Put Up Your Duke (Dukes Behaving Badly #2) by Megan Frampton

Summary from Goodreads:
He was once happily bedding and boxing, but in the newest Duke's Behaving Badly novel, Nicholas Smithfield has inherited a title and a bride . . .

To keep his estate afloat, the new Duke of Gage must honor an agreement to marry Lady Isabella Sawford. Stunningly beautiful, utterly tempting, she's also a bag of wedding night nerves, so Nicholas decides to wait to do his duty—even if it means heading to the boxing saloon every day to punch away his frustration.

Groomed her whole life to become the perfect duchess, Isabella longs for independence, a dream that is gone forever. As her husband, Nicholas can do whatever he likes—but, to Isabella's surprise, the notorious rake instead begins a gentle seduction that is melting every inch of her reserve, night by night . . .

To his utter shock, Nicholas discovers that no previous exploits were half as pleasurable as wooing his own wife. But has the realm's most disreputable duke found the one woman who can bring him to his knees— and leave him there?

Nicholas Smithfield becomes the new Duke of Gage by accident of law: the former Duke of Gage inadvertently caused an investigation of his family tree during the course of a lawsuit and the entire ducal branch was nullified. To the benefit of the cadet branch leading to Nicholas. Also by accident of law, Nicholas inherits the Duke of Gage's betrothed, one Lady Isabella Sawford. Isabella is beautiful, well-trained, docile, and the perfect duchess-to-be, emphasis on perfect. In other words, she is a shell of the woman she could be - and Isabella knows it.

Throughout Put Up Your Duke, Nicholas and Isabella circle warily around each other.  Isabella, now married, has the freedom to make her own decisions regarding her household, her wardrobe, her marriage...but isn't quite sure how to proceed or trust that Nicholas won't pull the rug out from under her.  Nicholas, though solicitous of Isabella's feelings and he doesn't wish to force himself on her to consummate the marriage, hasn't the foggiest idea how to get her to tell him what's going on in her head rather than tell him what she thinks he wants to hear.  (Obviously, coming straight out and saying that he knows she is very nervous, and that he doesn't want to hurt her, and that maybe they could get to know each other first before getting-it-on because that is sexier would clearly cancel half the plot of the novel.)

I was a bit hesitant to start this next installment in Megan Frampton's "Dukes Behaving Badly" series (there's a novella, When Good Earls Go Bad, that I skipped).  The first book, The Duke's Guide to Correct Behavior, was underwhelming.  While the snippets from the (fictional) behavior guide The Duke's Guide to Correct Behavior were funny, the characters felt flat and/or rehashed from other books, the plot was poky, and there were too many basic historical and conventional slips to ignore.  It wasn't a terrible book, just....eh.  But Avon Books gave me access to the DRC for Put Up Your Duke - and asked very nicely if I might review it - so after about three chapters, I settled in for a few hours of enjoyable reading.

Put Up Your Duke is a wonderful improvement on the series.  The characters of Isabella and Nicholas are well-developed, the main plot is engaging, and the legal mess that lands Nicholas in the ducal coronet is a good hook to the start of the novel. While some of the secondary characters still feel one-dimensional (like Isabella's parents), there is enough hinted at for Lord Collingwood (the former Duke of Gage and a nasty individual) to reappear later in the series without making him boring or giving too much away.  I enjoyed this book enough to look forward to the next book in the series (which I believe is called One-Eyed Dukes are Wild, and is set to release at the end of December 2015, but don't quote me on that).

However, I still have to pick a few nits regarding the series title.  "Dukes Behaving Badly."  Megan Frampton's Dukes are almost saint-like in their mild badness.  In The Duke's Guide to Correct Behavior, we are told frequently that Marcus, the Duke of Rutherford, is dissolute and shocking but we never actually see him do anything "shocking".  In Put Up Your Duke, the novel opens with Nicholas eating a strawberry out of the cleavage of a courtesan sitting on his lap while two other courtesans fawn over him.  When his brother Griff arrives with the news that Nicholas is now the Duke of Gage, Nicholas leaves the brothel and pays the madam even though he's done nothing but eat a strawberry (literally, not figuratively).  In the novel, Nicholas frequently mentions that he abstained from sex from that moment; he doesn't have a mistress and he treats Isabella with a great deal of consideration in every way, not just in the bedchamber.  So, what makes him so "bad"?  Because Nicholas and Marcus are far less "bad" than many of the minor characters.  The series is set early in Queen Victoria's reign - the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Lord Byron has set the bar pretty high for naughtiness. If we want bad noblemen of romance novels, I'll take a few more "Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain"-s.  So more badness in our "Bad" Dukes, please.  It makes their rehabilitation far more enjoyable.

Put Up Your Duke by Megan Frampton is available today, June 30, 2015, wherever books are sold.

Dear FTC: I received a digital ARC from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Love in the Time of Scandal by Caroline Linden (Scandalous #3)

Summary from Goodreads:
USA Today bestselling author Caroline Linden's third novel in her Scandalous series brings together a feisty heiress, a notorious rake, and a shocking book that could bring one woman the utmost despair—or the greatest pleasure...

