Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Times Change
***** Times Change by Nora Roberts. Time travel romance. Re-read.
This is the second book in Nora's time travel duo, following Time Was. Jacob Hornblower, the brother of Caleb from Time Was, is a genius, and he's finally figured out how Caleb time-traveled back to the 20th century, so he's going back to bring Caleb home.
But when he gets to the Stone family cabin in the mountains, Cal and Libby aren't there--instead, there's just Sunny, Libby's sister. Libby reminds me a bit of Judy Maxwell from What's Up, Doc?--she's very smart, and she's tried just about everything--she just hasn't found her niche yet.
When they meet, Sunny, thinking he's an intruder (well, he is an intruder--just not a criminal one), tosses him to the floor using martial arts. It sort of sets the tone for their relationship. They excite and challenge each other, and although Jacob knows he's going to leave, and Sunny has her doubts about a man who couldn't even be bothered to come to his brother's wedding, they can't ignore or resist those sparks.
Although the two books involve the same families and the same subject, there are distinct differences. Jacob knows where--and when--he's gone, so he doesn't have the confusion to deal with. Plus, he knows he can get back home, while for Cal, it was just a possibility.
There is still the impossible situation, however. There is no chance whatsoever that Jacob will stay in the 20th century. He can't do that to their parents after seeing how devastated they were until Cal's ship came back.
Once Cal and Libby come back, it's even more emotional. Jacob seeing his brother for the first time in a couple of years and centuries, and Libby terrified that Cal will leave with him.
Cheering everyone up is Libby and Sunny's parents, who announce they're expecting another child. They're legends to Jacob, which is fun, because in this time they're just hippies who've found that people want to buy what they make. That baby is the reason I expected this to be a trilogy, but the story really is complete with this book.
Again, it's short and sweet, but there's a believable romance, some vivid emotion, and a nice little sci-fi touch. Just perfect.
Categories: Books, 5stars, TimeTravelRomance
Labels: 5 stars, books, TimeTravelRomance
Friday, October 24, 2008
The Right Man
****½ The Right Man by Anne Stuart. Time travel romance.
I wasn't sure I should add the sub-genre here, because I wasn't aware of it when I picked up the book, and it was such a cool surprise that I'd hate to spoil it for someone else. Then I realized it's a 9-year-old book, and that all the Amazon reviews mention it, so it shouldn't be a huge problem.
The Right Man starts out with Susan Abbott getting ready for her wedding, which is to take place in five days. She's trying on her mother-in-law-to-be's wedding dress, which she absolutely loathes, but can see no way out of wearing.
Enter Jake Wyczynski, bearing gifts from Louisa, the eccentric godmother Susan's never met. She asks him for help with the zipper, and he yanks, ripping the dress irreparably in the process.
Coincidentally, the first of several gifts from Louisa is a wedding gown--specifically, the wedding gown worn by her aunt Tallulah, who was killed in a train wreck on her honeymoon.
There's so much going on, and we haven't even gotten to the time travel part yet. Attraction between Susan and Jake, which you undoubtedly saw coming. Edward, Susan's fiance, is a "logical" choice, though neither of them is in love with the other. Susan's mother is all for Susan marrying Edward because she herself had married for love--an unsuitable man, and the difference in their social status broke them apart.
Then Susan tries on the wedding gown... and finds herself in her aunt Tallulah's body, just days before her wedding... and her death.
After coming to terms with whose body she's in, and the strangeness of meeting her mother as a young child, Susan decides that, Quantum-Leap-like (she even mentions the show), her mission is to save Tallulah.
To tell you the truth, I wasn't all that thrilled with the book before the time travel. I can't understand the mothers (and they're not all that rare in fiction) who are so determined that their children marry someone they know they're not in love with. Probably because my number one priority for my kids is that they'll be happy. And regardless of what those mothers seem to think, there is a middle class--the alternative to marrying a wealthy jerk doesn't have to be marrying a charming homeless guy. Gah.
