Get it while it's hot...

I’m taking a break from my nonstop writing orgy (32K since Thursday) to pimp the book of a friend. Now, I just bought my copy today, so you will have to wait a bit for me to rant and rave about Evie Byrne’s new novella, Dante’s Inferno, but I’ve read another book of hers that will be coming out soon from Samhain, and I’m currently reading one of her works in progress, and they are both fab-u-lous.

And if you want a professional opinion, just check out Mrs. Giggles’ review of Dante’s Inferno.

Not bad for book number one, eh? So buy yourself a copy. Get hooked.

And now, back to my regularly scheduled lack of blogging.

I know we have had our differences in the past. And, ok, I am willing to admit that much of the animosity between us came from me. Me with my mutterings of “It’s so boring and flat!” or “It’s so hot!” and “They should split it into three states just so you’ll feel like you’re getting somewhere when you have to drive through it.”

But this last road trip, I saw a different side of you, Texas. I saw a softer side, a prettier side. I’d like to say I saw a less swelteringly hot side, but you are Texas and this is July–I might as well wish for a unicorn to gallop up to my door with a winning MegaLotto ticket pressed between its pearly teeth.

Anyway, Texas, the point is, even though I know many a kind soul who was born or who lives within your borders, I’d always secretly suspected they were a tad heat-addled when they swore to me that you were “beautiful country” or even “God’s country”. But that was likely because I hadn’t yet been to Texas Hill Country, which aptly illustrates both of the afore-mentioned descriptions. Lovely.

Oh, Texas, I’m so sorry I thought poorly of you. But I’ve changed. I now appreciate your many, many, many miles of smoothly-paved, well-tended roads. Your vast, wide-open vistas, and bright blue skies, and your numerous roadside shrines to oil, cattle and BBQ.

In addition to your many wonderful sights, you are also home to some wonderful people. You are home to the kind yet wise-cracking stock from which sprang my beloved SmartAss, and you are home to the talented and charming Ms Sherry Thomas (who was kind enough to let me talk her ear off for quite a while–Sorry Sherry!) and her wonderful family.

One last thing, Texas: You may not know this, but I once wrote a story that started out in a BBQ restaurant in a small Texas town. The kind with a Victorian-era court house square, and a park with a gazebo and a bronze statue. I gave up the story, or, at least the part that was set in the restaurant in Texas because I figured I just didn’t know enough about Texas to make it realistic. But on this latest trip, Texas, you gave me the town and the courthouse, and the park with the gazebo and the statue. And then, a bit later, you gave me the restaurant, too.

This abandoned Bar-B-Q is pretty much the setting I’d imagined for that long ago story. Everything from the sign to the porch to the windows. The only thing missing is the green linoleum floor on the inside, but I won’t hold it against you, TX. You gave me back a story I thought I couldn’t write. You set my imagination off in a million different directions. When I finish the current crop of Works in Progress on my schedule, you can bet I’m going to dig up that old story. I’m going to resurrect the BBQ, and I owe it all to you, Texas.

I’m sorry I doubted you. Thanks for everything.

XOXO

bettie

Now that I’ve read it, I wish I hadn’t liked it quite so much. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have read it so quickly. And if I hadn’t read it so quickly, I would have had more time to enjoy it.

Private Arrangements is a grand book. Really, that’s the only word I can think of to describe it, except, perhaps, “delicious” and Delicious happens to be the title of Sherry Thomas’s next book, which I will be buying the day it comes out in August, 2008, so I really should conserve that word for further use this summer. And speaking of this summer, expect another terse blog post telling you to go away. I apologize, in advance, for my future rudeness, but if today was any indication, I won’t be in my right mind.

I should start by saying, this is not a review. I’m lousy at reviewing, and I’m suspect, besides, since Sherry Thomas wrote a lovely double review of my novellas Ember and Like a Thief in the Night for Dear Author back in January which probably sold more copies of Like a Thief than all of my confused, sorry little attempts to promote the story, combined. But please don’t think I am biased just because I have reason to be, because if you do, you will miss out on one of the best historical romances ever. Ever!

You think I’m exaggerating. I must admit, I’m prone to hyperbole. What I love, I love, and I can’t shut the hell up about it. Which usually leads people to nod and smile as they back away from me. So I try to tone it down. I try to mention any possible flaw in a book when I recommend it so that people won’t think I’m some sort of blindly rabid fan girl. So that people will think I’m reasonable.

This time, I’ll just admit it: I’m not reasonable. Technically speaking, Private Arrangements’ wind-up to the end was a little slow, and the end felt a little fast, but really, that’s just me grasping at straws trying to think of something critical to say about a book I devoured in three hours and forty-two minutes, and plan to start rereading at a more leisurely pace once I finish this post.

