The Novel Cure

Summary from Goodreads:
A novel is a story transmitted from the novelist to the reader. It offers distraction, entertainment, and an opportunity to unwind or focus. But it can also be something more powerful—a way to learn about how to live. Read at the right moment in your life, a novel can—quite literally—change it.

The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith’s There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you’re not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you’re stuck in traffic or can’t fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more.

Brilliant in concept and deeply satisfying in execution, The Novel Cure belongs on everyone’s bookshelf and in every medicine cabinet. It will make even the most well-read fiction aficionado pick up a novel he’s never heard of, and see familiar ones with new eyes. Mostly, it will reaffirm literature’s ability to distract and transport, to resonate and reassure, to change the way we see the world and our place in it.

I have a bit of a bone to pick with the blurb - the concept of The Novel Cure is nice, rather than brilliant, and the execution is in no way satisfying.  The authors apparently have a bibliotherapy service (?) which is interesting but I don't think I'd be making use of it based on this book.

The nicest thing I can say about The Novel Cure is that it added lots of books to add to my TBR pile.  There's a really good range and selection of titles but the authors undercut everything with an uneven tone. Are they being flippant, witty, or sarcastic? Earnest? Serious?  I can't tell.  I also think the layout of the book didn't quite work.  I would have much preferred longer chapters by broad subject (relationships, aging, birth, death/dying, etc) rather than an a-to-z run down with really silly alphabetical categories i.e. "Bad Blood", "Beans, Temptation to Spill", etc.  There's even a header for"Broken China"....huh?  Carnivorousness (which ails us)?  There also a moment where "new novels" are dismissed in favor of novels that have stood the test of time yet the authors later recommend Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings for the section on Mr./Mrs. Wrong - it had only been published in April 2013, less than six months prior to the publication of The Novel Cure.

Perhaps this isn't a book for me.  Too late - I read the whole thing.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

Summary from Goodreads:
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, a leading cancer physician and researcher, selects the year’s top science and nature writing from journalists who dive into their fields with curiosity and passion, delivering must-read articles from a wide array of fields.

I loved Siddhartha Mukherjee's book The Emperor of All Maladies and was thrilled to see that he was the 2013 guest editor for The Best American Science and Nature Writing.  A good collectionon the whole. I would have liked more "science-y" articles particularly since Mukherjee made a point in his Introduction of saying that he looked for articles that explained the technicality of science.  It felt very pop-sci to me. For example, I couldn't quite get a take on the essay about shipping Russian iron ore to China via the Arctic and the Bering Strait - sort of about global warming and globalization, but then not very science oriented either.

There is an excellent essay by Jerome Groopman on new advances in cancer treatment with immune therapy and David Quammen has a chapter from Spillover in here as an essay from PopSci.

The Best American Essays 2013

Summary from Goodreads:
Selected and introduced by Cheryl Strayed, the New York Times best-selling author of Wild and the writer of the celebrated column “Dear Sugar,” this collection is a treasure trove of fine writing and thought-provoking essays.

Cheryl Strayed is probably the best choice as this year's guest editor for the Best American Essays collection.  Between Wild and Dear Sugar she's in just the right place to sift through the many essays published in the previous year.  And this is a very readable collection.  Each piece seemed to be chosen to showcase some aspect of personal growth or challenge and I really appreciate how her preferences went into her editorial process.  Standout pieces include Alice Munro's "Night", Vanessa Veselka's "Highway of Lost Girls", and Zadie Smith's "Notes on Attunement".  There was also the ultra-weird "Keeper of the Flame" - Matthew Vollmer gets some props for the research on that one because I don't think I could have stomached being in the same room with all that Nazi paraphernalia. Ick.

The Best American Infographics 2013

Summary from Goodreads:
The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media—from a striking breakdown of classic cocktails to a graphic tracking 200 influential moments that changed the world to visually arresting depictions of Twitter traffic—reveals patterns in our lives and our world in fresh and surprising ways. In the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge—on the environment, politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more—to digest, to tweet, to share, to go viral.

