Month: November 2012

Review of Knitter in His Natural Habitat (Knitting #4) by Amy Lane

Rating: 4.75 stars

Stanley loves his job as floor designer and store manager of Ewe’ll Love This yarn store, he loves his condo and his cats. And at 35, by following his strict regimen of diet, exercise and new hair plugs, he’s looking pretty darn amazing. So why is he feeling sort of hollow?  Ever since Craw dumped him for Ben and true love, not even going to the clubs for a quickie is appealing any more.  In fact, just watching  Craw and Ben together highlights to Stanley just what he wants in his own life but he’s not sure how to get it or if its even possible at his age.  So instead of looking for love, Stanley finally decides its time to learn how to knit to fill the void in his life.  Then a funny things starts to happen,  As his knitting progresses, so does his life start to knit together.  He finds a family in the people around him, from Craw, Ben and Ariadne to the store owner and her daughter. And then the new delivery man walks into the store and into Stanley’s life. Johnny is unlike any man Stanley has gone out with.  Huge, older with an air of the city and East Coast about him.  He likes opera, the theatre and Stanley.

Johnny is just settling into his new life in Boulder and his new job.  But he has plenty of secrets and a dark past that only one person in Granby knows about.  Just when Johnny and Stanley realizes the depth of their feelings for each other, Johnny’s past arrives in town to threaten them both and everyone around them.

A Knitter in His Natural Habitat is the fourth book in the wonderfully endearing Knitting series and each book just keeps getting better and better. We started off the series with Craw and Ben in The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters (Knitting, # 1).  It was cute and as adorable as the critter on the cover. And as much as I loved Craw and Ben, it was the ancillary characters that really captured my attention. In How to Raise An Honest Rabbit, it was Aiden and Jeremy, who took possession of my heart, especially Jeremy, our broken little bunny of a man.  They are all back of course as well as some splendid new characters unforgettable in their own right.  Especially look out for Jeremy who figures large in this new story but more than that I can’t tell you unless I want to head into spoiler territory.

With this fourth installment, Amy Lane turns her attention to Stanley, someone we meet in the very first book.  Stanley was Craw’s bed buddy to use the mildest of terms.  To Craw, Stanley meant someone he could count on for casual sex without complications with someone he saw only when he was delivering his yarn to the shop.  Unfortunately, Stanley’s feelings were a little more engaged than Craw realized and Stanley was very hurt to find himself dumped not only for a younger man but someone Craw was deeply in love with.  One of the marvels of Amy Lane’s characters is that they are so very real in every aspect.  Stanley is meant to come across as a superficial, flirty little queen on first impression and he does. But just as quickly we see the loneliness and pain underneath the artifice he has constructed to fool others.  Again, the author flips the perspective and we see Stanley and Craw’s “relationship” from Stanley’s POV and what a difference that makes.   I love the details the author gives us that adds up to a complete portrait of a man who has reached the age of 35 without having one meaningful relationship and now realizes it.  From his tan, his egg-white omelets and this rainbow  painted condo, each personal detail is perfection.  Layer upon layer piles up until Stanley and her other characters breath, flirt and knit their way across the pages, larger than life.

This of course, includes Johnny who we met briefly in How To Raise An Honest Rabbit.  Johnny and Jeremy come from the same dark past and Johnny played a huge part in Jeremy’s survival.  And much like a East Coast fish out of water, he is so different from every other character in the story and that makes him perfect for Stanley.  I loved his courtly manner towards Stanley.  In Stanley’s world, Johnny’s small gestures and gentlemanly behavior is just what is needed to win him over.  I immediately got how and why they meshed so quickly.  As I have said before, Amy Lane understands relationship dynamics and uses that to create realistic romances for her characters, an aspect of her stories I also love.

But it’s not just the romantic angle of Amy Lane’s stories I look forward to, it’s the family of characters she creates and brings together that enriches her stories and embed themselves into our hearts and memories.  Here it is the group of people that gather around Ariadne in her hospital room as she awaits the birth of her first child.  The doctor has put her on extended bed rest due to complications with her pregnancy and you fear for her  and the unborn child’s safety even as person after person comes to knit, gossip, and tend to her emotional wellbeing.  I wanted to climb into their midst and settle in with my knitting as well. There’s Stanley working the stitches on his first scarf, and Alice who bonded instantly with Ariadne, and of course, Jeremy and Aiden whose sex life speculation enliven each knitting session.  It’s the author’s ability to make them all so real that when she causes them pain, we feel the impact as intensely as the characters.

