CBR IV Review #1 - The Next Always by Nora Roberts

“You're the woman in my life," he said. "Another thing about me and my brothers? We look after the women in our lives. We don't know any other way.” 

Yes, I'm kicking off the new Cannon with yet another Nora Roberts book.  I can't help it - the woman writes such delicious fluff!  This is the first book in her new series, The Inn Boonsboro Trilogy.  Interesting trivia for you at the end of this review!

Y'know how moments ago I said Nora writes delicious fluff?  It's true.  But I'm not sure it fully applies to this book.  Tense and unsettling are words I almost never apply to Roberts' work, even when she's writing romantic thrillers like Carnal Innocence (oh yes, I not only read that, I watched the horrible Lifetime movie).  However, this book really got to me.  I'm not sure if it's just that I didn't realize I had a button there to push, or it was just really well written, or some combination.  But this is the first time in a long time I had violent, horrible nightmares from a book - more particularly, ones where I lose.  I never lose in my dreams, and yet I lost in these.  Anyway.  I digress.

This first book sets up a little town called Boonsboro in North Carolina, home to the Montgomery brothers and a cast of lovely local characters.  The Montgomery brothers, Beckett, Owen and Ryder, own an architectural and construction company.  Their project at the opening is rebuilding the historic Inn in the town, which boasts its own very interesting ghost.  The three brothers are different enough to tell apart, and their love interests are pretty apparent from the start, as is typical in a Roberts' series.  This book focuses on architect brother Beckett and his decades old crush on Clare Brewster, mother of three and widow of a soldier.  Clare runs the bookstore across the street from the Inn and lives alone with her three boys, who are absolutely adorable, especially in their bonding scenes with Beckett.

In addition to the predictable hurdles of dating a woman who is a widow with three children, there is a huge obstacle in the form of a local creeper, who I won't say too much about in case you are as naive as Clare and simply don't see what's going on from the beginning.  I will tell you that I knew right off the bat exactly what was wrong with this guy and his part of this story is what haunted me.  ::shivers:: Not ok.  

I promised you trivia, and I'm going to deliver.  This series is based on an actual location, and all the businesses in it, including the titular Inn are real.  Better yet, the Inn itself is owned by the author, Nora Roberts.  I had gone through the book admiring the research it must have taken to get all these details of construction correct, but knowing this was something she actually built changed that dynamic instantly.  Also?  It is immensely cool to go to the website and see that the images in my head are real and fully realized.  I'm dying to go stay down there in one of those beautiful theme rooms.

Overall?  Very good read, and one that I couldn't put down near the end.  I look forward to seeing the inevitable Avery/Owen and Hope/Ryder romances play out over the next two books!

A new year brings a new Cannonball Read!

Alright!  It's almost time to kick of CBR IV!  I've decided to use this same blog page to do my review for this, and future, Cannonball Reads.  I'm once again attempting the half cannon (26 books).  I'm a little more daunted by it this time around because I have a show that eats up most of January, and then my life is dedicated to my wedding in April.  But I'm hoping to succeed again!  If nothing else, I certainly enjoy the journey.  :-)

CBR III Review #26 - Savor the Moment by Nora Roberts

She’d known him all her life—that was fate, she supposed. But it was her own fault, and her own problem, that she’d been in love with him nearly as long.

This is the third in the Bride Quartet, focusing on Laurel McBane, baker extraordinaire and Delaney Brown, Parker's brother.  Laurel has had feelings for Del most of her life, and has never acted on them since he is the brother of her best friend.  Stubborn and willful, Laurel is more used to fighting with Del than falling into bed with him, but that's what happens just the same.  

While I enjoy this book, it feels a lot like the Emma/Jack story, with the long term feelings and the big conflict being "you don't love me like I love you so we're going to fail" and ending in a proposal as a show of "sike, I really do love you" from the guy.  While the characters themselves are very different, and reasons for the hesitations in both are different (with Jack/Emma it was about his parents' divorce, with Del/Laurel it's about class differences) but it felt more like putting new paint over the old instead of creating something new.  Laurel is a fun character, and I'd love to have a beer with Delaney, but their romance didn't throw me the same way as many of the others.

This book is GREAT however if you love cakes, which I do.  So I enjoyed reading about Laurel's creations and how she went about designing and building them.  This is probably my least favorite of the Quartet overall, but still a necessary piece of the puzzle - a lot of what happens in Parker's story in the last book has roots in this one.

CBR III Review #24 & 25 - Vision in White & Bed of Roses by Nora Roberts

“Love can really screw you up before you learn to live with it.” 

