Happy 4th! Administrivia

My last post was on June 21. I will go back and do some back-dated posts for our recent trip. However, I may or may not go back and fully repopulate something for every date.

The last few days before departure on June 25 were hectic, because with all the snow days last winter, school continued through to the 27th or thereabouts for my kids. They were already watching movies during school hours, so I don’t feel like I did any harm taking them out early to go to Grand Tetons National Park and Yellowstone National Park. We had a good time and are happy to be back.

JAK Stephanie James _Fabulous Beast_

This is a reprint, that lists both names. The original was from April 1984. My sister brought me a paperback to read on vacation. Thank you!

Our Heroine, Tabitha “Tabby” goes on a cruise, because she would sort of like to be a different person than the bookstore owning, divorced by a guy she never should have married because she was too boring woman about to turn 30. While on the cruise, picking up dragon tchotchkes as one does in 1984 — she has a thing about medieval bestiaries — she stumbles over (literally) a beat up Devlin, the hero, also a passenger on the boat. She drops her packages, gets him to a taxi and back to the boat where she delivers him to the onboard clinic, infirmary, wtf, and then nurses him back to health herself, thus exercising her bossier side quite safely.

Meanwhile, Devlin was in the alley beat up after stuffing the guy he was in a fight with into a dumpster. He was there to do some sort of covert pickup something or other, and later on, after Dev and Tabby had misunderstood themselves into a sexual relationship that might or might not survive the cruise, Dev’s covert ops activities drag Tabby into them (because this is, after all, a JAK romantic suspense novel).

Tabitha cuts and runs, and contemplates what she has learned from her abbreviated cruise ship adventure. She throws herself a 30th Birthday party (hey, spoilers! Also, duh spoilers!). It goes super well, altho while her efforts to pick up a Hot Younger Man are largely successful, they are both too drunk to follow through and wind up snoring on her sofas, conveniently In Flagrante something or other when Dev finally reappears in Tabitha’s life.

There’s a lot here that is familiar, and a lot here that is troublesome. Dev’s behavior is a bit retrograde even by mid-1980s standards, but it is _appalling_ by 2018 standards. OTOH, you _can_ frame what these two are up to as a covert 24/7 kink thing. Pretty easily, actually. So if you are tied into kink enough to find takedown scenes HAWT this might really work for you. But if the whole idea of someone being forceful in a romantic context makes you ill, then you should really stay away.

Sadly, I got a huge kick out of it, and I think this may be the first time I’ve read this one. I was a little bummed there was no grotto scene BUT there is a maze! Trade offs!

#24

_Snob Zones_, Lisa Prevost

#25

Subtitled “Fear, Prejudice and Real Estate” and featuring places like Darien (Auntie Mame’s “Aryan from Darien” remark is discussed), Ossipee (oh, New Hampshire) and a variety of other towns, New England and otherwise, Prevost’s book was written over a period of time. Some parts were published in the NYT. Some parts pre-date the bust; some are post. None are from the most recent years of massive increase in prices and homelessness. Seattle was still looking pretty good when this was written. Ooops!

Prevost’s perspective is unambiguous: she doesn’t approve of slam-the-door attitudes. She never calls it that — she uses the more standard NIMBY. But I like slam-the-door better. It captures the idea that I get to move to some place and then stop change cold, including new entrants. NIMBY includes a lot of other stuff.

Prevost does _not_ chalk everything up to racism, which honestly, I think is good. Racism is real, and a lot of snob zoning has disproportionate racial impact and that is also real. Classism is _also_ real, and a lot of snob zoning is more about classism than it is about race. Many of these communities are perfectly happy to welcome people of color who can afford the results of four acre minimum lot size. They are _NOT_ perfectly happy to welcome “white” people who can’t.

I could wish that Prevost’s discussion of business interests backing legislation that undermines snob zoning in the interest of workforce housing had been more extensive. On the other hand, that probably is because I wish this were happening a lot more than it is. It’s hard to cover something that is as nascent as business interest support of workforce housing.

Lots of great stories here, altho I could easily imagine that some readers might take Great Offense at the author’s undisguised contempt for people who oppose affordable housing. I know I have a bunch of neighbors who are currently freaking the fuck out about a house down the road that is due to be torn down and replaced with a small cluster of four houses. They also freaked out about the parcel they _thought_ was wet that had an $800K house built on it (I really like that house — I also like the Chinese-American family that bought it). And before I moved here, they freaked out about the condos built down the street across the road from the school campus. And they freaked out about the people who owned the land my house was built on selling it and it being subdivided into two houses. They also freaked out about the idea that the sewer might be extended to the loop I walk around and that I live on (my house is on the sewer). They are Concerned Citizens who fear what might happen if the sewer is extended. I mean, _apartments_. They could _happen_. And _traffic_.

But if you are like me, and you want people to move into your neighborhood, and make it a vibrant, changing, diverse place where interesting things happen like good restaurants, and you value walkability and want to share it with more people by building more housing near things like commuter rail stations, you might just love this book.

_Iron and Magic_, Ilona Andrews It's awesome! SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

#26

So. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Now that my entire, very teeny tiny readership has gone off to read the book _first_ since I said It's awesome! before all those spoiler warnings, I can now gush.

