Auuugh, I am so far behind on my book reviews! That was bound to happen eventually, though, as I’m basically the worst blogger ever. So here goes. Perfect Chemistry is another book I won in Cindy’s awesome giveaway, which is great, because I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, as I don’t read much contemporary YA.

Basically: Perfect Chemistry is a YA romance in which Brittany, all-around perfect rich girl and captain of the pom squad, and Alex, a Latino gang member from the wrong part of town, are paired together to do a chemistry project. (Get the title now? Huh, do you?) They can’t stop fighting, but it’s all secretly foreplay and the sexual tension runs wild. Things don’t go well, though, when Brittany’s family life turns out to not be so perfect at all, and Alex’s gang wants him to take the leap into drug deals and murder. Can two such different people with such different problems ever find happiness together?

SPOILER!

I really, really enjoyed this book. It hit on a bunch of my favorite tropes: Alex is secretly very smart and is only in the gang to protect his family, and he’ll do anything to keep his brothers out of it! He’s tough on the outside but has a soft and sweet center, like some kind of gourmet candybar! And, uh, let’s not analyze exactly why rich girl/poor boy (and good girl/bad boy, or in this case head cheerleader/gang member) romance set ups appeal to me too much, okay? And I love, love, love “we bicker because of our sexual tension.” It’s kind of my favorite romance trope of all.¹ This book basically gave me everything I want in a romance and was incredibly fun to read.

General spoilers after this cut. Read this article »

So the thing about traveling was that I was reading as we were on the plane, but I was too busy working to write about it. And then I waffled and decided I wanted to read more than write up book reviews, so I kept reading and now I’ve got quite a backlog. Here are the first four. Yay books!

#26: The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca
A nonfiction baseball book that does exactly what it says. I find baseball’s place in culture really interesting (it’s the American studies major in me, really), and the whole culture within baseball is, too. This book does pretty much exactly what you’d expect from the title; it’s a look inside the baseball culture to explain the unofficial rules players follow. Things like when it’s unacceptable to bunt or steal a base, why pitchers decide to throw at players, etc.

There was lots of interesting stuff in this book, but it took me a long time to get through. As I’ve said before, I have problems with nonfiction because what gets me to pick up books is story and narrative, and by its nature this lacked… that. My favorite parts were the anecdotes about the rules in action, but it was also chock full of interesting bits and pieces.

#27: It’s In His Kiss by Julia Quinn
My sister loaned this one to me as a little light travel reading. It was so light that I finished it by halfway through the flight, and then promptly forgot about it entirely.

Basically, Gareth St. Clair is a bit of a mysterious rogue, estranged from his father and gossiped about in polite society. Hyacinth Bridgerton always speaks her mind and it’s made her less than popular. A diary in need of translation and a possible hidden treasure bring them together — will they fall in love?

Hint: yes, they will. There’s not much to this book, but it was a lot of fun. A+ vacation reading.

#28: Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover by Ally Carter
I reviewed the first two in this series awhile ago; in short, they’re delightful YA but I was frustrated because the second one was basically just a retread of the first. It had made me hesitant to read #3, but I did and I’m pretty glad.

It wasn’t the same story and an identical climax, thankfully. Instead of just girls in a boarding school spying on a boy they like, you’ve got girls trying to find off a mysterious secret society while worrying about a boy they like. The stakes were a lot higher, which was great, and the set up (one of the spy girls’ father is running for VP and they have to protect her on the campaign trail) is great.

Not so great: equal narrative weight is given to trying to protect her as is given to the “Does this cute boy like me?? I can’t tell!!” part of the plot. Which… no. Once again, Cammie (the protag) basically loses the ability to spy she’s been training to learn for years when faced with a boy she likes. It makes me make this face: :-/

Overall, though, fun book with an exciting (if reasonably predictable) dun-dun-DUUUUN moment at the end. I want the next book, but I can wait for it to be out in paperback.

#29: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
Discworld! I’m not a devotee, but I’ve been reading these occasionally since middle school. I know I’ve read some of the Watch-centric novels before, but this is the first one I can remember grabbing me.

You guys, I have a crush on Carrot. He’s so nice and handsome! He always remembers everyone’s names! I love, love, love the long-lost king who doesn’t want to be king (but is able to put swords both into and out of stones) gag. I love his sense of responsibility. I love his ability to be a great leader and that he’s decided to only every use that power for good.

And of course I enjoyed all the Discworldiness of it; Ankh Morpork and Death and CMOT Dibbler always make for good times. The plot is nothing to get excited about but it’s not like I read Discworld for the plot. So overall, quite enjoyable!

