Laura K. Curtis's Blog, page 2

Book Talk

A conversation I was having the other day on Twitter reminded me how much I treasured the book blogger community. There are fewer book bloggers around now than when I started, but I’d like to encourage people to visit them, especially since you are more apt to find less well-known books by looking at blogs, books you might really enjoy, but might otherwise never find.

“Who has time to cruise all these sites?!” I hear you cry.

“No one,” I answer. “That’s why there are feed readers.”

At the bottom of this post, there will be a list of blogs. I encourage you to add more in the comments so I can keep updating the list. I want to know ALL THE BOOK BLOGS! But first, a few words about feed readers. If you’re like me, you get a lot of email you just don’t care about. So you don’t open every piece. Instead, you read the subject lines in your mail program, read what seems important or useful, and toss the rest. That’s how feed readers treat blogs—like mail. You don’t run from blog to blog, your feed reader presents you with a list of posts that have been made since you last opened it. You read the ones you are interested in and forget the rest. So if a blog post has the subject line:

Top Ten Romantic Comedies of the Year

and that’s one you want to read, you click and read it. I encourage commenting while you’re there, so blog writers know you appreciate their content but if you don’t have anything to say, that’s fine…just pop back to your feed reader to see what else is out there you want to check out.

My favorite feed reader is dead simple, but it is in the process of being transferred back to its original owner (who’s developed the newest version) so it’s not available right now. It’s NetNewsWire for Mac and it’s so basic it’s not even funny. But there are a ton of feed readers out there to choose from. This is Feedly. As you can see, it gives you a glimpse of the content and you decide what you want to read.

Now, for the list! Please do add more in the comments! And add some (or all) of these to your own feed readers to feed your reading addiction.

A Willaful Woman  https://willaful.wordpress.com/   (romance)

Ana Coqui: Immersed in Books  https://www.anacoqui.com/  (romance)

All About Romance  https://allaboutromance.com/  (mostly romance, but other books, too)

Bea’s Book Nook  https://beasbooknook.blogspot.com (mystery and romance)

Book Binge http://bookbinge.com/ (romance)

Book Riot https://bookriot.com/ (all kinds of book-related content)

Book Bub Blog https://www.bookbub.com/blog (all kinds of books)

Book Blog from Signature Reads https://www.signature-reads.com/ (all kinds of reads)

The Booklist Reader https://www.booklistreader.com/ (all kinds of books)

Crime Fiction Lover  https://crimefictionlover.com/

Crimespree Magazine  http://crimespreemag.com/

Criminal Element http://www.criminalelement.com

Dru’s Book Musings https://drusbookmusing.com/  (mostly cozy mysteries)

Fantasy Book Critic http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/

The Geeky Blogger http://www.geekybloggersbookblog.com/  (romance)

The Good The Bad and The Unread https://goodbadandunread.com/ (mostly romance)

Instalove https://instalove.wordpress.com/  (mostly romance)

Kaetrin’s Musings https://www.kaetrinsmusings.com (romance)

Kirkus Reviews https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (all kinds of books)

A Little Bit Tart, A Little Bit Sweet http://tartsweet.com/  (romance)

Literary Hub https://lithub.com/ (all kinds of books)

Love in Panels http://www.loveinpanels.com/ (romance and comics)

The Misadventures of Super Librarian  http://wendythesuperlibrarian.blogspot.com/  (mostly romance)

Miss Bates Reads Romance  https://missbatesreadsromance.com/

Mystery Fanfare http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/

Mystery People https://mysterypeople.wordpress.com/

Mystery Playground http://www.mysteryplayground.net/

Natasha is a Book Junkie https://natashaisabookjunkie.com/  (romance)

News from Locus Magazine http://locusmag.com/ (sff)

Off the Shelf https://offtheshelf.com/ (all kinds of books)

Omnimmystery News  http://www.omnimysterynews.com/

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/

The Rap Sheet http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/  (crime fiction)

Red Hot Books http://redhotbooks.com/ (romance)

Romance Junkies http://romancejunkies.com/

Romance Novel News  http://www.romancenovelnews.com/joomla/

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/  (mostly romance)

Smexy Books http://smexybooks.com/ (mostly romance)

Sci-Fi/Fantasy Blog from B&N https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy

Tor.com  https://www.tor.com/  (fantasy, sci-fi, horror)

 

Primary Concerns (A Political Rant)

Normally, I don’t talk about politics on my blog. There’s rarely a reason to. But in a couple of weeks there will be an election I feel strongly about, and since it reflects some of my concerns about politics in general at this particular point in time, I thought I would share my opinion. Feel free to ignore and move right along

If you’re a regular reader, you know I live in New York. The state, not the city, which is important to this. On September 13, there will be a Democratic primary and I will be voting in primaries relating for my county’s state Senator and my Governor.

