen kids who wakes up one morning and realizes that she's just a vessel, a way station where life passed through before it passed her by." 

Ave Maria Mulligan is a 35-year-old Italian pharmacist that's spent her whole life in Big Strong Gap, Virginia, in coal mining country. It's 1978 and while she seems generally pretty satisfied with her life, she's somewhat bothered at being an old spinster in a place where most people get married in their teens, and the pickings are slim. She does have a handsome best guy friend Theodore that she'd love to get involved with, but Theodore doesn't quite feel like getting sexy and settling down with her, darn it. Then there's Jack, a guy Ave Maria went to school with that she's starting to get feelings for ever since she walked in and saw him in his underwear--but he's already dating and getting quite serious with a divorcee named Sweet Sue (to distinguish her from the other Sues). And those are pretty much the eligible dudes in BSG as far as I can tell.

Ave Maria's dad died a while back and she can't really say she misses him--he never seemed too fond of her. But she was very close with her mother, who just died recently. But after her death, her mother left Ave Maria a letter saying that her father was really an Italian guy named Mario who wouldn't marry her, and she married Mr. Mulligan for the usual reasons of not having a bastard child. The lawyer's wife is an eavesdropping gossip and the entire town knows about it in five minutes. Ave Maria actually doesn't feel too bad about the situation with the dads, but she does get interested in tracking down her lost relatives and father and eventually going to Italy. Her evil aunt on her not-bio-dad's side starts demanding everything Ave Maria inherited and Ave Maria promptly sells it all off to her teenage employee Pearl that she mentors.  Hah. Also, Theodore expresses some interest and backs off, proposes and backs off.... and Jack breaks off his engagement with Sweet Sue and proposes to Ave Maria, but he seriously does it in one of the worst ways possible. Pretty much along the lines of "I got forty acres and a mule and we're the only two single ones left in town, how 'bout it?" Suffice it to say Ave Maria is not swept away by the romance of it all and turns him down, leaving Jack smarting. Finally getting marriage proposals isn't as fun as it seems, especially when you like both dudes but they propose in such a way where you know you can't go through with it.

Oh yeah, and then there's the time Elizabeth Taylor and her politician husband visited the town, a real life event. Also, at one point the town dogs started boinking in front of everyone. I don't know if that happened during the event, but bwahahahah anyway.

Anyway, this is generally the story about Ave Maria deciding to change her life and possibly take her leave of BSG altogether, pruning things out of her life and looking for other things. I liked how she was portrayed as a woman who's generally okay with how her life's going but definitely has her fears about say, getting into a relationship. She doesn't want to have to change herself for a guy and then feels like that's why she can't get married. I enjoyed how she'd occasionally sass back and tell someone off--particularly the hot teenage girls picking on her employee, or Jack when he's failing at proposing. I loved how she handled the evil aunt situation. I love that she's a book nerd who's into Chinese face reading. 

I loved this for Ave Maria's voice. She is just fun to read in first person. I love a good first person snappy narrator and Ave Maria is just entertaining to listen to talking, even if this isn't like, a major events novel and more chick-lit-ish. As for everyone else, most characters are drawn well and have their clear personalities and other aspects that stand out. Though I wasn't a super fan of Jack--he's okay, he's a very nice dude but I don't know if I was captivated with him as a match for Ave Maria per se. Though I will say that he definitely makes some improvements after that sad proposal, including doing one very sweet big gesture that did more or less win me over. 

The copy of the book I got is movie-branded and has some extras in it, like a conversation between the author and BSG's town librarian (a book character). The author describes Ave Maria like this:

"Ave Maria is the woman you can count on. She's your best friend, the person you go to for advice, the person who has a cool head in a crisis. Maybe she's a loner and lives a life of service and not of intimacy. She's the woman that you wonder about. You hope she finds a nice man. You hope she's happy; she certainly seems to be. That's what the novel is about. A person may appear to be one thing, but inside of them there's a river of complexities and fears and desires. When you find that out, there is no end to the depth of emotion. The book is really about the interior life and feelings of that woman you know; perhaps she even reminds you of yourself." 