The Best American Infographics captures the finest examples from the past year, including the ten best interactive infographics, of this mesmerizing new way of seeing and understanding our world.

It's Best American time and, guess what? There is a new addition to the series - The Best American Infographics!

Statistics and pictures, yay!  I've been learning more about data visualization (adding to the job skills, yo) and it was fun to see how the compilers used the intersection of information and art. My only issue, and it likely will be hard to correct when converting newspaper-sized or web-page-sized graphics to print, is that the binding cuts through the middle of the graphic and makes it hard to read. Only a serious problem with one or two graphics, though.  I'd love to see this as an enhanced ebook to get the interactive graphics working (might make the file size too big, though...).

'Tis the Season: My child has a Lexile score of...

October has arrived.  Cool weather, pretty fall color, yummy drinks composed of apple cider or hot cocoa, and I get to wear scarves (I like scarves as an accessory).

And standardized testing, if you are or have a school-age child.

In my area of the country, it seems school districts have chosen testing that calculates a Lexile score for a child's reading level with an associated score range.  Lexile is a company that uses a software program to analyze books for word usage, sentence length, etc. and produce a Lexile Text Measure for each book (I copied the description from the Lexile Analyzer site):

The Lexile ® measure of text is determined using the Lexile Analyzer ®, a software program that evaluates the reading demand—or readability—of books, articles and other materials. The Lexile Analyzer ® measures the complexity of the text by breaking down the entire piece and studying its characteristics, such as sentence length and word frequency, which represent the syntactic and semantic challenges that the text presents to a reader. The outcome is the text complexity, expressed as a Lexile ® measure, along with information on the word count, mean sentence length and mean log frequency.
Generally, longer sentences and words of lower frequency lead to higher Lexile ® measures; shorter sentences and words of higher frequency lead to lower Lexile ® measures. Texts such as lists, recipes, poetry and song lyrics are not analyzed because they lack conventional punctuation.

I'm not a huge fan of putting a "score" on a book based simply on a computer generated metric because the software doesn't take into account context or content of a book.  Or form, cf poetry.  But this seems to be accepted by the educational powers-that-be, so it's here for the time being.  However, I don't know how well or often the scores are explained to parents, because I wind up in a lot of parent-bookseller conversations like this:

Parent: My child has a Lexile score of XXXX.  She has to read books in the range of XXXX-XXXX.  Will this work?
Bookseller [thinks]: Fuuuuuuck.
Bookseller [says]: Well, lets pull up the Lexile site to see what it suggests for that range and go from there.

The major problem here is that the parent hasn't THE FOGGIEST IDEA what books go with the child's Lexile score or how score ranges line up with likely grade-levels.  They don't have/haven't been provided with a list of suggestions for the range.  They haven't looked up Lexile on the Internet to get a handle on what this thing is (I mean, hello, the Internet is the Information Superhighway, Google it).  And their poor child is off in the corner trying desperately to read another Warriors book by Erin Hunter or Wimpy Kid or the new Babymouse before the "grown-ups" force her into reading stuff that she thinks she doesn't want to read.

As booksellers (and by extension librarians, a population I am not a member of but respect greatly), we are the information gatekeepers the parents turn to in this situation.  We are the ones to take an abstract range of numbers and turn it into a physical pile of titles and authors.  We have to differentiate between editions because scores can fluctuate wildly and Lexile isn't very informative (type "The Sun Also Rises" into Lexile - the old Scribner edition has a score of 610L, the ISBN for the reprint isn't found, and the Modern Critical Interpretations edition is listed with a score of 1420L....confusing, right?).  And we are the ones who have to know what stories lay between the covers of those books so we can explain the contents to the parents. 

