Kathryn Troy's Blog, page 3

Medieval Romance with No Wrong Steps - The MacKinnon's Bride

After reading Lynsay Sands's The Deed  and being completely turned off by the perpetuation of chauvinsim as being somehow more endearing in the past than in the present, I was wary that I would find a historical romance set in the medieval period that would still appeal to my female-forward criteria for romance while also satisfying my wish to read in this period.

I wasn't expecting much from The MacKinnon's Bride because it was free through Amazon Prime. That was a mistake. The premise here that Page, the daughter of an English nobleman, is taken captive by a clan of Scots led by the MacKinnon in order to exchange for his own son, is a good setup that puts these two in unwilling company. Their chemistry develops at a good pace, and there are no flubs with her captivity somehow becoming romantic yet against her will. The author makes their mutual interest clear from the beginning, and how MacKinnon willingly keeps Page with his party once her father repudiates her makes him chivalrous and endearing. He does lots of sweet things that make it clear he genuinely cares about her, more than anyone else ever has in her life. He never forces himself on her, but he comes off as a charming rogue nevertheless, and it's extremely effective. So is the fact that there is no insta-lust in this story - at least not that is acted upon. There's a good balance between the narrative voices of both Page and the MacKinnon, and their backstories make them both sympathetic characters and perfectly suited to each other, which makes you root for the match even more. That to me is what makes romance satisfying. The steamy scenes weren't the best I've ever read, but there wasn't anything wrong with them per se either. I guess the emotional buildup was so high that I was expecting a greater reward, but their physical chemistry was somewhat perfunctory.

The secondary plot about a traitor/murderer in the midst of the clansmen is interesting, but I ended up being a bit ambiguous about it in the end because there was enough of a threat to their blossoming romance when Page's father does eventually seek to regain his daughter, so I wasn't really sure what that side-plot added to the overall narrative. It was interesting though, which is a sign that the author is a good storyteller, even if she couldn't really weave it all together as tightly as I would have liked.

I will definitely be picking up the other books in this series - at least now I have hope that medieval-period romance can in fact be done right.

K. Rating: 4/5

Good But Not Great: Horrorstor

I like very few contemporary horror writers. Very few. My tastes run more toward the 1970s and 1980s all the way back to the gothic period, so when something like My Best Friend's Exorcism comes along, which does classic things in a fresh way, of course I'm going to have my eye out for other works by Grady Hendrix. Naturally, Horrorstor  had been on my bookshelf very soon after it came out - it had been on my husband's radar first. So while I'm waiting for the next book which promises Southern vampirism, I read this book about a haunted Ikea-adjacent store.

It was good. But it wasn't great. The characters were okay, but there wasn't a whole lot of establishment of them or their environment before they (we) are thrown into the horrific situation of a haunted building built ontop of another haunted building that might have gateways to alternate, horrifying dimensions. The horror elements were fine, good even, but they didn't carry the compelling weight that I would expect because there just wasn't a strong enough connection to the characters experiencing this horror or the place itself. The concept of a place that is designed specifically to disorient you is really interesting, but I don't think it was utilized to its full potential, which is a shame.

What makes me happy is that the next effort was a million times better, and I hope that these southern vampires are everything I'm dreaming of.

K Rating: 3/5

Interesting, but not Compelling: The Lady from the Black Lagoon

It's been a long time since I've picked up nonfiction for the sake of my own edification. Call it the hours and hours and hours and hours put into studying for orals exams that put me off this as a leisure activity. It's been almost a decade, so I am now easing myself back into reading nonfiction for its own sake. One of my first selections was The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick. 

