Charles, the beast, is blind in one eye and has a bad leg. But he is otherwise strong and handsome, not to mention wealthy, and he is for the most part sought after rather than shunned by women. He has entered into an engagement (sight unseen) with an American heiress at the urging of the girl’s parents; they have sealed the bargain with control of ships and a supply of ambergris, which he needs to further his dream of inventing a classic perfume. His bride-to-be and her family are traveling by luxury ocean liner to France for the wedding; he takes passage anonymously on the same ship.

Louise, the beauty, is an equally fascinating character. She wants to rebel against her parents, but has only done so in minor ways. She fears the marriage they have arranged, hearing that her husband-to-be has physical impairments, but she doesn’t quite have the nerve to refuse the match. She is only 18 and rather lost in life; she doesn’t know who she is or what she wants, and everyone else seems to think that her beauty and inheritance are her most important qualities.

Both characters are compelling and yet not conventionally likable. Both are vain about their looks and their intelligence, seeing themselves as superior to most other people. They are selfish, privileged and sometimes shallow; they probably deserve each other, in the positive and the negative senses. Naturally, they are attracted to each other, and they enter into a sexual relationship during their time on the ship — an unequal relationship, because Charles knows Louise’s identity, but keeps his own a secret, going so far as to insist that their encounters be limited to darkness.

I’ve said recently that I’m a little weary of sex scenes in romance, particularly historical romance. Some feel gratuitous, some aren’t written very well, some exhibit both characteristics. For me, the overall result has been that I tend to skim those scenes or lose interest in the book altogether, and I have reached a level of fatigue that encompasses even well-written sex scenes that are integral to plot and character development. And then I read this book, and I remembered that in the hands of a skilled author, fatigue is dispelled. The darkness of the scenes puts emphasis on other senses, particularly smell, as Charles is a perfumer with a sophisticated nose. Charles is 37, much older and more experienced than Louise, and this is used to good effect in what is eventually a mutual seduction. They become intimate physically and emotionally, even though Charles keeps so many facts about his life secret or obscured.

While the combination of age difference, gender power difference and the huge advantage Charles keeps of secrecy, I would expect to be uncomfortable with the power dynamics of this story so far. But I’m not, in part because it’s clear that Charles isn’t in control of the situation; Louise continually makes choices that surprise him and establish her agency. Also, it’s obvious that at some point Louise will learn the truth, and at that point Charles is going to have a lot of groveling to do. A LOT. Halfway through the book, it’s clear that these two are a good match, and that they bring out the best in each other. I’m looking forward to the rest.

So here’s what I’m going to try. Below I have listed the books that I plan to read, or have recently read and plan to review, in the next few months. If one or more of those titles is one you’re interested in reading and talking about, leave a comment to that effect. (I’m likely to prioritize those books, to be honest.) When I post my reactions, I will tag the tweet with “#onthesamepage.” I’ll do my best to let you know that I have posted, so that you can come comment, and we can have a discussion.

I invite others to use the same idea — post your list of books you plan to read, and share widely when you’ve done so and are ready to host discussion. I envision this, if it intrigues folks, as something that spans multiple blogs as a feature, without necessarily needing central coordination. It’s just a way of creating opportunities for discussion.

Huge thanks to the lovely Sunita, who helped me thrash this out and made me think others might be interested.

Here’s my near-future TBR, as far as I know:

Any Duchess Will Do, by Tessa Dare. I already finished this, but I’ll be re-reading it for a review nearer the May 28 release date. Also, Beauty and the Blacksmith, a novella by the same author, which is released tomorrow and I have pre-ordered.

Ghost Planet, by Sharon Lynn Fisher. This book caught my attention because it’s the April selection for Felicia Day’s Vaginal Fantasy Hangout book club. I don’t participate, but I love the idea and this book intrigued me.

A Woman Entangled, by Cecilia Grant. Has a release date in late June, and I will be reviewing it. And you all should be reading it.

The Rebound Girl by Tamara Morgan, released May 13. Another one I’ve already read and am excited to talk about; the heroine is a blast of fresh air, and the hero teaches kindergarten. Need I say more?

