Miranda Phipps

I cruised through Carolyn Jewel’s Scandal yesterday afternoon.  It’s such a different romance–very quiet in its tone, but truly a mesmerizing read.  I loved this line especially:

She was near enough now to see his eyes.  Black rimmed his irises, the color bleeding slowly into a solid and unrelenting gray eerily flat of expression, or rather, she thought, the color, like silver gone to tarnish, made them impervious to reflection of his inner thought.

I think there was another bit about layers of silver tarnish in his eyes that I liked as well, but I couldn’t find that one.

And, I really liked the final reveal that Sophie, although she remained true to her vows in practice, did not do so in principle.

Despite a truly hideous day filled with staph infection (my daughter’s not mine) and a crazy project at the day job, I managed to sneak off and see Neil Gaiman read from The Graveyard Book up in Boulder.

It’s odd seeing the physical manifestation of a voice that I’ve come to know through reading his books and following his blog on a daily basis. Odd mostly in that there are no real surprises. Except for the black leather jacket, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise anyway.

And when he told me that Boulder would get to hear the second half of a chapter out of the middle of the book, I felt a little blossom of disappointment, but Neil took care of that very quickly. It was phenomenal, even if I did have to spend the whole time closing my deal on the blackberry.

I ate most of this up in one huge serving of sleeplessness while DH was out of town last week and just finished it up this past weekend. I loved the concept of vampires of beautiful, glittering, irresistible creatures.

Meyer reminded me of how powerful an experience it is to follow the protagonist into a new community and to experience the emotional satisfaction that comes of having your protagonist be accepted by that community. Meyer also does a nice job of knitting all that into the high school experience–one every reader can draw on. I also thought the first person POV worked especially well in this book.

I consumed a huge portion of this book on a plane ride back from Tampa, Florida over the long weekend and finished the thing last night while hubby and I laid in bed and read for three totally indulgent hours. Usually I have to read in 35 minute intervals while walking on the treadmill, so to have such dedicated chunks of time to read was sublime.

McMaster is an expert storyteller—she makes it look so easy and she has such a good sense of what to tweak to make the world she is describing seem real, but not so much that you can’t relate. I LOVED the concept of groundsense (an ability the hero has to sense living creatures—and, critically, non-living creatures–around him), but I had a hard time with the winter/spring romance. As someone who reads for romantic tension, I felt like the novel didn’t offer enough of that in the last act. Part of this, of course, is the difficulty in writing a trilogy about the same couple. There are just going to be points with less dramatic tension. I struggled with the Warprize series for the same reason. But that complaint aside, McMaster is so good, I think I’ll be borrowing the next book in the series from my s-i-l.

I just Eloisa James’s latest book in the Desperate Duchesses series. I powered through it in two days, so clearly I liked it. Her style is so readable–the dialogue is especially entertaining.

I did miss the exchanges between Villiers and the Duchess of Beaumont, though. It troubled me that Jemma didn’t seem to care that Villiers was on death’s door. Villiers is the character I want to read about, and when he spends an entire novel in a delirium, I can’t help but feel a little disappointment.