Since my current county Senator says he a Democrat but has shown fairly clearly that he does that only to get elected and caucuses with the Republicans, I will be voting for his opponent. I very much hope she wins because I find his behavior reprehensible.

But the gubernatorial primary worries me.

I see an awful lot of young women out there saying “I’m going to vote for Cynthia Nixon because she’s progressive.”

I have nothing against Nixon’s progressive ideals, but I don’t really see how much “more progressive” they are. Here are things I see with our current NYS government as led by Governor Cuomo.

• I have been self-employed since I moved to NYS in 2005. NYS always had a “no questions asked” policy about healthcare—if an insurer wanted to do business here, they could not ask you about your pre-existing conditions. But the prices were very high. When I couldn’t afford it, I went to “Healthy New York” which was set up almost specifically for people like me. Lots of small groups and unions had buy-in through Healthy New York. Just about everyone I knew had their healthcare in one way or another through Healthy New York.

Is that Medicare for all? No. But M4A, which I would love to see at the national level, was not a possibility at the state level.

• My sister and her wife were able to get married in New York long before SCOTUS said they had to be allowed to get married. (They got married in Canada before that, but marriage was legalized here before it was nationwide.)

• NYS has very strong gun control laws without actually banning any guns that might be needed for hunting, target shooting, or self-protection.

• NYS has paid family leave

• NYS has very strong domestic violence laws.

• NYS, like much of the US, has volunteers as its primary firefighting force. Cuomo is very firefighter-friendly. In NYS, you can get a tax break if you are an active firefighter.

• Speaking of taxes, when the current administration slapped together its new blue-state-punitive tax plan, Cuomo led the fight to find a way for citizens not to suffer.

• NYS has a $15 minimum wage

• NYS’s “Excelsior” scholarship makes sure that NY’s students have access to higher ed if they want it.

• NYS considers those below 18 “underage” when it comes to criminal responsibility

• The whole state is a sanctuary state. That may be something you disagree with, but it’s certainly progressive. Cuomo sued the federal government to find out what children were sent here and where they and their parents were when the Trump administration started separating families.

And then there are the things Cuomo’s gotten wrong—and admitted he’s gotten wrong, and changed his mind about. To me, that’s the adult thing to do. When constituents are unhappy, he listens.

• Thinking that having a single source for prison packages would make things easier. This did not last. People said “it’s not fair to either the prisoners or their families, especially the poorer families, who cannot afford to do this—they need to be able to get what they want at the best possible price. And this supplier does not have a wide range of reading material, which means prisoners won’t be able to develop empathy or learn what they wish.” So, yes. He got it wrong. And he reversed his decision.

• Fracking. Another time Cuomo thought something was a good idea until he heard from the majority of his constituents.

I don’t expect perfection from my candidates. I don’t even expect to want to go out to dinner with them (which is a good thing, since I don’t want to have dinner with either of these two), but you can earn a lot of respect from me if you show that you’re trying to do the right thing by your constituents. ALL of them.

People complain about Cuomo being “too Republican.” But I am a realist. New York is immensely Republican. No, not the city. But the state. If you want to get things done here, you have to be willing and able to negotiate with people.

New York State is immensely complex. There are vast differences in wealth. Yes, you can say “I am a Democratic Socialist and I want to make that better,” which is a lovely sentiment. But how are you going to manage that? Raise the minimum wage? Cuomo did it. Add more tax brackets so that taxes aren’t so flat and the people who have more pay more? He did that, too.

Plus, part of the big problem is that the city is so wildly out of line with the rest of the state. I don’t live in the city, though I grew up there. But you get out onto Long Island and suddenly you’re in Trump country. I currently live in a highly purple district, where our Representative changed from a violently pro-life Republican in one election to a gay man in the next. These are issues people who don’t leave the city don’t really understand. If you’re a dairy farmer in New York or an orchard owner, or even a restaurant worker in South Salem, your point of view is apt to be very different than that of your average NYC resident. All the touchy-feely lovely sentiments in the world aren’t going to make a difference to your ability to manage those different needs. Cuomo may not be a warm and sensitive soul, but he’s done a lot of good for a lot of people.

