Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand

 Irene is spending New Year's Day alone because her affectionate but often absent husband is away again for work. Then she receives a call that he has been killed in a helicopter crash. She calls her two grown sons and together they rush to the Caribbean island of St John.  There they discover that their father/husband owns a villa where he kept a young local woman for company, who was also killed in the same accident.  As they piece together the mystery of their fathers/husband's death, they start to be charmed by the local culture, and people. Abandoning the search for truth, they instead each go on the hunt for romance and companionship.

This book was recommended to be by one of my patrons, but I will admit that I only got through 4/5th of it.  It was not only too spicy for my taste, but I also realized that all the main characters where pretty shallow and I didn't really like any of them. Even though I was mildly interested in what actually happened to the husband (it was clear that he wasn't really dead, but that he had faked his death to get out of some kind of trouble with the law), the author wasn't focusing on the mystery at all, but instead on how quickly the mother and both brothers (one of which was married with a child) abandoned their whole prior life to go chasing after people they had just met. Maybe if I had spent the final two hours to see how it turned out I might have liked it better, but after I had to skip several steamy pages a second time, I decided it wasn't worth it. Sorry, Ms Hilderbrand, you are going on my "Authors to avoid" list. (2019, 336 p)

Faith by Beverly Watts

 Faith third of the many Shackleford sisters.  The other two have married well above their station, but Faith doesn't have her sister's stunning looks or vivacious personalities.  When her father finds he needs time to recover from an injury, Faith agrees to accompany him to Torquay for his recovery.  While there she meets sees a light bobbing around the derelict mansion next door to the one they are renting.  When her father finds out about it, he is sure there is a treasure there, and convinces Faith to go and search for it.  What she finds is a ring, still on the previous owner's severed finger.  The discovery plunges her and the owner of the house, a recently returned sea captain, into dire trouble. As they try to solve the mystery of the ring, they reluctantly admit their attraction to each other. 

When I checked this book out, I forgot that the first one in the series had more sexual element than I was comfortable with.  The true was the same with this book.  98% of the book was just fine, but one chapter suddenly depicts them jumping into bed together.  The description was at a level some might not object to, but it was too much for me. Actually, the references to sextual arousal, though pretty tame, were throughout the book.  I think I need to start a companion list to my "clean romance writers" list.  This one will be "Not so clean romance writers to avoid."  Watts will be my first addition. (2021, 254)

Grace by Beverly Watts

Nicholas Sinclair, the new Duke of Shackleton, was wounded in the battle of Trafalga in both body and spirit.  The Duke understands he has a responsibility to marry and produce an heir, but has no emotional energy to conduct a courtship. He approaches the local reverend and asks if he can have one of his eight daughters to marry by the end of the week. The reverend, understanding how such a marriage will elevate his family's prospects, agrees and offers Grace, his oldest daughter, to the Duke. Grace is independent and headstrong but smart enough to know how much her marriage will help her family.  She is determined to be a good wife to the Duke, but her efforts to get to know him are met with icy indifference. Nicholas is surprised by how much he is drawn to his new wife, but is determined to keep her at a distance. A battle of will and wits ensues, as both struggle to make their marriage of convenience a marriage of love.

I don't remember why I put this one on hold.  I think my idea was to try a new historical romance writer.  I ended up enjoying 98% of the book. The plot is not super original, but the characters fine and there are some truly amusing scenes with Grace's father who acts in the book as a kind of comic relief. So what of the other 2%? (spoiler alert) About half way through the book the couple decide to consummate their marriage and the author goes into way too much detail about that event. Why? I ask myself. The scene only lasts a few pages, which I skipped over, buy why add it in at all?  Why not just have him carry her into the room, and then skip to the morning when they wake up smiling in each other's arms?  I guess Ms Watts is not going on my clean romance writer's list. I need to start a new list.  An "uhhh, no" list of historical romance writers. (184 p, 2020)

Two books I didn't finish by Emily Henry

I discovered this week that Emily Henry is not the author for me.  I started with Book Lovers and really liked it in the beginning.  The dialog was clever and snappy, but two hours in the description of their sexual attraction got too much for me.  I just don't want to hear over and over which body parts were throbbing and what each was touching when they lost control around each other. 