This was a good and important book. It's just a shame that the author has no actual credentials to do this kind of research and to present it in a convincing, compelling fashion. Because it shows. The book is padded out with the author's personal journey to find Milicent Patrick and the undeniable proof that she is responsible for the creature design of The Creature from said lagoon, and that she became a victim (like so many other women) of industrially-sanctioned misogyny. In that way, the author's own experiences deserve to be a part of the tale, to a degree, as should the contemporary references to issues that spurred the MeToo Movement in Hollywood, but these are executed in such a lackadaiscal, off-hand fashion that they do not come off as aggressively compelling as such facts could be. The prose is too laid back, too informal, and does nothing to bolster the credibility of the author or make me believe that she's the right person to bring this story to the foreground. Getting a tattoo of a woman on your arm (while a great idea), is not a credential for writing an important biography, which this book clearly intends to be and should be.

The biggest misstep this book makes is that it doesn't "show the work," to take a math homework analogy. When you get to the meat of the story, there are passages that refer to interviews Patrick gave while promoting The Creature from the Black Lagoon, original planning for the press tour that was later changed that significantly altered Patrick's role and relationship to the film's production, the actual press articles that resulted from the tour, and inter-office memos detailing the changing tenor toward Patrick and her eventual dismissal from Universal studios on the whims of male ego. None of that makes its actual way into the book by way of quoting, excerpting, photoscans, or anything. NONE OF IT!!! That's what I (and I assume most readers) came to this book for - to see the proof of Milicent's contribution and the injustice she suffered, to read the language of these sources for ourselves. What we're left with instead are bland paraphrasing from someone who's already proven that she's not a great communicator or conveyor of facts and ideas. And that is the absolute tragedy of this book- is that it could have been soooo much better, if only it had used its own evidence more effectively - the way a professional would have.

K Rating: 3/5

Amazon in China: The Warehouse

The sci-fi techno thriller The Warehouse promised deep dark corporate secrets in a futuristic capitalist setting. What I got is what it might look like if Amazon were a Chinese-based company in the here and now. There wasn't anything here that was thrilling, as a majority of the book takes pains to demonstrate how grindingly monotonous life in the Cloud is. It wasn't new- I saw shades of 1984, Soylent Green and, let's face it - Disney Magic Bands. Something that unlocks your door, holds your place in line, accesses your dining credits, and hooks up to all pertinent financial information? It's a Magic Band. Nothing about that screams futuristic or exciting. People living in a complex owned by their employers, and therefore at their mercy? Nothing new about that either. Perhaps if the author had taken his head out of the sand and looked both at the whole world and backward in time (like to the Lowell Mills of Massachusetts), he would have realized this major flaw in "building" a futuristic world and come up with something more imaginative. Instead, this is just now-adjacent, with characters and a plot that go nowhere except places where you'd easily expect but don't make much sense in the narrative nevertheless. The question of energy input/output isn't satisfactorily answered either, and the relationship between energy and food, which is important in real life, is tenuous at best here.

So, no. This was not an enjoyable read.

K. Rating: 1/5

If Only a Better Writer Had Written It...Oh Wait! They Did: The Twisted Ones

My quest for a contemporary horror author that I can actually appreciate is ongoing. I enjoyed reading The Twisted Ones , a story about a woman asked to clear out her dead grandmother's house and finds weird things in the woods behind, but the whole time, I was thinking about how the authorial voice was getting in the story's way. Even as things get weirder and creepier, you don't really feel the impact of those moments because of the perpetual snarkiness of the narrator.

But there were so many elements of this story - the person writing something maddening that has happened to them, the lost manuscript, the dreamscape/journey into other worlds, secret societies and even more secret universal mysteries - that smacked of Lovecraft's bread and butter. If only this book had his eldritch voice, I thought, this would be a great story with terrifying effect. In addition, a lot of the things that are set up at the beginning, like the hints to a secret society and the strange nature of Mouse's grandmother and the relationship between the late woman and her husband, are never resolved. They end up being loose threads that would have been infinitely more interesting to follow than the multiple passages detailing the act of clearing out a house filled with junk.

Only after I finished the book and read the Author's Note did I realize that this was heavily based on Arthur Machen's The White People, which was of course also on my to-read list. Better yet, this book was based on a letter that Lovecraft himself wrote to Machen about his book. So even without knowing any of this, my mind still insisted that Lovecraft or those of his ilk would have been better suited to tell this tale- it reeked of Lovecraft and his circle. The fact is they did - I just wish I'd realized in advance. I would have just plucked a different book from the shelf.