Why does this worry me? Because people seem to forget that for all her big smiles and activism, Cynthia Nixon has zero experience. In anything. She’s never run a small business. Never sat on city council. Never worked in middle management with pressure from above and below. Governor of a complicated state like New York is not where you begin. It’s not like Congress, where you can learn from colleagues. About the only true colleague you have as Governor of New York is the Governor of California. I applaud anyone who wants to get into politics and make a difference, but I am deeply, deeply concerned about people who vote based on emotional appeals and gender. (Why do I bring up gender? Because I was told by a canvasser collecting signatures for Nixon that as a Democratic woman I should endorse her. I don’t believe that was on direction, and I don’t blame Nixon for that, but it’s a disturbing point of view.)

So when you go to the polls, wherever you live. I urge you to consider more than hype and personality. Vote in every election and vote carefully.

And that’s your long, boring PSA for the day.

Costa Rica in Pictures

My husband and I went to Costa Rica over the last week. Here are a few pictures to bring you with us! Click to enlarge.

We even saw a giant Green Pacific Sea Turtle laying her eggs. They’re protected and you can’t startle them while they’re figuring out where to nest, cleaning the space, or digging the hole, but once a female begins to lay, she goes into a trance. While she’s laying, she is oblivious and you can close in and get some video. Which, of course, I did. The infrared is what we had on and you can see her shell on the left side where that is. Once she started laying, the guides dropped in a white light that we could use to get the egg part.

Weekend at the Fair

This past weekend was the annual Rhinebeck sheep and wool festival. If you’ve never been, it’s a grand time. I didn’t take a lot of pictures of yarn. It’s a bit dark in the barns and you don’t get to see how gorgeous the colors are. Plus, the whole point of fiber is the way it feels, and that won’t come through in pictures. So instead, I took pictures of animals, which I hereby present as an antidote to all the depressing news in the world. (For full sized image, click and then click again.)

Those last four pictures are from the “spitters’ obstacle course,” in which young 4H members attempted to convince some seriously stubborn alpacas and llamas (aka spitters), to do things like walk on a tarp, step over a bar, and back into a “parking spot.”

And last but not least, the llama part of the animal parade.

Llamas on Parade from Laura K. Curtis on Vimeo.

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A Few Good Books

Periodically, I like to recommend a bunch of books without writing reviews. This post focuses primarily on what I’d call mainstream fiction mixed with women’s fiction, and all of the recommended titles have a romantic element. They’re also overwhelmingly UK releases. If you haven’t read the books in my Worth Every Penny post, I recommend looking at those as well.

The Orchid House by Lucinda Riley

Spanning from the 1930s to the present day, from the Wharton Park estate in England to Thailand, this sweeping novel tells the tale of a concert pianist and the aristocratic Crawford family, whose shocking secrets are revealed, leading to devastating consequences.

As a child, concert pianist Julia Forrester spent many idyllic hours in the hothouse of Wharton Park, the grand estate reminiscent of Downton Abbey where her grandfather tended exotic orchids. Years later, while struggling with overwhelming grief over the death of her husband and young child, she returns to this tranquil place. There she reunites with Kit Crawford, heir to the estate and her possible salvation.

When they discover an old diary, Julia seeks out her grandmother to learn the truth behind a love affair that almost destroyed the estate. Their search takes them back to the 1940s when Harry, a former heir to Wharton Park, married his young society bride, Olivia, on the eve of World War II. When the two lovers are cruelly separated, the impact will be felt for generations to come.

The Unfinished Garden by Barbara Claypole White

This book is the only straight-up romance on the list, and I put it here because I thought it was interesting. The hero has OCD, which is highly unusual for a romantic lead.

James Nealy is haunted by irrational fears and inescapable compulsions. A successful software developer, he’s thrown himself into a new goal—to finally conquer the noise in his mind. And he has a plan. He’ll confront his darkest fears and build something beautiful: a garden. When he meets Tilly Silverberg, he knows she holds the key…even if she doesn’t think so.

After her husband’s death, gardening became Tilly’s livelihood and her salvation. Her thriving North Carolina business and her young son, Isaac, are the excuses she needs to hide from the world. So when oddly attractive, incredibly tenacious James demands that she take him on as a client, her answer is a flat no.

When a family emergency lures Tilly back to England, she’s secretly glad. With Isaac in tow, she retreats to her childhood village, which has always stayed obligingly the same. Until now. Her best friend is keeping secrets. Her mother is plotting. Her first love is unexpectedly, temptingly available. And then James appears on her doorstep.

Away from home, James and Tilly forge an unlikely bond, tenuous at first but taking root every day. And as they work to build a garden together, something begins to blossom between them—despite all the reasons against it.

A Place of Secrets by Rachel Hore

Auction house appraiser Jude leaves London for her dream job at Starbrough Hall, an estate in the countryside, examining and pricing the manuscripts and instruments of an eighteenth-century astronomer. She is welcomed by Chantal Wickham and Jude feels close to the old woman at once: they have both lost their husbands. Hard times have forced the Wickham family to sell the astronomer’s work, their land and with it, the timeworn tower that lies nearby. The tower was built as an observatory for astronomer Anthony Wickham and his daughter Esther, and it served as the setting for their most incredible discoveries.

