Reviews - Roberts, Sizemore, Whiteside

RED LILY by Nora Roberts

Story about young lovers. She's pregnant with someone else's baby; he's the son of her benefactress. Nice, but where was the romantic tension? Also, I've never been interested in crazy villains or ghost stories, ergo the suspense plot didn't interest me. This feel-good book was not a keeper.

SCANDALOUS MIRANDA by Susan Sizemore

Disappointing. I'm a fan of Susan Sizemore's books. She strikes me as a naturally gifted storyteller, but this one was a snooze. A Victorian woman hires a secretary bodyguard to accompany her back to Italy, where, a year earlier, she'd stumbled into the path of an assassination attempt. She'd been injured, temporarily blinded, and nursed by an Italian bandit whom she secretly longs to find again. What she didn't know was that the Italian bandit was really a top-notch Scottish assassin, and he's the man she's just unwittingly hired. What potential, but the verve and excitement were missing, as if Sizemore's heart wasn't in this book.

THE SWITCH by Diane Whiteside

This book showed up unasked on my doorstep from the publisher, but I figured I'd read it because I'd met Whiteside once years ago when she was still an aspiring writer.

The book was OK. It's about a long-time celibate widower ex-Army Ranger (I think) who secretly wants to be dominated. He meets a high-powered high-finance type in Seattle, they size each other up, and they do their fantasy domination and submission thing. She, however, is looking for a man who is able to be both top and bottom, and isn't willing to fall in love with anyone who isn't naturally both.

It was a very warm and fuzzy pervy book. All was respectful between the couple; the power dynamics didn't make me queasy. I liked seeing a deviation from the usual sexual roles in romance novels. I cannot stand alpha-jerks, but the funny thing is I felt a niggling disdain at this really nice guy as well, because I saw him as being made weak by having to hide his socially unacceptable desires. (And I really do think it was this particular character I didn't warm up to; Kinsale's Allegretto is one of my all-time favorites.)

Anyway, Whiteside has a very readable writing style--the kind that gets you a wide audience a la Linda Howard or Jayne Ann Krentz--so I expect she'll be quite successful. The long fantasy scenario sequences she added in disrupted the narrative force of the story, I thought, but I figure it must have been tough to pad this book from the shorter version that had previously been published by Ellora's Cave.

Spoiler alert for this paragraph:

This entry would be way too long if I talked about what interested me and what annoyed me about the story. There was a lot. Noteworthy that heroine was half-Japanese. Squicky was that the hero involved his 18-year-old son in a kidnapping sequence at the end of the book that proves to the heroine he can be dominant. I think allowing your son to aid in your sexual escapades, even if it means helping you win the heart of the woman you love, is just a tad disgusting. On the heroine's side, I guess it's refreshingly honest, if not completely sympathy-inducing, for her to give this wonderful guy the brush-off because he can't fulfill (so she thinks) her own deep-rooted sexual needs.

OK, so I pretty much ended up talking about all the things that annoyed me. What else is a blog for anyway, if not for that?