Oh, and “Bjorn Again” is the second-worst Discworld pun I’ve run across.¹

The fourth and final of Loretta Chase’s Carsington Brothers series, this is the one with the secret baby. I’m fairly new to romance and actually had never read a secret baby novel before, only know about it as a trope, so I went in curiously. Basically, as a teenager Charlotte was seduced by a rake, had a secret baby (while he abandoned her and then got killed a duel), and gave it away — no one knows but her step-mother. Meanwhile, Darius is a heartless rake obsessed with logic and science, whose father tells him he can either manage a piece of the family’s property and make it profitable within a year (an impossible task, since the property has been abandoned for a decade and is totally unliveable) or he can marry an heiress. Of course he takes up the challenge, but meets Charlotte and falls for her — and then discovers the secret baby.

So, how did I feel about the cliché? It delighted me! The whole book did, rather. I tore through it; it took me awhile to warm up to Darius, but when he sat down and realized that yes, then logical thing to do when he’d screwed up was to apologize and ask for help, he won me over. (Hey, I’m easy.)

The weakness of this book is that there’s literally nothing to it but the secret baby. They meet! They fall in love! He finds out! He marries her anyway! The end! There’s sort of an antagonist, in that there’s another guy who’s in love with her, and he finds out about the baby and assumes Darius is nothing but a rake and she’s going to end up in trouble again, so he…tells her he knows, proposes, and she says no, and that’s the end of it. He doesn’t really do anything antagonistic, now that I think about it. At all. There wasn’t even a big misunderstanding; at one point there was a set up for one, but then Darius and Charlotte talked it out on the next page instead of not speaking for weeks and crying about it. So the book was rather light in the plot department, but enjoyable all the same.

Because I’m the sort of person who likes to list and innumerate things, having read the whole series, my favorite is definite Lord Perfect, in which the, well, perfect oldest son needs to learn to loosen up and that it’s okay to fall in love with the wrong woman. I think that Mr. Impossible is my second favorite, followed by Not Quite a Lady; I like Rupert and Daphne better as characters, and enjoy a lot of elements of that book more — but it also had a pacing issue, looking back; it wasn’t really about the plot, so that just wandered all over the place awkwardly and dragged things out. Sort of the opposite of Not Quite a Lady. (Which leaves Miss Wonderful in the last-but-not-least slot; it was fine, but neither of the characters, nor the set up, particularly interested me.)

Hey, I really like long post titles!

Will you all think I’m shallow if I say I don’t read much non-fiction? I mostly read for entertainment, and about 80% of my reading is done on the subway as I commute to/from work. That means that, in the morning, I’m bleary-eyed and haven’t yet had coffee (it’s all I can do to manage simple things like getting out of bed, showering, and getting dressed for the first 45 minutes or so after I wake up; coffee gets made and consumed at work), so it’s much easier to just stick on my iPod and stare at the wall than it is to open a book. On the way home, it’s about a 50/50 shot whether I want to open a book or just play games on my iPod. So the book has to have really caught my attention to make me want to crack it open at all.

Fiction holds a serious advantage over non-fiction in that regard. Most fiction — stories, basically — is designed to make you want to come back to it, to wonder what will happen the characters and if it’s all going to turn out okay in the end. Wondering about those things makes me more likely to fight my internal laziness and pick up the book. Non-fiction, on the other hand, has to be something I’m really interested in, or very compellingly presented (or both) to get to that point.

For example — or, I guess, non-example — Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past by Ray Raphael. I picked this up because it looked interesting. And it was! But the thing is, I know how the Revolutionary War ended¹ so there weren’t a lot of narrative questions gripping me and bringing me back for page after page. I enjoyed it well enough. I quite liked some of the myths that Raphael dissected, and getting a glimpse at the actual events they were based on. (Though I wasn’t 100% sold on the book’s main conceit, that the stories that have evolved hide the real and very patriotic acts that led to the country’s founding; some of the arguments towards that were more convincing than others, but overall the actual history segments of the book were more interesting to me than the arguments made about patriotism.)

But ultimately… I don’t know. I feel bad even putting out there that I didn’t finish it, because the book was interesting! I feel comfortable giving it 3 stars on GoodReads, regardless! But after a couple weeks during which I kept it in my purse, but never pulled it out, I decided it was time to set it aside and move on. (This is not helped by my own neurotic rule of reading only one book at a time; growing up, if I read multiple things at once, I tended to get the characters and plots confused, which made things pretty difficult. So basically, for a couple weeks I wasn’t reading this, but wouldn’t let myself read anything else, and so didn’t read anything at all. To combat this, I’m confessing it to the internet, and moving right along with my life.)

