Be My Valentine

It’s early February, so naturally my thoughts tend to gravitate towards Valentine’s Day. How did this social conditioning happen? For the first 12 years of my life I didn’t even know about this tradition: we were sheltered from all the Evil Capitalist Inventions when we lived under Communism....

So anyway, it’s early February and I’m choosing my reading matter accordingly. At the moment, I’m trying to get my hands on a copy of “Be My Valentine” by Jane Beckenham. No, it’s not a pure romance (think “The time traveller’s wife” by Audrey Niffenegger) : it has time travel, it has pirates, it has the allure of the Carribean. And it has Romance with a capital R.

Set in Jamaica—land of pirates, prostitutes and rum - on Valentine’s Day. The protagonists, Dave and Tyler, are thrust back in time, shipwrecked and sold into slavery. And yet, Be My Valentine is a story of hope. It’s a story of a love that lasts an eternity. Only on Valentine’s Day. And forever more.

(Available from http://www.trebleheartbooks.com/BeckenhamSynops.html.)

The New Spy Who Loved Me

For years Camellia has avoided capture. Working behind the scenes and using whatever means necessary to shake up the establishment, she's been helping the descendants of disavowed women reclaim their birthright. But when she falls into the arms of an uncompromising spy, she may very well have met her match.

Melody Knight’s "In Trysts" (www.melodyknight.com), published December 2006 by Linden Bay Romance, is a must read for thriller fans and romance readers alike. The book is the author's nineteenth published novel, but her first passion piece. Years of science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing offer an edge to this fast-paced romantic thriller.

Watch out, "Casino Royale". New Zealand knows how to make great movies, and "In Trysts" may be next.

Excerpt:
He could tell from her moves that she pictured herself as a ferocious feline. Now, as she wriggled, he could have told her how wrong she was. He was the feline, the cat, the predator. She was fragile, fighting, like some fluffed-up chick in her ridiculously bright plumage. And he was about to eat her.
He pulled her in, close, her arms pinned between them. She butted him with her head, right in the chin, so his teeth clacked together.
Dammit!
Jake locked his fingers in her hair, and tilted her back, to see her face.
Experience told him she’d do anything—say anything now—to save herself.
It wasn’t the message in her eyes.
Too proud to use him...too proud to be used. Experience also told him he’d be a fool to read her that way. This was no time for whimsy.
But there was no doubt she was terrified, and didn’t know how to end this. Jake did. He wrapped his arms around her, and tilted her head back, fingers still trapped in her hair, so she couldn’t slam him any more.
He was still within the bounds…nothing overstepped...yet. It was like watching himself from without. He could’ve stopped what came next…told himself to stop what came next...but didn’t.
He lowered his lips, ever so slowly...to hers.

Gretkowska, Grochola, Chmielewska - The World of Polish Books

I don’t know what it is about Polish books, but I seem to love them regardless of their genre, style and themes. I’ve just finished two chick lits (which I don’t bother reading in English), an autobiography (I never ever read non fiction if I can help it), and now I’m into a stream of consciousness diary of a writer (another one of my pet hates when it’s, oh, say, by James Joyce).

The chick lits are about intelligent women (I wrote about that at length last year, the difference between an intelligent heroine and an irritating one).

The autobiography is of a writer of humorous murder mysteries. I’ve read all her books and even though she doesn’t know me from a bar of chocolate, I regard her as a friend, so reading her autobiography is kind of like reading her blog.

The stream of consciousness diary? Hmmm. It’s probably because I identify with the writer. She’s a 38-year old whose brilliantly-crafted books don’t sell (are you beginning to see the resemblance?). Her prose is usually poetic: “I’m savouring the wine and the heat. The one is melting into the other. A transfiguration of taste into torture. I close my eyes to prevent them from evaporating. The trees here, even ordinary plantations, are works of art. Their green is mixed with the blue of the sea: Tuscany has united with the sky”... unless it is vulgar: “A woman is a man’s punishment for jerking off.”

She loves shocking the public with very explicit comments about sexuality. She’s scared of the darkness and the enclosed-ness of movie theatres, she’s happy that her beautiful wooden house doesn’t have mice.

She’s a mother of an adored toddler girl and is scared to fall pregnant again “in case it’s a boy”. Every night, she breathes in the scent of her daughter’s hair and knows without a doubt that: “I gave her life and so in exchange I owe to her to sacrifice my own”.

A heady mixture of poetry, life’s truths and shocking offensiveness.

Eureka

Yes, I’m still reading. Another Nicci French thriller at the moment, interlacing it with the slow poetic (and as yet not engaging) “Alejento Blue”. A quick scan through the reviews on the Internet confirms my suspicions: “Alejento Blue” is a second novel, rushed out hot on the heels of its good predecessor. The language is pretty, so I’ll give it another chance, but the topics introduced so far (extreme poverty and the communist movement in Portugal) don’t really excite me nearly as much as beads did.

