Rae is talked into hooking up with the new local hottie.  Little does she know, when they finally exchange names there are several surprises!  What happens when she wants more?

Griffin was thrilled to find a welcoming woman, but he timing could have been better.  Once he finds out her brother works with him there is possible repercussions.  Should they take a chance on what they may have found?

While I found the pace quick, and the story rather fascinating, I was generally annoyed by the accent from Griffin being overly much.  I know the author was trying to set a tone, but it really turned me off.  The characters, however, are a joy to read and the fireworks were poppin'!  I give this book a 3/5 Kitty's Paws UP!

***This copy was given in exchange for an honest review only.

Asperfell - Mark Smith;Jamie Thomas

***I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Uproar Books!***

I wanted to like this book. I really really wanted to like this book. It is exactly the type of book that I normally enjoy. A young, spunky female lead character. Magic. Society that seems to be based on a Victorian standard. Mysteries. Prisons. Other planes of existence. But I just couldn’t like it.

The writing is very good and thus why I gave this a two star rating over a one star. The dialogue is engaging, the plot moves at a fairly good pace, and the narrative flows beautifully. The first half of the book seemed a bit on the slow side while the second half was very rushed but that is my only complaint about the writing.

WARNING: From this point on there will be lots of spoilers, consider yourself warned.

This book has never met a young adult trope that it didn’t like….and utilize…..frequently. Let me preface where my opinion is coming from on this novel. The very first sentence, before I even hit the first chapter is that the author wants to “smash the patriarchy one novel at a time!”. Now, I will also explain that I am rather tired of reading militantly feminist literature, it seems to be everywhere these days. Normally I can overlook an author’s personal views or opinions about the book and just take the book for the story it presents. But not when that’s what you open with. The very first thing you told me about your story is that it’s smashing patriarchy with its strong female characters so you need to live up to that. You have now infused that idea into your novel and need to deliver.

This did not deliver. Instead I got the same old tired tropes of the young adult genre that feminist readers complain about constantly. How exactly are you smashing patriarchy? By presenting me tropes that I’ve been reading since I was 13 years old?

Briony is just like every young adult female lead character. She is spunky, sassy, strong willed, and bucks the patriarchal system that she was born into. Her older sister is the perfect lady of the court. This isn’t a new dynamic and it can be a good one when used correctly. I didn’t actually mind this because it set up Briony as a character who is questing to be knowledgeable. Knowledge and wisdom will be her weapon in the fight against what society has said her place is. That’s all well and good.

My problems start when Briony gets to Asperfell. Naturally she instantly dislikes Prince Elyan. He is dour, brooding, and wants nothing to do with her and largely he is exactly what one expects from the young adult male lead. I assumed Briony would be on a mission to find the answer to take him home whether he protested or not. But…..she doesn’t. Within the space of a chapter she seems to have completely forgotten about her mission and just goes along with working in the gardens and learning magic all while throwing a glare at Elyan when he deigns to make an appearance. He, of course, is primarily there to ridicule her efforts before disappearing again.

It wasn’t until about the last forty pages that Briony suddenly remembers that she is supposed to be getting Elyan back to their homeland. And only because someone whacked her across the head with the information that would lead her to that goal. She was far too busy trading gossip, learning magic, gardening, and making sarcastic remarks at Elyan to actually discover the answer on her own.

Another trope, instalove. Authors think that they are avoiding this if their characters start off hating each other. But Briony and Elyan go from coldly tolerating each other to gazing at each other affectionately literally in the space of a single dance. So not quite instalove but maybe 3 1/2 minute love? Microwave love? Be sure to wait for the ding!