I just liked how everything was handled. It's a small town story, it's not full of huge epic moments and yet in a way it kind of is. Four stars. 

Glamour in Glass

By Mary Robinette Kowal.

Now this is what I’m talking about, and this is what I was hoping for when I started this series. While it takes place in the same Jane-Austen-with-magic world, this book has much more plot and action and drama and it’s nifty.

 

After getting married, Jane and Vincent have been doing a glamural for the Prince of England (who sounds lovely), but then they end up taking a honeymoon trip to Belgium, something that’s been undoable for years since Napoleon has been in charge. But Napoleon’s recently been deposed (it’s 1815) and hey, why not make a trip to the Continent to stay with Vincent’s glamourist friend there? However, Vincent’s acting a little weird while they’re there and Jane is bothered by this. Also, she comes up pregnant and of course that means she’s forbidden from doing glamour, which makes her feel completely useless and takes away what she and her husband bonded over. However, right before that happened, Jane came up with a brilliant idea: figuring out that a glamour can be trapped in glass and used without having to make glamour. How cool is that?

 

Not only cool, but useful.... since usually glamour can’t be worked while one is moving or pregnant.

 

I enjoyed Jane’s thinking. She’s the kind of girl who tries to figure out how to handle a royal dinner while noticing something in the glamural she wants to fix. She gets annoyed when her husband gets all the credit in public, though he supports the heck out of her. She gets scared that her husband will lose his connection to her without her being able to work glamour. I loved how they figured out new uses for glamour. And when Napoleon comes roaring back and abducts her husband, Jane has to figure out how to rescue him with the tools she has on hand. And she’s awesome. You go, girl. Four stars.

Shades of Milk and Honey

By Mary Robinette Kowal.

I've heard this is "Jane Austen with magic," and by god, that's exactly what it is, no more, no less. It's most similar in some ways to Sense and Sensibility. Basically it's the same kind of world, but people have the ability to use/shape/create things out of glamour, which is...folds in the ether of some kind, I think? I'm not the sort who'd be clear on the details, but it sounds lovely. People create tableaux vivant, fancy up their houses, maybe disguise their features a bit (though our heroine would point out that eventually someone would be surprised when she had to let the glamour go), create glamurals...sounds lovely.

Jane Ellsworth is a 28-year-old spinster who's decidedly unattractive by the standards of her day--brown hair, too long nose, sallow complexion--but in personality she's super smart, kind, polite, protective, and loves all kinds of puzzles. She's a pretty good glamourist despite not having had massive amounts of formal training, but she's not like, the world's best ever. (Yay, realism.) Jane is perpetually comparing herself to her younger and hotter sister Melody, who's actually attractive. However, Melody is apparently perpetually comparing herself to Jane because Jane has talents and Melody basically hasn't been that interested in applying herself. As the story goes on, the sisters become more quietly resentful of each other and annoyed by each other, and Jane has to stifle like heck when she finds out things like her sister likes to fake injuries to get men's attentions.

Anyway...both girls are originally interested in their nice but circumspect neighbor Mr. Dunkirk, but Mr. Dunkirk seems to be more interested in Jane and Melody quickly moves on to the charming Captain Livingston, who apparently gets around. Jane befriends Mr. Dunkirk's little sister Beth, who seems to have had some drama and scandal in her past that makes her brother choke on it. Eventually Jane finds out the whole story, and has to eventually take steps to fend off disasters. (And I have to say, how she did it was pretty cool. Excellent use of skills.)

There's also the mysterious grumpy glamourist Mr. Vincent, who's been employed to create a glamural at a highborn house. Mr. Vincent seems put off by Jane at first--she's very interested in his work and it bugs him when she can figure out what he did--but he starts to relent a bit as time goes on, and they get asked to create tableaux for others' entertainment. After Mr. Vincent falls ill and Jane manages to get the right kind of help for him, he gifts her with his notebook on glamour--which is potent stuff in all kinds of ways.

