Category: links (Page 8 of 10)

June Round Up

June 30, 2014 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

The Lumberfox by Ava Lovelace – B+ I picked this one up when it was free on promotion and for various reasons I was looking for something short to read so I opened it. Despite the title, it is not a shifter book. It is a quite delightful erotic short. It retails for 99c but I think it’s well worth the money. Geek girl Tara is out in what proves to be a blizzard buying her first vibrator. I was amused she christened her new toy Han Solo because, (wait for it):

“he was cocky and looked like he was going to shoot first.”

I’ve never even seen snow let alone been in a blizzard, but apparently what one does in such situations is leave one’s car on the road until the blizzard ends. When she is (gently) rear-ended by Ryon’s jeep, he gets out of his vehicle to exchange information with her and from there, in a mostly believable way, she ends up in Ryon’s apartment to wait out the blizzard – both of their cars as well as everyone else’s it seems, will wait on the road until the weather is better.

There is immediate chemistry between Tara and Ryon but consent issues are important to both and Ryon gives her a safeword – anytime she wants to call a halt, she only needs to say “Wookiee”. Little things like that Tara made Ryon call her mother and give her his driver’s license number for safety made it easy to relax into the story and the humour really worked for me. Ryon (let’s get this over with – his name annoyed me. Why not just Ryan? I was calling him Ry-ONN in my head the whole book. It was irritating.)… anyway, Ryon is a baker and brewer and has the fortunate surname of Brubaker so I guess his course was set from birth (heh) – he makes a wonderful dinner for Tara and they also share slow hot sex and fast hot sex (in an elevator no less) and in between they talk to each other and find out they have a lot in common – and not just science fiction love. In fact, Ryon shows himself to be both a tender, respectful and inventive lover who is not afraid to get an assist from Han Solo.

Review at AudioGals

June 12, 2014 / Kaetrin

I’m over at AudioGals with a review of Wait for You by J. Lynn, narrated by Sophie Eastlake. I reviewed it in print here and it was fun to revisit the story with a favourite narrator.

May Round Up

June 1, 2014 / Kaetrin

on Paper/eBook

The French Have A Word For It by Josh Lanyon – B- Last month, when I bought Heart Trouble, I also bought a number of other novels and short stories by Josh Lanyon (Twitter is my book enabler). This is a sweet short about an American guy in Paris, there to pursue his painting career and get out from the watchful eye of his wealthy grandfather. When he was 14, Colin was kidnapped and Thomas was the bodyguard who rescued him and then make sure of his safety until Colin went off to college. Colin thinks of Thomas as his first love but realises that part of that was youthful infatuation and the unique circumstances which made Thomas very much a hero to Colin. When Thomas turns up in Paris, 10 years have passed and Colin has grown up. They connect and there is the very beginning of a relationship. I would have liked maybe another couple pages to get a better handle on their potential future (because I’m not a fan of ambiguity) and I could easily have read more than that, but it was an enjoyable story and perfect for a night when I didn’t have a lot of time to read.

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Coming Soon

April Round Up

May 1, 2014 / Kaetrin

on Paper/eBook

Heart Trouble by Josh Lanyon – C Sunita had a post up at Vacuous Minx (there is also a version of it at Dear Author now too) and she talked about short stories, serials and length/form in genre fiction. One of the books she linked to as a favourite of hers was this short story. It’s only 21 pages and the RRP is $2.99 (I got it at the recent All Romance eBooks Earth Day sale so I earned back $1.50 in ebook bucks which made it more palatable for me). I’ve only read a little bit of Lanyon – what I have read I’ve liked to one degree or another and there are quite a few of his books on my TBR and wishlist.

I would have enjoyed this story more but there was something in the premise that I struggled with. The story starts with Ford at the hospital – he thought he was having a heart attack. His doctor is Dr. Jacob Hoyle. Jacob is caring and kind and very helpful to Ford in a medical sense. He goes above and beyond and takes Ford home because he doesn’t want him to drive. It’s about at this point that I started feeling uncomfortable. Because Ford is still his patient and I have trouble finding a current doctor/patient romance romantic or… okay actually. This is just me though. Some people can’t read a teacher/student book or a lawyer/client book – doesn’t make any of it bad or wrong. Vegemite.

I can see from an intellectual point of view how the story is clever and does what it needs to do in a short space of time. I didn’t get the sense that there was anything that ought to have been there that wasn’t. So Sunita was right – all the words counted and the story was complete. I like fiction of all kinds of lengths – sometimes short little bites are perfect for my mood or the time I have and other times, something longer or lengthy is what I’m after. For me, this story was one I could admire in a technical sense even while I found it difficult to connect in the emotional sense.

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Coming Soon

Vote for me!!!!

April 4, 2014 / Kaetrin

So there’s this competition thing for Australia’s Best Blogs and there’s a People’s Choice part of the competition which closes on May 5, 2014. And, this blog right here is in it. Click on the badge in this post (or on the sidebar) to vote for me!!!! (if you want to).

There are nearly 900 blogs listed on the survey and you can vote for as many as you like but you can only vote once. The blogs are listed in alphabetical order – mine is on page 2 but you have to go to the end of the survey to get to add your name/address/email and the “vote” button.

Happy April everyone! 😀

This ends the shameless self-promotion portion of the programme. Regular blogging will resume tomorrow.

#BestBlogs14

March Round Up

April 3, 2014 / Kaetrin

on Paper/eBook

**NB – this review first appeared in the March ARRA members newsletter**

Too Busy for Love by Tamsin Baker – C- Too Busy for Love is a short (about 35 reading pages) erotic m/m novella featuring rich mergers and acquisitions man – Thomas and a younger architecture student/part time gardener, Luke.

Even though Australian spelling it used (eg mum), the book is set in America. I think Luke is about 19 or 20 – he is two years away from an architecture degree. The bonus for him working at Thomas’ estate is access to the extensive library for study after work. When Thomas stumbles across Luke late one night, he is instantly attracted and promptly propositions Luke. Luke hesitates because he’s not sure he’s gay.

Thomas doesn’t usually do any form of relationship and prefers no-strings sex but Luke has him thinking about other things.

I admit I was troubled by the idea that having sex in itself is the identifier of sexuality. I believe sexuality is more complicated than that. I also found it a bit unlikely that this 19/20 year old man would not have checked out a bit of gay porn on the internet, perhaps done a little solo experimenting – but apparently he has not. There is also a bit of pronoun abuse – when the main characters are both men it can sometimes be confusing which “his” we are reading about.

It is a very short story so there isn’t a lot of time for deep characterisation or deep discussion of sexuality issues either for that matter. I think it works better as an erotic story because most of the page count is filled with pretty hot sexual encounters between Luke and Thomas.

I didn’t really see them fall in love. I didn’t see why they fell in love. I saw why they were attracted and their definite sexual chemistry. The story does have a romantic epilogue – I wouldn’t have minded having more details about their relationship apart from sex within the story though.

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