The Sword Dancer, by Jeannie Lin. May 21 release. These Tang Dynasty historical romances are always a welcome change of pace for me.

Freefall, by Jill Sorenson. May 28 release, the sequel to Aftershock. I understand that this book is written to stand alone, but I’m happy that it follows the characters who most intrigued me in the earlier book.

Sweet Revenge, by Zoë Archer. Her first book with a new publisher, to be published June 4.

Edited to add: These release dates are not the dates my reviews would be posted, but rather the earliest that most of us could read the book. So look for my posts a week or two after that, especially if I know that others are reading, too.

What about you? Have anything planned to read in the next couple of months that you’d like to discuss with other readers? Let us know, so we can be on the same page.

Deanna Raybourn is well-known as the author of the Lady Julia Grey historical mystery series, of which I have read and enjoyed several. This book, however, is a separate entity, and that isn’t at all a bad thing. A Spear of Summer Grass is a special reading experience, one of those wonderful books that makes me wish there was more and yet is complete because it ISN’T part of an ongoing series. (There is a prequel novella about the main male character, which I haven’t read.)

Set mostly in colonial Africa, with just a few set-up pages in Europe first, the book captures the tensions of the place and time — beautiful wild scenery that holds real danger, peopled by a powerful ruling minority and a subjugated majority with a different, largely unacknowledged power. I really felt pulled into the world, seeing it through the first person narrator as she encountered it and it changed her.

Delilah is sent to Africa as a means of social exile, because of a scandal involving her late husband. She’s a sophisticated 1920s party girl, and she is completely unprepared for what she finds waiting for her. The native people who work on the deteriorating family plantation to which she’s been banished are strange, even alien, but she finds herself drawn to befriend and protect them from the more familiar British aristocrats and merchants who control the colony. Her sometime ally is Ryder White, a hunting guide for wealthy residents and visitor. Ryder moves between the beauty of the natural Africa and the jaded social and political circles of the colony; he shows Delilah the Africa, both place and people, that most colonials ignore, fear or try to control.

The romance of Delilah and Ryder is only part of the attraction of this book. There are also mystery, both natural and of the plot variety, vivid secondary characters, and thoughtful consideration of complex social issues. The touches of humor are bittersweet most of the book, since they are colored at first by Delilah’s anger about being sent away and later by the distaste with which she comes to view most of her peers. There are moments of action and heart-pounding danger, but also sections that are almost lyrical, and for me the book was a very emotional reading experience.

WIN

This is the story of William Marshal, fourth son of a powerful father who came of age in the turbulent 12th-century English/Angevin court. He served Henry II, and in turn his sons Henry and Kings Richard and John, all while remaining devoted to Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a renowned tournament fighter, and he was respected by all the lords he served. This novel follows his early struggle to find a place for himself, and then the challenges he faced trying to loyally serve the royal family.

I really liked this book’s treatment of Eleanor of Aquitaine. She’s one of my favorite historical figures, as she both embodies and belies so many myths, hopes and fears about women’s power in an age when even royal women were chattel. To play her on stage in The Lion in Winter, I researched her life in both straight and fictional biographies. Some writers put me off with their treatment of her, but Chadwick didn’t — Eleanor in this book isn’t petty or pointlessly vindictive, but she’s aware of her power and prepared to use it in her own interests and her sons’. William’s relationship with Eleanor was a highlight of the book for me.

William married late in life, at the age of about 40, to an heiress in her late teens. They eventually had 10 children, and he seems to have treated her with love and respect. The book portrays this as something he learned about powerful from his dealings with Eleanor, which made sense. Isabelle is a good character, a strong, beautiful and practical woman, who rises to the challenge of being William’s partner and “safe harbor.” Their relationship was nicely romantic, and the book has a happy ending because they are both still alive and thriving.

Chadwick creates interesting and memorable minor characters as well; a lot of them are selfish and stubborn, particularly the kings and princes, but even they are portrayed with humanity and some sympathy. The story is involving, and true enough to the history that I didn’t feel that the fictional license taken was too much.