Penelope Weston does not like Benedict Lennox, Lord Atherton. He may be the suave and charming heir to an earl, as well as the most handsome man on earth, but she can't forget how he abandoned a friend in need—nor how he once courted her sister, Abigail. He's the last man she would ever marry. If only she didn't feel so attracted to the arrogant scoundrel...

Once upon a time, Benedict thought he and Penelope got along rather well. Though he needs a wealthy bride to escape his cruel father's control, spirited Penelope just doesn't suit his plans for a model marriage—until a good deed goes awry, and scandalous rumors link his name to Penelope's. She might not be the quiet, sensible wife he thought he wanted, but she is beautiful . . . beguiling . . . and far more passionate than he ever imagined. Can a marriage begun in scandal become a love match, too?

Fair warning: if you haven't read the second book in Caroline Linden's Scandalous series - It Takes a Scandal - you may want to read that before reading Love in the Time of Scandal because the conflict between the hero and heroine is introduced in the earlier book.

Love in the Time of Scandal contains what is possibly my favorite romance trope: the socially-demanded marriage of convenience between two people who think they are completely wrong for each other but turn out to be exactly each what the other needs.  Penelope thinks that Benedict Lennox is an ass for not helping his friend and only courted her sister for her money while Benedict thinks Penelope Weston, for all her pounds sterling, is far too loud and unconventional to ever join the aristocratic classes of Society.  When Penelope inadvertently causes Benedict's chosen fiancee to reject him, he is righteously angry.  However, when he goes to confront her, he finds her at the mercy of a cruel member of the ton, Lord Clary, because she is protecting her friend Olivia Townsend.  Benedict rescues Penelope, but the two are seen - at that point they are alone and Penelope is in a, shall we say, less than composed appearance...they must marry.

This is when everything starts to get fun.  Penelope's dowry - which her father has not withheld - allows the new couple to form their own household.  Penelope also has possession of the scandalous pamphlets 50 Ways to Sin (despite her mother's attempts to ban them) and Benedict gets some marvelous use out of scarlet ribbon.  The two of them begin to, very warily, build a life together, one that might even include happiness, warmth, safety, and even love.  Then Benedict's sociopathic, abusive father pops up during a dinner party simply to discompose everyone and invite the new Lady Lennox to visit....Linden serves up such a delicious plot turn here.

I loved this installment in the Scandalous series and had there not been an announcement of a fourth book I might have rioted.  The plotting is excellent, the details fleshing out both Penelope's and Benedict's characters are so on point, and I love how Caroline Linden uses examples from literature to give her virgin heroines sexual agency (if you don't listen to the DBSA podcast, Caro gives some amazing examples of period erotic literature in a recent episode).  I almost cried - almost - at one point.  And if I cry out of happiness at a romance novel, you are doing it right!

Love in the Time of Scandal is out now, wherever books are sold.

Dear FTC: I received a digital advance copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss...and then I bought a copy.

Dearest Rogue by Elizabeth Hoyt (Maiden Lane #8)

Summary from Goodreads:
HE CAN GUARD HER

Lady Phoebe Batten is pretty, vivacious, and yearning for a social life befitting the sister of a powerful duke. But because she is almost completely blind, her overprotective brother insists that she have an armed bodyguard by her side at all times-the very irritating Captain Trevillion.

FROM EVERY DANGER

Captain James Trevillion is proud, brooding, and cursed with a leg injury from his service in the King's dragoons. Yet he can still shoot and ride like the devil, so watching over the distracting Lady Phoebe should be no problem at all-until she's targeted by kidnappers.

BUT PASSION ITSELF

Caught in a deadly web of deceit, James must risk life and limb to save his charge from the lowest of cads-one who would force Lady Phoebe into a loveless marriage. But while they're confined to close quarters for her safekeeping, Phoebe begins to see the tender man beneath the soldier's hard exterior . . . and the possibility of a life-and love-she never imagined possible.

I'm not going to lie. I've wanted a novel for Phoebe and Trevillion ever since it was pointed out that they fight like wet cats - which is about halfway through the previous novel in the series, Darling Beast (review).  So, lucky for me, I didn't have to wait long for Dearest Rogue.

In Dearest Rogue, Captain James Trevillion - wounded in Duke of Midnight (review) and unable to remain with the dragoons - has been hired by Maximus Batten, Duke of Wakefield (yep, that Duke), as bodyguard to the Duke's visually impaired sister, Phoebe (who has grown and grown on me since her introduction in the second book, Notorious Pleasures).  Even if James had the full use of both legs, this would not be an easy job.  He has to shoot a would-be kidnapper in the face.  On Bond Street.  With Phoebe mounted in front of him on their escape horse.  When a kidnapping attempt becomes temporarily successful, James whisks Phoebe away to a secret location for her safety.  And to drive himself insane with unrequited love, because a duke's daughter could never, ever love a common soldier with a cloudy past.

Or so he thinks.  For her part, Phoebe has been chafing against the restrictions imposed by her brother so much she has yet to see Trevillion as a man, not her jailer.  As James and Phoebe negotiate how to create new experiences without undue risks, Phoebe realizes how much she doesn't know about James.  She had assumed he was old and ugly because she didn't want a bodyguard (he's neither).  She had assumed he was uneducated (while not a scholar, he is a middle-class gentleman).  She had assumed he was abrupt with her because he didn't like her (she couldn't possibly be more wrong).  Just as people make assumptions about her because of her blindness, Phoebe has made assumptions about James.