On the other hand, my sister handed me Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels a few days ago, and I devoured it. I’ve only read a handful of romance novels, and only occasionally skim the Smart Bitches website, but I do love good media and cultural analyses. And despite its very casual tone, this book is that. (In fact, I loved its casual tone. I tend to be turned off by a Look How Academic And Serious This Book Is tone.) The book gets into sex and sexuality as presented by romance novels, in a wider cultural scope — for example, the way rape in romance novels fell out of common use with the rise of the “No means no” mantra, and how that changed the genre as a whole. They delve quickly into race and the segregation of African-American romance novels, which I wish they’d spent more time on. And they get into the structure of most of the books, which I looooooooove. (I am kind of obsessed with narrative structure. IDK.)

The book included a lot of frills (games, puzzles, illustrations) that I don’t think it needed, but they didn’t take away from it, really. Overall, it was smart and very entertaining, and reminded me of why I was an American Studies major, back in the day. It’s an insightful look at a part of the culture that is often dismissed, and it not only looks at romance, it spends a lot of time on why the genre is dismissed, and why people the people who love it embrace it anyway.

I chopped a good five or six inches off my hair yesterday. It’s the shortest it’s ever been now, I’m pretty sure. This is what it looked like when the stylist blowdried it. It, uh, doesn’t look like that when I blowdry it. But whatchagonnado?

Anyhoo.

Two very different books this week: historical romance and contemporary YA.

Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase

I was really looking forward to this one — I’d already read two of the Carsington Brothers series (Lord Perfect and Miss Wonderful) and found them charming, but both of the people who’d recommended them told me I’d like Mr. Impossible best, because a) it’s basically The Mummy in prose form (without an actual mummy) and b) Rupert is a charming scoundrel.

Basically, the book is about a scholar named Daphne, who has to pretend it’s her brother who’s the genius because no one will accept a woman who’s smarter than they are. But her brother gets kidnapped as they’re studying ancient Egypt, and the only one around who can help is Rupert. She and Rupert set off together and through a series of adventures, they fall in love. He thinks her smarts are hot, she thinks his hotness is hot (and it is!), and they have lots of good sex. Hooray!

My one complaint is that it’s set up very clearly at the beginning of the book that Daphne is the brains, where Rupert is the muscle; Daphne is logical where Rupert is rash. But Daphne spends a lot of the book bursting into tears and missing the obvious, while Rupert picks up on clues and does the actual mystery-solving. While Daphne’s smarts showed through in her scholar-ing (that’s a word now), when it came to the plot itself, it was very much an applied attribute. That said, I loved her character growth as she came to terms with being smart and not being ashamed of it, and began to embrace who she is. And I loved the romance (which is, obviously, kinda key to enjoying the book). She and Rupert are delightful, and I would read a million more books about their adventures.

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers

I’m honestly not quite sure what to say about this one. It’s really not my genre; while I read lots and lots of YA, very little of it is contemporary and of that, basically none of it is stories about mean girls and social hierarchies, because those are not things I particularly want to read about. But I adore Courtney — her twitter is super fun to follow if you love Lady Gaga or hate werewolves (or both!) — and despite it not being my genre, I enjoyed her debut novel, Cracked Up to Be, quite a bit.

And I can’t say I didn’t enjoy SGA. I read it in one sitting, and stayed up quite a bit past my bedtime to do so. It’s compelling. But it’s definitely a story about mean girls being mean. And not in the Lindsay Lohan-movie way. The book is brutal: it kicks off with an attempted rape, and the antagonists laugh about it and use it as a way to torment the protagonist throughout.

Speaking of the protagonist, Regina: she’s not nice either. She’s not a good person who’s dealing with bad things happening to her; she’s not sympathetic. She was one of the mean girls until she got frozen out, and Summers doesn’t shy away from the fact that Regina is basically exactly the same as the people tormenting her, she’s just on the receiving end for a change. It was definitely interesting; one of the main themes of the book was that everyone revels in being a bitch sometimes.¹ It would have been dishonest if Regina hadn’t been, too. But that made it hard to root for her. It felt almost arbitrary that she was the protagonist and the girl she hated most was the antagonist; without changing much of the story before the very end, only flipping the point of view, it could have been about Kara getting back at Regina for a variety of horrible things Regina had done.

So ultimately, I’m not sure what to say. A few months ago, Courtney² posted a very interesting blog entry about mean girls and writing SGA; looking through the comments, what I wrote in response was:

I really wonder if my own completely weirdo high school existences are why I don’t read much contemporary stuff and am much more drawn to sf/f. Hmmm. There wasn’t really a lot of bullying or cliqueishness in my school (that I was aware of); I never felt bullied or that I had to find a way to belong with my equally-weird friends. So I rarely see myself reflected in contemporary stuff and I rarely identify with the characters on either side.

Aside from the fact that I evidently wrote “existences” instead of “experiences,” I think that’s the best I can do to sum up my feelings on SGA. It was a good book; it just wasn’t a book for me. But Summers’ writing³ is compelling — I read both of her books cover-to-cover without stopping. So I would absolutely recommend to people who are into mean girls-style stories.