Sunday, June 14, 2009

Sunday Round-Up

This week has been a slow one for concentrated reading, since I strained my eyes and neglected my life during the Reading Challenge last weekend. I started a lot of books, but only finished two:

His Bundle of Love, by Patricia Davids (2006). This is an inspirational romance about a homeless woman who lists the fireman who rescues her as the father of her baby when she thinks she is dying. By the time she recovers, he loves the baby. It's a fluffy piece since the characters are forced to fall in love because of the genre, but it raised interesting questions for me about what it means to be a parent and what our responsibilities are -- does Mick have to step aside even when Caitlin is clearly making bad choices? Does Caitlin's poverty automatically make her a bad mother? The book doesn't answer the questions, instead letting plot jerks solve everything, but I still liked getting to think about them.

Fantasy Lover, by Sherrilyn Kenyon (2002). Grace is disillusioned with men, so her woo-woo friend gives her a book containing one guaranteed love-slave, good for a month. He's hot and he's obedient. He's also rather unhappy with his lot in life, which Grace realizes after a few hundred pages.  This is a very silly book, even for a romance. Even for a paranormal romance. The big bad guy is Priapus, which tells you a lot right there. The characters are all morons, who continually angst over doing something before doing the opposite, there is no real conflict, and there is a baby scene at the end. Even the sex isn't that great, although the scene where Grace puts her face in love-slave Julian's crotch (twice) to adjust the seating in her car is rather priceless. I only recommend it for people who love train-wreck books.

On the other hand, it wins Genre of the Week: Magical Love Slaves! So far the entries are Tiger Eye, by Marjorie Liu, and Fantasy Lover. Are there other books where one of the characters is forced to serve the other? These characters are magically bound together -- freedom is impossible unless they break the curse.

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