I thought it appropriate that my last two books should be from the same series as the first one I reviewed on here.  As I only committed to 26, the next book (number three in the Bride Quartet, titled Savor the Moment) will be my last.  Also?  With all my wedding planning, I was just in the mood for them!

Vision in White and Bed of Roses are the first and second books in the Bride Quartet, a series about four women who run their own wedding business.  Book 1, Vision in White, focuses on Mackensie "Mac" Elliott, the photographer of the group.  Mac comes from a broken home and a terror of a mother, Linda.  As such, she is very hesitant about love and romance, even working in the industry she does.  Cue Carter Maguire, a professor of English at the Academy Mac once attended, and a former friend and classmate of the crew.  Carter had a crush on Mac all those years ago that she never knew about, and the flames are rekindled when he stumbles upon her in her bra when he is on premise for his sister's wedding consult.  Mac finds Carter amusing and charming and decides to give him a shot.  The two pick up a romance that is both interesting and incredibly real.  Interfering in their happily ever after are Mac's paranoid concerns about love really lasting, Linda's interference in everything ever, and for a brief moment, an ex of Carter's trying to break things up.

This book is easily my favorite of the four.  Mac and Carter remind me a lot of myself and my fiance, although he is no where near as clumsy (that's me) and both of us come from stable, two parent, nuclear families that are very close.  But my man was in love with me from the first, and I was terrified of it - I get how Mac's brain works in that way.  Of course, this being Nora Roberts, they get together in the end with a proposal that really fits their relationship.

Book two, Bed of Roses, is about Emmaline "Emma" Grant, the florist of the group, who has pined for friend of the group Jack Cooke for years and never acted on it.  Jack has felt the same, but felt Emma was out of bounds, as Parker's brother, Del, sees all the girls as his sisters.  This is sort of a mirror relationship to Mac and Carter; Jack is the commitment-phobe and Emma the hopeless romantic.  As such, as she falls deeper and wants more from him, Jack starts to screw things up by pulling away.  There's a really lovely climax to this one, one that involves all the girls standing up and protecting their friend.  And as the heart of all of these books isn't the romance, but the relationship between these four powerful, smart, fabulous women, that scene struck me the most.  Again, in Roberts' fashion, they end up with a beautiful proposal straight out of Emma's dreams that should melt even the hardest heart.

In case you hadn't gathered, this is my second read through of these books, which should be an indication of just how much I enjoy them.  Usually Roberts' books are great fun for one go through, but don't really bear re-visiting.  This is a series I will probably come back to often.

CBR III Review #23 - The Magician King by Lev Grossman

“Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.” 

Hot on the heels of completing The Magicians, I decided to read Grossman's sequel,  The Magician King.  This was a mistake on several levels.  The first problem is that the first book was awesome.  The second was going to have a hard time living up regardless.  The second problem is that the second book doesn't even come close to the first.

This book again follows Quentin Coldwater, our protagonist from the first book, although this time his chapters are interspersed with chapters detailing Julia's life before the starting point of this book.  Yes, that sentence was terrible.  Anyway, this narrative structure was just one of the missteps for this book.  Honestly, I didn't care about Julia in the first book (not that we were given a reason to - she was a throwaway in the first book, barely a blip on Quentin's radar once he became a magician.  Learning about her story never mattered to me, and actually following it detracted from what I was reading in the present (as her story was in the past).  While I understand how it was relevant in the end (which I won't spoil, even though it's mind numbingly stupid), getting through her chapters was like pulling teeth.  Moody, teenaged, depressed teeth.  Ugh, so did not care.  Julia is no substitute for Alice, and I felt her absence keenly every time Julia took center stage.

In addition, Quentin, who I expected to have grown up a little after the epic finale of the first book, really hasn't.  Every time his character experiences some growth, something comes along to make him instantly disregard everything he's tried to learn.  By the very last pages, I don't feel like Quentin is any more of a man or a grown up (or, more importantly in the context of this book, a hero) than he was at it's opening.  It takes the few steps he had made in the first book and just throws them out the window every few plot twists.

And then there's the plot.  Jesus.  Quests, Gods, mystical rape, Unique Beasts, travels in and out of Fillory - it got really really ridiculous.  Personally, I'm a big hater of using "God" or "Gods" as a scapegoat for creating conflict.  The first book laid an interesting foundation point for where magic comes from.  When they graduate from Brakebills, Dean Fogg gives a great little speech about how they have access to this power they probably shouldn't, and where does it come from, and who might take it back?  This is really interesting theoretically.  And there might have been ways to explore a source of magic without being so damned cliche about it.  Without getting terribly spoilery about it, I just felt that not only was the use of Gods trite and uncreative, but the way they brought them into the story was just ridiculous.  And whereas the showdown with the Beast from the last book was violent, graphic, and disturbing because it needed to be, the invocation scene with Julia just...no.  No, no, a thousand times no.  That got graphic and gross and the worst part is it felt like it was there for shock factor, not because that's how the story had to go.

