The Glom

Sadly, or perhaps not quite sadly, Carolyn and I have both been lost in the glom. It's an exciting place to be but ultimately scary as you lose sight of the real world and are navigating through the world of an author's creation.

Carolyn can talk about her glom since she's been in a few but mine has mostly been KA (yeah, her again). I discovered the Unfinished Heroes series which were her answer to 50 Shades, I guess, because two of the books, Raid and Knight were very bondage/discipline. Knight was icky because he liked to be called Daddy when having sex.

That man needed a shrink more than he needed a woman. **shivers**

Raid was an interesting hero since his woman got the shit beat out of her and was in the hospital and he took off after the guys who did it and never saw her in the hospital once.

Wait... what's that I hear? A team of shrinks being called in for these guys.

The third book was Creed but I read that before and its very meh.

Now I'm reading one of her books with a virgin girl pool hustler which is different. We'll see how that goes.

But I also reread Motorcycle Man and this time it was **shivers deliciously**  Then I read the story of Lanie and Hop and loved that one too.

After these I have some Jill Shalvis and Kristan Higgins to read as well.

More serious glomming coming on.

Sommersgate House by Kristen Ashley

 

 

Blurb:  Douglas Ashton is the cold and unfeeling owner of the gothic Victorian Mansion, Sommersgate House. Julia Fairfax is his stubborn American sister-in-law. After tragedy strikes, Douglas and Julia are forced to live together at Sommersgate and raise his newly orphaned nieces and nephew.

Douglas has no desire to raise his dead sister’s children nor does he want the distraction of the tempting Julia living under his roof. Julia is struggling with grief and trying to make a go in a new country without much help from impossibly handsome but even more impossibly remote Douglas. Not to mention, she has to deal with the active hostility of Douglas’s frosty, Attila-the-Hun-in-a-skirt mother, Monique.

Douglas decides the best way to give the children what they need, get his mother to behave and give himself what he wants is to marry Julia. When he tells her (yes, tells her) she will be his wife, Julia thinks Douglas is (probably) insane. And anyway, she’s decided if she ever has another husband (since the last one wasn’t so great), he was going to be short, balding, have a paunch and worship the ground she walks on (none of these characteristics define Douglas in the slightest).

One more thing, Sommersgate House is haunted by the ghosts of the man who built the house and the woman who was the love of his life. They both died mysteriously at Sommersgate months after it was finished. When they did, a curse settled on the house making it seem strangely alive. And the only way for the beautiful but frightening house to rid itself of this curse is for its owner to find true love.

 

 

This book was definitely a surprise. It was not the Kristen Ashley we've come to know and love and it was definitely not crackalichous. It's not a bad book; in fact it was better written than some of the Colorado and Rock Chick books I've read.

 

Most of her writing tics are gone: no repeating names ad nauseum, no 'then's' beginning three or four sentences in a row, and the result is a surprisingly well written book. The plot takes place in England and even the spelling is English, for example - colour, favourite.

 

There's a Gothic tone over it all and small mysteries and nice people. The plot is very simple: two people falling in love and overcoming some trivial problems during the process.

 

I liked the ghost angle, although they seemed to be very alert ghosts. It was a fun read albeit a little draggy in places.

 

The author bio with this book states Kristen Ashley lives in England, in the West Country, so that would be before she came back home and wrote the Rock Chicks?  Were her tics deliberate?

 

Don't know what I'm saying, it's 3:20 a.m. here and I think I'm finally ready for bed. Be so glad to hear from Ashley fans who have read these very different books..;

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Holiday Schmoliday

I'm going to be a cranky old fart and pfft! on the holidays.

Okay, truth be told, I'm a complete and total dewdrop when it comes to the holidays. I totally love everything about them. I decorate, I bake, I wrap everything in festive holiday wrap and give myself warm snugglies like a crazy bitch.

I am a Christmas Ho-Ho-Ho.

About the only thing I don't like about the holidays is my family. Ha! We're not especially close and we kind of force ourselves to do a pretend lovey-dovey ding-dong thing that I could live without.

Otherwise, get me some eggnog, Elf, and keep the fire crackling!

I always feel like writing holiday stories that I rarely complete. I buy Christmas romances that I never read. I do however, watch all the Lifetime Christmas movies and masturbate with some mistletoe in a holiday buzz.

Carolyn, I will point out, is a grinch. Wish her a Merry Christmas and she'll start snarling that when she was a girl they had to eat reindeer to get through the Canadian winters and Rudolph would made a damned fine red-nosed roast.

So around this time of year we'll just tiptoe around our Southern Canadian cutie and hope no carolers come to her door. Hopefully they learned from the last time when she turned the hose on them and pelted them with mutant gingerbread men.

