This is probably the best holiday novella I've ever read, and possibly the best novella, full stop. Jenny, a microbiologist who makes her living viewing tiny organisms under a high powered microscope, moves across the country to become a research scholar, and then almost immediately receives a life-changing medical diagnosis:

While working through the stages of grief related to her condition, and adjusting to her new job and new city, Jenny strikes up a serendipitous cyber relationship with the former tenant of her apartment. After several innocuous online interactions, their relationship turns to very spicy cyber sex, which is both a physical and an emotional refuge for Jenny, who is lonely and tending toward depression.

Meanwhile, Jenny also has sexual tension developing in her contentious relationship with her occupational therapist, Evan, whose job it is to help her adjust to the new reality necessitated by her medical condition.

The reader realizes much sooner than Jenny that Evan and her online lover are one and the same, and when Evan realizes and doesn't immediately tell Jenny, that could have been a huge turnoff for me (I hate intentional dishonesty tropes), and yet Mary Ann Rivers negotiates that plot twist deftly enough that both characters' motivations and reactions are both relatable and ethical.

The writing is hauntingly beautiful. I'll be thinking about this story long after finishing it, and I'll definitely read it again -- perhaps every Christmas season.

Honey has a crush on her English Professor, Ben, but professors aren't allowed to date students at this college. Then, surprising exactly NO ONE (except Ben and Honey), Ben turns out to be Honey's roommate's boyfriend's best friend (because in a city as huge as NYC, of course he'd just happen to be the same Ben, right?). Once they're part of the same crowd, it's even harder to resist the attraction.

I struggled with this book -- well, with the last two books in the series -- because while the characters are good and the writing is snappy and entertaining, the plotting gave me whiplash. There's a conflict, and then just as it's about to be resolved, something else happens just to keep the plot moving and drag the book out a little longer (all three books are pretty short). Here, the thing that kept happening to create more conflict tended to be Ben misunderstanding Honey, getting pissed off and behaving like an ass, only to realize his mistake and have to fix it. Now, I can go with an honest misunderstanding and a good grovel or grand gesture to win back one's girl, but only one per book. In real life, if a guy ever screws up as badly and as often as Ben does, he needs to be out of chances.

Wow. It's hard to even know where to begin to review The Windflower. Written in 1984 by husband-and-wife team Tom and Sharon Curtis, Windflower is one of the most famous books in the romance canon. It's gone in and out of print several times, and in between releases, it wasn't unusual for used copies to sell for hundreds of dollars, since demand for the book remained sky high even in times of scarcity. Rereleased (for the first time in ebook form) this spring in honor of its 30th anniversary, Windflower faces a new generation of romance readers (like me) who tend to be skeptical, even contemptuous, of the rape-y conventions of old skool bodice rippers of the 1970s and '80s. I approached this read with trepidation, doubtful that it would live up to the hype, because virtually every attempt I'd ever made in the past to read "vintage" romance ended with disappointment at best and mad feminist fury at worst.

Hoo-boy, but Windflower was a revelation. Yes, it is a product of its time. The prose is unabashedly florid, even tending toward purple, especially in the love scenes:

Under the press of his body, Merry ached in colors... she tingled every hue in the prism. The world was a collection of sweet and vivid light beams, and she was one of them, and mindless, a spinning miscellany of liquid cells.

(p. 155 -- Huh?) The heroine, Merry, is such a perkily innocent Mary Sue that when Alexis Hall reviewed Windflower for Dear Author, he changed her name to Rainbow Sparkles. The plot is full of over-the-top WTFery: spies, kidnapping, pirates, man-eating crocodiles, betrayal. 

In other critical respects, though, Windflower subverts the old skool conventions, most notably with respect to sexual consent. On the surface, Windflower follows the old skool trope of the kidnapped virgin at the mercy of pirates, her virtue ever in jeopardy. The hero does threaten to rape her, and worse, to throw her to the crew to be gang raped by the lot of them. But it doesn't take very long before the reader realizes that these threats are all talk, and neither Devon (the hero) nor the crew would ever follow through. Even at his angriest, most alph-holey moments, Devon's threats are belied by descriptions of his character and his demeanor--he is constantly described as 'kind', 'gentle', 'compassionate,' "infinite in [his] ability to warm and reassure"--so the reader gets the sense that whatever he may say, Merry's virtue isn't in any real danger. Likewise, while we're told, along with Merry, that the pirate captain and crew are rough, dangerous men, fond of raping and pillaging and drinking and mayhem, what we actually see is a remarkably clean and organized crew that functions as a democracy, indeed, almost as a family, and to a man the pirates protect, support, and educate Merry at every turn. (And, boy howdy, is Merry sadly in need of educating!)

