Minus One Family Member
Jul. 7th, 2019 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutToday, A. and I spent the day at home. Like, the whole day. I think I went out for a walk, and M. came over for a visit.
R. took T. to sleepaway camp. It is very quiet here.
ETA:
Oh right! Book reviews.
_The Cowboy_
I was bored and look! JAK dropped the third in the Legends and Legacies (I might have that slightly wrong) recently so I noticed, bought it and read it. Fun! I may go back and read the whole trilogy (loosely tied together thematically, and 3 women friends who are all romance novelists, so all kinds of meta here).
The title character Did Our Heroine Wrong about a year ago, when he dated her without telling her he was competing with her boss to acquire a third company. When she found out, she told her boss and quit that job, because of the obvious loyalty conflict, and he dumped her, because he was mad that he told her boss. This is pretty standard contemporary romance stuff from Back In the Day (I have no idea; maybe it still is now) and I have read other JAK novels with similar content. As a Second Chance Romance, a chunk of the book involves the usual unpleasant maneuvering to get everyone together long enough to hash the whole thing out. This one is a little unusual, in that there is clear awareness on everyone’s part that this is unpleasant maneuvering — it is quite transparent and everyone discusses the transparency as it is developing. It is really fun, too, in the final Round Two of conflict between her old boss and The Cowboy, that they continue the argument.
SPOILERS SERIOUSLY DO YOU EVEN KNOW ME
They continue the argument right through a runaway marriage in Vegas and apparently their wedding night. Not on page, fortunately — ugh! — but it is mentioned when The Cowboy calls off his revenge on the boss and the two decide to take off their suit jackets and do this the old fashioned way (because after all, the old boss DID misrepresent his relationship with his administrative assistant, which is Not Cool, and an Old Skool Wrong Requiring Righting By the Hero).
Without the meta, this would really be a very Un OK book — potentially a romp, but not ok at all. With the meta, it stays in delightfully problematic land, and worth a lot of thinking about how people handle transitions in social mores.
_Fit_First in the Fit Trilogy by Rebekah Weatherspoon
I bought this a while ago and did not read it. So, in the spirit of, hey, it is sitting there, if it is awful, you can delete it, but you might as well try it.
It was pretty good. I am not sure it is good enough to read the next in the series (which is saying something, because it is short, as a novella). Our heroine is a producer? In Reality TV cooking land. She has one good friend (also works on the show with her — they have come up from gophering coffee together and are loyal to each other, altho not always the best influence on each other), and spends all her time working. Faye drags her off to drink too much, eat too much sugary dessert type things, and, eventually, to a class at Curves, er, Pinks, run by a Cross Fit, er, I cannot even remember trainer. Margaret pulls Violet aside at the end of class and recommends Grant Gibson as a personal trainer for her. Violet sets up a coffee meet up with Grant, and the lines are immediately blurred by him between whether he will be her trainer and help her meet her fitness goals, or whether he will be her Dom and, er, whatever.
This is actually the really interesting part. She calls bullshit immediately, and he knows he screwed up and backs down. She later calls him up, and asks him if he is a chubbie chaser or has fetishes related to her ancestry. She is straight up awesome in this interaction and also, clearly, using biting humor to make her point. And it is biting AND funny. On some level, I wish this had been a Chick Lit book with a whole series of losers before finally finding a Good Person to Date, and this guy could have just been roadkill on the way. OTOH, he is super likable right from the beginning, so I cannot fault the author for deciding to really work with this flawed pair.
There are so, so, so many obnoxious D/s tropes going on here. Fortunately, there is also a whole lot of remarkably good actual fitness training going on. Like, he has her food journal with a focus on honesty and completeness rather than trying to make immediate dietary changes. He takes her for walks and slowly increases distance and intensity. He makes it pleasant enough and do-able enough and denatures the shame spiral so she starts adding more walks on her own between sessions.
The remaining closet aspects of sexual minorities play out in the breakup
OH SERIOUSLY SPOILERS HOW DID YOU MAKE IT THIS FAR ANYWAY
I particularly liked that Grant had realized that he needed to completely unwind out of the professional relationship and he also needed to do a lot more open negotiation about the D/s relationship if they were going to have any chance at the long term intimate partnership he really wants out of the whole deal. And he had a good plan in place for how to do that before Violet dumped him.
