Review: SCANDAL OF THE YEAR by Laura Lee Guhrke

Aidan is an upstanding duke who usually avoids temptation, unless it comes in the form of Julia, or That Woman as he thinks of her. When Julia's hubby catches them in bed together, it leads to a messy scandal that involves Julia getting a divorce and Aidan's fiancee breaking off their engagement. But it's only the beginning of Julia and Aidan's relationship.

Laura Lee Guhrke has written some of my most favorite romance novels of all time, but I've had a difficult time working up interest in her latest releases for some reason. Scandal of the Year is an okay read--certainly better than Silk is for Seduction by Loretta Chase (review here)--but it has some serious pacing issues and there are a lot of anachronisms a copy editor should have caught.

In all honesty, this novel moves reallllllyyy sloooowwwwlly. It put me to sleep a few times, no joke. Usually that's a deal breaker, but what kept me reading were Julia and Aidan. They're both atypical characters for a romance, especially in the beginning of the book. Aidan is a straight-arrow who wants to get married, have children, and settle down. He doesn't really expect romantic love, but he is looking for a woman whom he can respect and share his life with. His plan would probably go well if he wasn't always being bothered by That Woman, aka Julia, who's shamelessly provocative, flighty, and who smokes, drinks, and drives like a maniac. I loved her! She's independent, but not in an emotionless or bitchy way; she just self-identifies as a rebel. I really enjoyed seeing her and Aidan interact and wanted to know how these two crazy kids would get together.

That being said, Scandal of the Year needed a lot more focus. The plot meanders all over the place, which is one of the major reasons why the book feels so slow until the last few chapters, when it suddenly ends. The flashback scenes didn't seem consistent with what we see of the characters in the story, and as I mentioned there are several obvious anachronisms. In one scene Julia describes a woman as "all right" (The Kids Are All Right?) and Aidan tells her, "That is lamest thing I've ever heard." Really, the LAMEST? n00b, u been pwn3d. Check out my awesome LOLcat, rotflmao.



ANYWAY. I read through the entire thing, despite these problems, so that should tell you about how much I enjoy Guhrke's writing. I would have appreciated more social consequences for Aidan and Julia's actions--especially Julia; how can I believe she's a rebel when no one snubs her for defying social conventions?--but it's impossible not to like this book. And at the same time, weirdly difficult to like it that much. I wish Guhrke had followed just one train of thought with Scandal of the Year and focused her energies on heightening the sense of historical place and emotional drama, instead of trying to fit the great characters she created into a more conventional fluffy romance novel format. But there's always next time, right?

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Check and Mate

Chess. It's not the sexiest thing in the world. OR IS IT? Lately I've been noticing chess is used as a metaphor for sex in a lot of books. In Arnold Haultain's Hints for Lovers (link), he writes,

In the chess-like game of love-making, no woman plays for check-mate: the game interests her too much to bring it to a finish. What pleases her most is stale-mate, where, though the King cannot be captured, the captress can maneuver without end.

Coincidentally, after randomly coming across this quote, I started noticing chess really is a metaphor for sex in a lot of books. Take Edenbrooke by Julianne Donaldson (review here), for instance--the hero and heroine spend a good portion of the book playing chess in the library, and when the heroine finally accepts Phillip's proposal he's like, "Hey girl, let's go to the library to play chess." There are also chess scenes in Scandal of the Year by Laura Lee Guhrke, Breaking Dawn (the movie--I'm not sure that was in the book), and Harry Potter.

Makes you wonder what they were playing for with giant game of wizard's chess, doesn't it?



Do you think chess is the Game of Love, or is it more like Parcheesi?

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Olde Timey Spy Gadgets: Guest Post and Giveaway by STEFANIE SLOANE

Today, historical romance author Stefanie Sloane is here to talk about the fascinating vintage spy gadgets she's come across doing research for her books about Regency spies, the Regency Rogues series. Welcome, Stefanie!


I write historical romance. Not historical fiction, but historical romance. There are plenty of differences between the two, obviously. But upon one point both can agree: research is important. The tricky bit for me is that I write about Regency-era spies. The heroes in my books are almost all members of the Young Corinthians, a covert spy organization that exists within the English government. In reality, such a group was formed during the reign of Elizabeth I:

1558 – 1603 marks the reign of Elizabeth I. Known as the Golden Age, it was a highly creative period in England’s history, as well as a time of prosperity and peace–or so it looked on the surface. Her father’s reign had proven to be one of the bloodiest England had ever seen. As for the Virgin Queen? She intended to end the Tudor dynasty on a high note and ruled with a more moderate hand and forgiving heart.