It just so happened that the next book on my hold list was also by Henry.  I actually didn't realize it was by the same author in the beginning but when I figured it out I was instantly on my guard.  People We Meet on Vacation was less steamy than Book Lovers, and I liked the characters a little better.  I actually listened to 8 of the 11 hours of the recording, but then got bored.  The reader learns early on that the main characters had spent 10 summers vacationing together. I had listened to the descriptions of 4 of them. They involved a lot of drinking and being silly together, and I thought, "do I really want to listen to the last  6 vacations for three more hours?" and the answer was "No."  Plus, their relationship in the "present" was heating up and I was afraid it would be as descriptive as in the Book Lovers book.

It is interesting that I put them on hold because they were some of the top requested titles on our library's e-books server.  Other people are clearly liking them better than I did.  

Cold Mourning by Brenda Chapman

 Kala Stonechild is the newest member of the Ottowa specialized crime unit.   She has come to Ottowa escaping an uncomfortable situation, and wanting to find a long lost cousin whom she fears is in trouble.  She knows she will have a tough time gaining respect of the other investigators as both a woman and a member of First Nations. A grisly death over the Christmas holidays gives both her, and the new crime unit a chance to prove themselves. 

I read this book because it was available and I was waiting for other holds.  It had good reviews and Chapman won awards with it as a new author.  In the end, however, it turned out to be super gritty.  There are descriptions of no less than three brutal rape situations.  I don't know why I kept reading.  I guess I hoped that if it had good reviews, the ending would be amazing and worth slogging through the smut. The plotting was good and the characterizations complex and authentic.  But in the end it wasn't worth reading.  I can't really recommend it to anyone unless you are super immuned to that kind of content. (2014, 392 p.)

Another author to avoid

I was so stressed this week that I went looking for another historical romance to read.  I read a "If you like Georgette Heyer" blog post, and chose one of the authors suggested, Julia Quinn. Well, all I can say is that I should have read more reviews.  It started out with fun snappy dialog and endearing characters.  Unfortunately by the end it was way, way outside my comfort zone for sexual content.  I didn't really finish it but I skipped to the end to see if the author would have the characters suffer the real consequences of their behavior--guilt, unwanted pregnancy, social ruin--but no.  So, I won't even list the name of the book.  I only list the author so others might avoid her. I may be a terrible prude, but I honestly wouldn't recommend it to anyone. 

Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Deep Trouble

Star Butterfly's friend Pony Head has been accused of stealing a tiara, and Star is determined to prove she is innocent.  Along the way, Star and Marco travel to various realms, meet an array of monsters, and seem to forget their original purpose. In the end they return a makeup compact to Pony Head which is really a telephone, but Pony Head doesn't care because she got a new one.

Here is an example of the kind of book that gives comic books a bad name.  Not only is this just stupid, it didn't even make sense.  I couldn't really tell what what happening, and it didn't really care to know. The pictures were colorful, and maybe if I was familiar with the TV show on which the comic is based it would make more sense to me.  Still, I can't really recommend the book I read. (92 p)

Mission Unstoppable by Dan Gutman

Twins, Coke and Pepsi McDonald, have been recruited by secret government agency called the Genius Files.  The purpose for the organization is to use the brightest children's flexible minds to solve the country's problems.  But all Coke and Pep seem to do is try to outwit evil henchmen in bowler hats who keep trying to kill them.  Coke and Pep's parents decide to take a trip across the country by RV to learn more about geography on the way to their aunt's wedding.  As Coke and Pepsi cross the country they are given their first mission, and learn lots of interesting but unimportant facts about America.