I know that Amy Lane considers some of her stories light and others dark in nature but I just don’t see that.  Even her “lighter” efforts have  dark threads running through them, and such a thing is necessary if her characters are to be truly human. One of the aspects of the Knitting series is that each person has a “true color” that represents them.  Jeremy sees Aiden’s true color, not as Sunny Sky Blue as Craw sees him but the blue of a sky streaked with the dark shades of purple and black  This is the darkest, most angst filled of the series so far.  In fact, at one point, I felt that I could have smacked the author silly with a hank of heavy worsted because of  the pain she caused one beloved character.Deep breath. And that is also the reason that it didn’t get 5 stars.  I needed the ending to be more complete, the characters more settled after the traumatic events towards the end of the story.  This series isn’t over yet so I feel that is coming, which is great.  Because as much as I have come to love these people, I need it to see them happy.  I trust Amy Lane to deliver that too.

So don’t dawdle, run, jump and skip over to the next eBook store and pick this one and all the rest up.  You will love them as much as I do.

Cover:  Catt Ford’s covers for this series continue to delight and enduce  smiles.  How can you not love this cover?

Note: Along with great covers, I love the titles of each chapter.  Here is chapter two  “Sometimes a Perfectly Placid Knitter Will Startle”. Love this series for so many reasons.

Here are the books in the series in the order they were written and should be read:

The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters (Knitting #1) read my review here.

Super Sock Man (Knitting #2)

How To Raise An Honest Rabbit (Knitting #3) – review here.

Knitter in His Natural Habitat (Knitting #4)

Review of Velvet by Xavier Axelson

Rating: 4 stars

Virago is the son of the Royal Tailor and his best friend growing up is Duir, the heir apparent to the throne of King Killian.  When Virago’s father dies in an accident, King Killian appoints Virago to take his father’s place as the Royal Tailor, a  position which will exalt him into near royalty status, making friends with others close to the crown prince. This leaves his blind brother Sylvain to spend his time alone with his animals in their father’s house.  When King Killian is killed in battle, Duir goes about a personality change and becomes a cruel and capricious ruler.  But Virago continues to support Duir no matter the atrocities he commits until he meets a musician and his world turns upside down in the most dangerous  manner.

Seton wants nothing more than to play his lyre for the King’s coronation and he knows that the Royal Tailor has the ear of the future King. He manages a meeting with Virago in order to play for him so he can hear for himself how fine a musician he is. And while he accomplishes his goal, he also finds true love as soon as he lays eyes on Virago.  But  homosexuality is considered a high crime and brings the penalty of death with it.  And Virago does not want to accept the fact that he is falling in love with a man.  As Duir becomes more unstable, he asks Virago to make a coronation outfit unlike any ever seen and a mysterious package containing a material worth a kings ransom appears at Virago’s shop.  These events help catapult Virago’s normally reserved, careful manner into flights of obsessive behavior about the material called velvet that seems to whisper strange things in his head and the musician he can’t get out of his mind.

As the coronation draws near, a malignancy is in the air, bringing with it an edge of madness. His brother warns Virago of a coming plague and tells him that Duir is violent and mad, the kingdom corrupt. So Virago must decide where his loyalties and future lie, with his friend and future King or with his brother and the prospect of forbidden love with Seton the musician.

I always look forward to a new story from Xavier Axelson.  The author’s lyrical language, beautiful imagery and intriguing metaphors contained within Axelson’s tales have been hallmarks of this author’s writing.   All those elements are present in Velvet and are the strength of this unusual story. Axelson always seems to include a mystical component or two within his stories, and the material velvet with its sumptuous qualities  is a perfect vehicle to use to upset a tailor’s mien.  Virago is a complacent, overly amiable sort of a man, one easily self deluded.  He has been that way all his life, blinded to the truth of the man who will be king and the corruption that is the kingdom where he and his brother live.  Virago blithely disregards both his brother’s warnings and the manner in which his “friends” have abused his blind brother all his life.  So  it must take someting momentus to dislodge Virago from his complacency.  First, it comes in the form of Seton, a young lyre player seeking to play for the King to be.  Seton makes Virago think “depraved” thoughts of homosexual passion, and while he tries to suppress his feelings towards the musician, they keep coming back every time he is in Seton’s presence.  The second thing to ignite his passion is a strange, never before seen material that was delivered to his father but the package never opened until now.  The wondrous material calls to him, the sensuality of the cloth and the vibrancy of the colors overwhelm his senses, including common sense.   Both the velvet and Seton become obsessions in Virago’s mind and heart, a wonderful detail by Axelson to mingle the two together for a tailor deeply involved in his craft.

And I can always count in birds and bird imagery to figure large in any Axelson story.  Here is a sample:

“Would I never know peace? Or would memories chase me like the gulls chase one another, endlessly hungry and insistent?”

Or this one,

“Behind my eyes, I saw white peacocks, heard their shrieks, and felt the crawl of disease.”

All powerful images that linger after the book is done.  This is one of the reasons I look forward to each new story from this author.  There is a magic in his touch with his narrative and the flow of his language.

I also admire the way he builds a foreboding feeling of awful events to come.  There is a subplot that swirls around a whore/theatre player  named Therese.  The fact that I figured out early on what her intentions were in no way negates the power of anticipation that builds the closer it gets to the coronation, and yes, there are peacocks involved.  In fact there are so many fine qualities to this story that I wished the main character was worthy of them.  Unfortunately, Virago is not.

