S. Scott Whitaker's Blog, page 9

Identity dissected in Simone White's Unrest, from Ugly Duckling Presse #poetry #review

Simone White’s chapbook, Unrest, from Ugly Duckling Presse,  is a serial abecedarian poem about “writing when it is forbidden,” (from the publisher’s note) for and from the contemporary black experience as part of the press’ dossier series. White dialogues with a variety of voices and touches upon culture in this serial poem that is as much about human identity as it is about racial identity. It’s a handsome chappie, and dense, layered, full of small quiet moments such as staring her cat n the eye, skull to skull, or trying so hard to slide into designer jeans that are by design tight, uncomfortable, yet necessary if only to remind us that we live in “a state of bafflement over own decay.”The poems of Unrest touch upon the author’s experience of language in law school, as well as her experience as a young woman with her own “weird/ugly thinking about my sex.” Though White is writing about and from the African American experience, the poems of the sequence are rooted in the body, in the physical experience of being alive, which enlarges her subject matter, allows readers who have no experience with African American culture to walk in her words. White’s use of text is editorial as authorial, excerpting a section of David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles…to the Coloured Citizens of the World” as both exigency of the sequence, and as a curator of work, allowing the excerpt to serve as poem F in the sequence. White condenses her experience into a timeline of experiences that she remixes together from her own family to her consciousness. In "Let the River Run" she waxes about knowledge, how motherhood defines a woman. This is ripe territory for White who picks up the thread of gender identity throughout the sequence, but not so boldy as in "P. Honorifics Lack Specificity" where she wonders about “worship of her/need to dominate her icon” or what it means to be in “bafflement over my own decay.” “What must it be like, to be so far ahead in one’s body.”

The ABC’s of Memory is a reminder that the voice of America has gotten broader and deeper, and more complex. #poetryreview

Lenny Lianne’s newest volume of poetry, The ABCs of Memory, from ScriptWorks Press, mashes two books of poetry, with opposing ideals, together, a tradition that harkens back to Blake,  An Alphabet from An Ample Nation, and An Alphabet of Modest Means. Memory strikes a contemporary chord, both cherishing the past and tightening the belt on the future, a theme most Americans could identify with in these recent years of economic recovery.

Lianne’s ABCs are broad in depth and range, and touch on cultural milestones such as Elvis, Nancy Drew, Wonder Bread, 9-11, and Ty Cobb, as well as personal memories of her family. These poems are celebrations, elegies, and like the titles of the books, or parts suggest, hint at a plethora of riches, or a plethora of troubles, big and small.

Lianne speaks with authority about young men drafted into war in “Basic Training” and young boys peeking at their Centerfold cousin in “Finding the Playmate of the Month.” Lianne doesn’t just recount these memories, invented, real, but often questions them, mourns for them without evoking false pride or anger.

The ABCs of Memory could easily fall into sentimentality, we are talking about memories. Lost wonders of the good old days, but Lianne does not allow the poems to do so. She steers them towards a unified bridge, another great American tradition--unifying the country through poetic voice, where all emotional landscapes butt up against each other, like so many state lines running parallel and perpendicular. One of the finer poems, Velocity and Other Variables, begins as a memory of boys throwing olives but ends as a meditation on war, as if all the world’s violence is seeded in the youthful volley of spitballs, baseballs, and olives.

This volume manages to be both grand and humble, her form is crafted, though not too formal for non-academics, but her language is direct and frank, allowing images and emotions to breathe, puffing up, or shrinking up as they will. Mostly the perspectives are from the white middle class, a shrinking population as America trudges forth in the 21st century. That’s not a criticism, mind you, but rather a reminder that what made the country great in the 20th century was the ordinary people in the middle who built, loved, sang, drank, died, and fought for something we used to call the American Dream. Something that perhaps belongs in the euro-white centric past. And in that sense Lianne’s book is an elegy for the American Dream, as it once was, for that ideal is changing with globalization and a leaner economy. The ABC’s of Memory is a reminder that the voice of America has gotten broader and deeper, and more complex.