For all that Faye causes all kinds of trouble for Violet, I also liked that she was not friendship roadkill. I liked how that drama played out, and Faye and Violet figured out how to move forward.
So. Lots of human, understandable bad judgment that does not turn into friendship or relationship roadkill or people being labeled as Teh Evil That Can Never Change. Very nice! OTOH, I would really hate for anyone reading this bad judgment to think, oh, see, it CAN work out! Yikes.
_January Girl_ / _Enemies to Lovers_ (first in Wilder Irish series) by Mari Carr
There was this really long series by Carr about a bunch of siblings and their dad and some other assorted kind and a bar in Baltimore and etc. It was pretty fun. Now, the siblings, having all paired off, are all grown up and have kids of their own who are now in the process of dating. Grandpa (Pop Pop) is still around, but some of the offspring run or work in the bar and the 2nd floor is a dorm for gen 3. The oldest of generation 3 is working as a lawyer (with another member of gen 3) trying to help people struggling with the various things that can go wrong in life. About half their clients pay, and they get some in barter and they do not live high so it is sort of working, until Lucas Whiting and his dad decide they want to buy the bar and everything around it and redevelop it.
Again, a D/s relationship that starts in a really, really, really bad way. There is a fair amount of Rich Dude’s Stuff described as well, along with Oh I Could Not Possibly Accept This Expensive Present and etc.
SPOILERS DO I EVEN NEED TO SAY THIS AGAIN
Inevitably, the conflict of the two of those dating was going to result in an ugly break and it does, altho not without resulting in some significant change in Lucas. He muscles his dad into backing off on the bar (well, of course that was going to happen), and the way that plays out is actually really interesting and appealing on many levels. Carr has taken some pains to show that the death of Lucas’ half brother really affected him, and he had already tied that to the way his family did things as a family and in a corporate context. Seeing Cait’s family in action showed him a viable alternative and he took it when he could figure out how.
I really did read all three of those in one day, when I have not read much for a while lately. Possibly, I will read some more.
R. took T. to sleepaway camp. It is very quiet here.
ETA:
Oh right! Book reviews.
_The Cowboy_
I was bored and look! JAK dropped the third in the Legends and Legacies (I might have that slightly wrong) recently so I noticed, bought it and read it. Fun! I may go back and read the whole trilogy (loosely tied together thematically, and 3 women friends who are all romance novelists, so all kinds of meta here).
The title character Did Our Heroine Wrong about a year ago, when he dated her without telling her he was competing with her boss to acquire a third company. When she found out, she told her boss and quit that job, because of the obvious loyalty conflict, and he dumped her, because he was mad that he told her boss. This is pretty standard contemporary romance stuff from Back In the Day (I have no idea; maybe it still is now) and I have read other JAK novels with similar content. As a Second Chance Romance, a chunk of the book involves the usual unpleasant maneuvering to get everyone together long enough to hash the whole thing out. This one is a little unusual, in that there is clear awareness on everyone’s part that this is unpleasant maneuvering — it is quite transparent and everyone discusses the transparency as it is developing. It is really fun, too, in the final Round Two of conflict between her old boss and The Cowboy, that they continue the argument.
SPOILERS SERIOUSLY DO YOU EVEN KNOW ME
They continue the argument right through a runaway marriage in Vegas and apparently their wedding night. Not on page, fortunately — ugh! — but it is mentioned when The Cowboy calls off his revenge on the boss and the two decide to take off their suit jackets and do this the old fashioned way (because after all, the old boss DID misrepresent his relationship with his administrative assistant, which is Not Cool, and an Old Skool Wrong Requiring Righting By the Hero).
Without the meta, this would really be a very Un OK book — potentially a romp, but not ok at all. With the meta, it stays in delightfully problematic land, and worth a lot of thinking about how people handle transitions in social mores.
_Fit_First in the Fit Trilogy by Rebekah Weatherspoon
I bought this a while ago and did not read it. So, in the spirit of, hey, it is sitting there, if it is awful, you can delete it, but you might as well try it.
