Janie's life isn't quite what she'd hoped it would be. She'd like to be an architect, but instead she's an accountant at an architectural firm. Her boyfriend Jon is...okay. Perfectly nice and very well off, but otherwise just okay. But Janie knows she's no prize herself (even though her friends repeatedly tell her otherwise) - she's too tall, her head is too big, and she has a tendency to go on and on about topics that no one thinks are important or fascinating but her.

Unfortunately, Janie has just learned that Jon cheated on her. She has also just been fired. Since she refuses to stay in the apartment she and Jon were sharing, her best friend Elizabeth's offer to let her stay at her place is the only thing keeping her from being homeless. The one bright spot in her terrible day is Sir Handsome McHotpants, the sexy security guard who escorted her out when she was fired.

A later encounter with McHotpants, whose real name is Quinn, results in an offer that could turn her whole life around. But is this really a solution to her problems, or just a different kind of trouble?

According to my records, I downloaded this for free three years ago. The cover looked relatively cute, but the subtitle, "a smart romance," gave me knee-jerk annoyance - I disliked the implication that romances aren't generally "smart." So it sat in my e-TBR until I learned that the author will be attending a conference that my mom and I are going to in a few months.

I had a little trouble getting into this book. I get that Janie was supposed to be awkward, but the way Reid wrote her was a bit much. Her habit of blurting out unnecessary facts wasn't just present in her dialogue, but also in her narration, and there were times I ended up doing more skimming than reading. There were also some really painful secondhand embarrassment moments - most of Janie's early on-page encounters with Quinn made me cringe.

I enjoyed myself more after the job offer happened, although other things started bugging me. As good as Janie was with numbers and random facts, she didn't seem to care in the slightest about the things going on around her that could have a direct effect on her life. Like, say, Quinn's true identity. It was pretty clear there was more to him than he was saying, and his reaction to a few of Janie's statements should have made her wildly curious, even if only from a "I like this guy and want to know more about him" standpoint. But it didn't, and so she basically had to find it out by accident.

Then there was Quinn himself. I liked that he listened to Janie and noticed the sorts of things she was interested in. I'm a sucker for romance heroes who unexpectedly find themselves falling in love and don't know what to do when they're smacked in the face with their feelings. I loved Quinn's dawning horror as he realized how Janie would likely react to learning his true identity. But ugh, I hated the meal scenes.

In one, Janie and Quinn were alone in a room with a buffet-style meal with hot dogs, burgers, potato chips, and fruit. When Janie started to fix herself a plate, she was interrupted by Quinn, who'd already fixed one for her, right down to picking the condiments for her hot dogs. Janie's only comment was that the hot dogs were just the way she liked them. In another scene, Janie and Quinn were at a fancy restaurant. Janie was about to order when Quinn swooped in and ordered for the both of them without checking with her first. This time around, Janie noted in the narrative that this sort of thing would normally annoy but didn't in this instance. I ground my teeth in frustration.

The bulk of the book was first person, from Janie's POV. In the epilogue, it suddenly switched to first person from Quinn's POV. While I enjoyed the conversation between Quinn and Elizabeth, Quinn's "voice" struck me as oddly bland, not at all what I would have expected. Also, the POV switch didn't do anything beyond give Elizabeth and Quinn a chance to talk out of Janie's earshot - there was no real insight into Quinn's thoughts or life beyond the stuff readers already knew from Janie's POV.

This was certainly a quick read, but not as good as I'd hoped it would be. It looks like the other books in the series are each focused on different members of Janie's knitting group. I'm not sure whether I'll ever give any of them a go. While I liked how supportive the knitting group was as a whole, most of the individual members didn't make much of an impression on me.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Sakamoto tutors Yoshinobu (the bullied kid from volume 1) while deftly avoiding and finally defusing Yoshinobu's amorous mother. Then Sakamoto outwits a teacher bent on believing he's trouble, even managing to add the teacher to his list of admirers due to a kind act he performs. Then there are a few shorter episodes: dealing with a slug in cooking class, drawing a classmate in a way that manages to be both flattering and insulting, and saving a classmate during a fire drill (?). The volume ends with a group of delinquents pursuing Sakamoto and always just missing him. As they try to find him, they hear about his past mysterious exploits. Then there's an incident involving a delinquent trying to pick a fight with Sakamoto and ending up in a bizarre push fight against him.

I don't know why I requested this. I shouldn't have. I disliked the first volume, which I felt had too much an "uncanny valley" feeling to it to truly be funny. I mean, this series is supposed to be a comedy right? I'm not misunderstanding?

I had similar issues while reading this volume. I'm sorry, but Sakamoto makes my skin crawl, and I can't bring myself to laugh at the situations he deals with. I wonder if a different artist would change things. Technically, Sakamoto and the things he does aren't that different from the occasional humorous bits in Black Butler, where Sebastian accomplishes seemingly impossible feats in order to properly serve his master. I love that stuff in Black Butler, but it doesn't work for me at all here.

The first part of this volume was particularly awful. Yoshinobu's mother struck me as a pitiful woman, and I disliked that the volume seemed to be asking readers to laugh at her and her efforts to corner Sakamoto. Not only that, she was attempting to molest a teenage boy - not something I'd consider good comedy material.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Anyone asking this in relation to St Mary's must be either very brave or very stupid. The disaster magnets are back and the chaos will only be bigger this time as Max is set to train a new bunch of them. Lots of nice adventures in this one, but it is slightly darker then the previous one, I think.