#JessicaJones source material is A plus #Marvel entertainment, #comicreview

Jessica Jones will be released in November on Netflix, and if you have never heard of the character you are not alone. Chances are that your resident Marvel fangirl or fanboy are hyper aware of its existence, release date, and potential cross-over appearances. The little fanboy that lives in our house is constantly digesting MCU material. Where does it all fit in, Dad? What’s next in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Potential viewers beware, the source material for the show Jessica Jones is not for kids. It’s for you, adults. For us alone. Can you feel the cheery Marvel buzz?
I ate comics through the eighties and early nineties. I consumed as much as I could afford, trade, or borrow. And I thought I remembered Jessica Jones as a character from Heroes for Hire. Turns out, I was wrong, though the comic book tramps through Hell’s Kitchen, and Misty Knight shows up as a cameo. From author Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos, Alias ran from 2001-2004 on Marvel’s adult comic imprint, MAX.  



Turns out Alias is a heck of a title. As good of an adult comic as say The Walking Dead, or The Maxx, or dare we say anything by Frank Miller? The first word in the book is “Fuck” and Bendis does not shy away from profanity or realistic dialogue. Gritty content and a commitment to character development, Alias treats the superhero world is the backdrop. Cameos by Daredevil, Captain America, Jarvis, and other minor characters serve as setting, color, flavor. 

Alias also satirizes superhero life. Luke Cage is described by Carol Danvers, or Captain Marvel/Ms Marvel as having a cape fetish, and the gossip among the superheroes is aired at cocktail hour while Jones gets hammered. Gaydos manages to capture Jones’ deadpan tone with his brush, and the title character’s smartass, insecure emotions. See Jones is a failed superhero. She couldn’t hack it. She tried. And now she works as a private investigator, and many of her cases involve cape culture, or anything that whiffs of superhuman. Cases tend to find her.

Possessing superhuman strength and the ability to fly (though she does not practice flying, save when she’s drunk and having sex, yes you read that correctly), Jones uses her powers when she has to, but the action is rarely in the panel. We see people going through windows, or we see the aftermath of a conflict, but rarely the action itself. It’s a crime series drama with a focus on character development. For the most part Alias is a redemption story. Jones is a wreck. She’s an alcoholic. She smokes too much. She’s emotionally guarded. She obsesses about her failure as a superhero, a lover, and a woman. She’s grumpy, and unpredictable. She’s only an average detective, and most her success is accidental or indirectly because of her powers, or from her association with the Avengers. She’s a very real person, you root for her and watch her fuck up again and again.  It’s a gorgeously rendered comic. Gaydos is a painter, and many of the comics feature mixed media collages reminiscent of comic book illustrator Dave McKean. One of the best issues features J Jonah Jameson and the staff of the Daily Bugle. Almost the whole issue is from Jones’ POV and is rendered in warm and cool watercolor panels. The writing crackles, the panel composition is eye candy.
Luke Cage is one of Jones's love interests. Matt Murdock looms large, and Daredevil casts a shadow over Jones’ world. While on a date with Scott Lang, one of the Ant-Men, the couple witness Spidey and the Human Torch in pursuit of Doc Ock. Jones almost has an itch to get involved but doesn’t want to. She just thinks she ought to. Because she has powers. Because she’s one of them.  But she isn’t one of them. Lang echoes her and they blow it off and have a nice dinner. It’s perfect fodder for the MCU, and it is ripe for Marvel to stretch its creative wings. Fan dissection of every inch of the show will multiply on Youtube and social media. Early word on the television show is that it will be a psychological thriller, suggesting the source material is inspiration only.
Netflix’s Daredevil proved to be a great crime superhero series with a gritty tone, paying homage to great crime dramas such as The Wire, or NYPD Blue.  Reading the source material certainly increased my excitement. Plus David Tennant as the Purple Man? No brainer. I’m on board. I’m not so sure I’ll let my kids watch it, perhaps a fight scene or two, but Dad’s gonna have to binge first and regulate later.

From SMD Archives: Beauty is The Appeal of Evil in Pembroke Sinclair's urban fantasy #fictionreview

John Keats and the Romantics explored the idea of deadly beauty, and like the poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," where brave knights are waylaid to death by a spirit that enchants them with her supernatural beauty, Pembroke Sinclair creates a narrative where the heroine, Katie, a senior in high school, finds herself waylaid by hot teenage hunks who are on opposing sides in the war of good vs evil.  Unlike the Keats poem, the hot hunks want Katie’s soul, not her life.  Beauty, it seems, exists on both sides of the war, and both tempt Katie in a tug of war for her heart, soul, and mind. Beauty is The Appeal of Evil.