The end action is surprisingly dramatic for the previous slow pace of the story, and I deeply enjoyed it when the drama erupted. Jane Austen never went that far, whee! In the end, we get a "happily ever after" summation, which I think assumed this would be a one and done story, except now there are sequels.

What do I think of this story? If you're super into Jane Austen, you'll love it. If you're not that into Jane Austen, I probably wouldn't recommend it because it won't be your thing. It ended up being a quick read for me.  I'll admit with the addition of magic I was expecting a bit more than slow courtship plotting and was a little disappointed in that, until the end where things picked up. (More use of glamour as a plot point, yes!)  I really like Jane as a character, she's certainly a worthy lass. Overall I think I'm going to give it three and a half stars.

 

Royal Wedding

By Meg Cabot.

It's been a long time since I read the beginning of the Princess Mia series, but like other series of late, the author's bringing her back for an adult take on her life. For those of you who didn't read the series, Mia Thermopolis was the bastard child of the Prince of Genovia and was pretty much kept in the dark as to her father's princedom until after he survived a bout with cancer and was no longer fertile.. which made her suddenly a legit princess in her teens because otherwise there's be no heir. 

"But if you think about it, I have no real problems. Aside from my obviously annoying housing situation, my mentally disturbed family, and the fact that a stalker says he wants to kill me."

As an adult, Mia's still with her high school boyfriend Michael and still friends with her high school friends who knew her before she was royal. She's getting stalked and hiding out in the Genovian embassy in NYC, her father had a little race car incident and is having some kind of nervous breakdown, and she keeps compulsively checking her royal popularity ranking on the Internet. Girl, stop doing that. 

As you figured out from the title, Michael finally proposes to Mia and it's time for a royal wedding...or, you know, distraction from the family scandals. Like her dad's impending nervous breakdown...or the fact that his sperm had one last gasp 12 years ago and Mia has a black sister nobody knew about. Upon discovering this fact--and that sister Olivia's being raised by a jerk aunt and uncle who want to haul her off to a country that's shitty for women--Mia literally jaunts off in a limo to her rescue. Olivia, however, takes this a lot better than you'd think. Go figure.

This is definitely in the "fun fluff" category of reading. It's a bit goofy and silly and while I'll admit the end was a bit much for me all at once (let's say Mia is surprised twice), it's the sort of thing fans would probably like. It wasn't a monumental book for me, but a fun enough time. So, three stars. 

Quote Corner:

