![]() ![]() Hot bare-chested studs have replaced the bodice-ripped heroines of traditional women’s romance, but the plot lines remain much the same as do, surprisingly, the audience and the writers-straight women. ![]() You can tell a lot about these books by their covers. But the devil finds work for idle hands and recently while cruising on Facebook I clicked on a sexy little icon that linked me to the erotic world of male/male (M/M) romance fiction. Like everyone else in America, I’m unemployed. ![]()
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![]() ![]() A brilliant 5-star read (Neda, The Subclub Books) Tangled more than earns a brilliant. sort of.īecause old habits die hard, and sometimes you have to go back to where you began before you can move ahead again. Emma Chase will keep you enthralled and captivated. So I came back to Greenville, to spend some time alone. In fact, he tried to decide for the both of us-but you know that’s not my style. But life is about choices, and Drew already made his. In the third unforgettable book by New York Times bestselling author Emma Chase, Matthew Fisher - the best friend of Drew Evans from TANGLED and TWISTED. ![]() He made it easy to leap with him.ĭid you think Drew and I were going to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after? So did I. There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who look first, and the ones who leap. Tangled, Emmas iconic enemies-to-lovers rom-com, was recently released by Passionflix and her royal romance, Royally Screwed, will be coming soon to the screen. Her books have been published in over 20 languages and optioned for film. When spontaneous and carefree meets cautious and responsible, falling in love can get just a little Twisted Emma Chase is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of romance filled with humor, heat and heart. ![]() In this heart-pounding follow-up to Tangled by New York Times bestseller Emma Chase, Kate reveals that there is trouble in paradise, when unexpected circumstances force her and Drew to "renegotiate" their relationship. ![]() ![]() In fact it would be an ideal matter for James Bond to investigate. ![]() Their disappearance will have to be investigated but to M it seems to be an absurdly trivial matter. M assumes that they simply ran off together. The Secret Service doesn’t even know they were murdered. The reader certainly knows they were murdered but the reasons for the murder are entirely unknown. His secretary, Mary Trueblood, also a Secret Service agent, is also murdered. ![]() The Bond novels were in some ways Fleming’s attempt to deal with this unpleasant reality by denying it, and by creating a fantasy world in which it’s always the British Secret Service that saves the day.ĭr No begins with the murder of a man named Strangways, the Secret Service’s Head of Station in Jamaica. One of the recurring themes of the Bond novels is Fleming’s bitterness at the loss of the Empire and the declining power and influence of Britain in the post-war world. His first-hand knowledge of the island was obviously an advantage but to Fleming it offered other attractions as a setting, being one of the last outposts of the British Empire (Jamaica did not achieve independence until four years after the publication of Dr No). Fleming had owned a house in Jamaica since 1945. Bond would return to Jamaica once again in The Man with the Golden Gun. ![]() Dr No, published in 1958, is the sixth of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.ĭr No takes Bond back to Jamaica which had been the setting for the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die. ![]() ![]() But we also see how the rest of Greece isn’t any better, and in fact, most of it is worse. In her new take on the character, however, Costanza tears it all down with such incisive fury that reading it is a cathartic release, especially for anyone who’s ever studied Classics and wondered how people could have accepted these narratives as they were.Ĭasati starts with the cognitive dissonance of Clytemnestra’s childhood, the things about her culture she’s never been able to stand and the things she justifies to herself in order to believe in the myth of Sparta, and how she becomes less willing and able to do that as she ages. ![]() But still, relatively few people question her role as villain, because doing so means questioning the entire Ancient Greek social order, and in doing that questioning all the narratives Western society likes to tell itself about the way things are today. It’s such an unreasonable position that even later ancient Greek writers had to find ways to further villainize her-painted as an unloving mother, motivated by sex and pride-to ensure the audience would go along with the play and see her death as a desirable outcome. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Nao feels loved and blessed when they are together. Jiko talks to Nao about some Zen Buddhist principles that she values, like the importance of the present moment and the impermanence of all things. Nao and Jiko become very close when Nao stays with Jiko at her temple over her summer vacation. Jiko tells Nao that her sorrow felt like a “whale” behind her chest, and by becoming a nun, she slowly “learned how to open up her heart so the whale could swim away.” Jiko knows that Nao is hurting, too, from all the troubles in her life-so she teaches Nao zazen (Zen Buddhist meditation) as a coping mechanism. Jiko decided to become a nun after her gentle, philosophical son, Haruki #1, was drafted into the military during World War II and died as a kamikaze pilot. Nao describes her as an anarchist-feminist Buddhist nun. Jiko is Nao’s 104-year-old great-grandmother. ![]() Part III, Chapter 7: Haruki #1’s Secret French Diary.Part II, Chapter 13: Haruki #1’s Letters. ![]() ![]() ![]() When she meets the natives of this planet, yes, some great eye-candy, but when she is told that she has to choose three or be left out in the wilderness where there are so many things that can kill her and Tremor.