You must understand, when I read this book, I got shivers. The experience was akin to the first time I read a book by Judith Ivory, Loretta Chase or other authors from the very short list of names on my Read Everything They Ever Wrote list and Keeper Shelf (actually, it’s more of a cabinet…).

I didn’t think about the writing, or the plot, or wonder where it was going. I just read. Page after page. I was entranced, insatiable, totally p0wned. I could not put it down. To be blunt: Sherry Thomas made me her bitch, and I liked it!

I was swept away by the grand, Gilded-Age setting (note, I love this time period, and I wish there were more novels set in it), and the grand passion between Gigi and Camden. The hero and heroine are intelligent, beautiful, rich, passionate, larger-than-life…and they are idiots. Complete, utter idiots. They are complicated, proud and obsessed — and completely irrational because of it. I adored them.

The plot is this: When Gigi and Camden were young, they were terribly in love. But love made him stubbornly noble, and her passionately deceitful. When his nobility met her deceit, the clash of two such indomitable, unreasonable personalities drove them apart. Camden rejected Gigi and put an ocean between them.

The story begins eleven years later, when Gigi has filed for divorce. Camden returns to England from New York to tell Gigi that he will grant her a divorce–if she will give him an heir. Huh? That seems backwards and dumb and completely illogical. But I totally bought it because these characters are experts at deceiving themselves. They are each their own worst enemy.

Those two, their love is like a blues song; it’s like the tastiest type of tragedy–the kind where it isn’t fate or the actions of villains that keep the lovers apart, but their own human flaws and foolish pride. They push, they pull, they rage, plot and insult — and in every instant, in every action, it is achingly apparent to the reader that these two characters are still madly, passionately in love. Oh, the drama! It’s delicious.

As the story unfolds, they begin to relate to each other as grown-ups instead of hormonal, over-dramatic young people. Camden comes to understand why Gigi did what she did, and Gigi experiences a bit of Camden’s old stubborn nobility. It’s lovely.

Also lovely is the secondary plot involving Gigi’s social climbing mother. I love the nuances to her character. She could easily have been the villain of the piece, a wretched caricature of a modern-day stage mother in historical drag. Instead, she is complicated, intelligent, self-deprecating, and, eventually, self-aware. In fact, all of the secondary characters are wonderfully well-drawn, with flaws and virtues all their own.

This “not a review” is getting pretty long. I suppose I should wrap up the love fest so I can start my rereading, but first, I need to say a few words about the writing: it’s wonderful. Smooth, sophisticated, elegant and intelligent, the narrative carried me along, never talking down, never dumbing down (I’ll post examples later–I was so busy reading, I forgot to mark my favorite passages). And, oh, that vocabulary. :sigh:

Private Arrangements is all the things I’ve always loved about historical romance. It’s a vivid, intense, Technicolor-bright tale of compelling characters and dramatic love painted across the wide, glittering canvas of a fascinating historical era. It’s one of three books I’ve read this year that I’m going to press into the hands of friends who love to read as I say, “You must read this. It’s grand.”

Now, since I was lucky enough to win an early copy of this book in a contest on Dear Author, I’m holding a contest to give away the copy I would have bought at precisely 11 am on March 25 from the Borders on Lake Ave (no Amazon–I hate to wait.) to someone who comments on this post. The deadline is Friday, March 28, 2007. As with the Dear Author contest, the catch here is that the winner will have to mention the novel in a forum, or blog post.

But come back on March 25th when I’ll give away the copy of Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas that I would have bought, if I hadn’t been so lucky as to win a copy in the Dear Author contest.

1. Ann Aguirre has given me money. Not to review this book, but to make a promotional bookmark. Grimspace had been on my Must Read list for quite a while, and I was so eager to read it that I asked Ann to include an ARC as part of my payment. That’s me. I Will Work for Good Reads.
2. The lovely cover of Grimspace may appear innocuous, but don’t be fooled. It is made of flypaper. Pick it up, and it will be glued to your hand until you turn the last page. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
3. I’ve tried to write my thoughts on Grimspace without going off on a tangent about the Romance genre, what it is, where it’s going, and what it should be. I tried, really, but this addictive, fast-paced picaresque sci-fi action-adventure novel is also a damned good romance novel. And for me, it highlights things I want from Romance, but don’t often get.