The second, less obvious but to me more fascinating, way that Windflower subverts old skool convention is in the character of the pirate captain, Rand Morgan. Readers of vintage romance will probably recognize that, in that era, a character revealed to be bisexual was invariably also a villain, as if bisexuality somehow functioned as code for "Unspeakably Evil." Windflower's plot unfolds very methodically, and the reader learns that Captain Morgan is bisexual (indeed, that he bought a traumatized teenaged boy from a brothel to serve as his lover, so he's not only bisexual but a pedophile), and that he is secretly orchestrating much of the drama befalling the other characters (including Devon and Merry). In the absence of information about his motives (which comes only much later), Morgan initially appears to fit within this bisexual-man-as-shadowy-villain trope. However, as the plot unfolds, the reader begins to question these assumptions, and even to question whether Morgan and Cat (the aforementioned traumatized teen) actually have a sexual relationship at all. (I vote yes.) In the end, one questions the methods of Morgan's Machiavellian manipulations, but at least his motives appear (mostly) benevolent.

Indeed, Morgan, Cat, and some of the other secondary characters (ahem, Raven) made The Windflower the compelling, timeless story it is, much more so than the romance between Merry and Devon. One tires of Merry's perpetual naiveté, the pirates making ribald jokes that fly right over her pretty little head, her repeated, fumbling escape attempts that inevitably end in ignominious failure. Devon isn't tiresome, but neither is he particularly interesting, either as compared to the other leading men in The Windflower or to other heroes in the Romance Canon: he's a privileged English peer (a duke, no less) whose power and influence is never questioned, and who has faced no real adversity. While both Merry and Devon grow as characters and the bond between them is convincing, it isn't particularly satisfying, and it definitely isn't what has driven the Windflower's enduring success over the past three decades.

No, instead, most readers (including me) are entranced by Cat, who is probably the most interesting and compelling character I've encountered in the entire romance genre, charmed by the winsome young Raven (conscripted into the pirate crew from a captured whaling ship when he was only 12), and intrigued (and at turns repulsed) by the manipulative Captain Rand Morgan. There is so much to this book, and these characters, that I don't think it's possible to absorb it all in a single reading: no wonder so many fans put The Windflower on their "keepers" shelf and read it again and again.

For me, much of the appeal of Shannon Stacey's contemporary romances is that they are so totally down-to-earth, so basic. They are set in northern New England (as is my life), and they feature totally normal people -- waitresses, landscapers, diner owners, barbers, contractors, cops -- in totally normal situations, against a small-town backdrop that feels like the snowy, dingy, sleepy, neighborly small towns where I have lived, and not like a polished, twee Hollywood representation of "Small Town, USA." Usually, there isn't any contrived conflict or angsty melodrama; instead, the characters confront the sort of totally normal problems that totally normal people have, and they just happen to fall in love in the process. Sure, these aren't the most exciting romances out there, but I find them sweetly reassuring in their conviction that true love can blossom among ordinary people in ordinary circumstances.

This novella didn't work for me because the plot is premised upon a coincidence that is totally contrived and ridiculous, which is exactly the sort of plot WTFery that I read Shannon Stacey to escape. Darcy and Jake meet at trivia night in a bar. Darcy invites Jake to spend the night. He does, and the earth moves, angels sing, flowers burst spontaneously into bloom all up and down the eastern seacoast, blah blah blah.... She writes down her number, but he gets caught out in the rain, the ink runs, and... c'est la vie. He can't remember the name of the bar where they met, can't remember where her house is, didn't catch her last name: it's hopeless. . . . EXCEPT of course she works for Jake's best friend and business partner, and six weeks later, her boss sends her up north to East Bumbleshoot, NH, to help his buddy start up a new restaurant, and of course the buddy is the One Night Stand That Got Away. SURPRISE! 

Even setting aside my annoyance at the Contrived Coincidence, Darcy and Jake really have very poor communication skills. The conflict in the last half of the story, once they've been reunited, stems from their inability to talk to each other about their developing feelings and the logistical issues that stem from the fact that Darcy lives in Concord and Jake is increasingly happy in East Bumbleshoot, three hours away. Conflict driven by the main characters' inability to talk through their issues like grownups is always a big turn-off for me, and this was no exception. 

P.S. - Apparently, this is the 24th book I've read this year (X is XXIV, in Sock Poppet's A to Z 2014 Reading Challenge).