In fact I found Virago unworthy of just about everything that occurs.  It would have made more sense if his hubris, his self deception lead to his downfall instead of a voyage to freedom. No spoilers here as this is the opening paragraph and the story is being related from the deck of a ship.  I actually found him to be a despicable person.  Virago let others abuse his brother, ignoring his brother’s torment at the hands of his friends.  He hears and sees the cruel actions of Duir, the murders and the torture and dismisses them as the acts of a grief stricken son even as others tell him that this is Duir’s true nature.  Not until he himself is the victim of a member of the court, does “everything become clear”.  And even then it is not due to the victimization of others but of himself.  To my complete amazement, he continues with bouts of self delusion right to the end, weeping when action is needed, wanting to warn Duir who no longer deserves it and as it imperils his brother and lover.  One happenstance after another just demonstrates what a clod Virago is, instead of the hero he is needed to be. If there is a hero, it is Seton to rises to do what’s necessary when they are threatened or his brother Sylvain, who has lived as the object of scorn and bullying his entire life and yet still has made a life for himself and cares for the animals that he rescues.  I would have preferred this story to be about Sylvain instead of the less appealing brother, the narrator.

And of course, there is the instantaneous love Virago feels for Seton and that Seton returns.  In a story of obsession, where the feelings he has for both Seton and Velvet are comparable, it would have felt more realistic or authentic to leave it as an obsession instead of true love.  I never really understood that Virago was capable of such feelings.  Sexual obsession yes, love not really.

Ruth Marcus stated in her article “Hubris meets high tech“* that “classic tragedy, indeed classic literature, hinges on imperfect knowledge.” and that “ego tends to trump intelligence when sex is involved”.  That describes Virago beautifully as his ignorance and his ego blinded him for years right up until the very end. Had Velvet turned out to be the cautionary tale of Virago’s downfall rather than his successful flight from the disease ridden kingdom, it would have rated 5 stars.  But as a romance between two ill suited lovers? That is one illusion I cannot make myself believe.

*The Washington Post, Nov. 13, 2012

Cover:  Very simple yet elegant.

Review of Splintered Lies (In The Shadow of the Wolf #3) by Diane Adams and RJ Scott

Rating: 4 stars

When cop Joe Christie’s shifter wife and unborn child died, a part of him died with them.  Since their deaths, he has just been going through the motions of life, running on his own in wolf form and avoiding all former friends and partners, including Nick.  That would be Nickolas Alexander, Joe’s former best friend and lover before his marriage to Mara.  Once Joe married Mara, Nick stepped back from their lives and away from Joe.  But Nick has continued to love Joe all through his marriage to a woman that he grew to like as well. And when Mara and their unborn child was killed, Nick stood by Joe as the shattered man tried to cope with their loss and failed.

One piece of information about the ongoing investigation into criminal acts against the shifter population shocks Nick to the core and then galvanizes Joe into action.  Mara and Joe’s unborn child were the recipients of an illegal drug and unknowingly part of a criminal experiment on female wolf shifters and their babies.  They were killed to get rid of evidence of the experiments not in a car accident as Joe and the others had been told. Only two others of their group know the truth and when Nick tells Joe how Mara really died, Joe explodes in rage, determined to find and kill the people responsible.

With Rob, Sam, Doug, and Jamie to help, Nick and Joe set out to find the truth behind the torture, kidnapping and deaths of the shifters.  Nick tries to keep his love for Joe quiet but working next to him in the investigation is unbelievably hard.  And Joe is also finding  that the love and lust he thought he had buried when he married Mara is coming back in full force.  Will his guilt and love for his dead wife make any future with Nick impossible?  And will the conspiracy to kill wolf shifters mean their deaths as well.

Splintered Lies (In The Shadow of the Wolf #3) completes the investigation into a wolf shifter conspiracy that started with Shattered Secrets (In The Shadow of the Wolf #1) and continued in Broken Memories (In The Shadow of the Wolf #2). All the couples from the first two stories are back as well as the auxiliary characters who are now the main characters here, Joe and Nick.  There is a conspiracy aimed at the destruction of wolf shifters.  Shifters have been captured, kidnapped and tortured, experimented on and then killed but the investigations into each case has proven that the leadership behind the criminal acts goes higher than anyone had anticipated, reaching into the top levels of the government itself. Authors Adams and Scott more than accomplish their goals in giving the reader a horrifying mystery to solve as each new angle or case makes the conspiracy behind it even more terrifying in scope.  Before we had abused wolves who can’t or won’t shift back, cases of multiple rapes and prostituted shifters, now it is revealed that pregnant wolf shifters and their fetuses have  been the subject of gruesome experiments.  And when those experiments have failed, the subjects have been deposed of, including Mara and their unborn child.  The subject matter alone here raises the horror factor considerably and thankfully most of the experimentation has been left to the reader’s imagination.  Again, this is such a huge element of the series and it is very well crafted.  Splintered Lies brings the hunt for the people behind the atrocities to a conclusion that is 99 percent satisfying as not all of those who participated are counted for at the end.  Are they setting us up for another book?  It would seem so.