I wouldn’t quite put this book on the level of Sharon Kay Penman (my favorite author who deals with this same era of history), but it was enjoyable to read. It’s not as steamy as Phillipa Gregory’s novels, but it does acknowledge love and passion beyond the bedroom door. I lood forward to reading some of the related books (there are quite a few!), especially Chadwick’s planned trilogy about Eleanor.

This book had all the things I’ve enjoyed about this series: amazing steam-based engineering, slightly subversive alternate history, and a cast of fascinating, believable, diverse characters. Reading Priest makes me wonder why so many authors stick to a white canvas or give active roles mostly to male characters, when the alternatives are so much more interesting.

This series focuses on a different set of characters in each book, with an overall story arc concerning the Civil War (decades long in this alternate history) and the growing walking dead problem facing North America. In Ganymede, the main characters are airship captain Andan Cly, based in the blighted, dangerous city of Seattle (sight of Boneshaker, the first book in the series), and New Orleans madame Josephine Early, with whom he has a romantic history. Jo, a free woman of color, has a plan to help the Union finally win the drawn-out war, and she needs an airship pilot to make it work. Cly wants to help if he can, and he also wants the fee she is offering — the money and the chance to have his ship modified by experts unavailable in the Western territories offer big steps forward in his plan to stop smuggling drugs (“sap” made from the chemical gas that blights Seattle) and instead work to bring Seattle back into closer contact with the rest of the country. His desire to change his life is motivated largely by his feelings for Briar Wilkes, the sheriff of Seattle who was the heroine of Boneshaker. Commissioned by the people of Seattle to bring back supplies, Cly and his small crew go to New Orleans.

It’s interesting that Cly and Josephine, former lovers, do not have a romance in this book. Cly’s feelings are all for Briar, although their relationship occupies only a few pages in the beginning and end. (Josephine has the beginning of a possible relationship by the book’s end, too.) Instead, Cly and Jo work together, not completely harmoniously or honestly, treating each other as equals. I enjoyed that.

Their project is the machine in the book’s title. Ganymede is a submarine, originally built for the Confederacy, which was lost while being tested. Jo and her co-conspirators want to give it to the Union forces, but attempts to operate it have resulted in death and disaster. Jo believes that the craft is designed more like an airship than a sea-going vessel, and Cly comes to agree that he and his crew can operate the submarine in a risky escape voyage from occupied territory into the Gulf of Mexico, where a Union aircraft carrier can pick it up. As with previous books in this series, success hinges on luck, bravery and creative engineering.

It’s a great combination of action-adventure and character interaction. Loyalty to causes and people are important, different types of intelligence and strength are explored, and the plot takes exciting twists as various forces, including zombies, come into play. Priest’s cast of characters includes strong women, loyal pirates, savvy prostitutes and various renegades of several ethnic heritages, working imperfectly together toward a dream of a more free and tolerant nation, with liberal doses of humor along the way. I’m glad I returned to the Clockwork Century.

Exeter Cathedral

On Tuesday, we drove to Oxford. We collected a friend of mine who is lecturing at Oxford for the summer and needed to get to Exeter to give a conference paper the next day. We were glad to get to spend a couple of days with her by driving her down to Exeter, my partner’s old university. (Picking her up in Oxford involved getting soaked with dirty water by a passing vehicle and a hair-raising illegal drive through the controlled part of the city trying to pick up dry clothes from her rooms. Definitely an adventure, but not one we care to repeat.)

Towelephant in our room at the Nobody Inn

Old Exeter

Exeter City Wall

1596 building in Exeter

Head of the White Horse

After saying our good-byes, we headed out of Oxford as far as Woodstock, where we found a warm late welcome at the Duke of Marlborough.

Cotswald Falconry Centre

Mike with Rosy and Jim, two vultures

A lovely pair of hawks

Kestrel

Falcons

Sill a noble pursuit

Wotan, the Bald Eagle

Xena, the Golden Eagle

Joe the barn owl, still working at age 20

Leah, a lovely falcon

Leah returns after a long free flight

Owl family

Breeding hawk, viewed through peephole

On Friday, it rained. All day. It was the wettest day of our entire fortnight-plus in the country, and we got extremely wet. We spend the day in Slimbridge at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, which is a fabulous, mostly outdoor, refuge and conservation site. They have amazing birds from all over the world, as well as some other wetland creatures. Ducks like water, so the residents were very active and visible; we had an umbrella and decent waterproof jackets. What we didn’t have was a charged battery in the camera, so I only took a few pictures, several of them of indoor amphibians.