Squeeeeeeeee!

I think everyone who reads romantic fiction extensively has a complicated relationship with certain romance novel tropes. But there are few romance novel tropes as complex as when you take someone who has been a big bad guy for a bunch of books in a series, and spin him off in a new series where he is the romantic lead.

Yikes.

Hugh d'Ambray gets married.

Of course it is a marriage of convenience! Because. Romance. Tropes!

Obviously, this is a spinoff _series_ in the Kate Daniels universe. There are reading order directions at the beginning of the book. You do You. Also, much like with the unrelated series, Hidden Legacy, I pretty much finished this book and wanted to turn right around and reread it. I _didn't_ because I wanted to squee first, so I went off and read Snob Zones instead. And parts of other things. But what I really wanted to do was turn back to page one and start right over again.

Did I mention this was awesome?

Book starts with Hugh trying to drink his way to oblivion, because of the Void that resulted when Roland (not my husband) (aka Nimrod) (and yeah, he's actually much worse than you might think, altho arguably his childhood was so fucked up he might be _somewhat_ justified. No, I don't mean that) cut Hugh off when he failed to deliver Kate to her dad, the aforementioned Nimrod. Not _a_ nimrod. Nimrod.

Hugh's immortality is thus gone; we don't really know his probable lifespan at this point. But really, who among us really does? There are buses everywhere, not to mention boiling pools of acidic or alkaline water. (Really. I just visited dozens of them. Many smell like _actual_ brimstone. Which is to say, sulphur. I did mention the acid, right?)

Hugh doesn't really know _what_ he has left, and he has to be brought back to sobriety with a healthy dose of guilt from what remain of his Dogs. Landon Nez is hunting them. Successfully. So Hugh has to come up with a base, and what his gang comes up with is the marriage of convenience to a woman of some mystery, Elara, the White Lady, who has some kind of super powerful magic, who might be incarnating some kind of chaos goddess, that might be feeding off of sacrifices. It's all pretty sketchy. There's definitely 4000 or so committed followers of the Lady, and she exerts an awful lot of effort to stop them worshiping her. None of that, no.

In addition to the threat from Landon Nez, which is substantial, and Roland, probably a bit distant, and from the Atlanta Pack and Kate's friends in general (don't forget: he's given them all a lot of reasons to hate him), there is a mysterious new threat, which the Dogs call Mrogs, basically, the magical boogie men.

Hugh obviously can handle Landon Nez. (Barrels! We find out what is in them! This really felt very D&D campaign-y. In a good way.) And the Mrogs dial up slowly enough that Hugh and the Dogs can come up with successful strategies for coping with them, too. It does not hurt that Elara has seers in her crowd of covens, along with her own hefty dose of chaos magic. Much trickier is trying to overcome the terrifying reputation Hugh has cultivated while in service to Roland. He's not real sure what _he_ will do if Roland asks him to come back, which means that any reassurances he might make that he's not working for Roland so things are different don't mean much to anyone (and to give Hugh credit, he doesn't bother to reassure anyone. Quite the contrary. It is Even More Terrifying).

There is so much in this corner of Kentucky to think about, in fact, that the book feels short. And yet it kept me up two nights running (granted, I was on vacation, and so couldn't really commit all my time to it. But I tried!).

The book does _not_ leave you hanging in terms of sexual er, resolution? Consummation? It's a one night stand, embedded in a marriage of convenience, part of a deal made between Elara and Hugh to ensure he doesn't decide to die gloriously in battle just to be shut of all the hassle and pain of the Void. That whole sequence is delightfully dirty.

Other bits of note: Hugh goes to get a horse, and picks up a junior psychopath -- I really like that kid. I'm looking forward to seeing more of him. The horse, meanwhile, is white, huge, and people see something shimmering on its head sometimes when the magic is up. Oh, yeah. Hugh is riding a white unicorn. Awesome.

HEY I DID MENTION SPOILERS!!! GO AWAY!

The end of the book is particularly delicious. In oh so many romantic suspense novels, the hero and heroine team up to solve some sort of problem, and she is put in jeopardy towards the end of the book and must be rescued heroically and somewhat violently -- but not too violently, except sometimes, when it is That Kind of Book -- by the Hero. It's a thing. Well, this time, it is gender bent. Landon Nez kidnaps Hugh and turns him over to Roland after a spot of torture. (Ew. Altho honestly, he has completely earned it. And more. Which he knows.) Roland is trying to sweet talk him into returning and Hugh isn't having it at all. In fact, Hugh makes a blood needle (a little too damaged and drained to produce more than that) and asks why he can still do that (nope, Landon and Roland don't have an answer there either. Fascinating! Guess we'll be asking Kate next, right? Ha ha ha ha ha. Or maybe Julie? Oh, fun days ahead!). Guess who shows up to break Hugh out? The White Lady in full manifestation / incarnation / WTF. So, so, so awesome. Actually, deeply creepy. Not detailed deeply creepy. Sort of via allusion deeply creepy. Probably not _actually_ as creepy as the Black Banshee, tho. That was freaky.

Oh, and sending the elephant back with flowers was _so_ cool.

I'll be rereading it. Probably more than once.