Dearest Rogue is so stinking adorable I want to weep with joy.  The trip out of London taken by James and Phoebe is an absolute delight and the development of their love story is spellbinding.  Do you know the best part? There's no dancing around the marriage plot, no back-and-forth, no will-we-won't-we-external-forces-are-a-problem-someone-can't-say-those-three-little-words problems.  Once James and Phoebe acknowledge they love each other they just decide everyone else can go to hell.  I love it.

When I was reading Dearest Rogue I was also catching up on episodes of the podcast Invisibilia, specifically the show "How to Become Batman" which dealt with blindness.  The intersection of book character and podcast interviewee was so timely my head almost exploded.  The Invisibilia producers interviewed a blind man who had developed very precise echolocation - he teaches this technique to other visually impaired people so he touches on the topic of raising a blind child and how attempting to protect such a child from any and all risk, with blindness as excuse, actually prevents that child from being able to properly assess and situation and develop independence.  This, precisely, is the point Elizabeth Hoyt allows Phoebe to make in Dearest Rogue: that by artificially limiting her experience, even with the best of intentions, Phoebe's world becomes stagnant and she becomes too dependent on others.  It is through the development of this part of Phoebe's and James's relationship that makes Dearest Rogue so wonderful and gives it such depth.  In that way, it is similar to my favorite Maiden Lane novel, Lord of Darkness (review), where Godric and Megs have to navigate a lot of assumptions and personal history before their happy ending. (What am I saying, I have two favorite Maiden Lane novels now.)

Dearest Rogue is available today, May 26, 2015, wherever books are sold.

Dear FTC: I received a digital advance of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss...and then I bought a copy, too.

The World Between Two Covers by Ann Morgan

Summary from Goodreads:
A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author's year-long journey through a book from every country.

Following an impulse to read more internationally, journalist Ann Morgan undertook first to define "the world" and then to find a story from each of 196 nations. Tireless in her quest and assisted by generous, far-flung strangers, Morgan discovered not only a treasury of world literature but also the keys to unlock it. Whether considering the difficulties faced by writers in developing nations, movingly illustrated by Burundian Marie-Thérese Toyi's Weep Not, Refugee; tracing the use of local myths in the fantastically successful Samoan YA series Telesa; delving into questions of censorship and propaganda while sourcing a title from North Korea; or simply getting hold of The Corsair, the first Qatari novel to be translated into English, Morgan illuminates with wit, warmth, and insight how stories are written the world over and how place-geographical, historical, virtual-shapes the books we read and write.

Some time in late-2012 I stumbled across a blog titled A Year of Reading the World.  This very nice lady, Ann Morgan, was apparently wrapping up a year-long blog project wherein she read a book from every country in the world.  Plus a territory chosen by poll from her readers.  197 books in all.

197 books, one from each country.  Translated into English.  (2012, for me, was the year I read 192 books, mostly romance novels because my mother was undergoing treatment for cancer and I couldn't handle much else.  So Ann's project caught me attention simply for her level of ambition - I have blog projects, but I am absolutely the worst at reading to list or schedule or timetable.)  As 2013 rolled in, I backed up to the beginning of Ann's blog and read it all from the beginning.  Not only did she find some really interesting books to read she also had a fair amount of trouble getting books to read from more countries than I would have guessed.  Ann's experience led me to check and see how much in-translation work I read....which, like my percentage of POC authors, was pretty terrible.  And then Ann announced she'd been offered a book deal based on her blog....

https://www.tumblr.com/search/Kermit-flail#

(Full disclosure: once I found out that Norton's Liveright imprint was going to publish the US edition I begged a galley off them.  I have no regrets.)

The US title of Ann's book is The World Between Two Covers and if you thought it was going to be a potted, bound version of the blog you're going to be disappointed.  What the book turned out to be is a very well-written examination of why the Anglophone (specifically UK via Ann's experience and US by extension) reading population and publishing arm reads little world literature, particularly in translation.  At best estimate approximately only 3% of non-Anglophone world literature is translated and published in English.  Only 3%.  That's terrible.

Ann touched briefly on many translation or publication issues on her blog but the book allows her to expand her topics in a very accessibly way.  There are a number of roadblocks one encounters when trying to find and read literature by authors (and, by extension, purchase legally) from, say, Burkina Faso or Nepal or Kuwait or Monaco or Lichtenstein.  New countries may not have a strong press or literature tradition (or even a written tradition as we define it in Western literature, as Ann found with some island nations).  Some authors turn increasingly to the ebook self-publishing industry for publication and access to readers, some are fleetingly available through small specialty presses. A huge list of books to read can be derived from Ann's work both in the actual 197 books she read in 2012 and the books she references in mulling over her experience.  The World Between Two Covers will make you think and grow your TBR list by leaps and bounds - which is exactly what happened to me.  You can also watch me natter on about this in two videos - I talk about the book and then about some recommendations for literature in translation.

And I made a display at the store because, ugh, so much good stuff to read.