In almost every customer interaction regarding Lexile, I have had to find books for a child who reads significantly above grade level (at grade level is generally pretty easy and parents with children under grade level often have a list of recommended titles as a starting point; for some reason, those children who read above grade level don't have many recommendations).  For reference, Lexile gives a grade approximation for the score ranges:

Even though the approximate ranges are pretty wide, a book or series that is popular among peers isn't often in the "right" score range for an advanced reader.  Some titles are marked "NC" meaning a non-conforming score (higher than intended audience) but it's hard to tease those out of a range during a search (I've tried).  It can get pretty emotional when the child cannot find anything he or she wants to read or that parents will allow them to read that "counts" for their Lexile score.

The biggest grade-to-score discrepancy I've come across was a seventh grade boy (and a bit young socially for his age) who had a Lexile score greater than 1100.  His Lexile range was approximately 1150 - 1210.  The boy had to read at least five books that semester in his range to pass English and he was already behind. His father had done some online research and was at a loss - he was having trouble finding content-appropriate books in that score range (there was also a religious consideration, so a lot of recommended fantasy titles were automatically out).  The boy was very open to reading Stephen King, who has a lot of high-Lexile score titles, but the idea was vetoed by Dad due to language (and probably the religious consideration as well).  Dostoevsky was perfectly acceptable to Dad, but the kiddo really couldn't get excited about it (he was into Gary Paulsen's Brian series, but that wasn't even close).  Some Dumas was in the right range but not the more appealing titles (The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask are both under 1000).  Gary Paulsen's My Life in Dog Years was just in range, so I was able to interest both parent and child in that.  I sold them on The Hound of the Baskervilles and then hit paydirt with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.  The boy had a friend with an Asperger-like syndrome and they were friends in their advanced math classes. Whew.  Finally, three books and a reasonably happy father.  But I couldn't help but think - what are they going to do as the child continues through the school system?

You're probably wondering where I'm going with all this since this isn't quite the usual tone for a "'Tis the Season" post.

Well, I really just wanted to put this out there to maybe help save parents, children, and teachers (and possibly other booksellers and librarians) some grief.  I would like to ask school administrators and teachers to work with children and parents to come up with lists of possible books appropriate to both grade-level and Lexile range (and I understand if you do this and the parents forget, are obstinate, or leave the list at home when they head to the bookstore).  For parents, Lexile provides a map with lists of titles for score ranges.  It's a good place to start when trying to find books.

I would also like to ask teachers to be less rigid when assigning Lexile-related reading assignments because this seems to be where children have the most trouble.  I have so often helped kids who love, love to read but have found that none of the books they find appealing "count" for a reading assignment because they aren't in the "right" Lexile range or have no score because either the book is too new or has an un-evaluable format.  These kids feel disheartened, that they're failing, that the things they love are unimportant, and I hate seeing their disappointment when I've gone through the entire stack of books they've picked out and not a single one was in the right range.  I had a little girl just burst into tears once when I told her The Last Olympian  - the book she so desperately wanted to read - had a score of 620L; she had to have books greater than 700 or her teacher wouldn't count them at all.  Please let children with high Lexile ranges count some of those lower-scoring books toward their reading assignment (say, an exchange of two non-Lexile books for one Lexile book, not to exceed half the assignment) or perhaps give them extra credit for those books as long as they're keeping up with the Lexile assignment (if you're already doing that, bravo!).  These kids are reading because they love reading and they're already reading outside of school, which is sort of the point of those types of assignments.   I rarely hear of a child being penalized for reading above his or her range so I think there's a compromise that can be reached for those kids who want to read but have trouble finding books due to age or content.

So bring your Lexile ranges to me and I and my fellow booksellers and librarians will do our best to find what you like to read as well as what you need to read - if we're very good, that book will fill both requirements.  'Tis that sort of season.

Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America's Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Summary from Goodreads:
“Mad Men for the literary world.” —Junot Díaz

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is arguably the most influential publishing house of the modern era. Home to an unrivaled twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and generation-defining authors like T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen, it’s a cultural institution whose importance approaches that of The New Yorker or The New York Times. But FSG is no ivory tower—the owner's wife called the office a “sexual sewer”—and its untold story is as tumultuous and engrossing as many of the great novels it has published.