More problematic are the characters of Joe Christie and Nick Anderson.  Joe is lost in his grief over the death’s of Mara and their child. And all the emotions he is going through seemed grounded in reality.  You can feel how shattered he is,  how his grief has immobilized him in his loss. But when it comes to the backstory of his and Nick’s earlier relationship, you want to know what was the pivotal point that made Joe choose Mara over his very real love for Nick.  Over and over Joe reveals how guilty he felt over dumping Nick for Mara and that Nick still appeared in his dreams but the reader never understands why Joe felt the need to make the choice he did and that serves as a huge disconnect between the reader and this character.  How can the reader mourn the loss of Joe and Nick’s relationship is it never feels completely real to begin with? Then there is Nick who in his love for Joe steps back and away from the man he loves.  He says he understood Joe, but again, we never feel either his passion for Joe or the bargain he made with himself.  Nick just comes across as way too passive with regard to his past with Joe.  Ultimately, while the confused sexual tension between the men had a certain gravity to it, the rest of it felt flimsy in its construction.  So while I liked the characters I never bought into a loving connection between them and the story suffered from it.

An intriguing angle I wish had been more throughly explored was the idea of  shifter assimilation versus shifter integration into human society. Sam posed that part of Joe’s behavioral problems was that he was trying to act “human”, from his method of dealing with his grief to crowded human conditions.  I loved this concept.  It came about  very late in the book and has so many great elements to it, so many places you could go with it that I wish it had been the focus of the story or  maybe the central idea behind its own series.  Again I felt like it was given short shrift but maybe that’s on purpose.  I certainly hope so because an exploration of what it means to be a wolf shifter in a human society could certainly benefit from another great perspective or even two.

So if you love shifters, add this series to books that you should read.  I adored two out of the three couples but the rest of the book has so many good elements that I don’t think it should be missed either.

Here are the In The Shadow of the Wolf books in the order they should be read in order to understand the long reaching plot and characters:

Shattered Secrets #1

Broken Memories #2

Splintered Lies #3

Another splendid series cover by Reese Dante

 

Review of But My Boyfriend Is (Florida series #4) by KA Mitchell

Rating: 4.5 stars

Dylan was frantic as he raced to the hospital after getting a call saying his twin brother had been admitted.  Dylan and Darren has relocated to Central Texas primarily because of Darren’s attending college at UT and Dylan going to culinary school.  Now with Darren about to graduate and Dylan working as a chef, he had wondered about their future but never entertained the possibility of Dar being hurt.  And somehow he just knew it was all his fault.  Whenever something happened to Darren, it was because somehow, someway Dylan had screwed something up.  The person,  Mike Aurietta, who called him told Dylan that his brother had been attacked in Webber Park, a place notorious for gay hookups and Dylan felt sick inside.  Darren should never have been there.  It was Dylan who cruised there occasionally looking for some action but that didn’t make him gay.  Did it?   Because Dylan went out with girls, lots of them, it didn’t mean anything did it if the sex was more powerful with guys?  And now his brother lay in a hospital bed, the result of a gay bashing and Dylan just knew who the beating had been intended for.  It was meant for him and Darren got the whipping that should have been his.

Mike Aurietta had been taking an unplanned shortcut through Webber Park when he ran into the guys viciously attacking a man on the ground.  He did what he could to stop the attackers and called for help when they finally ran away.  Mike ended up going with the unconscious victim to the hospital and stayed to help any way he could.  Mike found the emergency numbers in the victim’s wallet, placed the calls he needed to and waited in the man’s  hospital room when they wheeled him into surgery.  What he was not prepared for  was to see the victim’s twin race into the room, demanding answers and the names of the people who attacked his brother.  Even in a rage, something about Dylan attracted Mike as no other man had done recently.  He explained what happened, his part in getting Darren to the hospital and before he realizes it, his good deed has turned into something quite complicated.

Dylan needs Mike’s help even though he hates to admit it.  And when his brother Aaron and his partner  Joey arrive to take Darren home to recuperate, then it’s not just Mike’s help he needs, but his friendship and the relationship  that is growing slowly between them.  But Mike is closeted because it is not possible to be gay and retain his job as a trainer for the college football team.  Being out is just not going to happen because he not only needs his job  but it is his only way to stay close to the sport and team he loves.  And Dylan?  Well, Dylan is just confused and angry that he is starting to feel something more than friendship for Mike because that might mean he really is gay.  And what would that do to his dreams of a family and kids?  As Dylan and Mike track down Darren’s attackers, the identity of one shakes Mike to the core.  It will wreck his carefully built closet and the new relationship with Dylan he has come to treasure, perhaps even more than his job.  And Dylan too must decide if he is ready to relinquish his childhood dream and admit that he is gay if he wants a possible future with Mike.

