Gunnie Rose continues!
At the end of my review of the third book in this series, I devoutly hoped there would be more, and I discovered last week that Charlaine Harris has come through with two more volumes while I wasn’t looking! Imagine my delight at getting to continue this entertaining dystopian historical fantasy mash-up for not one book but two!
You can read my entire review of the first two here, and the third one here, but just to quote myself to give a reaction to those too impatient to do so,
“This series is pure delight, from the elaborate world-building to the laconic Western flavor of Texoma, and the characters are so alive they could step off the page. Harris has written this with just the amount of detail you crave, without drowning you in either description or explanation, and the pace of this mystery/adventure story is perfect. The minute I finished the first book, I jumped without hesitation into the second one.”
You really should read at least my review of the first two, because it gives a thorough description of a rather complicated world-building exercise. But even there, Harris achieves the maximum in understanding with the minimum of detail. She is apparently no more a fan of the info-dump than am I, for which I am thankful.
The fourth book, The Serpent in Heaven, picks up pretty much where the third left off; Felicia is now a school boarder at the Grigori academy in San Diego. She was initially admitted as a sort of honorary student because of the need to keep her safely squirreled away, since she is one of the few blood donors remaining who can save young Tsar Alexei’s life should he have a mishap (he’s a hemophiliac). But in this book, due to some unexpected hazards at the school, Felicia reveals the true scope of her wizardy powers and gets promoted to the “real” classes to learn to control, direct, and expand them, mentored by the curmudgeonly Victor.
This book was told from the first person viewpoint of Felicia herself, which added an extra element to the story, since in the course of her narration you get to know her much better and understand her background, upbringing, and level of skill. Lizbeth (Gunnie) and Eli are mostly missing from this chapter, because they have married and gone off to live in Texoma after the disastrous coup that disgraced parts of Eli’s family in the last book. We get news of them only through an occasional letter or telegram or word-of-mouth message. I thought this would be upsetting to the narrative, but I was completely absorbed in Felicia’s story and didn’t miss them, for the most part, compelling characters though they are.
Harris makes up for this in book #5, All the Dead Shall Weep, when Felicia, accompanied by Eli’s brother Peter, goes to visit Lizbeth and Eli in Texoma, mostly to get away from an ongoing threat of kidnapping by various factions who have figured out her value as a wizard and want to (either voluntarily or forcibly) marry her into their bloodline to amp up their descendants’ talent pool. But bad fortune follows Felicia like a hungry stray dog, and there’s also a new military rebellion beginning to muster, with which the sisters and their men must contend. This book is told by alternating narrators Lizbeth and Felicia, which was initially jarring when I didn’t realize the voice had changed, but actually really helpful in giving all the behind-the-scenes thoughts and feelings you craved from these characters.
And this fifth book ends on a truly ominous cliffhanger, historical in nature, which bodes well for more sequels, though ill for their contents! Still a fan. Check them out!
Interesting, but…
I’m going to finish that phrase with “not compelling.”
I started a new series by J. J. Marsh called the DI Beatrice Stubbs mysteries, and although the first book, Behind Closed Doors, has much to recommend it, I found myself reacting somewhat tepidly to its charms. There were three books on offer at a discount as a boxed e-book set (with another three-book set if you liked these), and the description—a team of Interpol agents led by a detective inspector from Scotland Yard, trying to solve a bunch of murders camouflaged as suicides—sounded intriguing.
The tip-offs that they were not suicides were two, the first being that DNA from the same individual was found at all the death sites, and the second that these were all singularly unpleasant characters, responsible between them for a lot of dirty dealing and corruption in the world. Obviously, the team feels, someone has targeted them for elimination and has gone to great lengths to do so both thoroughly and cleverly—and also what would have been undetectably save for the DNA. The conclusion is ultimately drawn that the DNA is purposefully planted to give a hint that these were, indeed, diabolically successful revenge killings.
The set-up sounds wonderful: The killings take place across Europe, mostly at glamorous and diverse locations (a luxury hotel, a ski run, a dam) and by creative methods (freezing, asphixiation, beheading). Because the victims are villains, mostly from the world of international finance, no one seems to excessively regret their deaths.