While I've enjoyed all the novels in this series so far, it was not before this book that I fully realized how much I liked it. It might easily be one of the best series I've read in the last few years. It's easy reading, but it is so much fun. That's why I've been reading them all back to back, but with this sixth book, I'm almost at the end (and I don't want it to end).

Note: This work is currently available for 50% off at Smashwords.

Yuki is a werewolf who's been kicked out of three schools in the past four years for getting into fights. She has a habit of acting without thinking first, and her amber eyes and  brilliant white hair do an excellent job of attracting bullies' attention.

She's determined to do better at Sumiyoshi Girls Preparatory Academy, but blending in suddenly becomes the least of her concerns when she spots a kitsune, a werefox, in her class. What Yuki doesn't realize is that Ami, the werefox in question, has no idea what she is. Ami, for her part, just wants to keep her head down, graduate, and become a veterinarian. Being friends with an enthusiastic weirdo like Yuki is definitely not part of her plans.

I'd been reading Eugene Woodbury's Twelve Kingdoms fan translations and decided I should buy one of his original works as a sort of unofficial “thank you.” Fox & Wolf seemed like the one I'd be most likely to enjoy. That said, the excerpt made me think of anime and manga related fanfic, so I wasn't expecting much. Thankfully it turned out to be pretty decent, although I'd still hesitate to recommend it to someone who wasn't already an anime and manga geek. There were a few Japanese words and cultural details that weren't explained – readers either had to figure them out from the context, already know them, or google them. For example, the context mostly helped me figure out “o-furo,” although I ended up googling it for further details.

I should probably mention that I'm a white woman who has never been to Japan and whose knowledge of Japanese culture is mostly derived from anime and manga, which I realize provide a skewed view. I can't say much about the accuracy of how Japan (specifically Osaka) was depicted in Fox & Wolf. A lot of it, like Yuki needing special permission from her school for her part-time job as a dog walker, fit with what I knew from movies, TV, and books, although there were a few other things I wondered about.

Anyway, my favorite thing about this book turned out to be Yuki and Ami's budding friendship. I had expected Yuki to be more hotheaded than she was, considering her history, but she turned out to be surprisingly mature. I loved that she both recognized that Ami was better than her in some areas (like academics) and that she wasn't the slightest bit jealous of Ami because of that. All she wanted was to be friends with someone she knew had a hidden supernatural side just like her. I wasn't sure whether Fox & Wolf was aimed at a middle grade or high school audience but, if it was YA, it was unusual in that there was absolutely no romance – Yuki and Ami's story was purely a friendship story, with Ami realizing her true nature due to Yuki's influence.

Unfortunately, the story wasn't just about Yuki and Ami's friendship. I wish it had been. Their supernatural abilities and complicated family lives could have provided plenty of story fodder all on their own. Instead, Woodbury introduced a storyline in which Ami's mother's family was involved in a tobashi scheme and tried to get Ami's mother to help them using Ami's trust fund as an incentive. Yuki's father, who she hadn't seen since she was too young to remember, was the special prosecutor leading the investigation. This could have put Yuki and Ami at odds, except Ami was pretty cut off from her mother's family and her mother had no intention of doing anything illegal, especially not for the family who threw her out after she fell in love with Ami's father.

I'll just say right now that the whole thing with the tobashi scheme bored me. I had trouble following exactly what was going on, and I found myself wondering how a middle grade or YA audience was expected to do any better.

Confusing aspects aside, I hope Woodbury one day writes a sequel for this. I most enjoyed the parts where Ami and Yuki got to know each other and worked together at Osaka Dog Doctor. It'd be nice to see more of them and their families, and there's still so much I'd like to know. I mean, what about Ami's dad? How much does Yuki's stepmom know about Yuki and her mother? How long had Yuki's uncle and dad been in contact?

Additional Comments:

There were a handful of typos, some repetitive phrasing, and one or two incorrectly used words. For example, I'm pretty sure that it's supposed to be “knock the world off its axis” rather than “knock the world off its axels” (27) (and, even if it had been correct, wouldn't it have been “axle”?). I had noticed these kinds of errors in Woodbury's fan translations but had figured they were just “I'm only doing this for fun” sloppiness. It was disappointing to see it in his “for pay” fiction as well.

(Original review, including read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

"What Could Possibly Go Wrong" was a refreshing return to kind of St.Mary's Mayhem that go me hooked on the series in the first place.

Max is on light duties and has become the Training Officer, responsible for shaping five new recruits into Historians. It should be a safe, straight-forward job. How could anyone get into trouble while their the Training Officer? Silly question really, this is St. Mary's, nothing ever goes according to plan.

Max has revamped the training program to give recruits early exposure to actually going back in time so we pack in a lot of training trips in this novel. Most of them are chaotic fun - what's not to like about wooly mammoths, even if they are stampeding towards you? Wh0'd miss a trip to the Valley of the Kings - a simple observe and record, at least it was before it all went wrong.

I enjoy these high-spirited romps through history, but what keeps me coming back to St. Mary's is the way Jodi Taylor offsets the chaotic with jumps to times and places that are fundamentally unpleasant. This time we get to watch Joan of Arc burn. No punches are pulled. The full brutality of the day is made very clear. It was emotionally draining.

In Max's world, behind the flippancy and the insane experiments that usually result in things going bang unexpectedly, there is always an external threat and the possibility of betrayal. This time the betrayals are from surprising sources and, in once case, for unique and very original reasons.

I think this is one of the best books in the series. It gave me all the enjoyment I expected and a few surprises along the way.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Zara Ramm. She has become the voice of St. Mary's for me. Actually, she's ALL the voices of St.Mary's and she does them very well. I think this is the best way to experience St. Mary's.