Other things booksellers do: find a book they like so much (@ayearofreadingtheworld 's WORLD BETWEEN TWO COVERS) that they make a whole display based on it of international literature

A photo posted by Melissa W. (@balletbookworm) on Apr 23, 2015 at 7:47pm PDT

Recommendation: buy this sucker and read the heck out of it, pen in hand.

Dear FTC: I requested an ARC from the publisher, nearly read the cover off, and had to buy a nice, clean copy for my shelf.

Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn

Summary from Goodreads:
The lives of more than twenty-five actresses lost before their time—from Marilyn Monroe to Brittany Murphy—explored in haunting, provocative new work by an acclaimed poet and actress

Amber Tamblyn is both an award-winning film and television actress and an acclaimed poet. As such she is deeply fascinated-and intimately familiar—with the toll exacted from young women whose lives are offered in sacrifice as starlets. The stories of these actresses, both famous and obscure-tragic stories of suicide, murder, obscurity, and other forms of death—inspired this empathic and emotionally charged collection of new poetic work.

Featuring subjects from Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer to Dana Plato and Brittany Murphy—and paired with original artwork commissioned for the book by luminaries including David Lynch, Adrian Tome, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama—Dark Sparkler is a surprising and provocative collection from a young artist of wide-ranging talent, culminating in an extended, confessional epilogue of astonishing candor and poetic command.

Actresses featured in Dark Sparkler include:

Marilyn Monroe
Brittany Murphy
Dana Plato
Jayne Mansfield
Jean Harlow
Dominique Dunne
Sharon Tate
Heather O’Rourke
Bridgette Andersen
Shannon Michelle Wilsey
Judith Barsi
Peg Entwistle
Carole Landis
Anissa Jones
Susan Peters
Barbara La Marr
Lucy Gordon
Sirkka Sari
Li Tobler
Thelma Todd
Samantha Smith
Lupe Valez
Taruni Sachdev
Rebecca Shaeffer

My working knowledge of contemporary poetry is not good. So color me surprised to find out that not only does actress Amber Tamblyn have a book of poetry coming out from HarperPerennial it isn't her first collection.  Huh.  But I was really intrigued by her subject matter for the new collection, Dark Sparkler: the lives and deaths of women in the entertainment history.

I won't lie, there are no happy poems here.  This is a sad and intriguing collection of poems distilled from the tragic lives of actresses, some quite obscure (I had trouble finding them with Google - and there is an 8 page list of search terms consisting of actress' names and deaths, many of whom died young and holy dude will that take a bit to go through and reconcile with those poems based on actresses I couldn't find initially).  There is no consistent form or style; it is pure feeling.

Included in and around these poems based on real women are anxieties that Tamblyn herself must share with these women - the pressure to perform, to conform, to be on display, to be perfect, and to be the object of obsession. The collection reminds me that actresses are judged far more for their appearance and behavior than their acting ability and that pressure causes so many women to harm themselves or turn to substance abuse. One particular poem is chilling in that it is blank, wordless, as if it is waiting for its subject's final move before filling in (I won't spoil that one by telling you who it is).  There are lessons here and a lot of things to think about.

Dear FTC: I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher.

Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

Summary from Goodreads:
“Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried.

This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.

Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.

As a single woman approaching middle-age, there are two things you can do: loathe your single state or work to accept the single life you have. I opt for the second. Loathing one's self because one lacks a socially acceptable relationship construct takes too much time. I have things to do. Yes, it sucks that there's no one to come home to at night (cats do not count) but there's a bit of pride that it's all mine, from the weedy yard to the dripping sink to the bed I do not have to share.

Kate Bolick has been coupled and uncoupled, but never married.  As her friends married and had children, she wondered why she wasn't doing the same.  She had a great life - she was an editor with Domino magazine at one point - and loved it.  She loved her apartment.  So....was she normal?  Bolick began to notice a pattern in her reading: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Wharton and others were women who held good jobs and houses and social lives independent of a marital bond.  She explores the lives and intersecting themes of these women and her own life in Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own.

I thought this was a very interesting, thoughtful look at women's lives in the last 100-150 years through the lens of Bolick's five female predecessors.  And, yes, several of them married later in life or were married early then divorced/widowed, but the major point is that their most productive periods - and possibly happiest periods - coincided with periods of their lives when they were single.  I liked the balance between personal memoir and group biography.  A definite recommend.

Dear FTC: I received a digital advance copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.

When Your Genre Kryptonite Has Its Own Kryptonite

One of my “genre kryptonites” – i.e. the genre of book guaranteed to part me from my money – are books about books, specifically of the memoir variety.

Read a book a day for a year (Nina Sankovitch’s Tolstoy and the Purple Chair)? Sure.

Your dad reads to you every night from grade school until college (Alice Ozma’s The Reading Promise)? Yep.

Examine all your childhood heroines and how they are helpful or problematic (Rebecca Ellis’s How to Be a Heroine)? Yes!

Decide to “better” yourself by reading 50 specific books (Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously)? Yes, HarperPerennial, you know me well.

Examine how your relationship to a specific work of literature has changed as you age (Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch)? Yep, yep, yep.

And (my personal, current favorite), read one book from EVERY country in the world in ONE YEAR (Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers (US)/Reading the World (UK))? HELLZ YES.