Briony was also revealed to not be that strong or much of a feminist either. The most offensive example of this is when another character attempts to sexually assault her. Okay, we kind of have to assume that’s what he’s doing because it doesn’t get very far but I’m fairly confident that’s where this was headed. Briony courageously defends herself. She fights off her attacker and escapes to safety before the situation escalates into anything much worse. I was cheering for her! I was so proud of her for reacting in her own defense so decisively and swiftly. But then she decides to have a whole inner monologue about how she feels shame about the situation. Why exactly? Surely you would be feeling scared but also proud of yourself? She even says to herself that she has nothing to feel ashamed about…..but then concludes that thought with “but I do” and moves on. Is this really an example of a strong woman? Feeling shame about something that you recognize should not be causing you shame and during which you admirably protected yourself? I was highly disappointed.

Next we have the other young adult trope that I despise so much. Briony does something very stupid and reckless. She recognizes internally that it was reckless and stupid. But when Elyan points out that it was reckless and stupid then she yells at him about it. Because, how dare he think that he can control her! He doesn’t own her! She can do what she likes without him! Does anyone actually think that this is the makings of a strong woman? Actual thoughts that she had. No one was trying to control her or prevent her from doing anything on her own. She made a reckless and foolish decision, but because a male confronts her about it then he’s controlling. Then later he, naturally, apologizes for daring to question her reckless, foolish behavior because he was just so scared of losing her. And she gets to walk away feeling smug. Strong women rejoice! Patriarchy smashed!

Finally, the ending. We spent a very long time getting to Asperfell. We spent an equally long time gardening and learning magic in Asperfell. That left about 60 pages for the conclusion. I thought the conclusion was supposed to be the rescue of Elyan from Asperfell and delivering him back home. Except that didn’t happen. The book ends with them in the woods. On their way to a potential way to get home, but they aren’t actually sure it will work yet. And of course, it ends with a kiss. Frankly, it left me wondering what exactly the point was? We couldn’t spare another 30 pages to actually get back to Tiralaen? And then end it once they have successfully left Asperfell? I recognize that we’re setting up a sequel here, but the sequel works just as well starting with the moments after they escape Asperfell as the moments before.

Overall, this story reminded me of every single bad young adult novel I’ve ever read. Exactly the same characters. Exactly the same plot devices. Exactly the same tropes.

I’m Hazel, I’d say when they’d get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs.

Hazel was, at the beginning of the story, a somewhat depressed character. She was terminally ill, her death prognosticated at her diagnosis. Her depression is, she says, not a side effect of cancer. It is a side effect of dying. Cancer is a side effect of dying. Everything is a side effect of dying.

Hazel's parents makes her attend a Support Group with a rotating cast of members (side effect of dying) , where she meets characters like Isaac (hilarious guy, especially when playing video games), Patrick (tells the same cancer survivor story every week) and she has her own healthy BFF, Kaitlyn, whose existence I kept forgetting.

Family relationships

Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”

Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”

Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.”

Mom: “Television is a passivity.”

Hazel's mother is more fleshed out as a character than her father. The only thing I know about the poor man is that he works in an office and that he tries very hard not to cry, often with little success.

I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.

Cancer doesn't only affect the patient. It often affects the entire family - emotionally and financially. I've had a relative who died from cancer, but when she was alive, her siblings pooled their resources to finance the very expensive series of treatments where one needle shot costed thousands. They had to take time off to drive her around to places for treatments, to religious events, and to handle all the extra care she needed.

The Romance

The Hazel/Augustus love story takes up a significant portion of this book - more than I initially expected, but was quickly resigned to. They were introduced rather early on the story and then proceeded to fell in love with each other rather rapidly.

Augustus is a pretty boy who, thankfully, seems to have some brain cells in his head, He says pretentious things like "my thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations." But then there are times when he sounded like a teenage FANGIRL. Example:

There's this declaration of always/forever that fictional characters always make to each other - this promise of infinity that is a paradox in itself, because nothing lasts forever and everything ends, and they know this, especially characters in a story like this, who knows that forever is a beautiful lie, a promise that cannot be kept. They promise it anyway, and I don't get it, because Death will inevitably separate them even if nothing else does.