The novel opens as Katie navigates another dreadful day in high school. But by the end of the day she finds herself balancing the pros and cons of Wes, her old childhood crush, and Josh, her new handsome knight in shining armor.  Wes is a tease. Josh is polite and decisive. Both offer Katie enough attention to keep her distracted and bothered throughout the rest of the day. Both boys have her hooked, and Katie spends most of the early act of the novel trying to figure out which one she likes best, which readers will relate to. This romantic tension will appeal to readers of the Twilight series; team Josh, or team Wes? Who does Katie like the best?

The Appeal of Evil is at its heart about the choices we make as people, and how they add up to a life. The main conflict is internal, for Katie is given choices. Josh offers answers, security, albeit of an evil variety, and Wes offers an old comfort, but no easy answers, and ironically, more deception. Josh is a demon sent up from Hell, but quite up-front about reaping souls, and Wes is a Praesul, a demon hunter, trained to be highly secretive and deceptive to protect those around them. Part of the appeal of evil, and Josh, for Katie is that evil doesn't lie, as much, where the good characters cloak themselves in lies and deceit. When Josh takes Katie out of the hospital and portals her to Hell, he tells her that she's needed and wanted as an agent of evil. Katie finds this honesty attractive, coupled with the fact that Josh is hot and knows exactly how to turn her on doesn't hurt either. Her path seems set. But that’s part of the narrative twists Sinclair sets up for the reader as she lays the groundwork for her demon hunting series.

Wes, and his despondent father, are both Praesuls, and because their life is cloaked in secrecy, Wes keeps Katie out, which ticks Katie off to no end. Add to the fact that her mother seems to find the father sympathetic and attractive, Katie bucks the demon hunting Brady Bunch impulse, or at least for while. Years of what ifs work against Wes: what if only Wes liked me? What if he opened up to me this time? What if he kissed me, or asked me out? What if he told my mother what was really going on with his family? What if Wes shares his demon hunting life with me?

Sinclair sets up Katie as the balance point between good and evil. In this way she is as ordinary as any of us in the real world. Good feels too hard, full of difficult choices, whereas evil feels easier, full of parties, popularity, and fun. It's a metaphor for the teen experience, and Sinclair puts up front for the choices that will, or could eventually ruin a life. Of course, in the demon hunting world of Evil, this means giving up your soul to popular, well liked Josh. And Sinclair is aware of the trappings of her metaphor, and even winks at the reader as she acknowledges Katie's metaphorical journey of heart and soul.  Her best friend, Deb has a secret, and when she reveals that her grandfather was also a Praesul, Katie's secret world opens a little bit wider, and she finally has someone she can talk to. Most of the novel's tension comes from the fact that Katie can talk to no one about her secrets. By novel's end she has a veritable Scooby Gang as she relies on Randy, Wes' father, to help her rescue her mother and Wes from Josh's evil machinations. What will she decide? Sinclair doesn't offer an easy answer, as she leaves the reader hanging in the balance, as Katie is left to figure out how to save herself.
The Appeal of Evil sets up what promises to be a back and forth series in the vein of The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight, where good and evil aren't necessary easily understood, and where the heroine must make difficult decisions and balance out the lives of loved ones with her own. Three stars.