But My Boyfriend Is, KA Mitchell’s fourth story in the Florida series, follows two of my favorite books, one of which happens to be Collision Course, a must read for a majority of m/m romance fans. And those are some tough steps to follow but I believe Mitchell has certainly achieved her goal in giving us a great new addition to a series I treasure.  The central characters of But My Boyfriend Is are twins Dylan and Darren Williams, half brothers to  paramedic Aaron Chase and his partner Joey Miller (two of my favorite characters) who we met in Collision Course. All the brothers and their sisters came from a background of abuse, abandonment, and the foster care system that hurt more than helped.  Their father is still in prison for manslaughter.  And that has left a legacy on each member of the family in differing ways.  In Aaron and Dylan, it has made them quick to anger,  rage and pain hiding behind prickly, combative personalities that act as shields even from other members of their family.  While most people see Aaron and Dylan as jerks, Joey saw beneath the “asshole” personas they wore to the hurting, vulnerable people underneath.  But Dylan has always had his brother, his “mirror” image and they have shared everything, almost.

KA Mitchell’s characterizations are just wonderful, so good in fact that she has done too exemplary a job in establishing both Aaron’s and Dylan’s  jerk attitudes.  Because for some that is all that they see, Aaron and Dylan’s obnoxious behavior.  But she also clearly establishes the reason for their behavior and that the hurt and pains inflicted on them in childhood, first by their mother and then by the system, has continued to be the engine that drives their actions and mannerisms.  These are not cardboard characters but carefully crafted personas.  And that makes them not only believable but people we can empathize with.  I actually fell in love with the prickly Dylan, so like Aaron when we first met him, for obvious reasons.  He is so confused about everything going on in his life at the moment.  Darren is graduating and has not mentioned his plans to attend graduate school, obviously without his brother for the first time.  And that has traumatized Dylan.  He has never been without his brother close to him and feels lost at just the thought of Darren far away.  And his sexual attraction to men is growing however much Dylan doesn’t want to admit it.  The author gives us a terrific portrait of a young man heavy into denial when his world starts to shake apart.

Mike Aurietta is another complex closeted young man.  Definitely gay, he hides his sexuality because he understands the reality of being an out gay man in Texas would mean the end of his job and his association with UT football team, or any football team.  But his denial has cost him emotionally too, and we understand the consequences of his actions even as he does.  Aaron and Joey  are here as well, doing what they do so well.  Supporting each other even as Aaron’s fear manifests itself in yelling, and angry commands and Joey acts as the glue to hold him and the others together.  What is surprising is Darren and his attitude towards his brother.  Totally unexpected so I was unprepared for Darren and his behavior.  But as I said, their backstory has left heavy footprints over all of them and in Darren it  manifests itself in a far different manner than it does in Aaron or Dylan.  I thought KA Mitchell really gave the boys extra layers I was unprepared for here in this story.

But this is really Dylan and Mike’s story.  One of coming out and perhaps even growing up, letting go of old childhood dreams while establishing new ones for adulthood.  My only quibble is that I wanted  much more of Mike and Dylan and the rest of the family.  I want to know what happens to Darren as he recovers and goes to graduate school.  And of course, I always want more of Joey and Aaron, the heart of the Florida series.  I had a hard time with the rating for this book, swinging back and forth between 4.5 and 5 stars.  I am still not sure it doesn’t  deserve more.  I guess I will be rereading it again to figure it out.  If you have ever had a friend act like a jerk but continued to love them because you understood where they were coming from, this book is for you.  If you have the ability to look beyond the superficial actions and responses, to see the truth that lies underneath, this book is for you.  And if you love stories of people reaching their potential as human beings, coming out and going forward this book is for you.  But don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself.  I think you will be happy you did.

Here is the Florida series in the order they were written and should be read. Some are free stories that can be found at KA Mitchell’s website:

Diving In Deep (my least favorite but introduces Joey Miller)

Collision Course  #2 (all time favorite read) Aaron Chase and Joey Miller

Collision Course Christmas #2.1 free story

Collision Course Valentine #2.2 free story

No Souvenirs #3 Dr. Jae Sun Kim and Shane  McCormick (love them) deleted scene here

No News Is Good News #3.5 takes place right before But My Boyfriend Is – free story  This explains Aaron’s mood when he gets to the hospital. A must read to fully understand his mental state.

But My Boyfriend Is #4 Dylan Williams and Mike Aurietta

KA Mitchell’s website

Angela Waters is the cover artist.  Just beautiful. Book available from Samhain, Amazon, and All Romance.