Ho ho ho indeed.

Kristen Ashley and Epic Romance

I'm on a big old Kristen Ashley glom. It isn't pretty. Hell, it's like watching someone going into a food frenzy, just stuffing themselves until they can't move out of the chair and they look dazed and beyond sated.

So why am I doing this?

I realized about a week ago that KA writes romance that's epic. Huge. It's fated love when two people see each other and it's immediate. But their happiness is jeopardized by their own inner demons, by outer demons (often carrying guns and/or knives) and HUGE misunderstanding.

Oh there are things that drive me crazy, like the heroines are all gorgeous but don't realize that they are. And every single hero talks the same way: "You got two different kinds of sweet and I like them both."

No human male talks the way KA's heroes talk. And if they did, we'd laugh hysterically.

But the romance is HUGE. These are men and women who are willing to uproot their entire lives for one another. They take bullets for the person they love. They're virtuous and honorable and nothing about them is small (except their conversational skills).

These are books romance writers should read. Because when you open up to the complete EPICness of what KA is doing, it becomes a lesson in writing.

Romance should be big. It should be huge. Falling in love should shake up the very foundation of the earth. Nobody should be unchanged by it.

Romance should be big stories with big emotions and sweeping declarations of love. It should disarm the hero, stun the heroine and leave worlds in its wake.

It should leave the readers breathless and drained and turned on.

KA got it. And I'm diving in headfirst and losing myself in the amazing world of love.

The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith

This just goes to prove that we're better at writing than reviewing, We totally suck at reviewing but both of us loved this book so we decided to give it a try. And I'm posting this without Lori's knowledge (don't tell her) because we both agreed it's not up to snuff. Still, it gives me a chance to recommend this book because it's damn good!

 

We don't give a shit about feminism or complaints of rape pertaining to this story. We refuse to apply modern mores to a story written in the future, just as we don't apply them to historicals.

                           Beware - may be spoilers!!

Lori:  I haven't read anything like this ever before. My science-fiction tastes have been more along the Asimov/Heinlein line so an epic romance like Gann would never have been in my radar except that everyone was raving about it (everyone being Jill Myles and Jane from Dear Author).

Carolyn downloaded it into our Kindles and we got to reading.

Summary: Amber's prostitute mother dies, she drags her sister Nicci to sign up to go colonize another planet, the ship is destroyed, crashes on the wrong planet, only a handful of humans live, they meet a religious lizardman and a lot of shit (especially bad shit) happens.

Amber was my idea of an amazing character. I'll admit that one of the reasons I loved her so damned much was because I related to her. Amber is an unattractive, fat woman who is bold, opinionated, not people savvy and immediately the focus of the blame when things go wrong.

However, Amber is also the reason that any of the humans are alive.

Among the humans are sister Nicci, Scott, a handful of fleet men and women who like the sisters, were going to colonize and breed.

From the beginning Amber is the one who guides the people away from the burning craft and saves the survivors lives when the craft explodes. Her push to get them near water ultimately saves their lives.

And her desire to keep them alive by hunting brings her into contact with Meoraq, the lizardman.
The world building in this book is spectacular and the introduction to M (as we'll call him) gives us an understanding that the society he lives in is rigid with rules. M is a sword of (Shuel), a fighter who kills to determine guilt and is allowed sex with any woman he chooses. It's a complicated society where women are subservient, certain people are running the show (like M) and a fall from grace means exile or worse.

M's encounter with the humans is a sign from God and his relationship with Amber becomes the center of the story as both a love story and more. Their slow understanding of each other, their acceptance of how two different species think and live becomes a HUGE story.


Carolyn:

That they are attracted to each other is almost a miracle.

Amber is an atheist. M's whole civilization is controlled by religion. And yet, although they argue and fight they have a tolerance for each other that leads to a deeper relationship.

M is fascinated by (to him) Amber's ugliness, her flat face and lack of language. He tolerates her derision of his religious beliefs and touches her whenever he can.

He has never treated another female like this. Females are nonentities to him, fit only to slack his sexual needs. Amber is as unlike the lizard females as it is possible to be, mentally as well as physically.

I admired M as he tried to keep his worldview within the religious concepts he'd been taught, and yet was open minded enough allow a bit of wiggle room. At first. Then his strength of will carries him through as the wiggle room becomes a vast deception.

These two, Amber and M, complimented each other so well.

I can't say the same for the rest of the crew.


Lori:

Unquestionably, the other characters (human-wise) are the least complex or interesting aspects of the story.

Amber's sister Nicci (who Amber forced along on the ship) is a horrible human being. She uses Amber constantly, turns her back when Amber needs her and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Nicci was so vile that later in the book when she's raped, I didn't care. I wouldn't say she deserved it, nobody deserves rape, but I didn't give a damn about her.