The team of investigators is what should be an interesting crew made up of three women and three men of various ranks and nationalities from several countries and organizations, brought together to definitively determine whether those who initially dealt with the deaths are right to be suspicious. There is a thinly disguised villainess who is either personally or professionally connected to all of the victims, but against whom nothing has been proven. The home base of the team is Zurich, with side trips to all the destinations where the killings took place, and there is a lot of name-dropping of cities and their tourist attractions—museums, opera houses, parks, resorts—to give everything an air of glamour. And yet…
I had a lot of trouble investing in anyone in this book. The main character, Detective Inspector Beatrice Stubbs, is supposed to be the primary driver of the action and thus, presumably, the sympathetic character, and she is nicely rendered as a person of brilliance who has just come back to work after a period of instability during which she may have attempted suicide herself. She is not painted as a tragic figure, though; she has a stable home life with a supportive partner, is committed to regular visits with her therapist, and has a boss who wants her to succeed and has her back. She’s a little older and a bit less fashionable than the other women on the team, which gives her both authority and vulnerability, and she has moments of both darkness and joy in the course of her days.
Other than her, however, I found the members of the team to be opaque. Each of them has a quirk or two that is played up in the course of their interactions, but you never really get to know the people behind those quirks. There’s just not enough detail provided to make you care about them one way or another and, in some cases, the element of personality chosen for them is actively irritating, making you not want to know them.
Similarly, the way the victims are described is probably accurate; since they are all from a certain class of wealthy, ruthless men, one might assume that they would each be likely to fall prey to flattery and deceit by the young women who set out to entrap them— but after a while the stereotypical behavior verges on misandry and becomes both unpleasant and repetitive.
When she’s not writing, J. J. Marsh works as a language trainer in four languages, so her prose is mostly fluid and descriptive. But despite all of this (and high praise from some readers), I found this book to be only okay, and probably won’t read the next two. Another near miss for my reading preferences.
Reiteration
I got frustrated this week by my seeming inability to pick a winner of a book, and fell back on a sure thing by rereading Charlaine Harris’s four-book series about Harper Connelly, victim of a lightning strike, who uses the ability given her by this event to make a new life for herself. And now, once again stymied by a new-to-me book series that isn’t grabbing my attention or enthusiasm, I’ve been considering rereading Harris’s other series about dystopian gunslinger Lizbeth “Gunnie” Rose. So imagine my delight, after going to Goodreads to remind myself which book was first in the trilogy, at discovering that Harris wrote two more in this series while I wasn’t paying attention!
If you’d like a more thorough dissection of these two favorite series of mine by Harris, go here and read all about them. This post reviews the third book in the Gunnie Rose series. And stay tuned for reviews of The Serpent in Heaven, and All the Dead Shall Weep.
Dog Day Afternoon
No, this isn’t a post about a 1975 bank robbery movie. But the title seemed appropriate, given that it’s National Dog Day and also that I am getting such a late start that my post won’t be available until after noon, one of those hot, sleepy afternoons when dogs (and people) prefer to lie around and languish (i.e., read!) during the summer heat. I did some pre-planning for this post by making a list of some pertinent dog-oriented books, but then my distracted brain failed to follow up, so a list is pretty much all you’re going to get this time. But don’t discount it just because it’s not elaborated upon; these are some great reads, encompassing fantasy, mystery, dystopian fiction, science fiction, some true stories, and a short list for children.
NOVELS FOR ADULTS (AND TEENS)
The Beka Cooper trilogy (Terrier, Bloodhound, Mastiff),
by Tamora Pierce
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, by C. A. Fletcher
Iron Mike, by Patricia Rose
A Dog’s Purpose, by W. Bruce Cameron
First Dog on Earth, by Irv Weinberg
The Companions, by Sheri S. Tepper
The Andy Carpenter mysteries, by David Rosenfelt
The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller
DOGGIE NONFICTION
Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog,
by John Grogan
Best Friends: The True Story of the World’s Most Beloved
Animal Sanctuary, by Samantha Glen
James Herriot’s Dog Stories, by James Herriot
A Three Dog Life, by Abigail Thomas
Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know,
by Alexandra Horowitz
CHILDREN’S BOOKS WITH DOGS
Sounder, by William H. Armstrong
No More Dead Dogs, by Gordon Korman
Harry the Dirty Dog books, by Gene Zion
(illustrator Margaret Bloy Graham)
Bark, George, by Jules Feiffer (one of the best for reading aloud!)
And for those who wanted more, here is an annotated list of more dog days books from a previous year, along with some suggestions for dog lovers that go beyond reading about them.
Bafflement and outrage
Have you ever read a book that, in the end, you wished was even worse than it was? I have just had that experience.