So I was prepared for the usual mother pushing for daughter to marry the rich guy, and the daughter falling in love with the unsuitable... er... suitor. When Susan leapt into Tallulah's body, though, that was interesting.
And to be fair, Susan's mother's attitude was explained, and I understood and believed it, though I still didn't like it, but even that ends up okay, because she doesn't just learn to accept Jake at the end--she learns that... okay, I'm not going to spoil the whole story. Just know that she grows and changes, too.
Fabulous story. As with Anne Stuart's other older books, I'm left wishing I'd been reading her all along. But then I wouldn't have so many new-to-me books to look forward to, or the fun of the treasure hunt of finding them.
Categories: Books, 4.5stars, TimeTravelRomance
Labels: 4.5 stars, books, TimeTravelRomance
Monday, October 06, 2008
Awaken, My Love
** Awaken, My Love by Robin Schone. Time travel romance.
Did I say something about wishing there were more time travel romances? This is not what I had in mind. Awaken, My Love had been in my TBR pile a long time. It could have stayed there.
Elaine Metcliffe wakes up one morning in a different body, in a different time. She's in the body of reluctant wife Morrigan, and she's afraid to speak for fear her identity will be discovered--or at any rate, that it will be discovered that she's not Morrigan. So she feigns laryngitis while she's bullied by Morrigan's creepy warped-religious maid Hattie and by her husband Charles.
Elaine had been sexually frustrated in her marriage, and Morrigan had been refusing Charles's bed, so it seems like a good match. And they do end up in bed and falling in love. But then Morrigan comes back, and threatens to expose Elaine.
It could have been a decent book. The synopsis doesn't sound bad, does it? I liked the premise.
But I felt like throwing the book against the wall several times.
Elaine is supposed to be a 39-year-old married woman from the 90s, but she's shocked by French kissing and oral sex, and she's so timid as to be unbelievable, particularly for a modern woman.
The evil Hattie was a good adversary initially, but then she got tiresome, and then inexplicable. Charles is portrayed as a control freak, yet he allows Hattie to stay, even after he and the reformed "Morrigan" are becoming more intimate and it's apparent that his wife is afraid of the woman.
Then too, Elaine accepts her time travel/body swap awfully easily. "Things look strange? Oh, I must have traveled in time and jumped into someone else's body." Not much questioning or even confusion.
And she immediately assumes that her voice would give her away, and that if it did, she'd be sent to a lunatic asylum. Why she assumes this, I don't know. I'd think that the voice would match the body. Even if it didn't, how hard is it to mimic a hoarse voice?
Then there's the romance, such as it is. Actually, all those late-80s early-90s category romances I read make it understandable. Romance = sex. So what if Charles is an abusive ass? Elaine's in need of some hot sex, and he provides it, therefore, it's True Love™. Never mind that Charles's vaunted "tantric training" is more talk than action--Elaine's extreme naivete means it's hot to her.
Morrigan (the real Morrigan) coming back in the end made no sense at all, and opened up a whole new story, begging for explanations that never materialized.
Worst of all, there was never any explanation for why Morrigan and Hattie were so bizarre. Charles's boorishness isn't all that odd, and Elaine's naivete I put down to bad writing, but what the heck was the reason for these strange, vicious women?
Categories: Books, 2stars, TimeTravelRomance
Labels: 2 stars, books, TimeTravelRomance
Time Was
***** Time Was by Nora Roberts. Time travel romance. Re-read.
This is the first Nora Roberts book I ever read. In 1989, I subscribed to Silhouette Intimate Moments for the cheap books. I gave up on them after a few months, but I kept three of those books. Two of them were this book and its sequel. (The other was The Vow by Dallas Schulze.)
Anthropologist Liberty Stone is taking some time off in her family's mountain cabin when she sees a plane crash in a storm. She races to the rescue in her Land Rover, and finds an injured survivor and brings him back to the cabin.