It was pretty good. I am not sure it is good enough to read the next in the series (which is saying something, because it is short, as a novella). Our heroine is a producer? In Reality TV cooking land. She has one good friend (also works on the show with her — they have come up from gophering coffee together and are loyal to each other, altho not always the best influence on each other), and spends all her time working. Faye drags her off to drink too much, eat too much sugary dessert type things, and, eventually, to a class at Curves, er, Pinks, run by a Cross Fit, er, I cannot even remember trainer. Margaret pulls Violet aside at the end of class and recommends Grant Gibson as a personal trainer for her. Violet sets up a coffee meet up with Grant, and the lines are immediately blurred by him between whether he will be her trainer and help her meet her fitness goals, or whether he will be her Dom and, er, whatever.
This is actually the really interesting part. She calls bullshit immediately, and he knows he screwed up and backs down. She later calls him up, and asks him if he is a chubbie chaser or has fetishes related to her ancestry. She is straight up awesome in this interaction and also, clearly, using biting humor to make her point. And it is biting AND funny. On some level, I wish this had been a Chick Lit book with a whole series of losers before finally finding a Good Person to Date, and this guy could have just been roadkill on the way. OTOH, he is super likable right from the beginning, so I cannot fault the author for deciding to really work with this flawed pair.
There are so, so, so many obnoxious D/s tropes going on here. Fortunately, there is also a whole lot of remarkably good actual fitness training going on. Like, he has her food journal with a focus on honesty and completeness rather than trying to make immediate dietary changes. He takes her for walks and slowly increases distance and intensity. He makes it pleasant enough and do-able enough and denatures the shame spiral so she starts adding more walks on her own between sessions.
The remaining closet aspects of sexual minorities play out in the breakup
OH SERIOUSLY SPOILERS HOW DID YOU MAKE IT THIS FAR ANYWAY
I particularly liked that Grant had realized that he needed to completely unwind out of the professional relationship and he also needed to do a lot more open negotiation about the D/s relationship if they were going to have any chance at the long term intimate partnership he really wants out of the whole deal. And he had a good plan in place for how to do that before Violet dumped him.
For all that Faye causes all kinds of trouble for Violet, I also liked that she was not friendship roadkill. I liked how that drama played out, and Faye and Violet figured out how to move forward.
So. Lots of human, understandable bad judgment that does not turn into friendship or relationship roadkill or people being labeled as Teh Evil That Can Never Change. Very nice! OTOH, I would really hate for anyone reading this bad judgment to think, oh, see, it CAN work out! Yikes.
_January Girl_ / _Enemies to Lovers_ (first in Wilder Irish series) by Mari Carr
There was this really long series by Carr about a bunch of siblings and their dad and some other assorted kind and a bar in Baltimore and etc. It was pretty fun. Now, the siblings, having all paired off, are all grown up and have kids of their own who are now in the process of dating. Grandpa (Pop Pop) is still around, but some of the offspring run or work in the bar and the 2nd floor is a dorm for gen 3. The oldest of generation 3 is working as a lawyer (with another member of gen 3) trying to help people struggling with the various things that can go wrong in life. About half their clients pay, and they get some in barter and they do not live high so it is sort of working, until Lucas Whiting and his dad decide they want to buy the bar and everything around it and redevelop it.
Again, a D/s relationship that starts in a really, really, really bad way. There is a fair amount of Rich Dude’s Stuff described as well, along with Oh I Could Not Possibly Accept This Expensive Present and etc.
SPOILERS DO I EVEN NEED TO SAY THIS AGAIN
Inevitably, the conflict of the two of those dating was going to result in an ugly break and it does, altho not without resulting in some significant change in Lucas. He muscles his dad into backing off on the bar (well, of course that was going to happen), and the way that plays out is actually really interesting and appealing on many levels. Carr has taken some pains to show that the death of Lucas’ half brother really affected him, and he had already tied that to the way his family did things as a family and in a corporate context. Seeing Cait’s family in action showed him a viable alternative and he took it when he could figure out how.
I really did read all three of those in one day, when I have not read much for a while lately. Possibly, I will read some more.