Though Jude is far away from her life in London, her arrival at Starbrough Hall brings a host of childhood memories. She meets Euan, a famed writer and naturalist who lives in the gamekeeper’s cottage at the foot of the tower, where Jude’s grandfather once lived. And a nightmare begins to haunt her six-year-old niece, the same nightmare Jude herself had years ago. Is it possible that the dreams are passed down from one generation to the next? What secrets does the tower hold? And will Jude unearth them before it’s too late?

Blueprints by Barbara Delinsky

Another romance novel, but the mother-daughter relationship here is more compelling than either of the romances (both of which are rather weak, IMHO), which is why it lands on this list.

Blueprints is the story of two strong women, Caroline MacAfee, a skilled carpenter, and her daughter Jamie, a talented architect. The day after her 56th birthday, Caroline is told the network wants Jamie to replace her as the host on Gut It!, their family-based home construction TV show. The resulting rift couldn’t come at a worse time.

For Jamie, life changes overnight when, soon after learning of the host shift, her father and his new wife die in a car accident that orphans their two-year-old son. Accustomed to organization and planning, she is now grappling with a toddler who misses his parents, a fiancé who doesn’t want the child, a staggering new attraction, and a work challenge that, if botched, could undermine the future of both MacAfee Homes and Gut It!

For Caroline, hosting Gut It! is part of her identity. Facing its loss, she feels betrayed by her daughter and old in the eyes of the world. When her ex-husband dies, she is thrust into the role of caregiver to his aging father. And then there’s Dean, a long-time friend, whose efforts to seduce her awaken desires that have been dormant for so long that she feels foreign to herself.

Who am I? Both women ask, as the blueprints they’ve built their lives around suddenly need revising. While loyalties shift, decisions hover, and new relationships tempt, their challenge comes not only in remaking themselves, but in rebuilding their relationship with each other.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She’s also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie’s parents banish her to Europe to have her “little problem” taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she’s recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she’s trained by the mesmerizing Lili, code name Alice, the “queen of spies,” who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy’s nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. That is until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn’t heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth . . . no matter where it leads.

I hope you enjoy exploring these books!

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Reissue covers!

I am so excited by these brand new covers for the books I originally released with Penguin. The eBooks should all be out by the end of September and the print books by the end of October. I know the books themselves are old news, but it’s so much fun to see them in their new clothes (if you wonder what their old clothes look like, you can check them out on GoodReads which, like Goodwill, is where old clothes go once you’re done with them.)

Black Rabbit Hall, a TBR Challenge Read

Okay, so I have completely fallen down on the TBR challenge this year and for that I apologize. On the up side, I have an amazing book to recommend: Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase. (By the way, there are a zillion different covers for this book, so I chose the one I liked best for this post. I think it’s actually the UK cover, though.)

Black Rabbit Hall is not a romance, though it is romantic. It’s not a tragedy, though it is tragic. It’s not even a mystery, though there are mysterious elements. I suppose it could be considered a family saga. It’s very, very British and quite Gothic.

A secret history. A long-ago summer. A house with an untold story.

Amber Alton knows that the hours pass differently at Black Rabbit Hall, her London family’s Cornish country house, where no two clocks read the same. Summers there are perfect, timeless. Not much ever happens. Until, one terrible day, it does.

More than three decades later, Lorna is determined to be married within the grand, ivy-covered walls of Pencraw Hall, known as Black Rabbit Hall among the locals. But as she’s drawn deeper into the overgrown grounds, she soon finds herself ensnared within the house’s labyrinthine history, overcome with a need for answers about her own past and that of the once-golden family whose memory still haunts the estate.

I give this book five stars, but that’s because I read it as straight, mainstream fiction. If you’re expecting a mystery, something to figure out, you’ll be disappointed. Likewise, if you’re expecting an enormous romantic arc you’ll (likely) be disappointed. Everyone in this book is pretty much who (s)he seems to be, and the gradual unfolding of what you already suspect is part of the beauty of it. The language, the pacing, it’s a quiet but lovely book.

And if, like me, family drama is the thing that grabs your emotions, you’ll cry. A lot.

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The Probable Future, a TBR Challenge Post

I do dearly love a little magical realism with my contemporary romance and women’s fiction, so when Alice Hoffman’s The Probable Future went on sale a while back I greedily snatched it up. Of course, I have no self control, so I was up until 3am reading it. I recommend you don’t start it in the evening!