The real wish is, of course, that you had never read it in the first place, but that ship has sailed, to indulge in a cliché for the sake of staying on point with this book’s entire raison d’être. The Vacationers, by Emily Straub, should come printed with a disclaimer at the front that says, Please check the Goodreads reviews before assaying this!
No, I’m not usually this vindictive when reviewing a book I didn’t like, because, I reason, perhaps someone else will like it better. But despite a couple of pre-publication glowing reviews (how much were you paid?), no one does, and people need to know that!
The characters were a group of the most repellently dislikable people I have encountered since trying to read The Casual Vacancy, by J. K. Rowling, which can serve as the perfect example of that book I mentioned in my first sentence—bad enough to make me stop reading by Chapter 4. Unfortunately, these people had enough of an initial tinge of normalcy that I was bamboozled into believing that this story could go somewhere and be something, so I kept reading, wondering when that might happen, only to arrive at the end and say, “What? What?” As a reviewer on Goodreads who is rendered even more bitter than I observed,
“I kept reading in the hopes that
someone would drown.”
—Meghan
So, you’re wondering, what is so terrible? It’s kind of hard to explain. The Vacationers is basically a book about a family who go on vacation together in Mallorca. There are the parents, New Yorkers Franny and Jim, who are having a crisis in their relationship that happened after the reservations were made, so they decide to go through with the vacation anyway; there are the children, 28-year-old Bobby (lives in Florida, sells real estate with a sideline in health supplements) and 18-year-old Sylvia (about to leave for college, desperate to lose her virginity); there is Bobby’s cougar girlfriend, Carmen (who everyone resolutely dislikes); and there is the best friend of Franny, gay Charles, and his husband, Lawrence (hoping to adopt a baby), all brought together in a beautiful house in the hills for a two-week sojourn. The potential family dynamics could, and should have, proved interesting, but…they didn’t. All the things under scrutiny mostly happened or have at least been substantially foreshadowed before the trip began, which causes tension and a lot of talking. Let me amend that: whining, over-dramatizing, obsessive dwelling on he-said she-said I should’ve you could’ve why didn’t you, if only? “White people problems!” should be printed on the cover as one of those shorthand blurbs offered up by other authors to help out their friend’s book sales. There is a load of privilege, entitlement, and snobbery accompanied by a faint whiff of racism, a bit of misogyny and, as some reviewers noted, the reader keeps wondering if this is a send-up but concludes that unfortunately,
it is not.
I’m not going to dwell on everything that was wrong with this “slice of life” disaster (Definition: “A storytelling technique that presents a seemingly arbitrary sample of a character’s life, which often lacks a coherent plot, conflict, or ending”) except to give a small spoiler by way of illustration: When girlfriend Carmen walks out on the vacation (and on Bobby) and makes her own way back home rather than stay and be subjected to any more of this, I should have followed her out the door. But that unfortunately happens too late in the story to have made a significant difference.
I gave it one star on Goodreads. I wavered around two, simply for the descriptions of the locale and the food, but no. Those were merely unfairly employed lures to keep me reading.
Choices
As I have mentioned before, I am an enthusiastic reader of mysteries of all kinds. I enjoy series featuring one lead detective or partners, with private eyes or amateur sleuths; and I enjoy police procedurals, legal mysteries, stuff that might be considered thrillers rather than straight-out mysteries, and even the occasional cozy. In short, my mystery tastes are pretty eclectic. And in general I am not one to shy away from stuff that can be graphic, although I don’t specifically seek it out. But everybody has their limits, and mine seems to be that I don’t want to read things that are unrelentingly dour and depressing.
After discovering the Will Trent series on TV and thoroughly enjoying it, I decided to check out Karin Slaughter’s original creation of this character and his world, and although I found the writing and story-telling to be good, I struggled with all the differences between the written and televised versions, ultimately deciding that I vastly prefer the TV show to the books and choosing not to read any more of them. This is almost sacrilegious for me, but…there it is.
I did, however, decide that I would explore some of Slaughter’s pre-Will books, so I picked up Blindsighted, the first in the Grant County series featuring pediatrician and part-time small-town coroner Sara Linton. The description sounded intriguing, and I always enjoy a female protagonist. The fact that she’s a doctor rather than a detective is a nice twist, and the connection to the law via her ex-husband, police chief Jeff Tolliver, keeps everything legitimate in terms of solving cases. In short, it sounded like something I might like. But there were a few words in the Goodreads description to which I should have paid more attention: brutal, twisted, macabre, sadistic, malevolent.