Gimmie. I will take them all. Hand them over.

Until I can barely force myself to read the blurb of a particular book.

On the first Sunday of December 2011, I was working at the bookstore. It was the holidays, there were more customers than would seem to fit into the aisles, then my brother called. He told me to get off the sales floor and go to the back – he wouldn’t tell me why. When I did, he told me he was at the emergency room, with my parents, and my mother had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

My manager told me to go to the ER to be with my family. Immediately. Once there, I convinced the doctor to show me the CT scan. The tumor looked like a small golf ball lodged in the back of her right ventricle. Over the next week Mom underwent brain surgery, rehab to make sure she was regaining her balance and strength, and the critical meeting with her oncologist and radiation specialists.

My mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, grade IV. A tumor that is perhaps two percent of brain cancers which are only two percent of all cancers diagnosed in one year. Aggressive, very aggressive. Insidious, hard to get “margin” surgically. The best clinical trial evidence said that half of all patients are still alive eighteen months after diagnosis. We were lucky in that my parents live near one of the best teaching hospitals in the country and that my day job is there as well, working in research for the hospital epidemiologist. I knew Mom’s surgeon was the best we could hope for, my boss is neighbors with her oncologist. She was in good hands. We counted off the days of radiation treatments, watched her white cell counts, bought her books (and a Nook – Mom had a noticeable decrease in her field of vision so it was easier for a while to read “one page” at a time with larger print on a tablet than navigate the pages of a paper book), counted out chemotherapy pills, and we waited to see what would happen.

That fall, a book was published that should have been in my wheelhouse, The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. When his mother was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, they began to read and discuss the same books. All sorts of books, up until her death two years later.

When I had to stock the store display with shiny new hardcovers of The End of Your Life Book Club I could barely open the packing case. Ordinarily, I’d have been all over a book like this, happily reading a personal account of books read. I would likely cry over what would probably be a beautiful rendering of a mother-son relationship. Instead, reading the first paragraph of the blurb made me feel nauseated. I couldn't read a memoir about a mom-who-liked-to-read dying of cancer. I couldn't – in a rational world, I could, but my irrational mind was worried that it might jinx my own mother’s treatment.

My genre kryptonite had developed its own kryptonite: my mother.

Three years later, Mom is doing better than anyone could have predicted. She wasn't able to go back to work as a parish administrator, but she has started playing the organ for church again (on occasion, it’s still too much to prepare for two services every week). She helps my nieces practice their piano lessons. Her balance isn't, and will never be, back to normal but as long as we make sure the kids don’t leave toys in her path it’s fine. She’s still my mom. All these extra months and years are a gift.

The End of Your Life Book Club is now out in paperback, it’s been included in promotional sales, and a few copies of the hardcover have popped up in the bargain bin. And I still won’t read it. Not even the first paragraph. I wish Schwalbe all the best, but I will probably never read his book.

There will be other books about books to make me weak-at-the-knees. And that is just fine.

I Am Not a Slut! Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet by Leora Tanenbaum

Summary from Goodreads:

The author of the groundbreaking work Slut! explores the phenomenon of slut-shaming in the age of sexting, tweeting, and “liking.” She shows that the sexual double standard is more dangerous than ever before and offers advice to—and offers wisdom and strategies for alleviating its destructive effects on young women’s lives

Young women are encouraged to express themselves sexually. Yet when they do, they are derided as “sluts.” Caught in a double bind of mixed sexual messages, young women are confused. To fulfill the contradictory roles of being sexy but not slutty, they create an “experienced” identity on social media-even if they are not sexually active—while ironically referring to themselves and their friends as “sluts.”

But this strategy can become a weapon used against young women in the hands of peers who circulate rumors and innuendo—elevating age-old slut-shaming to deadly levels, with suicide among bullied teenage girls becoming increasingly common. Now, Leora Tanenbaum revisits her influential work on sexual stereotyping to offer fresh insight into the digital and face-to-face worlds contemporary young women inhabit. She shares her new research, involving interviews with a wide range of teenage girls and young women from a variety of backgrounds as well as parents, educators, and academics. Tanenbaum analyzes the coping mechanisms young women currently use and points them in a new direction to eradicate slut-shaming for good.

"Sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never hurt me."

I was teased a lot as a child (by one specific individual mostly) and repeated that phrase to myself for comfort.  But that old saw is wrong - words have the power to cut a life down, particularly the word "slut" and it's linguistic extension "ho" and in the viral culture of the 21st-century's social media those words can easily become lethal rather than a phrase to shrug away.  That is the point of Leora Tanenbaum's new book, I Am Not a Slut! Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet.

Through a societal sexual double-standard, young women are expected to cultivate a sexually experienced image but not to actually engage their own wants or desires in demanding agency in their own sexual experience.  How often are there hand-wringing articles about pre-teens "dressing provocatively" or about how "young women place themselves in bad situations" or about the vicious, vicious slut-shaming and victim-blaming that has cropped up online around cases like the Stubenville rape case? How often?  The shaming and blaming doesn't come exclusively from men; some of the worst accusations come from other women.  