Boris Kachka deftly reveals the era and the city that built FSG through the stories of two men: founder-owner Roger Straus, the pugnacious black sheep of his powerful German-Jewish family—with his bottomless supply of ascots, charm, and vulgarity of every stripe—and his utter opposite, the reticent, closeted editor Robert Giroux, who rose from working-class New Jersey to discover the novelists and poets who helped define American culture. Giroux became one of T. S. Eliot’s best friends, just missed out on The Catcher in the Rye, and played the placid caretaker to manic-depressive geniuses like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Jean Stafford, and Jack Kerouac. Straus, the brilliant showman, made Susan Sontag a star, kept Edmund Wilson out of prison, and turned Isaac Bashevis Singer from a Yiddish scribbler into a Nobelist—even as he spread the gossip on which literary New York thrived.

A prolific lover and an epic fighter, Straus ventured fearlessly, and sometimes recklessly, into battle for his books, his authors, and his often-struggling company. When a talented editor left for more money and threatened to take all his writers, Roger roared, “Over my dead body”—and meant it. He turned a philosophical disagreement with Simon & Schuster head Dick Snyder into a mano a mano media war that caught writers such as Philip Roth and Joan Didion in the crossfire. He fought off would-be buyers like S. I. Newhouse (“that dwarf”) with one hand and rapacious literary agents like Andrew Wylie (“that shit”) with the other. Even his own son and presumed successor was no match for a man who had to win at any cost—and who was proven right at almost every turn.

At the center of the story, always, are the writers themselves. After giving us a fresh perspective on the postwar authors we thought we knew, Kachka pulls back the curtain to expose how elite publishing works today. He gets inside the editorial meetings where writers’ fates are decided; he captures the adrenaline rush of bidding wars for top talent; and he lifts the lid on the high-stakes pursuit of that rarest commodity, public attention—including a fly-on-the-wall account of the explosive confrontation between Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Franzen, whose relationship, Franzen tells us, “was bogus from the start.”

Vast but detailed, full of both fresh gossip and keen insight into how the literary world works, Hothouse is the product of five years of research and nearly two hundred interviews by a veteran New York magazine writer. It tells an essential story for the first time, providing a delicious inside perspective on the rich pageant of postwar cultural life and illuminating the vital intellectual center of the American Century.

Well...after that jacket copy there isn't much to say!  Haha.  I was pointed toward Hothouse by Josh from Bookrageous and it sounded quite interesting, a history of a specific publishing house that has published some of the great literature from mid- to late-twentieth century America.  It seems very timely since the television show Mad Men spans some of that same era - the fifties and sixties - and even seems to echo some of the office politics.  I really have to give Kachka for portraying the main players in the publishing house evenly, showing both the good sides and the warty sides, without demonizing or glorifying anyone.  If there was any imbalances, I think that had more to do with the personalities and historical evidence available. Straus left an oral history behind and was the most outspoken partner while Farrar and Giroux were much quieter so the "flavor" of the book falls more to the Straus side.  I was very interested in the insider-baseball information pertaining to the Jonathan Franzen/Oprah's Book Club mess - informative.

One drawback of the book came from the author's sort-of non-linear timeline. He would often refer to future events without using strict dates so sometimes a paragraph didn't make quite as much sense as it should have. But definitely a book to recommend for those interesting in the history of publishing

The Wicked Deeds of Daniel Mackenzie (Mackenzie/McBride #6)

Summary from Goodreads:

Second Sight And Seduction…

Daniel Mackenzie lives up to the reputation of the scandalous Mackenzie family—he has wealth, looks, and talent, and women love him. When he meets Violet Bastien—one of the most famous spiritual mediums in England—he immediately knows two things: that Miss Bastien is a fraud, and that he’s wildly attracted to her.