I didn’t, unfortunately, and once I got started I felt obligated to give the book a shot. In the absence of any other book waiting in the wings, I kept reading and finished it, but I have decided that the books of Karin Slaughter aren’t for me; the subject matter is just too much. This being the first in the series, I can only wonder where she goes next, after a story this grueling. I used to like Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books—likewise headed by a medical examiner—but had to stop reading them when they got too dark. This one was too dark out of the gate.
I think there also has to be a balance in books like this: If there are going to be horrifying murders committed by deranged serial killers, you need a certain amount of balance provided by a stable and focused protagonist. That was what ultimately made me turn aside from Cornwell and, now, Slaughter: Not only were the murders gruesome and strange, but the protagonists and all those surrounding them were angry, sad, depressed, and distressed. I can take one or the other, but the entire experience can’t be an unrelenting downer.
While I have always believed that people should read outside their comfort zones in order to discover things they never knew they loved, I also believe that it’s good to be able to narrow your choices by deciding what’s okay with you and what’s not. I just found one author who is unfortunately not, even though she seems talented and writes prolifically. Too bad, but sometimes despite doing everything right, a writer isn’t for you. I’ll move on and keep looking.
Sweetness and lies
The description of Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame gives off major cozy vibes: Jenny, a woman of 77, happily part of a couple for 59 years with her beloved Bernard, 83, feels a little restless settling further and further into the undeviating routine of their retirement. She takes an unexpected opportunity to apply to be a contestant on the television show “Britain Bakes” (yes, think The Great British Bake-off), to see if life still offers the potential for meaning and adventure. She enjoys the new-found independence of her choice, but it brings up some old memories that begin to affect both her and her relationship…
It sounded ideal: I like baking and recipes, and I like seeing older people charging towards life rather than sinking into it. But…I’m going to quote another Goodreads reviewer here:
“I feel tricked. I wanted ‘elderly woman finds herself through entering a baking contest.’ Instead, I got ‘elderly woman reminisces about the most traumatic thing that ever happened to her (which she’s kept a secret for 60 years) while participating in a baking contest.'”
The trouble started for me when Jenny decides to keep her application a secret from her husband until she knows for sure that she got in, or at least has a good chance. I didn’t have such a problem with that—you don’t want to get people’s hopes up, or deal with their expectations, for that matter—but the way she went about it was inconsiderate and rather thoughtless (not to mention incredibly inept), and leads her husband to believe that she’s hiding something serious, like a life-threatening illness. And when she realizes that is the conclusion he has drawn, she doesn’t come clean and put his mind at ease! I began to like and respect Jenny a little less.
Then we discover that there’s a much bigger secret she’s been keeping from Bernard (and everyone else) for the entire 59 years of her marriage, as the baking of some of her old family recipes brings up memories of her life at 17. She claims that she has kept the secret all this time in order to protect him, but we figure out pretty quickly that it’s to protect herself from being looked at differently by him and by her other close family members. Which didn’t track at first for me, because the secret would explain so much—but once I realized in what way the trauma has shaped their subsequent lives, I liked Jenny even less.
I would really, really like to go into the specifics of why I was kind of horrified by the ramifications of her secret, but I don’t want to give away a central plot point. I will say that I felt like she robbed her beloved (and charmingly portrayed) husband of his agency in a particularly cruel way by never taking him into her confidence.
But…I did thoroughly enjoy the baking narrative, with its descriptions of such delectables as Battenburg Cake and Treacle Tarts; the interactions with her extended family and with the people she met and in some cases befriended on the show; and the descriptions of the filming of the show’s production. Reading those parts immersed me in the bake-off experience, and if the book had been exclusively about that I think I might have liked it better. Many people gave this book five stars, with few being as curmudgeonly as I have been here. Perhaps I am overreacting…but I didn’t like the lies, the implications of Jenny’s emotions about the traumatic event, or the way it finally resolves, which seemed a little too pat.
You will have to decide for yourself whether you want to allow yourself to be whisked away into this story, pun intended.
An addendum: This is my 500th post on The Book Adept Blog!
National Book Lovers’ Day
Here are some of the books I love. You are welcome to respond to this by listing some of the books you love, in the comments. These are not in any particular order, and it is by no means a complete list, just a random assortment—a combination of books that occur to me when “books you love” comes at me in a Facebook post, and a scan of my Goodreads files for five stars.)