I'm very close to giving up on contemporary horror. Very close.

K. Rating:2/5

How is this Romantic? My Fake Rake

Foiled again, in my search for a romance author other than Tessa Dare. I anticipated loving My Fake Rake , based on the premise of a secret admirer/bookish scientist who falls for a woman who's trying to grab the attention of someone else.

The progression of this strange situation, where Lady Grace enlists Sebastian to pose as a rake to impress another guy was a cute premise on the back of the cover, but soured quickly, as its execution here showcased just how selfish, self-centered, and utterly unsympathetic Grace is as a character. She wants to gain the attention of someone who isn't interested in her for herself by playing ridiculous, childish mind games. When she starts to have feelings for Sebastian, the long-time friend, (who she had feelings for when they first met, by the way), she can't exactly define her attraction as such, even though she has no problem defining it when it refers to another male - so not clueless, and not in denial, either. I don't know what kind of ridiculous mental hoops Grace has to go through to hold up this premise for the length of the book.

Sebastian is just as bad. He's so eager to please Grace, who he constantly expresses attraction for but at the same time isn't attracted to  (as in, he thinks to himself "she's beautiful - wait, what? where did that come from?) that he doesn't see Grace's flaws for what they are, doesn't realize that she's doing the same thing to him that she regrets has happened to her, and doesn't realize that in order to get her attention, he needs to change himself dramatically. The same way Grace is trying to change herself to gain the attraction of another.

This is not what I'd call progressive, female-forward, or any kind of positive. Also, it made no sense. It could have possibly made sense, but not the way that it was written here, that people can recognize their attraction to other people but not each other, even when the symptoms of attraction are described in identical ways.

I wasn't rooting for anyone, which is the kiss of death for a romance series.

K. Rating: 1/5

Solidly Atmospheric Historical Mystery: Death Comes to the Village

I am a reader of mysteries, but when something is praised as being "charming," "quirky," or "cozy," I avoid it like the plague. I like my mysteries dark and...mysterious.

So as much as the first book in the Kurland St. Mary series, Death Comes to the Village , takes place in a Regency setting in a quiet village with a rector's daughter and a wounded Major, this mystery packs a serious punch when in comes to atmosphere, bordering on the gothic. And who doesn't want a gothic mystery?

Robert Kurland, the army Major practically crippled and bedridden by his wartime injuries, sees a mysterious figure carrying something mysterious over his shoulder in the middle of his night out of the window. Later, the grouchy magistrate learns that two girls have gone missing from the village. Since he doesn't have the use of his legs, he enlists Lucy, the rector's daughter, to do the legwork for some investigating. Some of the time though, she does this without prompting, since it's members of her household that have gone missing, and she's a more well-known, respected, and integral part of the community, with a working knowledge of all the villagers and their affairs-at least on the surface.

Without giving the game away, the plot continually thickens as Lucy sees more and more recent events in the village come out of their normal, sleepy alignment, and is threatened multiple times (by multiple people, which keeps up the suspense) to keep her mouth shut and her nose out of everyone's business.

In the meantime, Robert is struggling to assert himself even as his own staff question his mental state and the effect of all the laudanum he's taking. Or is he?

There's so much to like here, especially the on-page chemistry between Robert and Lucy, who are both flawed and human, both sympathetic, and both eminently likeable. It's an absolute great start to a fantasy series, and I'm very eager to see more of their adventures.

K Rating: 5/5

Fantasy Soaps: The Daylight War

Never have I seen such a strong start to a fantasy series fall so far. The third book of Peter Brett's Demon Cycle, The Daylight War , promised a climax to the first two books, which built up both the war between humans and demons, and between Arlen Bales, the Warded Man/Deliverer, and Ahmann Jardir, the murdering, raping, bloodthirsty conqueror from the east.