The Book
The episodic plot of Grimspace follows interstellar navigator Sirantha Jax as she is broken out of prison by a rag-tag band of mercenaries out to end the Farwan Corporation’s monopoly on interstellar travel by setting up their own navigator academy, with Jax as the instructor. The group travels from place to place, usually leaving destruction in their wake. But as the book progresses, the action-packed journey through space becomes secondary to Jax’s emotional journey from the crash that killed her lover–a crash for which she has been blamed and imprisoned, and for which she blames herself–through grief, peace, and into love with her new pilot, March. March and Jax are both broken people in the process of putting themselves back together after tragic events and misspent lives. The touching thing about their story is that they know each other’s faults and strengths, and fall in love not despite this knowledge, but because of it.

Jax is a complicated, twisty pragmatist. She’s not lovable, noble or sweet, but she’s real in a way that makes her story compelling, and the ending emotionally satisfying. We see the action from inside her head in first-person present tense. You may think you have problems reading first-person present tense, but Aguirre’s novel will convince you that you don’t. The narrative style is much like Jax herself–tough, unflinching, immediate, and marbled through with lovely threads of imagery and phrasing that linger in your mind after you’ve turned the page, after you’ve closed the cover.

Possessor of the mysterious and rare “J” gene, Jax facilitates interstellar travel by guiding ships through grimspace with the help of a pilot. During the trip through grimspace, the pilot and navigator are mentally linked, bound up in each other’s heads, privy to the other’s private thoughts. When I closed the cover on Grimspace, I felt like Jax was tangled up in my thoughts, too. Great characters stay with you like that, and right now, Jax is sharing space in a corner of my brain with some of my other favorite first-person narrators like Hammett’s nameless Continental Op, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, Baird’s Cass, Banbury’s Jill, and Carey’s Phedre. (They all hate each other, of course, but pass the time playing poker while they wait for me to reread their books.)

Maybe I’m just a sucker for flawed heroes and heroines, but characters like Jax and March are something I’d like to see more of in the romance genre. People do not have to be perfect to fall in love. Heroines do not have to be selfless martyrs to be worthy of love, heroes don’t have to save the day every time to be macho or attractive.

But for all my talk of romance, Grimspace, still works as a straight-up sci-fi genre novel. Aguirre’s imagined universe is a diverse, vast, violent, wide-open wild west of a setting, corrupt, confusing, and stuffed with possibilities. Good genre novels are often praised as “transcending genre” which is a backhanded complement if ever I’ve heard one. Grimspace doesn’t transcend the genre, it expands it. It fucks with gender stereotypes, and genre expectations, providing both the kick-ass action adventure you’d expect from a traditional action sci-fi tale, and emotional introspection, and a newfangled type of romance.

With its flawed, fascinating protagonist, its science fiction setting, and its blend of action, adventure and romance, Grimspace is not for strict genre traditionalists, for readers who like perfect heroes, or for the faint of heart*. It’s not perfect, but I thought it was one hell of a read–engrossing, entertaining, exciting. Aguirre has written a sequel, and I’m already brainstorming ways to get my grubby mitts on an advance copy.
*edited to clarify who “everyone” might be.

My ARC of Ann Aguirre’s Grimspace arrived in the mail today. If her vast Grimspace Publicity Juggernaut has somehow missed you, Grimspace is an exciting new sci-fi novel which Jane of Dear Author recently reviewed very favorably and of which Sharon Shinn said the following:

An irresistable blend of action and attitude. Sirantha Jax doesn’t just leap off the page–she storms out, kicking, cursing and mouthing off. No wonder her pilot falls in love with her; readers will, too.

This book is one of my top five awaited reads for 2008. I wanted to read this book so much that when Ann asked if she could hire me to do a bookmark for Grimspace, I said, “Love to, but you have to give me an ARC.”

And now my ARC is here, in all of its pristine, white paper covered glory. So, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go read.

You may have read her book reviews on I Swear it’s Not Chick Porn, or her short story in “The Serial” but if you haven’t read her blog, you are missing out. Her blog posts totally rock. They’re insightful, interesting, and thought-provoking. They are, in short, the kind of blog posts I would want to write if a magical fairy one day floated down from the heavens and blessed me with the gift of Good Bloggery.

She has a marvelous ongoing series of posts on classifications of Romance novels. Her posts on fairytales are tons of fun. And she dares to ask the question, “What in the bloody hell is up with the anatomically misplaced hymens in so many Romance novel love scenes.” Okay, maybe she didn’t say “what in the bloody hell” because as she has wisely pointed out, “why in the bloody hell” is not terribly British.

Anyway, point is, this is a blog that always gets me thinking, and if you haven’t read it, you should give it a try.

Yeah, What She Said is an ongoing series in which Bettie will discuss the blogs she reads instead of writing her own blog.