• Mia, comparing herself to her elderly cat Fat Louie: "Of course I don't revenge-poop on things when I don't get my own way."
• "Michael and I are an anomaly. Hardly anyone stays together forever with their first significant other, except maybe in YA novels. And usually when they do, it's because he's a vampire or a werewolf or owns a beautiful estate called Pemberley or something." -Mia
• Mia comes from a long line of warrior princesses. Princess Rosagunde strangled her husband in his sleep with her braid, which got her named ruler of her village. (Princess Mathilde smashed her cheating fiance's furniture with a battle ax, then rode off with his hunting dogs, servants, and horses. Her own grandmother Clarisse sued her ex fiance for the cost of her new wardrobe when she found out he was married.
•  "The first rule of being a royal is that you have to learn to take a joke." "The first rule of jokes is that they have to be funny." -Mia and Michael
• "Seriously, if my life were one of those romance novels with a love triangle, Lars and Michael would be the sexy paranormal alpha males, but the two of them would be in love with each other and just ignore me." -Mia
•  "Why do you think your father would be so ashamed of loving a spider man?" -Clarisse
• "Famous? Being famous isn't a job! Then I realized that it is. Being famous is very hard work, but it's also empowering, because you have influence over a large number of people and can do amazing things with that power. And it doesn't even matter anymore how you happen to come by that fame, singing or dancing or posting a sex tape on the Internet or finding out that you're a princess. It's what you do with your fame that matters." -Mia
• "If I recall correctly, when you were a tween, you would walk around with a cat stuffed down your pants while my sister filmed you for her public-access TV show." -Michael
• "I guess that's what brides--kind of like princesses--are for. We might think we're in charge, but when all is said and done, our main purpose is to give people something to admire, and also to make them feel better about the world." -Mia
• "And besides, that school obviously isn't a very good one if it can't handle a young boy's perfectly normal interest in flatulence." -Mia's dad
• The word "twunt" is used. and sadly, they don't finish the "that's a cross between a--" definition.
• "The two rivals for Amalia's affection, "Mick" and "Jared," come from enemy factions. Jared is blond and warmly creative, whereas Mick has dark hair and is more coldly analytical. Amalia seems to be leaning more toward Jared. But none of it really matters since they're all dying of radiation poisoning." --Mia on the plot of her annoying ex's novel
• "Any day that begins with you trying on wedding dresses and ends with your fiance beating up your ex-boyfriend is a good one, right?" -Mia
• "Your dad did it! He finally impressed your mom! And he didn't have to injure himself in a high-risk sport to do it!" "Yeah, right. All Dad ended up having to do to win my mom's admiration was alienate his own country's populace by hiding a love child for twelve years in a small town just off the New Jersey Turnpike. Easy!" -Tina and MIa
• "In addition to the usual antiroyalists, anarchists, misogynists, and general wackos, we've now acquired a few white supremacists and even some anti-Semites (Michael says he's very proud he was finally able to bring something to the family, even if it's only a hate group)." -Mia
•  "Reader, I married him. Ha! I've always wanted to write that!" -Mia
•  "I read J.RR.Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series when I was pregnant with you. I've always wondered if that's the reason you turned out the way you have." -Mia's mom

The Dress Shop of Dreams

By Menna Van Praag.

This is a sweet and slightly paranormal village soap opera kind of story, kinda like reading Alice Hoffman or Sarah Addison Allen books. I think the best way I can attempt to explain the book is to give a character rundown.

• Etta: runs the title shop and sews rather enchanted dresses that give the wearer an emotional boost of confidence and sexy when she sews a little star into the cothes. Fifty years ago she fell in love with a priest and still misses him to this day.
• Father Sebastian: Etta's priestly love who still misses her.
• Cora: Etta's scientist granddaughter who shut off her emotions after the deaths of her scientist parents many years ago. She's been way too closed off to notice the childhood pal who's been pining after her for years. After Etta works some magic on her, Cora starts focusing on the deaths of her parents and whether or not they were murdered.
• Henry: a detective with an inner lie detector who helps Cora investigate.
• Francesca: Henry's ex-wife who still loves him--so why did she divorce him?
• Dr. Baxter: Cora's boss/mentor, who's hiding some things from her she doesn't know about.
• Walt: Cora's aforementioned pining childhood friend, who hits his limit after Cora rebuffs him and decides to date someone else. He has a side gig as ""The Night Reader" on a radio show that gets him a lot of fan mail that he usually ignores, and he starts dating a fan.
• Milly: The fan that Walt dates: she's a lonely widow dying for another husband and children. Too bad for her this book makes it clear that Walt's destined for another.
• Dylan: Walt's radio station boss who decides to answer his fan mail for him and falls for Milly in a Cyrano-sort of way. (Which made me go, GEEZ, DUDE, THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA.)

I had a fun time reading this, though there were the occasional plot elements that made me go "Oh nooooo" (namely, Dylan's pen palling and Milly's considering "oopsing" Walt if they ever have sex). One plot revelation surprised me even though I suspect it shouldn't have. And the ending line...wow, that was also a surprise. Generally speaking, the characters are sweet to read and I liked the quiet magic aspects of the book, particularly Etta's sewing, which makes me want to put stars in my clothes now.