This book is the first in the Genius Files series but it seems pretty obvious to me that the writer is no genius.  This is one of the dumbest books I have read in a long time.  It is clear that Gutman's main purpose in writing the book was to tell children about unusual places to see in the US.  At the beginning there is an author's note that all the places described in the book are real.  A lot of time is spent with the characters spouting random facts about the National Yo-yo Museum, or the World's Largest Ball of Twine in Kansas.  After all the geography lessons, there is not much room for plot.

On top of that, the children's behavior is not at all realistic.  After the first time the assassins try to kill them, they seem not at all traumatized but walk home worrying that their parents will be mad at them for being late. Then they seem to forget that happened, and calmly go to school the next day.  The attempts on the kid's lives are completely lame and contrived. At one point the assassins throw them in a pit, hoping they will die of thirst, and are confident that their parents, who are in a car less than a mile away waiting for the kids to return, will not come to look for them in time.  Another time they are in a Spam factory and the assassins try to throw them into an open vat if Spam. Of course, all food factories have meat in open vats with walkways over them.  I could go on.  The final scene where they meet the evil mastermind, and he monologues about why he is trying to kill them is the lamest of all. 

The thing is, I read one of Gutman's "My Weird School" books and it was actually very clever.  So I don't know what was up with this one. (293 p)

Monstrous by MarcyKate Connolly

Ok, here is the other book I was having a hard time getting through.

Kymera is like Frankenstein's Monster, patched together from parts of different animals while having a human head and mind. She awakens with only part of her human memories.  She knows how to talk and basic vocabulary, but she remembers nothing about her life before she was remade.  Her "father"  tells her she used to be his daughter who was killed by an evil wizard. He has  resurrected her in her part human, part animal form so that she will have the unusual powers she will need to rescue the other girls of their town who have been sickened and who are being taken by the Wizard, one by one, for his evil purposes. She embraces her role as savior of the girls with enthusiasm and nightly sneaks into the "wizard's dungeon" and "saves" a girl by bringing her back to her "father". You can see the problem here, right? And so can the reader, hundreds of pages before Kym figures it out.  Even after Kym finds bones buried under her rose garden, body parts in freezers in her dad's laboratory, and even a whole dead girl, she is still in denial that she has, all along, been helping the very wizard she thought she was fighting.

Because of Kym's extreme naivete and the slow pace of the plot I almost stopped 1/3 of the way through, but I decided, as the fiction purchaser for the library, I better finish it to decide whether it needs to be moved into the YA section.  It is very dark and very violent.  It is not only the wizard who is killing and cutting up people.  At times, when Kym's animal instincts take over, she rips apart battalions of soldiers with her bare claws and emerges from the battle covered with blood and panting.  There is a high, bloody, body count, some of them little girls cut up in pieces.  It is horrendous.  And yet it has this cute little girl monster on the cover, clearly targeted at 10-12 year-olds.   I still haven't decided whether to move it or not.  I think I will try to (with my boss's approval).  Nothing about the book warns an unsuspecting reader of what lies inside. (424p)

Wings of Fire: the Dragonet Prophecy by Tui T. Sutherland

This book starts out like a typical cutesie dragon story.  There are five little dragons representing different elements; a shadow dragon, and water dragon, a sky dragon etc.  They are young, but a prophecy has predicted that they will end a long standing war between their different tribes. For their own safety, they are raised in hiding, but one day they decide to escape and see the world outside.  That is when the story takes a grim turn.  I kind of got the first clue when the first humanoid you meet in the story gets its head bitten off.  From then on the book becomes over-the-top violent.  The dragonets are captured and enlisted in gladiatorial games. One of the dragons shies away from killing his opponent, but another of the cute little dragons snaps her opponent's neck. The startling thing is that some of the dragons, even the young ones, are so callused about killing. Later they come across a battlefield, and the description of the scattered corpses would be rated "R' if they were describing humans instead of dragons.  I really can't recommend this book to anyone within the target age group.  The ladies at the library say it is circulating well.  Sad. (304 p)