Swan gathering

Ne Ne, Hawaiian geese

Some sort of tropical pheasant (?)

African Clawed Frog

Some kind of newt (creepy)

Poison Dart Frogs, always my favorites!

To good friends!

Autumn Adams never planned to follow in her mother’s footsteps as Chicago’s answer to Martha Stewart — she can’t cook, doesn’t clean, and would rather play soccer than discuss the joys of white bathtub grout. Then some lunatic starts sending her threats in the mail and Audie finds herself under the protection of simmering, sexy Detective Stacey Quinn, a man determined to examine her every nook, cranny, and ex-boyfriend in his effort to find the stalker. A disarming combination of macho cop and sweet charmer, Quinn is hard to resist. But with Audie’s bad luck at finding and holding on to Mr. Right, she think it’s best to keep her distance.

A couple of things missing from this description help explain why I liked the book more than I expected to. For one thing, Audie is REALLY messed up. She hates running her mother’s “Homey Helen” empire, but she feels obligated by a deathbed promise to her mother. Her relationship with her mother was poor, her relationship with her brother is just as bad, and she thinks she’s a failure at romance. But she isn’t a loser — she’s a terrific soccer player, and she has a great relationship with a former boyfriend, and the reader learns over the course of the book that Audie’s “bad luck in love” is really due to her insecurity from a lack of affection growing up. She’s an easy character to like and to root for, and she has a lot more justification for the “poor little rich girl” trope than I was expecting.

Even more unexpected, and really delightful, is the character of Stacey (his mother’s maiden name) Quinn. He is actually a “Homey Helen” fan; he learned cooking and the satisfaction of providing a comfortable home from his mother, and he’s a bit of a neat freak. That makes from some initial humor in his early encounters with Audie, and it becomes a symbol of her increasing importance to him when he loosens up a little about putting housework ahead of other activities. He comes from a large, complex Irish family, which is both a draw and an obstacle for Audie. He has almost endless patience once he realizes that Audie is “the one” for him, and he needs it.

The secondary characters are also interesting and amusing; there’s no obvious sequel bait, and yet I would happily spend more time in the company of these people. There are interesting side stories that don’t detract from the main plot, which is romance with a suspense framework.

It seems that I’ve read a lot of books recently where the heroine isn’t a virgin but hasn’t really had good sex. I can believe that two characters in love find sex more amazing than any they’ve had without love, but I’m bothered by over and over reading male characters like that paired with women for whom sex has been forgettable, even unpleasant, before this, as though only men and sluts are capable of enjoying sex with partners other than “the one.” Donovan handles it better than many authors — at least Audie knows what an orgasm is — but it still felt unbalanced to me, and that kept me from fully enjoying their romance through a lot of the book.

Other than that, I enjoyed reading this book, with its funny side, its sexy side, its warm and fuzzy side,and its over-wrought but effective ending. I will be on the lookout for more by this author.

The Samurai’s Forbidden Touch , by Ashley Radcliff, was published in November 2010. It is set in 12th-century Japan, in the last few years of the Heian period, the last imperial age before the feudal period of shogunate rule. It’s a fascinating setting, but (and I’m reluctant to say this), it is perhaps too rich and/or too unfamiliar to work well in a 33-page novella. I felt that the setting was short-changed. When the characters thought or talked about the culture or the political situation, it didn’t feel integrated into the story, and I had to hit Wikipedia for some context after reading the author’s note and the story itself.

It’s a challenge to write romance in medieval settings where women have almost no power; in this case, the answer was (as it often is) to write a heroine labeled by the society around her as rebellious and abnormal. Miku is a poet, and she writes poetry about love that her uncle (her guardian) thinks is scandalous. She also runs away from home to bathe naked in hot springs, lounges around in skimpy clothes, and both thinks and says inappropriately independent things. To me, however, Miku came across as a modern woman plunked down in the period; her chafing at restrictions and refusal to follow the rules felt like a heroine in a time-travel romance, unused to the cultural rules, rather than a woman born and raised in the culture and somehow motivated to work against it. There was a lot of telling rather than showing, which didn’t help matters.

