Ridley's Reign of Terror

I picked this one up a while ago based on the unusual pairing for a regency, and then promptly forgot about it since my TBR is out of control. When I was ranting again on Twitter about how hard it is to find romance with POC characters, someone brought it up as a suggestion. I’ve been starting and discarding books for days, and this was only a novella, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It was a quick read but, unfortunately, not a very good one.

Like Fraser’s other books, A Dream Defiant takes place during the Napoleonic Wars. We meet our hero, Corporal Elijah Cameron, as he and his men are looting a French supply train after a victory. When one of his men is mortally wounded by a French straggler in a struggle over a ruby necklace, Elijah promises the dying man that he’ll give the jewelry to the man’s wife, Rose Merrifield, so that she can sell it and “be what she wants”. Of course, giving a now unprotected woman in a military camp a treasure like that makes Rose a target for schemers, so she and Elijah enter into a practical marriage of convenience.

And, that’s it, pretty much. The premise is basically a plot synopsis. Rose keeps saying she loved her husband, but three days after he dies she marries Elijah, and a week after that they’re knocking boots and exchanging I-love-yous. After that, the book jumps two years into the future, where Elijah solves racism with a clever pep talk. There’s an almost complete lack of internal conflict and very little went into developing the romance.

I love a good swashbuckler story. They’re like westerns, only wet. It’s all dashing tales of derring-do where wrongs are set right and scrappy loudmouths make their fortunes and look good doing it. I love the action and the attitude of swashbucklers, and The Sublime and Spirited Voyage of Original Sin has both of these things in abundance.

When her father, the captain of the pirate ship Original Sin, is shot in the chest during an attack by the Royal Navy, Gayle Malvern desperately needs a surgeon. When she finds out that theirs was killed in the raid that injured her father, she has no choice but to send some men to shore to scare up a new one. Unfortunately for them, the town’s doctor was not available and Celia Pierce, his seamstress fiance, would have to do for now.

Celia is shocked at her abduction at first, but quickly adjusts to the situation. After helping the oddly attractive pirate sew up wounds, she wonders if maybe this is the grand adventure she’s always wished for. Lord knows she wasn’t looking forward to her impending marriage to the doctor who hid and left her for the pirates. Why not enjoy a last fling?

I have a complicated relationship with Harlequin Presents. On the one hand, they’re a seductive fantasy, like a contemporary fairy tale. They take place in a world where wealth and privilege have made it so the only challenges left to the characters are the interpersonal. Everything external drops away to focus on the hero and heroine and the angst and drama. There are French chateaus, designer gowns, gala events and elaborate secrets that threaten to destroy it all.

The secretive art dealer Reiko Kagawa wears the designer gowns in The Sinful Art of Revenge, and the French aristocrat and art collector Damion Fortier provides the French chateau. Like many of my favorite Presents, the couple has a shared past, and the book begins five years after a passionate weeks-long affair that ended with Damion bankrupting her grandfather and both feeling betrayed by the other. (Why Damion feels betrayed by Reiko seeing someone else a few weeks after he reveals that, surprise!, he’s given her a phony name and is actually the heir of the man her grandfather owes a fortune to escapes me, but this is HP land, so let’s roll with it.) Blake wastes no time placing the reader down in a tense scene of high drama and opens with Damion driving his expensive sports car to the back door of a run down English country home then climbing through the bushes to spy on the heroine through the windows.

Set in WWII with a white heroine and black hero. Intrigued.

This is probably going to be a hate read. Looks like she appropriates disability and fails at it.

Author Keta Diablo had a Twitter meltdown today where she vociferously denounced the Book Smugglers as "cyber bullies" over this DNF review from three years ago. Screenshots are below:

<

This is old news, but this author apparently uses Facebook to mobilize fans against critical reviews. 

Reblogging is great, right? You see a really well-written, interesting post, and you want to make sure that everyone else sees it,too. But, how do you make sure that your friends dashboards aren't cluttered with post-after-post-after-post of the same post, reblogged?

Could I make a few suggestions:

Leave a comment, if you would, about which you prefer:

Reading reviews without leaving your dashboard feed.

-or-

Reviewers using pagebreaks to put longer reviews behind a "read more" link.

Just a heads up that the group blog I am a part of - Love in the Margins - now has a BookLikes page of its own.

We review romance and erotica that we feel the mainstream doesn't pay enough attention to. So give us a follow if you're looking for reviews of books featuring people of color, disabled characters, f/f romance and everything in between.

 http://loveinthemargins.booklikes.com/

[Screenshot of an email from Goodreads. It reads:

Originally posted at Love in the Margins.

Matchmaker Lindsey Tuttle is going through a rough patch in life. After moving to Boston from western Mass with her newly-minted lawyer fiance, she’s neither engaged nor sure if her relationship’s worth the effort any more. When the cocky, gorgeous, MMA fighter Rich Estrada kicks their ongoing flirtation up a notch, Lindsey doesn’t bother trying to fight the attraction between them. Just as things are heating up in the back of a cab, a text message stops Rich cold, leaving Lindsey wondering what went wrong.

Nearly a year after that night in the cab, Rich still thinks about Lindsey. He may be thousands of miles away in San Diego, training for his first big championship fight, but he can’t help but wonder: What would’ve happened if her friend hadn’t texted him to say she had a live-in boyfriend? When a broken foot sends him back to Boston to recover, he gets another chance to see what, if anything, is going on with him and the sexy little matchmaker.

I've seen a number of people wondering how the review and shelf deletions went down, so here's a couple screenshots of the notice Goodreads sent me on Friday afternoon.

The Holy Terror nails why I've left Goodreads in this excellent comment in the feedback forum.

Ms. Laurens seems to have a violent streak.

On the top of your homepage you’ll notice your navigation bar.

This will bring up your Settings page.

Now Scroll down a bit until you see this:

That’s going to bring up the template customization page. In the upper left hand corner, you’ll see this:

Once that is done, beneath the above posted menu you can scroll down. Do so until you find this:

DON’T FORGET TO CLICK SAVE!!!

Now comes the fun part, making that image static. Click on the Edit HTML button.

This is going to split your screen, with your blog showing below and the code window at the top. Don’t freak out. Scroll down through the code until you find these lines:

Now, where you see the green word ‘repeat’, replace that with ‘fixed’. It should now look like this:

DON’T FORGET TO HIT SAVE!

Okay, so as you’ll notice in the screenshot above there’s a drop down menu with the word Blog selected. In order to assure that your background is fixed for all your pages you have to select that drop down and repeat the code change for each one listed:

DON’T FORGET TO HIT SAVE FOR EACH ONE!!!

Good luck, everyone. Hope this helps!