SELF PORTRAIT IN REAR VIEW MIRROR: Fleda Brown’s Driving with Dvorak

Fleda Brown’s memoir, Driving with Dvorak, selected by Tobias Wolff, for the American Lives Series from University of Nebraska, invokes the elegiac tradition while Brown drives us across spaces as wide as America itself: the architecture of family, marriage, divorce and re-marriage, and the essential defining of self. And Brown pulls us into her history, her ruminations on identity, “Who am I? How do I begin?” And where Brown goes her reflective eye and poetic voice follow.
She is at home in her skin, her body, but cuts memories to the bone as if she were a butcher, separating the lean from the fat. In the title essay, Brown’s father, “someone to love and fear” appears to her as a greaser, and then as memories of hot summers where his edge boiled over into rage. At times you feel she wants to let him off the hook, as if she understands that he was trying to keep the family together, her sisters, their needs, and the exhaustive needs of her brother, Mark, disabled and inert. There is weight and pain in her memories, wondering what it would be like if her father and brother were to drown when Mark goes overboard one summer day, “I don’t know what I want to happen, what I feel, what solution would make the world a better place for us.” These truths turn up like polished bones in the long tidal rhythms of her prose. I suppose that’s what’s cool about the music of elegy, it’s haunting, aching, and pretty, and touches a key of doom that humans feel when they love too much.
In “Hiking with Amy,” her stepdaughter, Brown questions identity, family, relationships, her chorus, if you will, but in “Hiking” she also questions her age, her ability to maintain pace with her stepdaughter. She goes to the gym, but what does that really mean, anyway? Maintenance? A kind of totem against becoming one’s parents? And indeed Brown is “pitting myself against so I won’t have her dowager’s hump, walking and running, watching my eating so I won’t have her stomach. Everyday I wake figuring how to live.” And throughout the hike and essay her sense of self is mercurial, she is ten, she is ancient, she has no gender, no definitions but the act of hiking and the very fact of the wilderness about her. Her identity wavers and gives, and enlarges with experience.
Brown’s sense of identity and how our whole lives are built around reconnecting with who we are, and who we want to become is compared to buying a new car, in the essay “New Car,” where vehicles, like marriages, become the sum of many dings and defects. Like the many cars we have had a relationship with, there are memories and touchstones to each vehicle. In “Car” Brown interrupts her narrative with mini factual narratives about the makes and models she has had a relationship with over the years, and the result is an emotional undercut to Brown’s history and memory. A brief reminder that the world is a place that is made and sold and bought, and that we simply maintain.

Throughout these essays, the poet’s voice is consistent; her eye is consistent, even though the speaker aches to be redefined. Consider “Showgirls” an essay about her ill sister, about Vegas, about poetry, and always about one’s search of self-identity, a search that Brown understands is a loop, and is endless and always. Brown’s search is our search too, and when she returns to memories of her father she does so tentatively; the ache in such hesitation ripples throughout her prose. “Where does one go to find life? There is only the vertical, only the awareness of each moment, even as it gathers its own version of past and future to itself.” There is only the moment, and how we adapt to its additions and subtractions, a reflection in the rear view mirror that changes like the landscape we pass through.

Anne Colwell's ear is sharp as her eye in Believing Their Shadows, #poetryreview

Anne Colwell's moving first collection Believing Their Shadows moves in lazy elliptical spins, each poem a widening arc that unites the disintegration of a love affair, a mother's long alcoholic suicide, a father's stoic walk towards death, and moments of magic that contrast with the anger and grief over living with a hopeless alcoholic.

In “Vacation Picture” Colwell takes an inventory of her mother's adolescence, her burgeoning alcohol addiction and the flash the addiction caused.  Colwell does not lay blame or slap her anger to the page, rather she takes a tender look, hoping that the fifteen year old girl in the picture can take a breath, enjoy, for a moment the blue sky and the cry of a gull, before the suffering the “debt of manlessness” and then the “red lipstick, the red flashing lights,”  and later “hidden bottles and open regrets.”

Colwell works in casida, or qasida, an Arabic form of rhyming poetry, usually centered on a single subject, and Colwell centers her casidas on love, the ache of it, particularly, a lover in Seville, the nights of restless longing as she stares at the Delaware Bay “where the rollers plead like fingers.” And the landscapes of Colwell's casida's are filled with scents and “secret skin” and the airlessness of radio that offers salvation, and the speaker of these poems is like an empty socket who has come “back/ten times/ too late” and who “hear your voice in grocery stores,/luncheon counters.” Colwell's line breaks show the tension of the relationship, accentuating the speaker's mood.

Colwell's poems possess a magic and bravado that contrast to the two other dominate cycles in Believing their Shadows, love and the ghost of her mother. Whether its the angel who comes to Mary in   the dark, or when the speaker rides a Centaur down Main Street in March, or a Man with a Hammer who forces “twin cataracts of starlings/ explode into the sky”. Or even her own Hamlet, this time her mother's ghost “bloated, drunk, matted hair.”

“Your hair is thin and dark caught back in a scarf.” Colwell's ear is sharp as her eye.