I probably wasn't alone in hoping for Jardir to get what was coming to him. But no, of course we weren't going to get that. A good portion of the book is spent rehashing events from the past book, just from Jardir's wife's point of view. Which really was a waste - it didn't really tell us anything about Inevera that we didn't already know, and it did nothing to change the reader's perception of the character as a hard, honorless witch. The amount of writing that progressed the plot took up only a tiny slice of this lengthy book, and it just didn't do enough on the fantasy/action/horror/adventure front. Even in what was new, it felt more like watching The Young and the Restless. There were endless (repetitively described) sexual encounters - more than you'd find in a straight romance novel. Those, too, did nothing to progress the plot. And in Leesha and Rojer's case, the characters are making a lot of stupid decisions that really make me less empathetic, and are not really in keeping with the way these characters were built in the first place.

The whole thing is unraveling - which is a shame. I can only hope that the fourth book, The Skull Throne, will be a return to form.

K. Rating: 1/5

All the Pieces, but Not Enough Feeling: The Remaking

I really wanted to like The Remaking , a horror tale about a bit of dark history turned urban legend, turned slasher turned slasher remake. Honestly- what is not to like about that? It's like all my favorite things, all in one spot. And the story was good - solid, even. But I can't say that I loved this book. And I think I know why.

It was the writing itself. The actual prose, the language chosen to convey this tale. It didn't carry enough emotional weight. It didn't have the same mood as a Stoker or a Lovecraft, didn't have the same strong word choices and imagery of someone like King or James. It was a great story, it just wasn't told very well. The language was sterile, in a way, very perfunctory and tell-y rather than show-y, which is just about the last thing you want when trying to terrify someone.

Also- and I'm not quite sure this was on purpose - I got a very strong sense of disdain for the subject matter permeating through the book. When you're following around Amber, the child star literally haunted by her iconic role as The Little Witch Girl Jessica in a cult classic, there's an unmistakeable disgust for slasher films, or horror in general, and their fans, as told through Amber. I got the sense that this was the author's own opinions through the mouthpiece of his character. Which would seem odd, considering how much detail the author includes on that front, suggesting that he knows more than your average horror buff. (As an initiate of the upper echelons of horror and the slasher genre in particular, I should know). It was a very strange disconnect and, I would add, not at all in line with the place of privilege that slasher films hold both as cinematic works that straddle high/low art and as cultural artefacts of profound significance.It's strikes me very much as people who hate gothic fiction but then write ghost stories into their books to sell copies.

I hope this gets made into a film - maybe the stuff that should have been great will translate better on a screen. Carpenter or Craven could do it. Argento or Fulci might do it better. Add a bit of Perfect Blue in there, and you'll have one hell of a film.

K. Rating: 3/5
When you do a story like this, you have to go all the way - Cannibal Holocaust -
a great and terrible film.

Compelling Historical Fiction: Bellewether

I normally don't read historical fiction of American history or anything related to the subject matters that I teach during the day, but something about the back copy of Bellewether drew me in. Must have been the ghost story (always)- that was very poignantly done, and the present sense of the haunting was visceral even as we went back in time to learn the story behind the legend of Jean-Philippe and Lydia's ill-fated love. Oh, and he's French (French-Canadian, but that def counts in my book).

Normally, I also don't like stories that switch between the past and the present, because those stories never seem to tie up as well as they should. Again on that front, I was pleasantly surprised - the story was cohesive, and organic, and I never minded switching between several extremely compelling characters and well-laid plots. Charley, the new curator of a historical preservation museum, could have been a drag, but she's so compelling as a character, as well as all the cliquey drama that she has to put up with, and the author's experience in museum work made this just as authentic, just as much compulsive reading as the historical sections.

So really, I was surprised on all fronts, and I'm very glad that I found this book, and this author. Her prose was beautiful, the story was excellent, and although I was wanting more satisfaction in the multiple romance plots, I will absolutely be picking up Susanna Kearsley again. Soon.