Review of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, A Clandestine Classic by Jules Verne and Marie Sexton

Rating: 4 stars

The year is 1866, and Naturalist Dr. Pierre Arronax and his manservant Conseil board the Abraham Lincoln, a vessel whose purpose is to track down and destroy the marine monster terrorizing the oceans.  This unknown monster threatens international shipping and has sunk the ships of many nations so it is imperative that it be stopped at all costs. The nations have come together to fund the mission and now the Abraham Lincoln holds the best sailors to do the job.  But from sea to sea, after visiting multiple locations where the monster has been sited, the ship turns up nothing, boredom besets the crew and the Professor’s interests turn to Ned Land, a sexy harpooner who returns Arronax’s interest.

As the Professor and Ned engage in a tempestous affair, the Captain of the Abraham Lincoln makes one last attempt to locate the monster and succeeds beyond its wildest goals.  The mighty sea monster is sighted and the Abraham Lincoln attacks, only to be attacked by the thing in turn.  During the proceedings, Dr. Arronax is thrown overboard, followed by Conseil, and then Ned Land.  The men find themselves rescued and then imprisoned upon The Nautilus, as their “sea monster” turns out to be a submergible vessel captained by the enigmatic and dangerous Captain Nemo. As the days aboard the secret submarine turn into months, the Professor and Conseil spend their days mesmerized by the new worlds they see under the sea and the Professor and Ned spend their nights investigating their sexual pleasures.  But Ned feels that he cannot live his life forever  imprisoned and the Professor must choose trying to escape with his lover or a life spent in scientific discovery on board the Nautilus.

With Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Marie Sexton merges the classic Jules Verne novel with m/m fiction to a remarkably successful degree.  Jules Verne published his popular science fiction story in 1870 and his saga of the mysterious Captain Nemo, the submarine Nautilus and its narrator Professor Pierre Arronax became a instant  classic that continues to this day.  A layered, complex tale of scientific discoveries, amazing undersea journeys and futuristic assumptions also included the basest of human emotions such as anger, hatred and the need for revenge.  Jules Verne was ahead of his time in predicting the military use of high speed submarines.  Also forward thinking was his use of “oppressive peoples” in his story,  that Captain Nemo was so voluble in his heated arguments and discussions about the oppressors and the oppressed which is how Nemo and his crew regarded themselves was a rarity.  The original book included authentic scientific lists of flora and fauna to go with the animals seen during their voyages.  As Marie Sexton states “several places where extended monologues or lists of plant and/or animal species have been deleted from the story.”  In their place, the author establishes a romance between Professor Pierre Arronax and Ned Land, the definitely did not exist in the Jules Verne story.

I throughly enjoyed the author’s addition to this classic tale.  I loved Arronax’s love for his Ned Land.  Their sexual exploration of each other is carried out in a realistic manner, as fear of exposure to those around them would have resulted in death.  Ned’s small cabin aboard the Abraham Lincoln allows only the smallest of sexual play and their assignations are kept to the minimum which is also authentic.  But once the men have been taken onto the Nautilus, things change between them as the rules and law of Captain Nemo are very different from the nations above them. Sexton does a lovely job of mixing historical reality with Jules Verne science fiction story.  She also gives us a sexual relationship that includes a slight Bdsm bent between Pierre and Ned as their larger cabin on the Nautilus allows them greater physical freedom in their bed.  Ned is a lovely  character given the genuine feel of a man who lives his life outside, his love of the thrill of the hunt is present in all of his actions. So when Ned’s adrenaline based life style is curtailed when he is imprisoned, however nicely, on the Nautilus, we can understand his frustration at his inaction and his anger at Nemo and crew.  Pierre Arronax, again the narrator, and his manservant Conseil, are also beautifully portrayed as the excited scientists they are as each new discovery propels them into frissons of delight and wonder during the day and Pierre experiences the joys of submission at night.  Again, I just loved Marie Sexton’s romance enhanced version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

I will admit that my father gave me my first copy of this story back in grade school.  He passed on his own copy that he had gotten when he was young along with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  I was mesmerized by the many descriptions of new places and animals I had never seen.  I couldn’t get enough of the forests of kelp or the schools of marine life I had never seen or heard of. There were so many unknown animals that I had to go look up, so many places I need to find on my globe that I often felt like a voyager along with Arronax and Nemo.  But as with the original, the lush multitude of descriptions, the veritable endless lists of scientific nomenclature had me flipping past pages then as it  did now.   There is a reason that many a student turns to Cliff Notes instead of wading through the original novel, and this version suffers from the same problem.  It is simply too long.  In trying to remain faithful, it too is as long as the original version.  Jules Verne’s came in at 352 pages (approximately depending upon font size), Marie Sexton’s at 390.  And as a Naturalist as much as I love revisting the scientific terminology for various species of flora and fauna, a little of it goes a long way.  And while I delighted in the sumptuous portraits of the wonders found under the sea, after a while it became just too many to digest, too rich a banquet as it were.  For me, I had to read it over a stretch of time, pace myself so I had time to look up the places the Nautilus went and the things they saw.  And once read, I never picked it up again however much I enjoyed it.