Īrh, Scar, and Dey aren't a triad in that they chose to be together. When she finds food just laying out for her, she will take it. When she gets hit by lightning and wakes up on another planet, she knows she isn't in Kansas anymore. Mikaela loves her furbaby Tremor, but having to take him out when the weather is not so great is pushing it. There are great world-building and in-depth characters. I always love to read alien and human stories, let alone Reverse Harem stories, so in this series, you get both. ![]() It could be read as a standalone, but there is some crossover from the previous story, Alien Barbarians' Hope, with characters. ![]() This is the second in the Purple Planet series. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The consequences of the photo are far-reaching: Luke isn’t talking to her and her parents don’t know how to act around her.However, some of what happens in the picture’s aftermath surprises Audrey. Audrey goes from having a fairly decent reputation to being labeled as a slut. Even Audrey’s teachers and parents see it. Audrey feels more for Luke than she’s felt for any other boy, but as she watches Luke talk to other girls, she can’t help but draw back from a possible romance between the two of them.Then someone takes a picture of Audrey doing something with Luke, and the picture is passed around to everyone. ![]() Party after party, they hook up, yet hardly ever speak in school. Super-smart Audrey does something completely out of character for her before school starts: she hooks up with Luke, the well-liked, athletic playboy. ![]() ![]() Things are going reasonably well for Captain Eva until her sister Mari is kidnapped by a mysterious and largely mythical criminal syndicate known as The Fridge, which holds people hostage in cryosleep until their ransom is paid, or until the poor schmucks who value the kidnapped person have gotten themselves killed doing The Fridge’s dirty work. (Eva Innocente has a Dark Past, but unlike so many of literature’s Dark Pasts, it’s not lovingly dwelled on and brooded over – it’s only mentioned occasionally as explanation for some of her skills and attitudes.) Her cargoes are small and her profits even smaller, ever since she broke with her not-exactly-all-aboveboard father and the crew of smugglers and mercenaries she used to run with. ![]() Part of me wishes I’d already read Chilling Effect, her debut space opera novel, at that point, because I’d like to ask how many of the little things that look like nods to Mass Effect and the likes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are there on purpose, and how many are the product of a shared cultural moment and shared sensibilities.Ĭaptain Eva Innocente has a ship, La Sirena Negra, and a small crew. ![]() I met Valerie Valdes briefly at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon. ![]() ![]() ![]() Young’s shoemaker is George Robert Twelves Hewes (the curious “Twelves” was apparently a family name) who was born in Boston in 1742. ![]() When it was remembered at all during that half century (which was rarely), it was as “the destruction of the tea,” the more “serious and reverential” term that appears on Charles Bulfinch’s 1790 monument to the Revolution standing (in an 1898 reconstruction) behind the State House. Young details in this fine account of one of the participants and of how the event was remembered, it did not become the “Tea Party” - with that “faintly comic and irreverent” connotation - until close to half a century later. No need to trot out a squad of musket-toting Redcoats just some face paint, some old clothes, and a buoyant box or two to toss off the Tea Party ship into the Fort Point Channel.īut as historian Alfred F. An easily told story, it also makes for easy re-enactment. The Boston Tea Party may be the most easily apprehended of all the events in Boston that led up to the Revolution. THE SHOEMAKER AND THE TEA PARTY: Memory and the American Revolution. ![]() ![]() But when Marie meets Edgar Degas and he asks her to pose for him, Marie prays that her life is about to change forever.Īnd change it does, but not in the ways she had suspected. Antoinette is being wooed by much older, and much wealthier men, and although she promises to send them money when she's set up as a mistress by her benefactor, she never does. Things soon change, though, for Marie and her entire family. ![]() Ballet is her life, along with the life of both of her sisters, enrolled under the tutelage of Madame Theodore at the ballet school. The only thing that brings joy to Marie's life is dancing in the Paris Opera. Marie knows their family-made up of Mother, Tante Helene, older sister Antoinette, and younger sister Charlotte-are poor and destitute. Her drunken mother is unable to hold down a job, and the place where they're forced to live can only be described as squalor. With MARIE, DANCING, the story behind Edgar Degas's well known sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, is brought to vivid life in this fictionalized account.Īt fourteen, Marie van Goethem still holds out hope that one day her life will be, if not grand, then better than it is now. I can't count the times that I've seen a truly inspiring painting or sculpture and wondered what the inspiration behind it was. ![]() |