What Tanenbaum does is back up and ask us to examine the societal pressure that would cause a girl to send a naked selfie to a boy (who is praised for amassing a collection of naked pictures from multiple girls while the girl is shamed, and possibly prosecuted, if that one photo is circulated).  Ask us to examine why other girls and women are so often the ones to throw the first stone and blame the "slut" for everything that happens to her.  Ask us to examine why young women turn to substance abuse in social situations.  Ask us to examine why "nonconsensual sex" is now a term used instead of "rape" when a woman who cannot actually give her willing consent to sexual intercourse has a forcible sexual encounter.

While I have a few quibbles and bones to pick with a few of Tanenbaum's points (first among them: her prescriptive advice to "not dress in a provocative manner" because the girl can't control the way boys view her as a sexual object), those quibbles I'm sure would touch off a really good discussion.  This whole book is something necessary to open up discussion.  The frank and very open discussion we need to have with teen girls and teen boys about media, social/peer pressure, good sexual relationships, and why it is so important to have agency in expressing sexual desire.

When offered a review copy of I Am Not a Slut! by HarperPerennial, I had to back up and read Tanenbaum's previous book, Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation, because it had missed me when it first published.  I was in my junior/senior years of undergrad (in a pre-med track) when it published so if it wasn't a biochemistry textbook or MCAT study guide or a work of escapist fiction completely removed from pre-medicine it just wasn't on my radar.  But in reading Slut! now, I recognized a lot of things that had happened when I was in junior high and high school.  And remembered a few others.  That I had, at the request of a friend, called a girl a "ho-bag slut" because the rumor-mill had it that she had "done" my friend's crush; in retrospect, it's likely that she hadn't done a single thing with said boy and if she had I was clearly out of line.  I remember the peculiar schadenfreude (a term I didn't know then) I felt when reading bathroom graffiti about another girl and was crushed when bathroom graffiti was written about me (over 20 years later, it is laughable that someone thought the need to write that when it was clear I had no time or opportunity to do those things).  I remember being so terrified by the excessive drinking and associated activities at the only "traditional" high school party I attended that I sat outside on the stoop in the middle of February because I hadn't driven there and couldn't even have called my father to come get me since we were out in the country and I had no idea where we were; as it happened, I was the only sober one at the end of the night and had to drive a stick-shift, without a permit/license, at something like 2am to get everyone back to the one girl's house where we were staying the night and the entire way back I worried that something had happened to one of the girls and didn't know how to ask her about it. I stuck to parties with the drama crowd where the craziest thing that ever happened was that we had too many Pez and put Time Warp on repeat.

Both Tanenbaum's books work through a combination of research and interviews with young women (and in the case of Slut! with older women who came of age in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s).  The personal histories, including Tanenbaum's, cut deeply into the ways that being labelled a "slut" or "ho" (or "whore" depending on the age of the woman) has caused serious damage to how these women view themselves as whole people.  The first book lays down the history of slut-shaming or slut-bashing.  The second is one-quarter new edition with updated (horrifying) statistics and three-quarters new information due to the advent of social media and the anonymity conferred by some social media sites.  Both are worth reading.

The situations presented in Tanenbaum's books weigh on my mind because I have nieces who are very rapidly approaching the "tween" stage.  I don't have children, and am unlikely at this point in my life to have any of my own, so my nieces and nephew are getting a third parent.  My older nieces are wonderful, beautiful, creative and fabulously eccentric in the way that only grade school-age girls are, yet....their parents have had to deal with a little boy who repeatedly tried to kiss one of my nieces - and it wasn't just a peck on the cheek.  Only a few days ago the other one asked her mom why all the pretty boys were so rude.  These are children.  What will we have to contend with as everyone starts going through puberty?  My nieces are lucky in that they have a good system of parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents who love them unconditionally and will be in their corner to matter what.  But many children are not so lucky.

Apologies, this review has wandered a bit.  We need books like Tanenbaum's to begin the discussion about sexuality, sexual agency, empathy, and social pressures.  We need to end the sexual double-standard that privileges one gender (male) over the other (female) (and I haven't even touched on the differences in the use of "slut" and like words and how those words are viewed/used differently among racial or non-heteronormative groups).  We need change.  Starting with our words.

Dear FTC: I received an advance copy of I Am Not a Slut! from the publisher; I borrowed Slut! from the library.

Four Nights with the Duke by Eloisa James (Desperate Duchesses #8)

Summary from Goodreads:
As a young girl, Emilia Gwendolyn Carrington told the annoying future Duke of Pindar that she would marry any man in the world before him—so years later she is horrified to realize that she has nowhere else to turn.

Evander Septimus Brody has his own reasons for agreeing to Mia's audacious proposal, but there's one thing he won't give his inconvenient wife: himself.

Instead, he offers Mia a devil's bargain...he will spend four nights a year with her. Four nights, and nothing more. And those only when she begs for them.

Which Mia will never do.

Now Vander faces the most crucial challenge of his life: he must seduce his own wife in order to win her heart—and no matter what it takes, this is the one battle he can't afford to lose.

A million stars and a box of Kleenex. That's the whole review.