Violet knows she can’t really contact the other side, but she’s excellent at reading people. She discerns quickly that Daniel is intelligent and dangerous to her reputation, but she also finds him generous, handsome, and outrageously wicked. But spectres from Violet’s past threaten to destroy her, and she flees England, adopting yet another identity.

Daniel is determined to find the elusive Violet and pursue the passion he feels for her. And though Violet knows that her scandalous past will keep her from proper marriage, her attraction to Daniel is irresistible. It’s not until Daniel is the only one she can turn to that he proves he believes in something more than cold facts. He believes in love.

[Note: my original review on Brazen Reads was much longer and contained more reasons why I loved this but had serious problems with many plot elements, but I didn't save it to Edelweiss, only the review link so this is just a mini-review based off what I remember]

It's nice to see Daniel the tinkering teenager moving onto larger things: namely combustion engines, cars, hot-air balloons, and motors.  It's part of what intrigues him about Violet: he wants to know where she got the contraptions she uses during her "seances".  Danny isn't an idiot, he doesn't believe in all that claptrap, and he just wants his drunken friends to leave her alone.  When he's cracked over the head while asking Violet about her engineering designs/seducing her, Violet fears that she's killed him and flees to the Continent with her mother (who can actually channel, to some degree).

Enter here my issue number one:  Daniel, by all rights, should be dead and and instead was brought back to life from a virtual coma by Victorian CPR....  There are a number of small, unnecessary things like this scattered throughout the book that take away from the actual marriage plot, which is quite good and has an excellent twist.  My second major issue is that Violet is so much like Beth in description and background and, combined with Danny's genius for engineering that mimics Ian's mental capacity, it gets a bit unnerving.  But still a fabulous entry in the Mackenzie series, I loved it a great deal (and we get a visit from Ainsley, Cameron, and a very charming, naughty Gavina who is now about eight or so).

Fortunately, the Milk

Summary from Goodreads:
"I bought the milk," said my father. "I walked out of the corner shop, and heard a noise like this: T h u m m t h u m m. I looked up and saw a huge silver disc hovering in the air above Marshall Road."
"Hullo," I said to myself. "That's not something you see every day. And then something odd happened."

Find out just how odd things get in this hilarious story of time travel and breakfast cereal, expertly told by Newbery Medalist and bestselling author Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Skottie Young.

Neil Gaiman, just to top the amazing story success of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, also put out a chapter book this year.  It tells the story of a dad who returns from a milk run to the corner store, is gone far longer than intended, and returns with a wild tale of alien abduction and dinosaurs....but he never forgot the milk.

I read this while covering breaks at the store and it had me laughing out loud - it's a chapter book, maybe 110 pages long and it flies along.  Just the kids' reactions to the tall tale and how it just. keeps. going.  Apparently the UK edition had different illustrations (which some reviewers liked better) but I thought these were just fine.  Another ace-in-the-hole from Neil Gaiman's brain!

The Giver

Summary from Goodreads:
The Giver, the 1994 Newbery Medal winner, has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life Assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community. Lois Lowry has written three companion novels to The Giver, including Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son.

Now, I am 99.99% certain that I read The Giver in the nineties.  I would have been in ninth/tenth grade when it came out and although that's a bit older than the intended audience, I remembered so much about the book I'm sure I read it.

I chose this to read during my "real-live human reading banned books" stint in the booth at the Coralville Public Library.  I had intended to read Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic because I thought we'd be reading aloud but since we were reading to ourselves (shame) I switched to The Giver.

Such a beautifully written, heart-wrenching book.  I think it's a bit underserved by being labelled a "children's" book because all adults should read it.  Amazing commentary on conformity, oppression, and euthanasia.  I'll definitely have to go on and read the other three books - I bought them all because of the gorgeous cover designs!

Looking for Alaska

Summary from Goodreads:
Before. Miles "Pudge" Halter's whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the "Great Perhaps" (François Rabelais, poet) even more. He heads off to the sometimes crazy, possibly unstable, and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young, who is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart.