But beneath the Virgin Queen’s perfect empire? Plots, intrigue, and conspiracies brewed.

Queen Elizabeth was the target of many assassination attempts and conspiracies against her rule—a fact that did not please her particular friend and spy master, Francis Walsingham.

Walsingham formed one of the first organized spy efforts known to man in order to safeguard the Queen and her crown. The year was 1570. Though Walsingham had successfully defended the Queen countless times before, the infamous Ridolfi plot shook the spy master to his core. An early supporter of the Northern rebellion, Florentine banker and ardent Catholic Roberto Ridolfi conceived of a plan that included support from abroad in a bid to bring Mary, Queen of Scots, to the throne.

The plot was foiled, the Queen saved. And espionage was born.

All very dark, dangerous, and delicious, yes? Well, to an extent. When I conceived of the Corinthians, I had in mind James Bond in breeches; men who were inordinately skilled in subterfuge and seduction. Of course, this is the Regency, a point in history spanning roughly 1811 – 1830. No fast cars nor poison ballpoint pens, bomb-filled briefcases or even one Miss Moneypenny. Transportation? Carriage, horse, boat, or by foot. Weapons? Knives, fists, and guns that shot one bullet before needing to be reloaded. Communication? Slow. This is where the fiction piece comes into play. I embellished. I finessed. And in some cases, I flat out lied. My heroes need to be heroic, after all. And while I aim for complete accuracy when it comes to setting, dress, political goings-on, and much, much more, there are times when artistic license is necessary.

And yet, during my research I stumbled upon several fascinating spy gadgets that I desperately tried to work into my books—to no avail, unfortunately. Some were crazy. Some incredibly inventive. And some just plain genius. Below are a few of my favorites. Are they more interesting than those featured in my novels? Lord, I hope not. But still, it just goes to show that historical research is much more than dusty books, tired eyes, and hours spent in front of a computer screen. It’s an adventure just waiting to happen.


A Chappe Tower near Saverne, France. With French people? (image c/o Wikipedia Commons)

Napoleonic semaphore. According to Wikipedia,

...the Napoleonic semaphore is a system of conveying information by means of visual signals using towers with pivoting shutters, also known as blades or paddles. Information is encoded by the position of the mechanical elements; it is read when the shutter is in a fixed position. These systems were popular in the late 18th to early 19th century. In modern usage, "semaphore line" and "optical telegraph" may refer to a relay system using flag semaphore, and "optical telegraph" may refer to a heliograph (optical telegraphy using mirror-directed sunlight reflections).

Semaphore lines were a precursor of the electrical telegraph. They were far faster than post riders for bringing a message over long distances, but far more expensive and less private than the electrical telegraph lines which would replace them. The distance that an optical telegraph could bridge is limited by geography and weather; thus, in practical use, most optical telegraphs used lines of relay stations to bridge longer distances.

The disk cipher made by Jefferson himself (image in the public domain)

Wheel cipher. According to Monticello.org,

During the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson had relied primarily on messengers to hand-carry sensitive letters, but codes became an essential part of his correspondence when he was America's minister to France since European postmasters opened and read all letters passing through their command.

Jefferson's wheel cipher consisted of twenty-six cylindrical wooden pieces, each threaded onto an iron spindle. The letters of the alphabet were inscribed on the edge of each wheel in a random order. Turning these wheels, words could be scrambled and unscrambled.

A pocket watch camera from 1886. (image courtesy of Watchismo)

Pocket watch camera. Ok, so this particular gadget was produced in the Victorian period, but still, it’s very cool. According to  J Lancaster & Son,

...the Lancaster Watch Camera was patented in October 1886 and made until 1890. Such tiny cameras were the forerunners for the ‘spy’ camera--a mechanism disguised as a different object. However, it would have been very inconvenient to use as four very small catches had to be released in order to remove the glass screen and to fit a separate metal material holder for each exposure.

**Giveaway**

Stefanie Sloane and her publisher are offering a very generous giveaway of all four books in the Regency Rogues series for one lucky reader of this blog! The giveaway is open internationally. To enter, please fill out the form below or click on this link:

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Weekend Cooking: DROPPING ACID by Jamie Koufman and Jordan Stern

I know this will probably shock y'all, but sometimes my life isn't that glamorous. Like a few years ago, I started to feel this pain in my chest as if I was being stabbed through the heart. I thought I might be having a heart attack and I was only twenty-eight! Fortunately, it wasn't a heart attack--it was acid reflux (I found this out after two visits to my regular doctor, a trip to the ER, and seeing a GI specialist).