So here’s my quibble with this Clandestine Classic, it is too true to the original.  It is very enjoyable and I give high marks to Marie Sexton for her romantic inclusion as well as the manner in which she honored the original.  That said, it is a lot to wade through.  I don’t have problems with people playing with the classics, it’s done all the time.  So if you loved the original and you love m/m romance, pick this up and prepare to enter back into Jules Verne’s universe with a twist.  If you found the original daunting,  perhaps you will give this a try in stages.  It is worth it no matter how long you take to travel 20,000 leagues under the sea with Professor Pierre Arronax, Conseil, Ned Land and Captain Nemo.

Posh Gosh over was interesting but I wish it had been more of a play on the original.

A Beautiful No: How Richard Herod III Turned a Townhome Rule Into Powerful LGBT Activism

Maryland, Maine and Washington legalized gay marriage. And in Minnesota, one man made a difference. Here is his story. A Beautiful No: How Richard Herod III Turned a Townhome Rule Into Powerful LGBT Activism.

Review of Chaos (Lost Gods #5) by Megan Derr

Rating: 5 stars

“Nine gods ruled the world, until the ultimate betrayal resulted in their destruction. Now, the world is dying and only by restoring the Lost Gods can it be saved.”    All of the five kingdoms but Schatten have seen their gods return to the world.  Schatten, a world of darkness and ice, has been isolated from the rest of the world by Lord Teufel, the Shadow of the Lost Licht.  By his power and enforced by the deadly Sentinels, Schatten has been ruled by Order, its people regimented, living under iron laws for over nine hundred years.

But now things are changing, the gods are returning and chaos has entered the lands of Order just as prophesied.   A man named Sasha roams the forbidden lands of Schatten, his memory gone, fragmented, with just snips of knowledge to go on.  He knows his name and remembers a fight with a beast with violet eyes.  He has a whip and knows how to use it.  On his finger is a ring of immense power and on his chest is burned a black violet spider web telling him he is cursed.  Sasha can remember just enough to realize he has a mission, but what?  Sasha has the feeling that time is running out, but the more he tries to remember, the greater agony in his head.  A young man from the nearest village takes him in, tends to his wounds and feeds him.  When the village is beset by Sentinels, Sasha destroys them, something unheard of and the wary villagers cast him and the young man, David, out.  Together they travel to the capitol, Sonnenstrahl, where all paths lead.  Sasha can only hope for both their sakes and that of Schatten, that he remembers who he is and what he has to accomplish before they arrive or all will be lost.

What an amazing ending to an incredible series!  I have to admit that when a series has been as great as this one I am always a bit apprehensive when approaching the final volume.  Will the final book tie the saga together?  Will it meet or exceed the standards set by the previous books?  Will all the characters I have come to love, and the rich drama that has carried me from book to book come together in the glorious ending I have been hoping for?  I am so happy to report that with Chaos (Lost Gods #5),  Megan Derr answers all those questions and more with a resounding yes!

Lost Gods is the saga of five kingdoms whose gods were lost or killed nine hundred years ago.  Their worlds were plunged into darkness, their people suffered, and only a handful of prophesies gave hope to the kingdoms of Kundou (Treasure), Pozhar (Burning Bright), Piedre (Stone Rose), Verde (Poison), and Schatten (Chaos).  One by one, we watched the unimaginable happen and through forgiveness, pain, and rebirth, each nation regained their gods.  Now the only kingdom left is Schatten, the place and the god that started it all, the Lost Licht.  In each book, there has lurked a malevolency in the form of a sorcerer or dark magic from the lands of Schatten, as Teufel, the Shadow of the Lost Licht, has tried to prevent the gods from returning.  But we have never understood the reasoning or the power behind these attempts, the nature of their god and the land of Schatten remained hidden behind the giant walls and secrecy.  But as the saga progressed, it was understood that the final battle was to be taken back to the beginning, high in the frozen mountains of Schatten.

Derr has given us the epic battle between Light and Dark, Chaos and Order, and all the threads she has been weaving throughout all the books come together in a rich tapestry full of life, pain, death, forgiveness, love, and rebirth.  These are the themes we have visited over and over in every book and so they must all be present here at the end for a mythic conclusion.  We have been waiting for the Child of Chaos and were told in Stone Rose that he had been born and must be hidden, protected until it was time for the prophesy to be fulfilled.  I had an idea that the Child of Chaos must be someone we had already been introduced to but when he is finally revealed (no spoilers here), I was floored.  It never occured to me that he would be the Child, but after the fact, this character was the only perfect one and Derr’s splendid planning and brilliant plot was just reinforced with that reveal.  Derr has been meticulous with her plots, as each story moved the saga forward but not always in a manner that was immediately obvious.  It might take the next book to bring to fruition an idea or plot line she started with Treasure.  The amount of notes and timelines she had to have established to make this convoluted, complicated mythology come together boggles the mind.  Megan Derr never once dropped a plot thread or misplaced a character’s purpose in her story.  Really, its just so beautifully carried out.

