Lara > Recent Status Updates

AAAARGH AAARGH I LEFT IT AT HOME WITH LESS THAN 100 PAGES TO GO.

Fen and Saskia are just going to have to hold hands and marinate in anxiety and sexual tension until after work.

On the one hand, I doubt any teenagers are going to still be saying "My body is ready!" 500 years in the future. On the other hand, this story is just as fast-paced and suspenseful and scary as Illuminae was, and I am all hearteyes over Hanna Donnelly. Cry havoc, sweetie.

I see Rhage and Mary and their family are mentioned in the jacket copy. STG, if this turns into another 400-page sobfest about how nothing is more important than a faaaaaamily made up of two parents and the children without which no one's life can ever be complete, I am off this series for life.

I want to read Cloudbound, just not right now. Back to the to-read list for you, friend.

Because sometimes, you just need two feisty shapeshifters, wacky hijinks, and a good dose of "Oh damn, we're ridiculously attracted to each other, what do?"

It's like Cat Valente and Nina Kiriki Hoffman collaborated, and I really like it.

Also, Smallbone has Stephen King's nasal Maine accent in my head.

The mention of the Hero's nameless, characterless Asian teacher of martial arts (in Regency England?) was just balanced out by Heroine's absolutely masterful takedown of a jerk noble at her presentation ball. Anna, I love you.

As Misty's foreshadowing has all the subtlety of an anvil to the head, I can already tell that the villains of this book are going to be the Valdemaran equivalent of MRAs.

I hope Amily destroys them.

It reminds me a great deal of Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, with politics and machinations rather than violent upheaval. There's definitely violent upheaval on the horizon, though.

Because I cannot bring a book titled Her Naughty Holiday to work to read over lunch when there are clients coming to the office.

Inspector O is a cross between Winston Smith and the little on-fire "this is fine" dog.

OAK AND ASH AND RUDDY THORN, SEANAN, IF YOU KILL THIS ONE SPECIFIC CHARACTER WHO IS CURRENTLY IN PERILOUS PERIL I WILL NEVER SPEAK TO YOU AGAIN.

Okay, I will, because let's face it, you and Toby own my soul, but I will do it out of the corner of my mouth, and bitterly.

I kind of love how Katherine, as her unlucky-in-love neighbor pours her heart out to her, is thinking I did not sign on to be a fount of wisdom and compassion, why does everyone want to cry all over old ladies, I just want to go to bed after a long day.

Also, if one more person calls little Fatima "Fatty", I'm going to punch them. It's not her fault she's always being unfavorably compared to angelic Tory!

I am at the point (this point comes in every Expanse novel) where I just want to drop everything and read frantically until the end. The ante's been hugely upped, and the tension's even higher because all four viewpoint characters in this book are the four crewmembers of the Rocinante, and nothing can happen to anyone in my precious space found family.

I like this book, I do. One slightly jarring thing, though, is that the sexy times seem to just appear out of nowhere. Heroine goes to talk to Hero about business opportunity--surprise blowjob! Hero goes to apologize to Heroine and finds her having a panic attack--surprise groping! And it's all consensual (and hot), and I'm not against it, but...the tempo's off.

I don't know what's more unsettling, the growing awareness that Lora's malfunctioning key makes her an unreliable narrator, or the choice to make the setting as nonspecific as possible. Middleton is in the "middle of the country", but no specifics are given, absolutely nothing to indicate whether this is the future, an alternate Earth, or whether Lora's broken key is affecting her perspective on the world as well.

She's really pouring on the descriptors in this one. It's never cold, it's cold, biting, and bitter. Owen's not just black-haired, he's black-haired, lean, and swarthy. I can feel my reading falling into a rhythm--sentence subject, adjective-adjective-and-adjective, verb.

And my heart is wrenched, right on schedule. Nobody makes you care, then makes you cry, quite like Mr. Kay.

Hee! The part-Indian hero has already alluded to women who pursue him because they think he has secret erotic knowledge. Excellent, sir, you have skewered one of my romance-trope annoyances, and I am already rooting for you. Also rooting for the heroine, who basically looked her fiance in the eye and said "So while I was trying not to die of exposure after a shipwreck, you were banging a local matron, huh?"

Hold all my calls, I need to devote the rest of my day to finishing this book.

I'm enjoying the digs at fantasy tropes and the general theme of Oh Gods Preserve Us, the Orcs Have Automatic Weapons...but is the cannibalism necessary? And that really disturbing (and very offhand) rape joke?

Okay, so the previous books in the series, Esther and Bathsheba, had white, or white-passing, women on the covers. Women who were wearing period-appropriate clothes and make-up (kohl around Esther's eyes), but who you'd look at and go "Yes, those ladies are white". The book about Delilah, an acknowledged villain character? Cover shows an unambiguously non-white woman. I am...discomfited.

I love these profoundly dysfunctional half-brothers to death, but I swear by all the gods and the poor broken Virtu, someone needs to sit both their butts down somewhere and say "USE. YOUR. WORDS." Yes, Felix is by nature a dick, and yes, Mildmay is so stoic ancient Greeks would cry, but they need to talk some things out.