Caleb Hornblower wakes up the next morning, disoriented, and unable to remember where he is or what happened. When he does remember, he wishes he hadn't, because either he's going crazy, or his spaceship crashed over 200 years in the past.
When I first read this book, I was blown away, especially given my expectations. I'd been reading the Silhouettes for a little while, and this was completely different: no man-hating heroine, and... time travel! I had no idea there were such things as time travel romances, but even if I'd known, they tend to take heroines back to the middle ages. They almost never take heroes from the future back to the present. And at a point where I was getting bored with romances and thinking wistfully of the days when I read mostly science fiction and fantasy, this was absolutely perfect.
Okay, granted, it's a Silhouette Intimate Moments. It's 250 pages long, and it's a romance. That means that there isn't a huge amount of detail about how Caleb got from the 23rd century to the 20th. But there is a lot of detail about how Caleb reacts to finding himself in the 20th century, and that's where the story is, anyway.
There's a lot of humor involved, as you might expect--things like Caleb mistaking shaving cream for toothpaste (in the future, they use a sonic device for teeth cleaning, IIRC). And there are a lot of details about the future that he finds different--he's confused, for instance, when Libby puts on reading glasses, since in the future, LASIK (or something like it) is a simple matter of course.
And the romance is sweet and poignant. If they're to be together, one of them has to give up his or her life--their family, their friends, their career, their home: everything except the other person.
For just 250 pages, Time Was packs a hell of a punch. It did 19 years ago, and it still does now.
Categories: Books, 5stars, TimeTravelRomance
Labels: 5 stars, books, TimeTravelRomance
Friday, May 23, 2008
Sundial
***** Sundial by Carrie Lofty. Time travel romance.
When Amber Schulman arrives in 1958 Sorrento, Italy from 2007 England, one of the first people she meets is Mark Lacey... from 1987.
He's been stuck in 1958 for 4 years, since he was 16. He's seen other time travelers come and go, yet he's remained. So he's frustrated, angry, and cynical, having grown up very fast when he was plunged into a different time and place at such a young age. Yet he still tries to help Amber out. He's irritable about it, but he does it.
They fall in love, but hold back because neither of them knows if or when they'll be whisked back to their own time. Eventually, working together, they try to solve the enigma of their time travel and engineer a return so they can be together.
This is one of the very best time travel romances I've read, despite its short length. In fact, I was surprised at how short it was, since the story was very complete. The characters are real and understandable and likable, and I could almost believe I was in 1958 Sorrento, it was described so vividly.
I'm not normally a fan of big age differences in romances (Mark's 20, Amber's 30), but it works well here: Mark's had to grow up a lot in his 4 years in 1958, and his greater familiarity with the place and the language makes up for the 10 years she has on him. Plus, it ****semi-spoiler****helps with the ending.****
I think my favorite thing about this story, other than the characters, is how the two of them worked together to get "back to the future." (sorry--I couldn't resist) I won't tell you how it turns out, but the ending is just perfect.
I bought this because I've enjoyed Carrie's blog, and I like supporting new authors. I have her next book, What a Scoundrel Wants, on my to-buy list for December because she's a damn good author.
Categories: Books, 5stars, TimeTravelRomance
Labels: 5 stars, books, TimeTravelRomance
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
****½ A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux. Time travel romance.
If I were the kind of person who could quit reading a book once I've started, I'd have thrown A Knight in Shining Armor against the wall somewhere during the first chapter. I loathed the heroine. I didn't just dislike her or think she was a wimp, and I certainly didn't feel sympathetic for her.
Dougless... and okay, let me get the name rant off my chest first. It's explained later on that she's named after a historical figure, and that fits with her father being a history scholar, but mostly it just seems like an excuse to indulge in the odd 1980s habit of giving romance heroines masculine names. And poorly spelled ones, at that--is she less of a Doug? lacking a Doug? Argh. I'm over it. I'll try again.
