De la Cruz, Melissa - Blue Bloods

I didn't like this nearly as much as de la Cruz's Fresh Off the Boat, largely because the lives of fabulously wealthy and upper-crust white teenagers in New York do not interest me nearly as much as the life of a Filipino girl's move from the Philippines to the US. Part of that may be because the latter is written with much more heart than the former; I sympathized with V in a way that I don't sympathize with the protagonists of this book.

Schuyler Van Alen is a student at Duchesne, an extremely rich, preppy and exclusive school for the terminally rich, particulary for those who have had family history going back to Plymouth. But when a student at Duchesne is killed and found drained of all her blood, strange happenings start... happening.

There's a ton of brand name dropping, along with talk of socialites, exclusive clubs, exclusive fashions, and all that stuff available to people who have had generations of wealth. I do like what de la Cruz seems to be doing with past lives, and her take on vampires is interesting enough to keep me reading, but I also have a greater weakness for vampires than most people. I also like the conspicuous absence of the brooding, mopey, morally upright yet constantly tormented antihero-cum-romantic-interest; all the POVs we get in this book are female. While they are involved in romances, the central narrative isn't how the pure, innocent mortal girl gets drawn in by aforementioned Tall, Dark and Broody, it's more on the mysteries of the worldbuilding.

I also liked the way de la Cruz plays at mythologizing American history, though I deeply wish her mythologizing weren't completely white.

I'm interested enough to pick up the next book in the series, but not enough to rec this to people, unless they are really huge vampire fans.

Links:
- furyofvissarion's review

Brooks, Martha - Bone Dance

See? I did actually do something outside of obsessively mainlining kdramas! (though admittedly, not much)

Alexandra Sinclair's father, whom she has never met, has just died and left her a parcel of land. Lonny LaFreniere is a bit miffed, as said parcel of land used to belong to his family. One would expect them to meet and fall in love, which they sort of do, but the book is actually more about the ghosts of the past (possibly literal).

I especially liked how the book wove in First Nations mythology; both Alex and Lonny have First Nations parents, and one of the key points in the plot is that Lonny disturbed a burial mound when he was very young. The prose is dreamlike and not always linear, and I suspect I would have liked this a lot more had I not read it looking for melodramatic crack, thanks to my recent kdrama addiction.

Withholding judgment on this, as I've really liked Brooks' works in the past and I suspect I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to read this.

Stuart, Anne - Ice Storm

I've held off on writing this, as I feel it needs more brain power than I possess to write a review that compares and contrasts it with Stuart's Moonrise with a particular examination of gendered roles in romance novels. Unfortunately, if I don't write this now, I'll put it off forever and end up forgetting half of what I wanted to say.

Ice Storm belongs in the unfortunately tiny subgenre of romance books that includes Megan Chance's Fall from Grace and Connie Brockway's All Through the Night; that is, they all star icy and morally dubious heroes and heroines and aren't so much romances as erotic power play. Parts of it also strongly resemble Laura Kinsale's Shadowheart, particularly in the way both heroes of the books are undone by sex, rather than gaining power through the sexual desires of the heroines, which is how most romances go.

Isobel Lambert is the head of a shady international organization called the Committee (as all shady international organizations are called, unless they are "the Institution" or "the Institute"). The Committee is supposedly on the side of good, though they do things like assassinate inconvenient people and overthrow governments. They now must protect an Eastern European international terrorist to get information. Little does Isobel know that he's actually Killian, the first man she fell in love with, the first man she killed, and also the reason why she stopped being innocent, sweet Mary Curwen and started being icy assassin Isobel Lambert.

This is the fourth book in a series; I could tell because there are three other couples. Sadly, all the prior books seem to be on male assassins and the innocent, beautiful women they are supposed to protect and/or kill. One of the couples has jokingly named one of their babies (there are lots of babies) "Swede" in honor of the Stockholm Syndrome.

I think they found that much more sappy and romantic than I did.

I suspect Anne Stuart would have written something much darker and more erotic if she thought it would have sold; either that, or she's so used to writing within romance genre constraints that they infest the book despite its boundary-pushing content. I would have loved this ten times more had it discarded the couples, the babies, and the gender roles. That said, I still loved this a lot for what it did do with genre tropes, and it would have earned a place on my bookshelf just for the heroine's final line. Also, it is hot like burning.

Even so, I actually wish this one had more sex, or at least more detailed sex (this may be a first for me, at least in the romance genre). The most interesting changes to the characters happen in bed, and I'm grumpy that we get the lead-in, a brief summary, and then the morning after, because it definitely needed something like the POV change in Shadowheart.

( Race )

( Gender )

( More gender, with spoilers )

I'd rec this if you like the aforementioned Kinsale, Chase, or Brockway books, even though Ice Storm is the most flawed of them all. That's really unfortunate, because if you squint past all the romance novel trappings, there would be a killer story.

Some day I will get the complete gender inversion of the usual killer alpha male hero and the sweet innocent heroine, and it will be the BEST THING EVER. Till then, I will satisfy myself with books that at least take on romance tropes, if not always successfully.

ETA: corrected horrible grammar errors

(no subject)

Yaaaay! I have a new DVD player and it is region free and! It plays DivX files! Finally! I can watch video files on TV! And! It plays .srt files, which means...

I CAN WATCH COFFEE PRINCE ON MY TV!

Possibly I even tested it by watching the chestnut scene and the couch scene for the third time in a week.

And to make this post not entirely pointless, I present for your edification and amusement (if you speak Korean and want to mock my horrible grasp of the language): Korean I have learned from watching dramas so far (excluding appellations).

(I actually wasn't going to post this, because I felt it only illustrated how dumb I am, and I don't want to mock kdramas as a whole, since I have very limited exposure and am still trying to differentiate kdrama tropes from things informed by Korean culture. But I remember how interesting I found it when anime/manga-newbies posted about their first impressions. So hopefully this will be somewhat interesting, though I am not at all sure it is.)

• I love you - learned from every drama I have seen
  
• I like you - also from every drama I have seen
  
• I'm sorry - also from every drama I have seen, but definitely from Coffee Prince, as there is one scene in which Eun Chan says it about a billion times.
  
• Hello (for answering the phone) - from all the modern dramas, of course. On a side note, I am geekily amused by how much plot takes place on cellphones via calls and text messaging, as opposed to emails. So much so that taking your battery out of your phone so people can't get to you is sort of like deleting your LJ!
  
• "my lord" - from Damo
  
• Library - clearly my brain prioritizes this, even if dramas usually do not
  
• Don't go! - from Coffee Prince, although I think this will come in handy

Sadly, I have not yet learned key phrases like "I am the god of death! I will kill you!" or "absolute destiny apocalypse," two of the first things I learned to say in Japanese.