And oh the characters we have met!  Each and every one a gripping, vividly portrayed person, whether it be a young pickpocket, a sensual White Beast of Verde, the haunted and haunting avatar of the Basilisk or the passionate, sword swinging captains of Kundou.  We have had young men sacrificed on alters of fire (I have never forgiven certain events in Burning Bright) and marble, old betrayals forgiven, and gods reborn amid the ashes of hate and love.  I have cried and laughed my way through each book while admitting I do have some favorites among her characters.  We revisit some of my favorites here and are introduced to new beautifully fleshed out characters who appear in Chaos.  High Seer Friedrich is just an example.  He is the High Seer of Schatten, one of immense power who helps enforce the laws of Teufel.  But from the start, we realize, along with him, that something is terribly wrong with him.  He hears a voice in his head, more than hears, he sees this person Dracht who talks to him, visits him in his dreams and makes love to him.  Dracht seems so  real but he whispers things of such sacrilege that Friedrich thinks he is losing his mind.  There is an under Seer who is scheming to take Friedrich’s place and a High Sorcerer who reports that Sentinels are being killed  all over the Kingdom, an unheard of event.  Then we meet David, a true innocent.  An orphan who loses the one person who took him in yet turns around and offers shelter to someone who might have caused that person’s death.  David is such a shining presence you fear for him immediately because you have seen what has happened to ones like him in the past.  David’s youthful goodness is balanced out by his younger friend, Killian, whose immaturity and bratty nature threatens David’s precarious position within the village.

And finally we have Sasha, the warrior with the lost memory and a mission to accomplish.  Sasha is older, powerful and at ease with his weapons.  He looks in a mirror but doesn’t recognize his face.  When he thinks of love, he feels pain and loss yet everything about David calls to him.  Sasha can’t remember his identity but realizes that the happiness he has found with David is something he has never achieved before, and the irony does not escape him.  One person after another strides across the landscape of this saga, each bursting with life, their emotions so real, so authentic that we cannot help but become involved in their stories. Their hopes and promises become ours, we absorb their pain and when their hearts break with loss so does ours.  That is wonderful storytelling, that is terrific writing. The boxes of tissues I have gone through over the course of this outstanding saga would fill a shelf.

But if I have shed many tears, I have also laughed, chuckled, and shouted with joy and ended my journey with the Lost Gods absolutely satisifed, amazed at the depth of Derr’s world building, and assured that the books of the Lost Gods will be ones I reread over and over again.  What a saga! What heros and what amazing gods we have met along the way.  Do yourself a favor.  Pick this saga up, settle into your favorite place to read, and prepare to lose yourself in worlds so amazing you will never want to leave.  I feel that way every time I think of these books. I think you will feel that way too. This is one of my best series for 2012.

Cover:  I love these covers by London Burden.  Each cover is a map of the kingdom whose story is being told.  The colors all have significance as well.  Just outstanding.  These are among my favorites of the year.

Here is the Lost Gods series, in the order they were written and should be read, in order to understand the complicated plots and characters within.

Treasure (Lost Gods#1) – Kingdom of Kundou

Burning Bright (Lost Gods#2) – Kingdom of P0zhar and my favorite book of the series

Stone Rose (Lost Gods#3) – Kingdom of Piedre

Poison (Lost Gods#4) – Kingdom of Verde

Chaos (Lost Gods#5) – Kingdom of Schatten

An Apple Braid or Do You See What I See? I SeeZ Bread Smut!

Now I am sure this is scrumptious but you know, my mind just has to go somewhere much smuttier.  What do you think the finished product looks like?

apple braid

by JENNA on APRIL 19, 2011

Hi all, I’m Rachael from La Fuji Mama and am tickled to have been asked by Jenna to share one of my crazy concoctions here on Eat, Live, Run!  Jenna is very brave!  I’ve had apples on the brain lately, partially due to these three handsome little fellas sitting on my counter top waiting for me to decide what they would become.

 

 

I love a good apple pie, but wasn’t really in a pie mood.  Then, when I woke up one morning craving homemade bread, inspiration struck.  Apples + Homemade Bread = An Apple Braid!  So I sliced up the apples into pieces,

tossed them with cinnamon, sugar, and lemon juice and threw them in the oven to start cooking while I made the dough for the braid.

When the dough was ready, I rolled it out into a big rectangle, then cut each side into strips.  Next I spread the apple filling down the uncut center of the dough, and then crisscrossed the strips of dough over the filling to create a braided effect.

The finished braid went onto a baking sheet into the oven until it was a nice light golden brown.  Then I brushed a vanilla cream glaze over the hot braid and set the braid aside to finish cooling.  This was the hard part—waiting for the braid to cool.  But it’s worth the wait, because the glaze will have time to set a bit, and the filling will have time to cool so that you don’t burn your tastebuds off trying to eat a slice!