Dougless Montgomery is on vacation in England with her live-in boyfriend and his 13-year-old daughter. I'm not going to bother describing them because they're not even as complex as 2-dimensional caricatures of The Most Obnoxious Boyfriend Ever and The Most Bratty Girl Ever. She's taken advantage of horribly, but there's no point in being angry with cardboard cut-outs. Instead, I think she's a complete idiot. Their actions are so over-the-top that only a fool would have put up with a fraction of it. At the end of the book, there's a half-assed apology and explanation, but I ignored it--it made no sense anyway.
Once she's been abandoned at a church, things start to look up for the story. She's sobbing her heart out next to a knight's tomb, wishing for "a knight in shining armor," and poof! There's one standing next to her.
He's Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck, and seconds earlier, he'd been in 1564, writing a letter to his mother while awaiting his execution.
It takes Dougless a long time to believe him, but she feels responsible for the apparently confused man, and she helps him out. Eventually they decide the purpose of the time travel is to clear his name and prevent his execution. And while they're working on that, they fall in love.
I'm not going to go into any further details, because the plot twists, and I don't want to spoil the surprises (surely, I can't be the only one who hasn't read this--though sometimes it's seemed like I was). Suffice it to say that the time travel aspect of this book is the most convincing I've read, and I've read quite a few time travel romances. Not the mechanics of how the time travel was accomplished, but the reactions of the characters.
Dougless's inability to believe, and the things that surprised Nicholas, were absolutely real, as were their outlooks on life and love. I've read so many historical romance characters who are very untrue to their times--nearly all of them are against slavery, strangely addicted to bathing, and would never consider marrying for other than true love. Nicholas is not like that. He's a man of the 16th century, and he acts and thinks like it.
Then add to that the emotional punch of the star-crossed lovers, and I was hooked. There are no easy answers for these two, and they know it.
There are also some very funny moments that stick in my head--Dougless showing Nicholas modern conveniences--a calculator, the TV--to distract him, and Nicholas's reaction on reading Romeo and Juliet (they were disobedient children).
The ending is very typical for time travel romances, but it's satisfying, and somehow more true to the spirit of the story than alternatives might have been. It's a hopeful, rather than a happy ending.
A Knight in Shining Armor would have fit well with last month's TBR challenge--so many, many people have cited it as their favorite romance novel ever. I can't say I agree, but I'd put it up there among my favorite time travel romances.
...more
Categories: Books, 4.5stars, TimeTravelRomance
Labels: 4.5 stars, books, TimeTravelRomance
Monday, July 31, 2006
**** Until Forever by Johanna Lindsey. Time-travel romance.
This is an unusual time-travel romance. Instead of one of the characters traveling in time and then finding their true love, these characters go back and forth in time.
Roseleen, a history professor and collector of antique weapons, has just made the coup of a lifetime: a medieval sword, "Blooddrinker's Curse." She had to buy it through her step-brother, as the previous owner was convinced that a woman must never be allowed to own the sword.
Understandably, because when a woman holds it, she summons its owner, Thorn Blooddrinker, from Valhalla, and he's cursed to obey her every command.
Roseleen's confusion and disbelief is well-done, falling between unbelievable credulity and boring (if probably realistic) insistence on disbelief that goes on too long. Thorn's reactions, too, are realistic--he's angry at being summoned, particularly when the woman summoning him doesn't seem to have any reason for it.
Their falling in love is a given, and unfortunately, as such, it's not particularly believable. I believe they're in lust with each other, and I believe that history professor Roseleen finds an actual Viking warrior fascinating. I just don't see true love. But I'm notoriously skeptical.
What made the book for me was when their time-traveling (Thorn can go to any time in which the sword has existed, and he likes going to battles) causes changes that are evident when they return to the present. Trying to figure out what they'd changed and how, and going back to fix things was lots of fun, reminiscent of The Butterfly Effect.
...more
Categories: Books, 4stars, TimeTravelRomance
Labels: 4 stars, books, TimeTravelRomance
