The Furthest Station (Peter Grant #5.7), Ben Aaronovitch

Always a pleasure to spend time with Peter. I wish it were longer, but I always wish novellas were longer. I liked the ghosts and the mystery -- now can we get back to the main plot? I am dying to know about [spoilers redacted].

Grade: A

#51 in 2017

Soho Dead, Greg Keen

This is a perfectly nice noir, if that's your thing. I like my noir mysteries to have something original about them, or really evocative language. This did neither. On the other hand it didn't go down endless rabbit holes where I forgot all the characters, either. If you want a classic noir this is certainly one.

Grade: C

#50 in 2017

Breakaway (Scoring Chances #1), Avon Gale

Another m/m hockey romance, which I enjoyed, mostly because I really liked Jared Shore. He's a grizzled old veteran of the minor minor leagues, who loves hockey but knows his time playing is almost up. He mets Lane, a hot young prospect, who convinces him to not only get into a relationship, but to try and have the best season of his life, remember what he loves about hockey.

What worked less for me was Lane, who was aggressively weird in a way that made reading his dialogue difficult and confusing sometimes. I fully expected the book to address it somehow, telling us that Lane was on the spectrum, which would have been fine and interesting, but mostly it was hard to follow the conversations, and instead of fun and quirky it was distracting. It's also weird that he'd never had any friends -- almost like an alien dropped into the story, rather than a character with a  background. (His resolution with his parents was also very easy after a whole book of angst.)

Grade: C
#49 in 2017

Empty Net (Scoring Chances #4), Avon Gale

I mean this is the most positive possible way: reading this m/m romance felt like reading fic.

This book was recommended to me because "Laurent is my type of character," which is true (and not the only time that's happened with a character named Laurent). Hockey romance isn't generally my thing, but it's a big enough subgenre that I've read a few, and this one is very enjoyable. Isaac Drake is an out-and-proud captain of a minor-minor hockey team, and then his arch enemy , who spit on him and called him slurs last season gets transferred to his team. Will they learn to work together? Will it turn out that his icy nightmare of a rival, Laurent St. Savoy, has dark secrets and is actually not THAT bad after all? Yeah, of course.

The drama is a little bit over the top (Laurent's backstory is VERY dark, he's dealing with an eating disorder, Isaac was kicked out of his house for being gay and struggles with telling Laurent that he used to do sex work to survive) but the emotional heart of the story is very real. There's a moment toward the end when Laurent is talking to a mental health professional, who tells him that he deserves kindness and love, and he doesn't know how to react, and I had that exact moment in therapy when I was in college.

I read this all in one night. If that particular enemies-to-lovers trope is your jam, you'll definitely enjoy this.

Grade: B
#48 in 2017

The Spring of the Ram, Dorothy Dunnett (The House of Niccolo #2)

I don't know what to say! I still don't love Nicholas like I loved Francis Crawford; I have a much harder time getting a read on his character. Dunnett writes brilliant description, and some of the dialogue here is very funny. I googled something and spoiled myself twice for this book, which took a little of the fun out, which isn't the book's fault. Catherine drove me nuts in a very believable way. I still feel vaguely like the book is implying things I'm not quite picking up on (there is a mysterious and sexy woman who says heavily loaded and implicative things -- this is a trope Dunnett loves). 

Clearly I enjoyed reading it, but I am at a loss to tell you why or why I didn't give it five stars without a few months of thinking about it, or spoiling everything.

Grade: B?
#47 in 2017

An Extraordinary Union (The Loyal League #1), Alyssa Cole

This is a great book. I didn't enjoy it as much as I think other people will because a couple of things about it bugged me, but it was truly enjoyable and wonderful to read a book about a topic I never thought would pop up in a romance novel, and to have it be historical and believable. This is the story of Elle, a free Black woman, who has agreed to go undercover as a slave during the Civil War to get information to help the Union and end the war. She meets Malcolm, who is a Pinkerton detective also undercover, on the same kind of mission. Oh, and importantly -- Malcolm is white. 

It's a fascinating story with no easy resolution. Elle is brilliant and beautiful and Malcolm loves her and respects her and treats her like a human being (whenever he can -- really only when they're alone). Elle loves him but she knows all the problems their relationship would face, even in the North. 

I was frustrated that Elle goes back and forth with Malcolm so many times. She has very, very good reasons not to trust him or want to be with him, and once she does, she seems to immediately change her mind, over and over. They also each get a turn being jealous over situations they know mean nothing to the other person. I was also a little frustrated that Malcolm is incredibly perfect from the very beginning. I can definitely see why the hero of this kind of book needs to be a man who is better than almost every other man; it's the only way it's justifiable that Elle will love him when there is so much to go against their union. But I have realized that as a reader, I always prefer selfish scoundrels or lying assholes who are reformed by love, to men who are fundamentally good and true from the beginning. It's just less interesting to me that way.