Women in the Sparrow family are always born in March, when the weather is changing, when the world is unpredictable, when new life is stirring. And on her thirteenth birthday, each Sparrow woman receives an unusual gift:

[from the cover] Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future—a future that she might not want to see.

In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past—and a very current murder—against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows’s legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors.

This book is women’s fiction at its purest. There are men. The men are important. But the reader is never invited to consider them as full humans away from their relationships to the focal characters, the women, even when Hoffman writes a scene from one of the men’s points of view. The women are fabulously well-developed. Elinor seems sympathetic at first while Jenny seems like a raving witch, and Stella a confused child, but as is true in real life, the more layers are peeled away—the bigger picture we get of each woman—the less clean those emotions are. Elinor made terrible mistakes. Jenny was confused. Stella is stubborn. Elinor was unfeeling. Jenny was greedy. Stella lies. But by the end, none of the negatives matter: you love these women and want desperately for them to succeed. The only bad thing I can say about this book is that I wanted another hundred pages so that I didn’t have to leave the characters.

Notes from the Alpaca Farm

Today I went over to Faraway Farms Alpacas for research. (My current WIP is set on an alpaca farm, but that’s all I’m saying because I’ve only started it.) I met several lovely alpacas and learned a few things I didn’t know, so I thought I’d share them here.

As one would expect, all the fleece when an alpaca is shorn is used. But it’s not all used for the same thing. Different parts of the animal provide different qualities of fleece. The stuff that’s spun into the kind of yarn you are used to using for knitting and crocheting comes from the “saddle”, the sides and up across the back. The neck is used for rug yarn, which is thicker and not so soft and fluffy. (I came close to getting a rug from the farm shop, and someone may end up with one for Christmas this year if I’m not careful). The lower quality fleece can also be used for felting fiber.

On a completely different note, I found out that alpacas use communal dung heaps, which makes cleaning up after them easier. You don’t have to search the fields for individual “patties”.

I found out that adolescent alpaca boys are exactly like human teenagers—they have to be kept away from the mommies, daddies, and sisters because they like to run, jump, wrestle and spit….generally annoying the other alpacas who are just trying to relax and have a good time.

Speaking of relaxing, alpacas are a bit claustrophobic and prefer not to be enclosed. It makes them nervous. So they have open sheds. When it gets really cold & wet, there are walls that can be hooked up to protect them, but in general they prefer to be open to the air!

Alpacas are curious and they will come and examine you, but only on their own terms. They’re not pets and don’t want you to stroke them.

Apparently, they’re relatively easy to farm. They eat grass and hay and sometimes a special grain mix that gets fed to those in need, like the pregnant females. But mostly they just graze and eat their hay. Shearing is a specialized skill, so the farm brings in someone to do that, and then sends the resulting fleece out to the mill for processing.

They don’t smell particularly. If anything it’s a bit grassy. No worse than my dogs smell a few weeks post-bath! Their fur is water-resistant (and flame retardant, too!), which helps both the beats and the humans who wear the sweaters made from their fiber. They’re shorn in May, so when I saw them today they were at their heaviest coat and most of them wanted to stand in the shade all the time because of the heat.

I had a grand time at the farm. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re ever in the area, and call to make an arrangement to visit her shop. She has some stunning goods made from her own alpaca fiber and also made by fair trade artists in Peru.

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The Wind off the Small Isles, a TBR Challenge Read

Anyone who knows me knows my deep and abiding love of Mary Stewart. Every year, I re-read at least two or three of the books. But up until recently, every time I checked for The Wind of the Small Isles, it would show up in the $75 range, which put it at about $1 per page. I couldn’t make myself do it. But apparently it was reissued last year, because this version is copyright 2016 and was released to honor what would have been Stewart’s 100th birthday.

I must admit that much as I love Stewart, when I got to the end of the book I had to go back and read this description again because it was just so wrong:

The Wind off the Small Isles is Mary Stewart’s sweeping, romantic long-lost novella, finally being brought back to print in a beautiful, all new edition for the first time in more than four decades.

Look, I loved this little novella, but at 80 pages, calling it “sweeping” is ridiculous. And even “romantic” is pushing it a bit given that the characters barely have time to develop themselves, let alone relationships. It’s beautifully written and typical of Stewart in the strong descriptions and sense of place that suck a reader in, but there’s no real mystery, and not much in the way of plot. If you can get your hands on it and you really love Stewart, grab it. You’ll spend some enjoyable time meeting the characters (there’s an Easter egg for die-hard fans of This Rough Magic) and walk away feeling refreshed, but it’s not sweepingly romantic.

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