The Terrorists of Irustan, by Louise Marley
Green Dolphin Street, by Elizabeth Goudge
The Wee Free Men (and sequels), by Terry Pratchett
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
The Beka Cooper trilogy (Terrier, Bloodhound, Mastiff), by Tamora Pierce
The Queen’s Thief series, by Megan Whalen Turner
Found in a Bookshop, by Stephanie Butland
The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett
The Obernewtyn Chronicles, by Isobelle Carmody
The Farseer books, by Robin Hobb
Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor
Vicious, by V. E. Schwab
The Last Dragonslayer series, by Jasper Fforde
The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater
Memory and Dream, by Charles de Lint
The Earthsea books, by Ursula K. LeGuin
Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley
Mary Stewart’s Arthurian saga
The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge
The Convenient Marriage, by Georgette Heyer
Tai-Pan, by James Clavell
The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault
The Rich Are Different, by Susan Howatch
In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden
Random Harvest, by James Hilton
Holding Smoke, by Elle Cosimano
Lacey Flint mysteries, by Sharon Bolton
We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker
Harper Connelly mysteries, by Charlaine Harris
What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George
Dublin Murder Squad books, by Tana French
The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig
The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton
The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Demolition Angel, by Robert Crais
Kill the Messenger, by Tami Hoag
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, by Lish McBride
Scarlet Feather, by Maeve Binchy
Coming Home, by Rosamunde Pilcher
The Far Pavilions, by M. M. Kaye
The Feast of All Saints, by Anne Rice
The Just City, by Jo Walton
The Family Tree, by Sheri S. Tepper
Dune, by Frank Herbert
Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
Just to put these in a little further context: These are books with longevity (for me). That is to say, I didn’t just recognize their merit and give them five stars in the moment, I returned to them at least once and, in some cases, again and again to reread and re-experience the story-telling that is always the foremost in importance to me; and they are also books I tend to think of when someone else asks for a recommendation. So while some of them may be “significant” books while others may seem like trivial choices, for me they resonated somehow, enough that I wanted to revisit them myself and share them with others. And again, partial list! I’m sure there are some absolute gems I left out and will later think, Oops! how could I forget THAT one?
Navola
That was…an experience.
When I was 20 percent in, I actually wrote on Paolo Bacigalupi’s Facebook page that I was enjoying his world-building and the use of language and nuance in his new novel, Navola. (As has been previously commented upon, I am a stickler for authentic world-building.) He responded that he had enjoyed creating them, and I can believe that, because there is a lot of loving detail in this book. As it turns out, maybe too much? At first it reminded me of my best-beloved fantasy series, The Queen’s Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner, and also gave me the feel of Ursula LeGuin’s masterpiece of pseudo-historical fiction, Malafrena. But as it went on, I felt so overwhelmed by the discussion of every niggling detail (and the need to figure out what was meant by all the semi-Italian, sometimes Latin-based lingo) that it almost felt like being back in English class, being forced to read a classic work about which I felt reluctant, since it wasn’t my choice. I couldn’t help but contrast this with Bacigalupi’s excellent Shipbreaker series, in which he masterfully paints the scene using just what he needs, and then jumps full-force into the story.
The world of Navola seems to be based on a loosely historical evocation of city-states from the Italian Renaissance. There is all the intrigue of the Borgias, with both front-facing and behind-the-scenes manipulation of absolutely everyone by everyone else, except by our protagonist, Davico, son and heir to the wealthy and successful merchant banker, Devonaci di Regula da Navola, who is the power behind the titular heads of state of Navola. Di Regulai rules by maintaining a calculated balance between greed and politics, alternately controlling and rewarding his many clients within Navola and in all the surrounding states. But despite Davico’s training in all the arts both physical (knife- and sword-fighting, equestrian, etc.) and mental/political (negotiation, the reading of faces and body language, the subtle acquisition of background information), he remains largely ignorant (or innocent) of the real breadth of knowledge necessary to step up to the challenge presented by his father—to rule Navola as Devonaci has done. Davico is a tragic hero: His honesty and authenticity is a liability in the world to which he has been born, and although he toys with rejecting his heritage, he is not strong enough to stand up to the culture within which he is embedded, nor to the expectations of his father.