(You don’t know the bead story? Well, halfway through last year, I was tasked with writing 6,000-10,000 words about a bead shop. Woe was me! I didn’t know the first thing about beads, and I had no idea how to thread them into a story. I spent a month reading everything I could get my hands on that was vaguely bead-related... yes, yes, the first cardinal sin of any procrastinating writer: over-research... but I digress. Suffice to say that I got fired up about the topic and you can read the result in “Murder @ a Little Bead Shop”: http://echelonpress.netfirms.com/Echelon/nfoscomm/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=81&products_id=399&osCsid=26e0fcb6024db49efa767acfdd5f99a0.)

So anyway. While putting off “Alejento Blue”, I started watching a SciFi mini-series, “Eureka”. It’s fun, and the episodes just keep getting better. The SciFi component is very hand-wavy (so suspend your knowledge as well as your disbelief), but the setting and the characters are way cool.

Now, here’s hoping that the kids go to bed early tonight, so that I can watch another instalment.

Huh, what was that? What “Alejento Blue”?

Between, Georgia

Possibly not as good as her stunningly superb Gods in Alabama, Between, Georgia (Joshilyn Jackson, Warner Books 2006) is nevertheless a very worthy read. You get to love the protagonists and hate their enemies. You get immersed in a world of no sound and no sight, the world that belongs to the sufferers of the Usher syndrome, but it’s a world of love and coping and survival, not a world of the handicapped. You get to experience the most unique love story of all: that between a mother and an adopted child. And you get a tasty dose of the South.

The only error I feel the writer may have made was to begin with a back flash - which, although fundamental to the story, didn’t allow us to experience the narrator’s personality. Once you get through the first chapter, though, you don’t want to stop reading.

I’m on holiday at the moment and neglecting my own writing in favour of reading other people’s fiction. The other book I managed to finish lately (between watching Casino Royale and The Queen, both, incidentally, highly enjoyable) is another Nicci French, The Memory Game. I really liked this one, even though the twist was fairly predictable and the protagonist a smoker. I now have a whole pile of books by the same author duo, and I’ll get onto them as soon as I’ve given my book club read a chance. Something like Alentejo Blues... no idea....

How to Kill your Husband (and other handy household hints)

“All women want to kill their husbands some of the time” says the blurb on Kathy Lette’s How to Kill your Husband. You might be forgiven to expect a bitter tale of matrimonial misery, but the book is pure chick lit for the thirty- and forty-something crowd, with a lot of laughter thrown in to counterbalance the deadly accurate reflections of nuptial life. In fact, it probably contains too many one-liners for my liking. Normally I adore one-liners, but when I encounter three on every page, I tend to feel somewhat distracted from the actual plot.

Not a deep or memorable book by any means, it is nevertheless a good book to throw at your husband (be it figuratively or otherwise) when the going gets tough.

Some of my favourite quotes:
“A woman needs a man to desire her. At least half as much as he desires victory for his country in the cricket.”
On being told by your best friend’s husband that you (as opposed to her) must be very creative in bed: “Oh yes, I am. I do origami, macramé and needlework.”
Husband’s excuse for not helping with the kids on a particularly busy and late morning: “I knew I’d just get under your feet. You’re so brilliant at multitasking!” (Sadly, that’s not the husband who gets killed....)

Warning: too little stress leads to reading

I don’t know whether I’m less stressed this week because I’m reading again, or whether I’m reading again because I have more time to myself because there are no stressful fires to kill... but anyway, I’m reading.

The first book in the marathon was Nicci French’s “Catch me when I fall”. Normally, I adore the work of this married duo of authors hiding under the pseudonym of Nicci French, because their work is both very female (emotions, great characterisation) and male (fast pacing, logical intricate plots with twists).

Now, before you all flame me for the sexist remark, and point out all the great male writers who use emotions and all the great female writers who do logic, let me tell you why I’m not too crazy about “Catch me when I fall”: it failed to have strong female as well as strong male attributes. It was difficult to get into the heroine’s head (admittedly, it may have been done on purpose to illustrate the enigma of somebody suffering from a bi-polar disorder), not much was emotionally at stake, the plot didn’t hold many surprises nor was it particularly menacing. The premise seemed to have lost the plot, and what could have been a gripping thriller about how a drunken one night stand with a mentally unhinged person could affect a happy marriage (I believe when Glenn Close cooked the bunny, she did not say everything there is to say on the topic), the book turned into a case study of a person suffering from a bi-polar disorder. Even the lost house key, like the proverbial gun hanging on the wall, failed to discharge by the end of the book. While the book was hard to put down thanks to the excellent writing, it was overall disappointing given the author(s).

The second book was Kathy Lette’s “How to kill your husband” (almost too hilarious), and the third “Between, Georgia” by the author of “gods in Alabama”. Watch this space.

Oh, a quick plug here: my "Murder @ A Little Bead Shop" is now availalbe from Echelon Press. Have a look on http://yewalus.kiwiwebhost.net.nz/.