After. Nothing is ever the same.

Guess what, peoples...teenagers have been known to experiment with sex, drugs, and cigarettes.  Including upper-middle-class private school teenagers like those depicted in John Green's Looking for Alaska.  We visit the school through Miles's eyes and he isn't a cool, sophisticated kid - he's a nerdy, naive, inexperienced teenage boy who is obsessed with deceased poets and the last words uttered by famous people.  It's pretty much a given that he'd fall for the manic-pixie-dreamgirl of the book, Alaska.  However, things don't quite work out as planned.  Alaska is self-destructive as all hell, which is all you need to know.  A really well-constructed book; it didn't have the emotional gut-punch that The Fault in Our Stars did (which is good, because I don't know if I could handle that much crying over a book so soon).

I picked this up for Banned Books Week - people like to harsh on the "adult" themes but, hey guess what, teenagers will be teenagers and John Green assumes that they are smart people as opposed to living in a padded room or something.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Summary from Goodreads:
The emergence of strange new diseases is a frightening problem that seems to be getting worse. In this age of speedy travel, it threatens a worldwide pandemic. We hear news reports of Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and something called Hendra killing horses and people in Australia--but those reports miss the big truth that such phenomena are part of a single pattern. The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. David Quammen tracks this subject around the world. He recounts adventures in the field--netting bats in China, trapping monkeys in Bangladesh, stalking gorillas in the Congo--with the world's leading disease scientists. In Spillover Quammen takes the reader along on this astonishing quest to learn how, where from, and why these diseases emerge, and he asks the terrifying question: What might the next big one be?

Who likes infectious diseases?  Me, me!  I love infectious diseases.  I recently described Spillover as the happy intersection of reading for work (epidemiologist) and reading for pleasure (epidemiologists who work in hospital acquired infections, who aced infectious disease epidemiology coursework, and have a morbid curiosity regarding crazy zoonoses).  As the human-developed world pushes farther and farther into more "exotic" locations they've never lived, either for habitat or agriculture reasons, the animal world is pushing back with stranger and stranger diseases.  For the animals, these diseases are a bit like the common cold - a minor nuisance, rarely fatal - but once it gets into a previously un-exposed species - like a human - all bets are off.  Mortality rates skyrocket.  And this is where things like SARS or HIV or the newest recombination of influenza with the dreaded avian genes comes from.  The borderland of the human-animal interactions and where viral genomes can recombine with glee.

Quammen has gone all over the world looking at past outbreaks to see if there is a way to predict where the next global pandemic will come from.  Hint: it's unlikely that we can predict it.  He has a great writing style and drops a lot of literary references so I think that might help non-science-y readers get through a few of the more technical chapters. On the downside, it kind of makes you not want to go in caves (bats, ick). Ever. Or leave your house again. And I sure as hell don't want to visit an animal market in Asia - holy damn.

Just for fun, I Instagrammed a number of underlined passages from Spillover - here's the first one; if you follow #spillover and #zoonosis I think you can find the others.

PS: Influenza season is coming so get your flu shots and wash your hands!

The Baron's Betrothal (Horsemen of the Apocalypse #2)

Summary from Goodreads:

War hero and Horseman of the Apocalypse William Tyler de Sayre, Lord Clun, happens upon love while intending to avoid the catastrophe altogether by arranging a marriage to someone he’s never met.

Meanwhile, Lady Elizabeth Damogan, whose father betrothed her to the baron without so much as a ‘by your leave,’ will be damned if she marries a man she’s never met, much less a man who refuses to consider the possibility of love.

Until she realizes, sometimes it's the hero who needs saving.

Fun, and less scandalous than Jem's "decoration" to kick off the first book, but Elizabeth and Clun make a good couple.

A bit long, though. Too much contrariness on both sides. I think perhaps shortening the middle since the beginning and end were quite good.