Acid reflux is the type of disease that sounds silly, until you actually get it and can't sleep, can't breathe, can barely move, and can't eat. I took Prilosec for about three months straight and that seemed to get it under control. Aside from occasional flare-ups, I didn't have any problems until a few weeks ago when I started to feel that stabby sensation again. Back to the Prilosec, even though it's not that good for your stomach.

Here's the thing about acid reflux: you cannot. eat. ANYTHING. Coffee, tea, chocolate, alcohol, bacon, cheese (you all know how much I love cheese)... Just imagine every food you enjoy or consider a comfort food, and then cross it off your list of things you can eat. Welcome to rice and boiled chicken for the rest of your life, bitches. I'd almost rather die, except acid reflux doesn't kill you--it just makes you FEEL like you're dying, then the cure makes you feel like there's no reason left to live anyway.

It's such a bummer.

I found out about Dropping Acid: The Reflux Diet Cookbook and Cure after googling "food to fight acid reflux." This is the only diet book I've ever read--but instead of cutting fat from your diet, you're trying to cut PH levels. I've read cookbooks for people with acid reflux before, like Eating for Acid Reflux by Jill Sklar and Annabel Cohen; but those books were incredibly disappointing. Not only did they not tell me anything I didn't already know, the recipes sounded terrible and weren't anything I'd ever want to eat.

Dropping Acid claims to be different, and for the most part it is. For one, I learned a lot about reflux, and realized I'd been suffering from it for a lot longer than I'd thought. According to Koufman and Stern, heartburn is only one of the less common symptoms of acid reflux--the majority of symptoms are things like coughing, hoarseness, feeling like you're choking or you can't swallow, and lots of mucus in your throat. If that's true, my reflux is definitely triggered by stress--I basically lived off frappacinos during finals week while in grad school, because I couldn't manage to swallow anything solid. Symptoms of "silent reflux," as Koufman and Stern call it, are often misdiagnosed as allergies, halitosis, dental disease, or asthma.

The diet part of the cookbook is two-fold: first, you spend 2-4 weeks on a strict diet eating nothing with a PH above 4. In part two, you can relax the diet and eat things with a higher PH, as long as you do so in small doses.

Here's what I really like about Dropping Acid: it's totally reasonable. When I first visited the GI specialist after realizing I had acid reflux, he was like, "No more coffee, tea, alcohol, or chocolate." Seriously? You need to let people down gently when you give them news like that. Koufman and Stern are more realistic: one cup of coffee a day is fine, a cocktail is fine as long as it's not right before bed, etc. They give you a list of really good foods you should try to incorporate into your diet, and generally bad foods you should avoid, and basically give you the building blocks to make smarter decisions about what you eat. They also say that everyone has their own hard limits on what foods they should definitely avoid at all times.

As for the cookbook section, that's a mixed bag. At first I was really exited because the recipes sounded like something I might actually want to eat! There were delicious-sounding smoothies, pancakes, quiches and omelets; salads that didn't sound half bad (I'm not a big fan of salads), entrées like mad mushroom stew, one-pot chicken blanquette, and scallops with penne verde; and even snacks and desserts like ginger cheesecake. A lot of the credit for these awesome-sounding recipes probably goes to Marc Bauer, a chef at the French Culinary Institute.



Then I tried to actually make a few of the recipes and realized the directions could use some work. For example, in the vegetable frittata with quinoa, there are no times given as to how long to actually cook the frittata or any of the vegetables. You can't assume people know how long it takes to cook to anything "thoroughly," or even that people know what a thoroughly cooked vegetable is. This is a culture that doesn't know fries are made from potatoes, for heaven's sake (The New York Times republished this recipe with cooking times--thank you, NYT). I also tried a few of the salads and they were okay, but a little weird-tasting.

Despite my problems with some of the recipes, overall I'm happy with this book, because it makes me feel like I can eat well and still be relatively healthy. Just knowing basic foods that are good to eat (rather than only the bad stuff) and warning signs other than heartburn is really helpful. I definitely recommend Dropping Acid if you or someone you cook for suffers from acid reflux.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up over the weekend.

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Mock-bookery

Remember #RRTheater? It was a thing Jane Litte from Dear Author used to do every Friday, where she'd read a free eBook and tweet about it, then everyone participating in the hashtag would make fun of it. Naturally someone got offended at some point and she had to stop (I'm surprised it took people as long as it did, honestly), but before that happened, it was really fun and we actually enjoyed a lot of the books!

I've noticed people tend to get huffy when others (me) make fun of books. Huffy like a big man with a walrus moustache. But just because I make fun of a book doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it! I make fun of Twilight all the time and I quite enjoy those novels.