On the other hand, I felt really sorry for Milly and winced pretty much every time she was on stage, and I wasn't emotionally involved in the idea of getting Cora and Walt together because they don't spend much time together for me to think they are MFEO as personalities. Okay, fine, they knew each other as kids, but what makes them soulmates now? I don't exactly see them together enough to sell me on them, especially since Cora spends most of the book now that her feelings are "on" again looking for her parents and what happened there, NOT with Walt, and the little I saw of them together before that wasn't winning me over. We see a lot more of Milly and Walt together. Hell, I just wished Walt would go for Milly already and get over Cora, but nope. There's a ton of "I'm going to confess my love but there you are with someone else" moments that were exasperating the more they went on. Oh, and "I want them to have a million babies!"--a remark made several times--was kinda making me gag.

(Admittedly, I'm childfree and thus not sold on proof of Our Love involving proof of babies, but really: do you want your favorite couples to have huge numbers of kids and be worn out and exhausted and not swooning in love with each other because they're too tired for that? Really? Why not just stick to two or three? But I digress....)

I think I'm going to give this three and a half stars. It's a pretty good sweet soap opera read, even if I was not quite so into the romancing and how it was handled.

The Hypnotist's Love Story

By Liane Moriarty.

This one was recommended to me by my shrink. Even though it involves stalking, which made me have some pause, she said it was all right. And it was. 

Ellen is a 35-year-old Aussie who's starting to date Patrick, a widower with a young son and a stalker ex-girlfriend named Saskia. Most people would be disturbed that he has a stalker, but Ellen is actually kind of intrigued by the idea. I did like how we start out meeting Ellen by Patrick being all, "I have some bad news" and Ellen starts immediately expecting to be dumped on date four and rearranging her expectations if he did it and thinking how she'll cope. This goes on for pages (perhaps a bit much), but as a permanently single chick I kind of liked her saying that, even if it's a big long after awhile. Anyway, back to the stalker: Ellen is rather intrigued at Saskia's passion because Ellen has never been that passionate of a person herself. 

The narration alternates between focusing on Ellen in the third person...and Saskia the stalker in first person, because what Ellen doesn't know is that Saskia is now a patient of hers. (Which one is eventually revealed, I didn't guess it.)  Saskia was essentially his son's foster mom for years and Patrick dumped her out of the blue and she was freaking devastated...and focuses on him even though she kinda knows it's bad--and at the same time she's operating under a certain self-delusion. I have to say that the author does an excellent job of portraying Saskia's mental state and why she's acting like she is and how she mentally slips into happy delusions that people will be happy to see her if she breaks into their house. She also kinda seems friendly in her own brain towards Ellen, thinking that to some degree she could help her. "You Oughta Know" sums her mental state up pretty well, especially the bits where she doesn't want to be just thrown away. She feels like without Patrick and his family (which threw her out), she has nothing but her job left.

I do not love Patrick. To be fair, this book and situation aren't putting him at his best, but I still don't think the guy's awesome. He's merely tolerable at best to me.  

After Ellen starts to head towards Typical Happily-Ever-After Land for a single lady over 30--which is to say she comes up pregnant and engaged pretty quick, and even the dad she never knew comes into her life--she starts to wonder why the hell she isn't happy like you'd think she'd be. Instead, she's annoyed at Patrick's quirks when moving in, feels jealous of his love towards his dead wife--isn't it a bit obsessive to visit her parents and her grave every month?--and then there's Saskia, now that Ellen's found out who she is. Ellen can't help but think that Saskia is the only one who'd understand how she feels about the dead wife, at least. 

And then there's Ellen's job, which is handled in thoughtful ways. There's pain management (Saskia's issue in multiple ways), there's figuring out what you really want in life (client Rosie is engaged but doesn't want to be), there's the patients that Ellen gets the idea to hypnotically prime to at least try dating each other, which is a bit ethically dubious... and then there's Ellen's hypnotizing Patrick to go to sleep, which leads her to some uncomfortable revelations and even more ethical dubiousness. And when Rosie's man finds out about this, he threatens to put Ellen out of business.  

Things get rocky, but they work out in the end, even for Saskia. Go figure. It's a nice story. Odd but nice. So overall I give it four stars.