The women in her poems are real, strong, and equally weak for love or alcohol, and Colwell moves in history's ellipsis, first Mary, and her ruination by the angel's lovemaking, the adulteress stoned to death for love, Queen Vashti's anger, and even Anne Bradstreet, who like the poet's own parents died before what could be said and done was said and done.
 

Maxson and Young’s storytelling shines in Comfort, #fictionreview

HA Maxson and Claudia Young have crafted a crackerjack historical drama with savagery and grace. Comfort is one of those novels that unnerves the reader, the characters are vile, beautifully rendered, and it action unfolds cinematically.  It’s 1816, the summer that wasn’t, and Comfort, a freed slave, is sold back into slavery by her alcoholic, gambling-addicted husband, Cuff, who is as bad as his name suggests. Comfort’s historical premise is based in fact, and meticulously researched, but history doesn’t weigh the narrative down, in fact Comfort’s prose is poetic, moving, even when describing the evil that people do to each other.

Cuff is the low life kind of antagonist that readers love to hate. He gambles, is superstitious, takes advantage of everyone. Cuff is ostracized for selling Comfort back into slavery. That’s one of the books’ hooks. Comfort has already escaped slavery once by buying her freedom. Talented and capable, she’s just barely free when Cuff betrays her.  Cuff is in the grips of addiction when he sells his wife to the reverse underground railroad (Google it...it’s real), and spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out why he’s the most hated man in town. He’s fogged up with gambling dreams, shakes, and bottle madness. You almost feel sorry for him, but reserve it. Cuff is necessary, and provides the moral backboard for the reader to hate equally Joe Johnston, a slave trader, and the master and mistress of the Osborne plantation, a dilapidated gothic hell-hole that as ugly as the villains who run them. Master Osborne is nearly blind, and Mistress Osborne is jealously hateful of her slaves, and between the two of them, Comfort, sold to them by Johnston, finds no peace.

This isn’t a novel whose purpose is to embrace the complexities of the villains.  The Osborne plantation is emblematic, perhaps realistic, but Maxson and Young make the place feverish, fetid, rotting; there is nothing remotely sympathetic about the place, or their masters. Mistress breaks Comfort’s fingers early in the novel, forcing Comfort to the fields where she will be broken by the hard labor; and its just what Mistress wants, for no one, especially not a slave, can possess domestic talents that surpass that of the lady of the house. Petty? Cruel? You bet, but it’s not grossly over the top either.  The Osborne place is full of violence, but it’s the underlying hate under the characters hearts that make the place reprehensible, to the reader, and to everyone else in the novel. White people, respectable Christian land-owners, hate the Osbornes. The kind of slave owners that slave owners hate and view as scum of the earth.

The novel’s protagonists are Comfort, and Esther, an octoroon slave who flees her home and heads South, pretending to be white, to save Comfort.  While Comfort is the title character, Esther’s story is possibly the most dramatic, and the most harrowing.  Esther must pass for white, and take Comfort’s baby south. She’s paranoid, out of her element, and terrified. Yet, It is this storyline that is the heart of the novel, and where Maxson and Young’s storytelling shines.

Grace, in the face of evil, grace in the face of danger is how Comfort, and Esther survive. “Comfort cut her glance toward from time to time, but mostly she stared ahead at the smooth unbroken motion of the hoe tearing weeds away from full grown plants, smoothing out wrinkles in the earth, piling rocks and pebbles, making hours disappear as the sun spun another cycle across the warm blue sky.” Comfort disappears into the work of the field. The suffering is beautifully rendered, but doesn’t feel exploitative, or hypersensitive.  
In the end, Comfort’s quick study and Esther’s knowledge of roots and herbs save them.  Disguise, poison, betrayal, all elements of high suspense, and though it all you root for Esther, you root for Pompey the mute slave, you root for Comfort, you root for her baby, pulled along by Maxson and Young’s well paced, graceful prose.