All in all, this is one I'd suggest skipping, especially if you had any affection at all for The Magicians.  I'm going to pretend I never read it and eventually go back and read the original again to wash the taste of this out of my mouth.

CBR III Review #22 - The Magicians by Lev Grossman

“For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.” 

The Magicians is the story of Quentin Coldwater, an exceptionally bright and incredibly unhappy teenager living in Brooklyn.  After an interview for Princeton takes a shocking turn, Quentin finds himself in a whole new world - one where magic is real, and he can use it.  He begins matriculating at Brakebills, a school for magicians, learning the skills and meeting the people that will shape him from then on.

Important to everything involved in this book is Quentin's love of a children's book series, called Fillory and Further.  A narrative shaped damn near identically to match The Chronicles of Narnia, these books were Quentin's favorite long after he "should" have outgrown them.  But now that he knows magic is real, could Fillory be real, too?

This book is wonderful.  I'm a big fan of fantasy lit, and this does a nice job of making it more contemporary.  Quentin lives in the world we know, but on the fringes is this whole other world, where magic is real, and possibilities are endless.  There is sex and profanity and the type of moral ambiguity and young adult malaise that are so commonplace now.  It felt very authentic and relatable, even if Quentin was often insufferable in his search to find something to make him happy.  Not all of the secondaries get real fleshing out (Janet, in particular, felt a little thin), but the ones that do are well realized (like Alice, wonderful Alice).  It also treats magic even more harshly than I think the later Harry Potter books do.  It is not only something you work at, that can hurt you, but over-reaching your power can get you killed.  This book does NOT shy away from violent descriptions, btw.  There is one particularly nasty sequence near the end that made me think of Sin City and turned my stomach.

A really great read that I totally recommend.  I picked up the sequel, The Magician King, immediately following my completion of this one and am already sucked back in.  I'm surprised this hasn't already been grabbed up for movie rights, as the material seems to lend itself to adaptation, but perhaps it just hasn't hit the right people yet.  Regardless, if you enjoy good fantasy, especially adult fantasy, this is well worth your time.

CBR III Review #21 - The Ghost of Hannah Mendes by Naomi Ragen

"Fight the degradation of your cultures, of your environment, of your nation and your community.

Dust off the jewels in the attic, shake out the skeletons – stare them in the face.

Stop being afraid."

The Ghost of Hannah Mendes tells the story of three Sephardic women (sort of four, but Janice is really more of an afterthought than a primary character) searching for the past and how to apply it to the future.  Catherine da Costa, a wealthy Manhattan Jew, is nearing the end of her life and realizes she has not passed on the cultural traditions that have made the family what it is today.  Her daughter, Janice, and two granddaughters, Francesca and Suzanne Abraham, do not practice the faith, do not appreciate their familial ties, and are completely disconnected from the history of their family.  Catherine decides to change this, motivated by visitations from the spirit of her ancestor, Hannah Mendes (who goes by several names in the course of the book, all historically accurate as far as I am aware).  She sends her granddaughters on a mission to Europe to locate the rest of Hannah's memoirs, a priceless heirloom missing from the family for generations.  

Both girls are a far cry from their ancestors power and family loyalty.  Suzanne is a stunning vegetarian do gooder who works for a rape crisis center and is perpetually broke.  She doesn't believe the past is relevant to the present and keeps a distance from her family.  Francesca is a petite type A overachiever, with a desire to have the things in life she thinks she should and an intense need to control things.  Once Catherine gets them to Europe, however, things start to change for all three women as they learn more about their family through Hannah's memoirs - discovering her life during the Spanish Inquisition.  The women have a great deal to learn about their religion, their roots, and themselves.

Naturally, there are two romantic subplots, because why not?  It's also one of Catherine's goals not to let the family tree die off, and her two single granddaughters are an obstacle to that.  They meet lovely Jewish men that fit their needs almost immediately upon arriving in London, and the way those plotlines resolve will surprise nobody.

What IS surprising, and enjoyable, is watching the women grow in the light of each new section of memoir they discover.  The book is broken up by excerpts from other texts (historical fiction, as far as I am aware) that teach them, and the reader, more about Hannah and what happened during those bloody years of the Inquisition.  It's a really fascinating read, especially from the perspective of a no-longer practicing Catholic.  I learned a lot about Judaism, and felt a lot of connection to the history within my own faith as well, even though I no longer practice.

This is a really great read and I highly recommend it!