Although I have always been a proponent of thorough world-building, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the information Bacigalupi attempts to convey throughout this nearly 600-page tome. There are multiple information dumps—my least favorite parts of the book—and even in the course of the sometimes exciting and action-packed scenes, the “behind-the-hand” translations of the language, the explanations about the involved parties, and the setting of context weigh down the actual events to the point where I felt I was constantly digging for the meat of the story.
There is a fantasy element (introduced on the cover by the depiction of a dragon’s eye, an actual artifact Devonaci keeps on his desk in his library), but while its presence is strong in the parts of the story in which it is included, those are few and far between. Its significance to Davico is toyed with early on, and then mostly recedes until near the end of the book, almost past the point where anyone would care.
There is also a grimness to this story that may be disturbing to some; in addition to the mental manipulation, there is no escape from murder, rape, or graphic revenge amidst the noble families’ bloody pursuit of power. It’s not quite as overwhelming as, say, Jay Kristoff’s Nevernight Chronicles, but it has its moments of queasy-making horror.
The real fault I have to find with this book, however, is the complete lack of foreshadowing by anyone—the author, the publisher, Goodreads—that this is merely the opener for a continuing story! I began to realize, at about the 80 percent mark, that this would have to be the case, because the events took such a back seat to the development of the venue itself that there would be no time, unless it was criminally truncated, to resolve the hero’s situation and provide a satisfactory ending, and indeed I was right; it’s one of those cliffhangers where the hero lives to fight another day. It’s not abrupt, but the story is by no means at an end and, if it is, then I would have to say, What was the point of all that? Navola is too well written to give it a bad rating, but if, when perusing the teaser for the book on Goodreads, it had said “volume one,” I would have approached it with a completely different attitude that wouldn’t have left me feeling duped.
Maybe the lack of this was the author’s way of leaving himself an out; if the first book doesn’t go over so well, do you really want to invest the time in writing a sequel? But I am here to say, Paolo Bacigalupi, you owe us all the rest of the story, having made us endure through the laborious stick-upon-stone of the world you built to house it!
Funny story
I was headed towards a long, intense perusal of Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest, Navola, but just as I was about to open it, the library popped up in my email to tell me this Emily Henry book was now available for checkout, and I decided to prioritize a shorter, lighter read in the midst of ranting about the Republican convention and scolding Democrats trying to ditch Biden in a last-minute bid for the nonexistent “perfect” candidate. And I’m glad I did.
I was surprised by this one, because I have read four other Emily Henry books and enjoyed them all, but so far Funny Story is my favorite. It’s surprising because a bunch of die-hard Emily fans gave it a low rating and found many things to pick at about the protagonists, the set-up, the story, the writing…not a bestie for many.
I may have been prejudiced by a few things: Daphne, the protagonist, is a somewhat buttoned-up children’s librarian. Miles, the other MC, is scruffy, mischievous, but also deep and troubled, and dead sexy. I also liked the opening premise: Daphne is engaged to Peter, and the wedding is imminent. Peter has a lifelong best friend named Petra, who is dating/living with Miles. Everything is on track when Peter and Petra decide, at his bachelor’s party no less (to which she was, of course, invited), that they are in love with each other, and dump Daphne and Miles. Peter then gives Daphne a week to move out of “their” house, to which he holds exclusive title and, given her limited options as a poorly paid librarian (trust me, there is no other kind), she moves into the second bedroom of Miles’s apartment. So yeah, she’s now living with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…
The next inevitable step is that Daphne, motivated by panic (and by revenge fantasies), intimates to Peter that she and Miles are a couple, and then she has to confess this to Miles. He is surprisingly sanguine about this lie, and promptly starts taking couples selfies to post on Daphne’s social media. And…you can probably guess the rest, although it’s nicely written and plotted, with a fair number of roadblocks in various directions, and also features some wonderful side characters, such as Miles’s sister Julia and Daphne’s new friend Ashleigh, and explores familial issues that illustrate why the MCs are the way they are.
The title may have been misleading for some, hence the disappointment when the book didn’t turn out to be particularly humorous (although it has its moments). It alludes to the story that all couples have and, if it’s a good one, like to tell, about the moment they met. Peter was fond of recounting his with Daphne, but it turns out not to hold a candle to how Daphne and Miles start their relationship. I really liked this book, beginning to end; some of Henry’s others have lagged for me at key points, but this one kept me going, start to finish. Don’t listen to the naysayers on Goodreads—check it out!