An orange by any other name would taste as sweet, Sheri Reynolds' fourth novel hits the sweet spot, #fictionreview

An orange by any other name would taste as sweet

I hate my body. I am so sick of living in my body, Kenny Lugo says in Sheri Reynolds’ fourth novel, The Sweet In-Between. Kendra is Ken and Ken is Kendra and the difference between the two is Kenny, a third name and identity her adopted family bestows upon her. Kendra is Ken and Ken is Kenny, and the difference between the three is the binding of the breasts, the ball cap, the shorn hair of a young country boy who monitors his intake of fluids so he won’t have to use the bathroom at school and be called out as a freak and punished with a short burst of hair spray to the eyes. Kendra is Ken. Ken is Kenny. And if making an uneasy truce with her body isn’t hard enough, Kenny’s creepy wolfish whisky-faced neighbor, Jarvis Stanley, kills a college girl who broke into Kenny’s duplex mistaking it for a rental. The shock and heat of the murder are enough to singe Kenny’s psychic hairs and send her into an anxious spin, the fear of being kicked out of Aunt Glo’s house when she turns 18 like hot copper on her lips. And when she isn’t worrying about having to live in the shack behind Glo’s house, which she renovates and redeems as she fights for identity, she worries about sex, which is front and center as her younger “adopted” brother simulates the female sex with oranges, while older brother Tim-Tim and his girlfriend, Sneaky, parade like cocky birds in front of Kenny, who’s just trying to deal with being a “nobody with a lifestyle,” a lifestyle she isn’t even conscious of, a lifestyle that’s just the truth.  But making an uneasy truce with her body leaves her isolated in the run-down school whose rigid rural restrictions on gender and sexual orientation are as tight as the Ace bandages that bind her breasts down, and she haunts the classrooms and clubs, sometimes called Ken, sometimes Kenny, never fully engaged in work or with others, her social world governed by blueprints laid out by her drug addled father’s absence, Aunt Glo’s pill-popping, and repeated sexual creepiness from dad, neighbor, weird-school-bus-kid, and “adopted” brother. And what could play out as Jerry Springer rings lyric and true under Reynolds power, for Kenny, despite her psychic suffering, tries to do right in the world, sacrificing her own emotional and mental stability.  When she was a young child she allowed Daphne, abandoned by her drug addicted mother, to nurse from her immature bosom, and the guilt Kenny suffers plays out in the endless hours she spends helping Aunt Glo raise the girl.To me, everything feels like work, Kenny states. Because she doesn’t belong to anyone she must work harder because her experience with family is as tenuous as tidal foam that washes up on the beach in town, as fragile as the decaying horseshoe crab tail she carries as a talisman, as a tribute to the dead and forgotten. And through the engendering eye of Kenny’s narration a simple visit up state to see Dad in prison becomes a psychic hassle, and humiliation, the prison guards thinking she was a boy trying to pass as a girl. And Daddy is no louder than the whisper of the dead girl whom Kenny anchors herself to; life’s happened to Kenny while he’s been away.
Like the oranges the characters sexualize Reynolds’ plot and character are layered: below the skin, there’s pith, and below that the meat of the fruit. For the action is really all reaction, the shotgun’s report an echo, echo, echo, as the family struggles to hold on in a run-down coastal town. The images mirror and reflect, and like a musician, Reynolds allows images to return loop and resonate. The males look like they should be females, Kenny says of the Buffleheads, one afternoon on the water. At school her favorite teacher is rumored to have changed her name to Saraswati, a lifestyle change which is as tolerated and understood as much as Kenny’s gender-bending. Identity slips and slides between the fingers like Kenny’s squid bait. The whole family is looking for their reflection, they all have fixes, and they all have identity issues. Identity washes in and out of the tide; after all names can change, and clothing isn’t natural, or necessary and of these identities Reynolds leaves us with no easy ending, this family’s life isn’t going to be easy, it’s a country-blues song without an end, but there is hope, even for Kenny who is Ken who is Kendra, a sweet in-between.

From SMD Archives: R.L. Naquin’s Fairies in My Fireplace cooks up a formula for fun, #fictionreview

