akadoor’s #CBR5 Review #4: Did You Miss Me? by Karen Rose

I’ve worked in a few bookstores in my life, and the best by far was the Island Bookstore in Corolla, North Carolina.  It was a small, independent bookstore that carried more than just the expected “beach books.”  It was a stone’s throw or two from the Atlantic Ocean, about half a mile from a lighthouse and another half mile from my very favourite house museum, the Whalehead Club.  But the very, very best part was the employee discount: forty-freaking-percent.  And now I’m having trouble remembering why I’m not still working there.  Anyways, needless to say, I bought a lot of books during my summer in Corolla.  Many of them were by Karen Rose.

It was during that summer that I Can See You by Rose was released.  I picked up the hardcover to read during my shift, and got so swept up in that I bought it, took it home, and spent the rest of the night reading it.  The next day, I bought every other Rose book we had in stock.  I subsequently ordered the rest of her backlist.  I’ve been a reader of Rose ever since.  Karen Rose books are exhausting, and I’m not just saying that because I’m incapable of putting them down and invariably finish them around 3 o’clock in the morning.  They’re exhausting because she writes dense, multi-layered stories which all take place in under a week.  Did You Miss Me? was no different.

Read full review here.

akadoor’s #CBR5 Review #3: Crystal Cove by Lisa Kleypas

When I was 13, my dad’s work took him to Seattle and my mother, brother, and I went along. We arrived and almost immediately hopped on a ferry bound for the San Juan Islands. The days we spent there rank as the greatest family vacation we’ve ever taken, beating out the rest (from Argentina to Disney World) to this day. So it was with no small amount of glee that I discovered that Lisa Kleypas, one of my favourite authors, would be basing a series in Friday Harbor, the town on San Juan Island where we had stayed.

Crystal Cove is the 4th book in that series, and I’m sorry I keep reviewing books that are the 3rd and 4th in a series, I’m not doing it on purpose. The series began with Christmas in Friday Harbor, a sweet tale about a man who’s adopted his orphaned niece. The only magic in it (to my recollection) was, well, the magic of Christmas. However, in each subsequent book, Kleypas has gradually brought in more and more elements of the supernatural until we arrive at Crystal Cove, featuring a woman who’s a hereditary witch and a man without a soul.

Read full review here.

akadoor’s #CBR5 Review #2: The Warlock’s Curse by M.K. Hobson

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson arrived on my front porch one chilly October day. It came from Amazon, lacking any sender information. The only thing in the box other than the book simply read “Happy All Hallows Read!” Now, I eventually determined who had sent the book (and by “eventually” I mean “almost immediately”—the list of folks who might send me fantasy novels out of the blue is tragically short), but the unexpected nature of its arrival is important because so much of the experience of reading it was a surprise. The Warlock’s Curse, Hobson’s third book and the third story from her unique alternate America, continued to surprise me at every turn.

The first two books in the series (called “Veneficas Americana”), The Native Star and Hidden Goddess, take place in the 1870s. The setting is softly steampunk (Hobson refers to it as “bustlepunk”), Gilded Age, and definitely magical. The Warlock’s Curse takes place in 1910. The bustles and steam have left the building but Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla have waded into the fray. The heart of the first two books is rooted in magic. The Warlock’s Curse is rooted in science.

Read full review here.

akadoor’s #CBR5 Review #1: Yours Until Dawn by Teresa Medeiros

Yours Until Dawn by Teresa Medeiros was the first new book I read in 2013, but I almost skipped it as my first Cannonball review because it’s a romance novel.  It’s been a long, long time since I felt any shame about reading romances, but there’s still a shameful attitude about reading them and it seemed easier to skip it.  Well, hell with that.  One of the biggest problems with the romance genre is that it often does not examine itself too closely, and I’d rather not be a party to it.  So: this review.

Yours Until Dawn belongs to a category I tend to think of as “Beauty and the Beast.”  This spans across all of the subgenres (that I’ve encountered, anyway), from historical to paranormal to contemporary.  All that’s required is a lonely, angry hero and a patient heroine (I have, on occasion, seen this gender-swapped).  The hero is often scarred or deformed in some way, and a large, empty house frequently plays a part.  Exactly what you would expect of a take–deliberate or not–on Beauty and the Beast.

Read full review here.