(haha, joking)

Fans of Eloisa James's Desperate Duchesses were introduced to Vander in Three Weeks with Lady X (review)...where he was attempting to affiance himself to heroine India while hero Thorn was having a temporary attack of love-induced idiocy.  Which doesn't exactly make Vander an s*-ferret, but that does put him on the back foot since attempting to scoop one's best friend's lady (even if everyone thinks the best friend and lady are broken up and you are doing it to save her reputation) isn't exactly cool.

Vander has his reasons for acting as he does but, mental arms folded, I was quite prepared to dislike Vander at the start of his own book. Dislike might be too strong...perhaps expect him to dig himself out of a trench is better? The prologue to Four Nights with the Duke also doesn't show Vander in a particularly good light when he doesn't defend teenage Mia during an excruciating scene at in the Villiers' library involving a love poem, moonbeams, and a skeevebag male friend.  Teenage males are the worst at empathy, so I gave him a pass even as I wanted Mia to cut him dead (which she did).

Then, in the first chapters of Four Nights with the Duke Vander dug his trench even deeper, which really surprised me.  Eloisa James's heroes are not, to my recollection, mean.  They might make stupid decisions (Thorn and his father the Duke of Villiers (my favorite), Gabriel, Piers, James) or enjoy some pointed verbal sparring with a partner of equal ability (what is it about those Daughtrys and their wives?) but they don't actively work to to come across as nasty (even Piers, really, despite his being patterned on House).  Even before Mia made her proposal and backed it up with sufficient inducement, Vander was downright mean.  He punished her for the sins of her father, just as he is punished for the sins of his mother...which is also the fault of Mia's father.  And just to top it all off, he tries to shock her sexually.  He does his best to dig that trench to infinite depths.  This is the first time I've ever actually disliked an Eloisa James hero (he isn't even funny like Loretta Chase's Dain).  S*-ferret.

Mia, however, stands her ground.  She requires this marriage to save her little brother and his future from their sinister uncle.  She fully intends her marriage to Vander to only last long enough to circumvent her elder brother's will.  The only mistake she makes is that she blackmails first, rather than explain exactly what is going on, and Vander doesn't bother to read the document setting out her plan. He makes his own demand for the marriage: that he will only bed her four nights out of the year and only if she begs him for those four days.  Well, it fits easily in with Mia's plans.  She will never beg him for those four days.

I was in Mia's corner from the beginning.  You give me a short, curvy, smart heroine who doesn't fit into the given Society expectations for women and I will root for her at the top of my lungs (cf. Sarah Maclean's Pippa).  Mia is a novelist.  Specifically, the bestselling Lucibella Delicosa.  She has her own income because her father dismissed her abilities - she could "keep her pennies" (bestselling novels bring in a lot of pennies).  She wants that love-match she gives her heroines for herself because there is no way that Vander will ever forgive her.

Trust me, Vander not only forgives her but works hard to dig himself out of that deep trench he made.  He makes her believe that she is worth loving.  For herself, in all her inky, novel-writing, curvy glory, not just because Vander can seduce her and scramble her brains and make her beg since he's a virile duke.  Vander comes to realize that not only does he want Mia to remain his wife because he loves her, he would do anything to make her trust him and love him back.  And, most important, he has to re-examine the relationship between his mother and Mia's father and himself...and let it go.  At the very end, Vander manages to get himself out of that trench.  You'll need the kleenex.

In addition to an A-plus love story, Eloisa scatters returning Desperate Duchess characters into the mix.  She introduces Vander's charming, drunk uncle - Chuffy - who wears eye-catching waistcoats and orders Lucibella Delicosa in special binding and quotes what seems to be the entirety of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  There are two sweet canines with names to delight any Harry Potter fan.  And then there's Charlie, Mia's little brother, who gives Thorn's ward Rose a run for her money in the "adorable wise moppet" department.  Even the villain is graced with a little pointy chin-beard like the grand-standing evil doge in a Gothic novel.  There's a delicious little bit of everything in this novel.  I loved it.

Four Nights with the Duke is available today at your favorite book dealer.

Dear FTC: I received a digital advance of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss...and then I bought a copy, too.

Above Us Only Sky by Michele Young-Stone

Summary from Goodreads:
From the author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, which Library Journal called, “ripe for Oprah or fans of Elizabeth Berg or Anne Tyler,” comes a magical novel about a family of women separated by oceans, generations, and war, but connected by something much greater—the gift of wings.

On March 29, 1973, Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind.

At fifteen years old, confused and unmoored, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women, storytellers with wings dragging the dirt, survivors perched on radio towers, lovers lit up like fireworks, and heroes disguised as everyday men and women. Prudence sets forth on a quest to discover her ancestors, to grapple with wings that only one other person can see, and ultimately, to find out where she belongs.

Above Us Only Sky spans the 1863 January Uprising against Russian Tsarist rule in Eastern Europe to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Lithuania gaining its independence in 1991. It is a story of mutual understanding between the old and young; it is a love story; a story of survival, and most importantly a story about where we belong in the world. This “is a raw, beautiful, unforgettable book” (Lydia Netzer, bestselling author of Shine, Shine, Shine).

There are times when you read a book and it so completely consumes your emotions....I finished Michele Young-Stone's Above Us Only Sky at my desk, at work, at lunch, absolutely in tears.

