Book Recs-

Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally

I loved the idea of a girl as a high school quarterback. There was a part of my brain that kept insisting that this was sheer fantasy, that it could never happen. Because girls are too fragile, too weak, and the prejudice is just too much against them. But the author was clever enough to give that voice a name in the book, and doubly clever to make that voice Jordan's father, who is a professional NFL player. I am not a football fan. I'm a triathlete, that's what I geek out over. But I understand enough about football to get what's going on, and I loved the descriptions of practices and games. To me, an athlete, they felt very real. The romance was almost a second thought to me, much less important. I'm not sure if I liked it because there's no reason that a jocky girl can't have romance, too, or if I felt like it made the book too girly. I think that my internal debate in and of itself tells me something about how well the author did her job. Until the reality of girls playing football, this book will open the gap.

Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

Sometimes I talk about "unnecessary" details in character description and world building. I can't think of a better example of that than Cloud Roads. I don't mean that I want the author to go on and on about irrelevant things that have nothing to do with the plot. But a bit here and there, just to leave the reader wondering if that will matter later, is perfection, like the chocolate curls on top of cheesecake that is already perfection. I felt like this world was so complete, and these characters so real that they could have walked off the page. I wanted to read more and more about them. I actually wanted to write about them myself, because they seemed like they were real people I could steal from.

OK, I'm nattering on without saying anything about the book specifically. A young man who can shape shift lives among humans who can't until the day when he sees another shape-shifter and discovers that he is a lost "consort," an important member of the court of shape-shifters. And they want him back. Or they mostly want him back. The court is not a simple place to be, and they are under attack by other creatures who are genetically related but "evil." How those genetic relationships are going to play out is something for another book, but this is a rich, full story. I loved the twists in the relationships between the male and female characters. On the one hand, this is a story of the lost princess who is found and then betrothed to the prince. Only it's not a princess, it's a lost prince. And he isn't sure if he wants to be married to the queen. She has power over him that really frightens him, magical power that "unmans" him to a certain extent. And the cost of coming back into this world that has forgotten him is giving up everything that he used to be. Loved, loved it!