(There are some mild spoilers in here. Just chill - I said mild)

I was so disappointed with Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. Like, crushingly disappointed. It was the same kind of disppointment I feel when I make soft boiled eggs and I leave them in the pan moments too long so that when I crack them open I discover the yolk has set (I take breakfast very seriously)

I was expecting the same level of adorably, squishy, heart-felt loveliness to be found in Fangirl but instead Eleanor and Park fell flat for me with it's drawn out, awkward romance, squirmy instalove and eye-rollingly embarrassing stereotypes.

Eleanor and Park's relationship felt to me like two corks in a bathtub - two separate, stiff, dry objects bumping into each other occasionally when they are tossed together by nothing more than the waves of their environment. I felt no connection to them, no warmth for their growing love for each other. I felt like they were thrown together by mere circumstance. They spot each other across the aisle of the crowded school bus, the stench of vicious teens out for the blood of the New Girl, Eleanor hot in the air. Park catches sight of her head of flaming red hair, her pirate outfit, her strangeness. Does he ask himself "Who is this intriguing, bold, chaotic girl?" Does he vow to learn more about her, for her oddity makes her fascinating? Does he attempt to catch her eye, for he must know her, he must discover her secrets, hear her story? No:

""Sit down," he said. It came out angrily. The girl turned to him, like she couldn't tell wether he was another jerk or what. "Jesus-fuck," Park said softly, nodding to the space next to him, "just sit down,""

Delightful. However, instead of telling him to, as we say here in Scotland get tae fuck Eleanor and he fall deeply and irrevocably in love in the time it takes me to blink. I genuinely thought I had missed something. One moment Park is ashamed to be seen just sitting near Eleanor, the next moment he's sharing comic books with her and drop kicking some dude outside the high school because he disrespected her. I hate instalove with a violent passion. It's lazy, it's nonsensical and it's basically missing a trick. The way people fall in love and get to know one another makes for a great story. Why do authors insist on sweeping over relationship origin stories, scrawling it on the page in thick felt tip, where it requires to be written delicately with a feathered quill. People are fascinating, complicated and intricate. But when instalove is rammed into a plot line all this depth of character and complexity is entirely obliterated. People rarely do things just becuz (unless they are following the ancient teachings of YOLO) so why authors attempt to write characters that behave this way and then expect us to believe in them is really beyond me.

Sandra Antonelli’s blog title says it all: Quirky Romance Novels for Grown Ups…and Smart Asses.  This is exactly what her books are and in part, they are quite a bit of fun.

"Holy, holy shit.  I love that you didn't stop and ask for directions."

                                                         - Willa to John after having sex for the first time

Synopsis:

Willa and John meet by accident when she comes back to Los Alamos, NM to investigate a charge of possible espionage which  may involve her best friend, Dominic Brennan (H from A Basic Renovation).  She is FBI who years before, worked undercover as a quantum physicist in the Los Alamos National Laboratory with Dominic who was totally unaware of her ‘real’ job).  To say Dominic is mad is an understatement.  

Right away, there is some serious chemistry between John and Willa and as a result some very funny bantering back and forth.  They are both older and both have had past serious relationships as both were married before and while John has been divorced for several years,

“He’d been married a long time ago in a galaxy known as the 90’s.”

Willa was widowed 18 months before the start of this story.  John especially, is ready to try again for a serious relationship and he’s decided Willa is the one to try with.  She is understandably reluctant as she has a job to do and can't be totally honest with him about it.  Let the Insta-Love ensue!

Along with all of this we have a bunch of other shit going on including Willa’s very conflictive relationship with her step-daughter, a sub plot with two other men (one, a fellow FBI agent and the other a Lab employee), both of whom also have a crush on Willa, an investigation into a possible murder, a meth lab bust, and enough 80’s pop culture references to choke a horse.

My Thoughts:

What we mainly have here is a book that didn't know if it wanted to be a romance, a police procedural, a murder mystery, or chick lit.