The beauty of this novel is not in the sweep of history but in the story of a family who has survived against the backdrop of that history.  Surviving the Tsarist rule, surviving massacre by the Red Army in World War II, surviving the Nazi invasion, surviving emigration to the US, surviving Communist rule in Lithuania, and, in Prudence's case, surviving the loss of her wings.  For in the Vikas family, the women's wings grow throughout their lifetimes.  Prudence's relationship with her grandfather - discovered when she is 15 - helps her understand some of the emptiness and contributes to her study of ornithology.  She begins to understand her family history and how much has been lost, including, to her grandfather's belief, his youngest sister, Dania.  They make two trips back to Lithuania - once before the fall of the Berlin Wall, where they are shepherded by a Party official, and once after 1991 when they make a remarkable discovery.

I can't even put all this into a proper review.  It's such a beautiful knot of a novel.

Above Us Only Sky is a heart-wrenching story of music, loss, grief, separation, hope, and joy.  Read it.  Read it, read it, read it.

Dear FTC: I received a DRC of this novel from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

Summary from Goodreads:
A major debut from an award-winning writer—an epic family saga set against the magic and the rhythms of the Virgin Islands.

In the early 1900s, the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule, and an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea. Orphaned by the shipwreck are two sisters and their half brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them.

Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic, set against the emergence of Saint Thomas into the modern world. Uniquely imagined, with echoes of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and the author’s own Caribbean family history, the story is told in a language and rhythm that evoke an entire world and way of life and love. Following the Bradshaw family through sixty years of fathers and daughters, mothers
and sons, love affairs, curses, magical gifts, loyalties, births, deaths, and triumphs, Land of Love and Drowning is a gorgeous, vibrant debut by an exciting, prizewinning young writer.

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time (even though it takes me a bit to actually get it read, the arrival is still timely).

Amid all the discussion last year of needing diverse books and how we should seek out books by diverse authors and containing diverse characters, there was a fair amount of buzz for Tiphanie Yanique's Land of Love and Drowning, her debut novel set in the early to mid-20th century as the Dutch Virgin Islands were being transferred to United States control.  Rebecca Schinsky at Book Riot talked about it, other bookish friends and Internet places talked about it, and I won an ARC in a Goodreads Giveaway.  Which I fully intended to read until my second Riot Read book arrived in August and that turned out to be a brand-spanking new hardcover edition of Land of Love and Drowning.  So I intended to read that copy but here's the thing about reading diversely: when you decide to try and make reading diversely a thing, your to-read list expands exponentially squared (I have decided this is a thing).  Because not only do you have all the books that you might normally find, but you start getting backlist and frontlist recs for authors of color in the US, outside the US, books in translation, books by authors of Jewish descent, books by LGTBQ authors, and books about all sorts of different, diverse characters.  And that's just the fiction books.  The TBR goes from large to Mt. Everest.  And that's OK.  All those titles will keep, I just have to keep reaching for them even as more are added to the top.

So I finally got far enough into the pile to find Land of Love and Drowning again.  It is a tangled web of family secrets set against the backdrop of the US Virgin Islands.  Fathers and mothers have suspect motives.  Sisters keep harmful secrets.  Myth and fate become reality.

The voices in this novel are absolutely pitch perfect: Eeona, so determined to be a "perfect" upper-class lady; Anette, who embodies the culture of the Virgin Islands; Jacob, whose sense of being caught between worlds is embodied in his language; and the narrator, who looks down on these characters as they play the hands dealt to them by their parents and the politics of the time.  The plot emerges in pieces as the voices in turn impart history and perspective.

What was most interesting to me was the look at the annexation and "Americanization" of the islands from the perspective the islands' inhabitants.  It's a perspective that I, as a white US citizen, have never been encouraged to entertain.  So in the midst of this evocative novel we, as readers, are given information that tells us the US has never made good on the promise that the inhabitants of the US Virgin Islands are actually citizens.  The land has been closed off, the young men drafted in war and subjected to racism, the tourism and entertainment industries have marginalized or stereotyped the island culture.  Land of Love and Drowning pulls the rug out from under the beautiful, care-free paradise we are sold on the travel websites and makes us think about the people who truly live there.  As it should.

Dear FTC: I received an ARC of this book via a Goodreads First Reads giveaway and then I read a copy purchased through the Book Riot Riot Read subscription.

How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis

Summary from Goodreads:

While debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre.

With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives.

I was at work exactly 3 minutes before one of the merch managers tossed me a book: How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis.  It was going in the Discover Great New Writers bay.  I bought it on break.  (My fellow booksellers know me well.)

Ellis's examination of her favorite childhood heroines intercut with a memoir of growing up in an Iraqi-Jewish community in London was really, very interesting.  I'd been thinking recently about how favorite books shift and change as I grow up and have new experiences (how I think about Jo from Little Women is a good example) so the fact that Ellis and I are approximately the same age, and that we'd read almost all the same books, was so timely.  And besides, where else can you read about someone's reading life stretching all the way from Anne of Green Gables to Pride and Prejudice to Ballet Shoes to Jilly Cooper's Riders to Scheherazade?

(Side note: In the eternal Jane vs Cathy debate I'm firmly in Jane's corner.  Jane saves her own backside and gets the happy ending; Cathy is a twit.)