Here's the thing, at least ninety per cent of anything anyone reads is utter crap. But, as Steven Lloyd Wilson says in his epic rant against twisty-panted snobs who hate genre fiction, "Pick Your Poison: Sturgeon's Law and Why We Love Bad Fiction," it's the utter crap you enjoy that really defines your reading tastes. Anyone can like Pride & Prejudice; that doesn't make you a hopeless romantic. Going through hundreds of romances a year in search of the most sigh-worthy story, on other hand... now that's connoisseurship.

But just because you enjoy it doesn't mean you also, objectively, are not aware of its flaws. So yes, if a book asks to be mocked, I will oblige. Am I also making fun of myself a little for enjoying such ridiculous books? Perhaps. But that's my prerogative. I have never and will never claim that the books I like are actually good, just that I had fun reading them, and sometimes that involves making fun OF them.




Have you read a book recently you enjoyed making fun of?

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Mini-Reviews: TWILIGHT GN Vol. 2, THE SLEIGHT OF HEART, and IN A DARK WOOD

TWILIGHT: The Graphic Novel, Volume 2, by Young Kim and Stephenie Meyer

I remember kind of liking volume one of Twilight: The Graphic Novel (review here), mainly because of the gorgeous art, so I was excited to read volume two. However, I had a really hard time getting into this one. Maybe it had do with being dropped into the middle of the story after a two year-ish break from volume one, but there were also a lot of stylistic things that bothered me.

For one, the pacing was really draggy. And for another, the dialog. Uhg. For some reason... the characters kept... talking with a lot of... dots in their sentences. Why? Are they breathing heavily? Cursing? (Actually, it might be fun to insert curse words into all the dot-dot-dot parts--too bad my copy comes from the library.) There was also a lot of shouting and exclamation marks! It seriously got on my nerves.

If I had to do it again, I'd probably reread volume one and then start volume two immediately after.



THE SLEIGHT OF HEART by Benjamin Parsons

I got this novella for free on Smashwords. It's a folk tale-esque story about how a rock formation shaped like a woman wound up on a cliff, and involves love and murder. I really liked the writing style, but the way the story was told didn't flow well at all. The paranormal elements felt tacked on, and there wasn't a single character to root for in the entire book. Plus, it's incorrectly categorized--this is NOT a romance, Gothic or otherwise, and I'm a little offended any person would think it was. Still, it wasn't too bad. If I wasn't expecting a love story out of it I probably would have been more satisfied with it.



In a Dark Wood by Josh Lanyon

This is an unusual story from Lanyon--usually his mysteries are quirky and fun, but this one was downright creepy. Tim is a NYC travel writer who meets Luke, a detective, at a party. At the urging of a friend, Tim tells a story from when he was thirteen and stumbled upon a ramshackle house in the woods with human bones buried in the yard. At the urging of Luke, he and Tim return to the house to investigate.

Not only is the house freaking scary in this story, but there are other dark themes as well. Tim has spent his entire adulthood blaming himself for not telling anyone about what he found, and as a result he's a moody bastard and a serious alcoholic. Overall I found In a Dark Wood to be well-paced, atmospheric, and worth the read, especially if you like spooky stories.

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Bloggiesta Final Update

I won't really be done with Bloggiesta until tonight, but I thought I'd post my final update this morning afternoon.

Yesterday I didn't do much other than compile some list pages. Right now I have Art & Art History, Harry Potter, Jane Austen, and Vampires. I was thinking of adding Foodie posts, and possibly something else. Any ideas? Obviously I can't just do genres like a normal person, haha.

Today, though, I mainly want to focus on writing up some reviews and taking it easy. I am definitely blogged out right now, yo. If I never see another HTML code, it will be too soon.

Updated to-do list:

• Link to my blog reviews on GoodReads. The real challenge will be remembering to keep this up.
  
• Tackle Technorati. I'm STILL ignoring this one.
  
• Find out why the FaceBook 'like' button on PGP isn't working. Tried it out last night and it works!
  
• Get rid of the TBFB at the start of every post and "This work by..." in the summary. The meta description for the blog is showing up, yay! But the description for individual pages isn't showing up at all and I have no idea why. =/ Tried Blogger help and naturally that was a dead end.
  
• Make page listings. I'm nearly done with this.
  
• Social media buttons. They look a little boring to me, design-wise, but oh well. They work at least!
• Get rid of gadgets in my sidebar. I got rid of a lot of gadgets after adding the social media buttons. Once I'm finished setting up the lists, I plan on deleting the tag clouds, too.

What do you think of the new social media buttons and pages? Any feedback is appreciated!

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