Fairies in my Fireplace, book three of the Monster Haven series by R.L. Naquin, is sheer supernatural fun. Naquin’s pace is quick, the dialogue witty, and the tone is light. Zoey Donovan is an aegis, a protector of the supernatural, of the Hidden (monsters and mythological creatures hidden from mortal eyes). As the novel opens her home becomes packed with supernatural creatures, running from an unseen evil, and as the book unfolds, the tension builds as a danger looms, in the form of the Collector, trying to snatch up creatures to sell into slavery. All the while Zoey has to balance her work life, her hot reaper boyfriend (he’s human--his job is to reap souls), and the chaos brought by the creatures seeking asylum.Balancing the characters is one of Naquin’s strongpoint. This book is popping with bizarre monsters, and it would be easy for a reader to get lost in them, but Naquin paces the action so it is easy for a reader to keep track of the goblins, sprites and djinns that come at the reader quickly, each of them adding to the humor and pathos of Zoey’s complicated life.  Naquin’s tone reminds me of the Stephanie Plum books, by Janet Evanovich. The heroine is plucky, smart, but bad luck with hair, clothes, cars, and men follow her like a cloud. Poor Zoey can’t seem to catch a break, which is part of the fun. She’s relatable even though she has the powers of an empath. Zoey and her BFF Sara, as well as her circle of witty, well-groomed, and hot friends, chat food and fashion, dish on the gossip of the underworld and tease each other with inside jokes, jabs to the proverbial rib, and the like as the action swirls, looms, and breaks over them like the Pacific. The action takes place is Sausalito, CA, and sunny California’s laid-back attitude shines through Naquin’s prose. Zoey is always promising to help. Promising that everything and everyone, monsters or no, will be safe. As a protector, her mothering skills are sharp, and her heart is big and large.  And what Naquin’s story really boils down to is family. The theme runs like a swamp monster’s spine through the novel. With goblin orphans, lost and lonely creatures, and even her own mother missing, Zoey’s heart is burdened with broken families. And as the novel builds to a climax, the theme of family becomes bigger in the spotlight. It doesn’t matter that Naquin is talking about the wreckage of alcoholism on a brownies household, or Zoey’s pain of not having seen her own aegis mother in decades; strip the supernatural from the novel and Naquin’s got an old fashioned tale of a family of misfits trying to make it against the big bad world.
I have not read the other two in the series, and I had no problem locking into the storyline. Naquin is easy on first time readers, making sure the stones in the path are laid one after another. Part chick-lit, part Supernatural mystery, part satire, Naquin’s Fairies in My Fireplace cooks up a formula for fun.  

From Share My Destiny's Archives: Lacy Danes' Open Flame is a bodice ripper for fantasy fans, #fictionreview

Lacy Danes' Open Flame: Dragon's Fate Book 2 is a fantasy bodice ripper with bloodsucking, steamy sex, and trippy time travel sensuality. Danes weaves strands of high Romance, and fantasy together to create one hot, wet, and messy tale of love and lust amid fancy European settings.Fina is the beautiful sharp, and pure, daughter of a brilliant clock maker who possibly is the key to the mysterious Madoc's design of a watch that can manipulate time. Madoc, one of many dark supernatural “beings”, Zir, whose mate is bound to them and imbued with power, eroticism, and magical powers, is seeking parts for this watch which he hopes will help him keep the upper hand among his brethren Zir, and the host of other supernatural beings that populate Danes’ world.  The plot is beside the point. Danes runs a city of subplots in this book, no doubt to anchor her Dragon’s Fate series, but all you need to know is that Madoc and Fina are kept apart by Fina's moral standards, that she finds, as her power grows, to be a thin wall between her and her future mate. Magical jewels and clock designs, and trips back into time jam up the tension between Madoc and his woman. They grow closer, of course, and get hotter, as well. I love historical Eurpoean settings, and Danes nails the torchlight romanticism. The social mannerisms of the period add to the erotic tension. And who doesn’t like a little erotic tension once and a while. But as you probably guess, ultimately, despite the powerful Carmen, the duplicitous Hudson, Open Flame is mostly about Madoc and Fina's desire between each other, and the urge to have lots of babies, and of course all the sex that baby-making requires. I was hoping Madoc to be a bit more sinister, at least because sinister neck biting is a hot, and is the base for so much erotic vampire literature. And though Open Flame is not vampire literature per se, it does borrow from the genre so much that one wonders why dragons and Zir? Of course, to be fair, I am reading the novel out of sequence, which you can do as well. Danes sets up the narrative with plenty of back-story to fill the reader in.
Dragon's Fate is a breezy read, and once Danes gets the blood flowing the pages fly. The menace is quiet, and most of the bad guys have more bark than bite, but Danes is a romantic at heart, despite the goth surrealism, and Open Flame wears its heart on its sleeve. 3 stars