The refugees were sheep and surprisingly weak characters. It was truly, to me, the greatest drawback. Amber's arch-nemesis Scott is the leader of the pack but he's such a nut case it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would follow him.

Amber is presented as so much smarter but so abrasive and unattractive that nobody would listen to her, no matter how right she was.

When the lizardman joins them (or herds the sheep, as it were), Amber's need to be responsible and care for the other humans makes her the only one willing to learn from M and ultimately friend him and more.

I didn't feel the sexual tension between Amber and M was as deeply sexual as it was a crossing of boundaries for both of them. The ways M would touch Amber, would teach her and open his life to her were breath taking. I always believed in him as Amber's hero because he was nothing short of perfectly heroic with her.

I kept waiting for M to grab Amber and run away from the other humans because they were so damned vile.


Carolyn:

If he'd done that he wouldn't have been so heroic. It was his growing respect for Amber that held him back, I think. He couldn't understand why she cared for her horrible sister or the rest of the sheep, but I think he respected her feelings.

The only times he forced her was when she was in danger, ie when full winter set in and he refused to let her continue their journey.

I hated Nicci with a passion, even more than Scott. I felt contempt for all the humans especially those who should not have been sheep - Marie and the 'official' crew. It did serve to isolate Amber though and when she refused to give her rug to Nicci, I almost jumped up and down!

So, Amber started out as a fat, mouthy gal and ended up as a skinny mouthy gal. Starvation will do that for you. I haven't heard any readers complaining that the author turned her into a size 2 or whatever. Have you?


Lori:

They were still calling her fat, I think, after she was skinny.

Now I have always, admittedly, felt the heroine made or unmade a novel for me. Amber was a definite winner for me and yes, mostly because I related to her so completely.

M was a fascinating character and I loved him. But my question to you Ms. Carolyn is: is your new book boyfriend a lizardman or not?


Carolyn:

M was perfect for Amber, not me.

I'm a voyeur and like to spy on character's lives. I don't imagine I'm the heroine nor do I lust after the hero, although I do love me some solid muscle and redeeming character traits.

So I was pleased they could pleasure each other but one thing bugged me - when the inevitable happened it was Nicci that had the explanation.

Nicci??

Really??????

So no, don't have a lizard BF but am very happy they got together and very, very happy to have the woman be the kinky (to him) aggressor. Ha!

And as an addendum, the humans called M a lizard, but I believe he and his people were warm blooded mammals who just happened to have similarities to terrestrial lizards.

Something that confused me: Gann was the name of the planet and, if I'm reading things right, also their name for Hell.

Is that how you saw it?


Lori:

Sorry babe but you forgot... Gann was the name of evil basically and (super duper spoiler alert) the end when they found the recording, remember Gann was the nickname one of the men had and he used it as a joke.

Which leads to something else extraordinary in the world building.

M is a deeply religious character as are many in the story and on the world. Ultimately the truth of the religion and the rules that M and his family (and other families) live by were created falsely to hide the monsters that these men became when filled with rage or lust.

It was a smart piece of writing as explanation and macguffin but it disappointed me in a big way.

M was like a born again Christian but his God seemed to answer his prayers almost constantly. And his ability to control his own feelings because of his religious teachings was admirable.

I think I was disappointed because ultimately choosing to turn the religion and the center of M's life into something else seemed too big to sum up in only a chapter or two.

Or maybe that was just me.


Carolyn:

I know this book was super long but there were still threads left untied.

SPOILERS!!

How was Amber (the only one of her kind) accepted into the indigenous society? How did her pregnancy go? What did she have? What did the baby look like? And what adventures did they have in trying to restructure their world?

Despite the length of the novel and that I was engrossed from the very beginning, it felt unfinished. I would absolutely love a sequel.

 

Hi!

I've really missed this blog. It's lonely blogging by yourself. I'll try to be more mouthy this time 'round, promise.  ;-)

I love this song. Il Divo recorded it especially for the victims of the Japan quake and tsunami. Translated from the Japanese. Hope you enjoy.

And what better way to open shop again than to share some eye candy? Let me check my collection ...

I think Lori intends some housecleaning; I have to go hide my dust bunnies.

We Lied

We're coming back...

Both Carolyn and I have had some life changes. I have a new job where I'm quite happy and Carolyn has no job and she's quite happy. (She retired and just in the nick of time.)

We're still reading and writing and bestest of besties and we missed doing this together so we're coming home.

The only thing is... I just don't feel like an old fart. Maybe a middle aged fart with bad knees, questionable hips, grey hair, a saggy middle (not to mention top and bottom)...

Okay, I'm an old fart.