Grade: C
#46 in 2017

An Unnatural Vice (Sins of the Cities #2), KJ Charles

The last book in this series was not really my thing; this book VERY MUCH was. I love Justin. He is an amoral schemer who pretends to be a medium and talk to the dead. (Side note: one of my least favorite things in the world is watching someone cold read on television and make people cry. It infuriates me. I can't sit through a commercial for the Long Island Medium without storming out of the room.) Justin is fully aware that what he does is awful, and has nothing but contempt for people who believe in what he does. But it's what he's good at, and he's built up a little family of assistants he needs to look out for. Nathaniel, on the other hand, is a crusading lawyer, who despises what Justin does (but is ridiculously attracted to him). Nathaniel doesn't really get much of an arc in this book, most of the forward movement is Justin's, because Justin is being crushed under the weight of what he does, and what he wants to do, and the idea that maybe, just maybe, he could be someone better if he got the chance. ...Oh, and also the fact that people are trying to kill him for most of this book. Justin is the perfect kind of scoundrel; convinced he is bad through and through, that he doesn't want anything and he doesn't deserve anything, and fiercely unapologetic for the choices he's made. Nathaniel is sure that there's some good inside Justin, even if Justin refuses to see it or admit it. I loved the way they came together and I love this book.

Grade: A

#45 in 2017

On Point (Out of Uniform #3), Annabeth Albert

The last book in this series perfectly hit my favorite tropes, while this one was just enjoyable. Ben and Maddox have been best friends forever, secretly in love with each other forever, and then they have a threesome that makes this super awkward. They decide to try dating, but Ben has a lot of issues about believing that relationships can last, and Maddox just wants to settle down. 

I really felt for Ben, although his flip out at the end felt a little ridiculous, since the book had been hinting about what Maddox was going to decide to do all the way through. I was happy they got together, I'm just not going to remember this book for very long.

Grade: B
#44 in 2017

Niccolo Rising, Dorothy Dunnett

This is a complicated book to review, because Dunnett's other series, the Lymond Chronicles, are my favorite books ever. And so as much as I liked this book, and as much as I told myself over and over not to compare it, of course I inevitably did compare it. It's also complicated because my Dunnett-reading friends haven't read this one yet, and as always there are twists and reveals I don't want to give away. (There great difficulty of getting people to read Dunnett for me, always, is that if you don't sell some of the upcoming plot, Game of Kings is so hard to get into. But there is no series that benefits more from a 100% cold read with no idea where it's going.)

Something I loved: the book is so beautifully written. The language is evocative and warm and describes life in Bruges (and Italy) so wonderfully that the atmosphere is immediate and enveloping. Dorothy's descriptions are so so so good.

Something I didn't love: a lot of this book involves people making very secret and sneaky trade deals. I teach about the alum trade in the Mediterranean Sea and I was still baffled about half the time, trying to keep the various Italian families and city-states straight. I finally worked out what was going on about 75% of the way through, when Felix did, but it meant that a lot of the book was meaningful meetings and people giving each other hints that I wasn't sure the significance of. (In fairness, as a reader of GoK you often have no idea what Lymond is up to or who he's making deals with, either, but there's enough of Will and Christian that it doesn't feel as overwhelming to me.)

Something I loved: Dorothy is so good at writing teenaged boys with a bad attitude. Felix is completely real in both his good points and his bad points, which makes him very frustrating to read about, even while you totally understand where he's coming from. I also loved (or hated, as appropriate) Katelina, and Simon, and Jordan, and Marian, all of whom felt like well-rounded real people. Oh, and Gelis. I'd read a whole book about Gelis.

Something I didn't love: From the very beginning, I felt like I had a grasp on who Francis Crawford was. Sure, his motivations were secret, but he was drunk and charming and sarcastic, with a bitter side and a noble side, and he was not to be trusted. I've read this book twice now and I'm still not entirely sure I get who Nicholas is. The descriptions of him in the first third of this book are baffling, and while I know that different characters see him differently, I never felt like Dorothy totally landed on an explanation of his behavior and attitude that I entirely understood. (No, not even at the end, when you learn a lot more about him.) The book cover describes him as a "good-natured dyer's apprentice who schemes and swashbuckles his way" through history. But that's not totally what happens. I could absolutely love a book about a nice guy who's secretly scheming, or a street-wise apprentice who's smart way above his station and fights his way to the top (which my kindle suggests is the plot). But without spoiling anything, that's not how he's described, especially at the beginning. I liked Nicholas. But I can't love him without understanding him better. Maybe in the next book??

Grade: B
#43 in 2017