My other problem with this novella was the amount of time spent on sex. I know, Undone is a sensual line, but in this story the sex happened before the characters really even knew each other, and it really overwhelmed the other aspects of the relationship. It felt to me like a case of good sex equals true love, which is not my favorite romance formula.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the guidelines for the Undone line, and I could absolutely see how this novella was attempting to do each thing the guidelines describe. But they didn’t come together for me, and it actually took me two sessions of reading to get through it. So although I love the cover and was pleased to read an unusual setting, this ended up as a disappointing read for me.

Luckily, our very own Superlibrarian, Wendy, came to my rescue on Twitter by suggesting that perhaps I had a Christmas novella tucked away that I could read and review quickly. I checked and found this gem, which I bought last year and never got around to reading.
Amanda McCabe is usually a solid read for me, so I figured decent writing and short length would allow me to finish the book despite my lack of Christmas spirit. As it turned out, the Christmas setting was almost incidental, and I enjoyed reading it.

One Wicked Christmas is a “widow” book, and while Cassie’s not a virgin widow, she’s the next best thing, a widow who has never experienced really GOOD sex. She loved her husband and misses him, but they didn’t have much of a sex life, as he was a bookish intellectual who handled sex rather perfunctorily. I admit that this bugged me; I’m always somewhat annoyed by the stereotype of the intellectual who’s lousy in bed, because it plays very much against my personal experience. The intelligent, studious men that I know are excellent lovers, once they find the right women; they approach sex the way they approach other subjects, eager for information, interested in experiment, unwilling to settle for being mediocre when they could learn to excel. I was initially disappointed that Cassie missed Charlie’s companionship, but she yearned after his best friend Ian, a more conventionally handsome, athletic, womanizing romance hero.

Ian, of course, has loved Cassie for a long time, but he still considers her his best friend’s wife and too “good” for him. That judgment is based on his assumption that Cassie would find sexual advances from his distasteful, which is clearly not the case and takes only 43 pages to clear up.

I enjoyed this story for several reasons. First, McCabe’s writing — she writes dialogue well, and the story pacing and character development are good. Second, the length — the novella is just as long as it needs to be, no longer; I appreciate having the story neither stretched nor scrunched. Also, the characters were engaging and likable. Despite my initial misgivings, I quickly came to like Ian, because he was willing to admit when he was wrong, and he realized that he needed to woo Cassie, not just depend on sexual chemistry to bring them together. Both Ian and Cassie had a healthy appetite for life and were reasonably well-adjusted people, which was refreshing after a long reading stretch of troubled characters with serious problems. I read it in one sitting and was smiling all the way through.

Thanks to Twitter, I actually took advantage this year of the late November/early December ebook sales at Books On Board and eHarlequin. Considering that I make regular use of the one-click buy button for my Kindle, kept stocked by my amazing partner with gift cards, I can safely say that these are not books I needed. Nor are they books I’m like to read soon, since there’s quite queue/backlog already. I totally blame peer pressure, and my peers know who they are.

Others have posted their “lists of shame,” (none of us needed any more books!), and I said I would if they did. And honestly, compared to some others, I look like I have some restraint. Ha!

Back to the Good Fortune, by Vicki Essex
More Than One Night, by Sarah Mayberry
The Other Side of Us, by Sarah Mayberry
Suddenly You, by Sarah Mayberry
St. Piran’s: Prince on the Children’s Ward, by Sarah Morgan
Rio Grande Wedding, by Ruth Wind
Meant To Be Married, by Ruth Wind
Her Ideal Man, by Ruth Wind
In His Eyes, by Emmie Dark
Restraint, by Charlotte Stein
Control, by Charlotte Stein
Nights of Steel, by Nico Rosso
Within Reach, by Sarah Mayberry

I’m posting this later than I intended, since the last couple of weeks of the semester have eaten my life. I’ve already read a couple of these, and so far I have no regrets.