I could have come very close to loving this book and I wanted to sooooo bad cuz I think this author has a great voice and writes great banter BUT the non-stop info dumping, copious amount of secondary characters along with weirdly thorough descriptions of said secondary characters kept kicking me out of the story as I went along.

First, the good:

• Protags are mature, likable, funny, and have great chemistry together from the get go.

• Dialogue is snappy and fun and real and story is emotional and heartfelt.

• A murder mystery that did actually have me guessing for most of the book.

• Location is unusual – Los Alamos, NM, home of the Manhattan Project (and my home state) with great detailed description of different locales. Antonelli also gives a shout out to one of my favorite historical authors and a NM resident herself, Laura Kinsale, naming an FBI agent after her, so you go Sandra. ;o)

And then the not so good:

• Massive info dumping and tons of introspective chatter in almost every part of the book, sometimes about important things the reader should know about but ended up being dragged out for so long that I ended up not caring about why they were being discussed/thought about after a while or they were about such unimportant and/or trivial things that it never should have been mentioned anyway.

• Several typos and one section of gobbledy-gook I couldn’t make heads or tails of.  Once again, I point out that this is Escape Publishing, an imprint of Harlequin Enterprises Australia, and I’m thinking we should be well past having this many of these types of errors.

There were also some truly WTFery moments which had me totally scratching my head:

• I am deducting a whole star because nowhere did we see a couple of very important characters from the first book: Lesley’s grandfather, a Sicilian fireball who IMO, saved the first book with his hilarious, if over the top antics as well as Dominic’s son, Kyle, who was a very important character and who supposedly is Willa’s godson in this book.  Seeing as Dominic and Lesley play a pretty big part in the events here, I would think their kid should probably show up at some point.  Instead we get Lesley's brother, Sean, a nosy, blowhard dickweed, who judges everyone by the size of his/her bank account.  Even Dominic’s domineering and scary mother would have been welcome so that we could at least see what was going on in her little psychotic world. 

So this begs the question, why in the world would you not bring back some of the best things about this series?  Why drop in completely unnecessary and frankly, weird one-off characters that don’t do a damn thing to drive the story?  The author sacrificed these two great characters in order to add a huge cast of other characters who, while they may have had minor roles, didn't necessarily deserve the airtime ultimately given to them.

• Extremely thorough (and not in a good way) characterizations and descriptions of said secondary characters.  Normally you might say this isn’t a bad thing but in this case, yes. Yes it was a bad thing cuz every, and I mean Every. Single. Character - and action - and reaction - and thought - were described to the nth degree in this book. Minor or major. Important or unimportant. Necessary or unnecessary.  This included extremely exaggerated accents and countless details about clothing, personality traits, habits, looks, etc.

• Dominic’s and later, Lesley’s totally inappropriate and violent behavior toward Willa.

• H’s laugh – yes, I said his laugh, or in this case, his sniff-sniff-sniffing.  This started in the previous book and apparently the author thought it would be a good idea to carry this endearing (not) trait over to this book – ad nauseam. Stupid Kobo apparently doesn’t have a search feature on their iPhone app or I would have counted, but take my word, in every fucking chapter, we are treated to John laughing, oops - I mean sniffing in hilarity.

• Last but not least, towards the end of the book, John jumps to a major conclusion regarding Willa's and Dominic's relationship, says very hurtful things and ta-daaaaaa - no grovel.  
  He spends a good part of the book insisting that her having a male best friend is no biggie (and in fact, his best friend is Lesley who BTW, he was interested in romantically in the first book) but after Lesley punches Willa in the stomach, he assumes the worst!
  (spoiler show)  WTF?

Sigh.

I predict a third book and I have a feeling I know who the main male protagonist will be.  I really, really want to know about his story but I just don’t know if I’ve got it in me to pony up what will probably be a very reasonable amount to find out.