This drawing made me think of a sun salutation, and also of Matisse’s Jazz cutouts. So I stuck it in a glass room in our atrium, outside which a jazz trio was playing for graduation. I love how the wall disappears in the photo.

And this one echoed the shape of a dinosaur model in a display in the science hallway. They can keep each other company!

I told people what I was up to and got some of them to choose a picture for their office doors. Making a guerilla art installation was the most fun I’ve had at work in ages. My mother-in-law and her friends have done some yarn bombing, and I can really see the appeal.

For the last four years, I’ve been chairing the academic governance council at my college, and doing much less teaching than normal (none at all this academic year). Making educational policy and approving curriculum is important, and I’ve found it interesting, but it is not much fun. I do a lot of my work alone in a windowless office. Teaching can be fun; interacting with students can be fun. Next year, I’ll be continuing on with some policy revisions, but I’ll be done with my governance role, and I will be teaching a section of Children’s Literature. I feel especially lucky because the following year we’re moving this class to second year, where it’s a more logical fit and transfers better, but which means it will be offered much less frequently (I teach at a community college, and most of our course offerings are first year).

Now I’m frantically deciding what books to order and how to structure the class, which I have not taught for five years. This section is three hours once a week, which means I have to adjust the two hours twice a week structure I used before and think about what is going to drop out. I try to choose a representative range of texts: we sample the origins of children’s lit (folk and fairy tales, fables, early didactic literature) and then do some novels. I’ve taught as many as five novels, but I’m increasingly a believer in “uncoverage” and I’m wary of assigning too much reading.

I like to choose novels that range from the realistic to the fantastic, include both “girl books” and “boy books” (though we question those designations), and have at least one Canadian author and one 19th/early 20th century “classic” on the list. But I’m thinking of doing only three novels for fall. There’s no way I can get all of that with three books–at least, not easily. Creating a reading list is kind of like one of those slider puzzles, or sudoku (if I pick this one, then I’ll have to do that instead of that other one). It’s frustrating and it feels like it will never work out–and of course it won’t be perfect, there’s no such thing–but it’s also fun. Lots of fun: “Oooh, this shiny book! That one! This would be so great to talk about!” Nothing has gone wrong yet, the semester remains an open field of delicious possibility, brilliance from me and the imagined students, wonderful deep learning, etc.

Here’s what I’m thinking (at this moment; ask me again in five minutes):

• Coursepack with some short critical/theoretical readings, fables, early lit; I might put fairytales in here or I might order an anthology. I’m still figuring out the contents. [In case you're wondering, we have copyright licensing. This will be legal.]
• Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. Technically young adult and outside the scope of the course, but we’re flexible (someone else has been teaching it, I noticed). And it seems especially timely because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is holding events in Vancouver in September.
• Kit Pearson, Awake and Dreaming. I love this book, it combines fantasy and reality in interesting ways, it reflects on the power of reading. Students love it. It’s very effective to teach, with lots to discuss. And I’ve got to choose at least some texts I’ve taught before to control my workload.
• Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle. I’ve done one of the Chrestomanci books before, but I think this will work better because it uses so many fairytale tropes. And it’s one of my favorites.
• I’m still thinking of maybe Adam Rex’s True Meaning of Smekday, which was a hit with my whole family. It’s a hilarious tale of alien invasion. I’ve found funny books hard to teach, though. People are afraid of popping the balloon and don’t want to analyze. And I can’t decide if I’d swap it out for the Wynne Jones or the Pearson. *slides puzzle pieces around, sees what picture looks like this way*

I just finished reading Rebecca Makkai’s The Borrower, which made me look forward to teaching children’s lit even more. Aimless 20-something children’s librarian Lucy Hull and her ten-year-old patron Ian run off together, in a funny and heart-breaking roadtrip. Or is it a classic literary journey? The novel is full of references to children’s books, right from the title: my own ten-year-old asked me if it was a book about “those little people who steal stuff.” And indeed, Lucy asks herself if she has stolen Ian or is saving him. It’s a book about how stories save us, and also deceive us. It’s about growing up, its pains and pleasures. And it ends, like many great children’s novels, with both disenchantment and hope. I thank Willaful for the recommendation, and Makkai for the reminder of all the big questions children’s literature helps us to talk about.

Bring on September. But not yet! Maybe that book instead. . . .

In a lot of Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment aesthetic theory, judgments of taste (essentially, judgments that something is beautiful) are somewhere between subjective and objective. They establish or appeal to a universal standard; they’re cognitive as well as emotional. We expect others to share them. This idea has real problems: it often depends on the judgment being made by the right kind of elegant, educated mind. Despite claims of universality, standards of taste are class-based (among other things). People who don’t share “our” refined tastes are lesser beings. The appeal to universal standards of the beautiful/good/valuable that led to things like the Western canon of literature has been under attack from a number of angles, and rightly so.

I don’t think you have to have read any of this philosophy to see some of this at play in debates over taste and reader-shaming in genre fiction communities. The idea that there’s such a thing as “good taste,” that taste isn’t purely personal, has legs way beyond a philosophy classroom. And if I believe my good taste is a mark of my superior, elegant, refined, educated mind, well, aren’t I belittling those who don’t share it? Is it surprising that in this wider cultural context some people feel shamed and judged by criticism of their taste?

I think genre fiction discussions are caught somewhere between the “vegemite” idea of taste Kaetrin discusses in her great post (everyone likes different things) and the “high art” idea of taste (there’s a universal standard of “the good book” and if you don’t share it, you need educating). Wine might be a good parallel. There are people who just drink what they like (I’m one). They educate their individual taste: that is, you have to drink enough wine to learn what you like (oaky chardonnay isn’t really my thing). But there are also wine-tasting classes and an expert vocabulary of taste; many people accept the idea that one can be educated about wine in a way that combines personal, subjective taste and more objective standards, or where personal taste is shaped by what one learns about objective standards. And, of course, there are wine snobs who judge the taste of others (see, for instance, Sideways).

In some philosophical and critical thinking, judgments of taste are bound up with moral judgments. That may be because both are judgments based on our feelings rather than on some empirical quality in what we’re judging. Or it may be because the critic believes art has a didactic purpose, so good art is art that teaches the right lessons. You can see this tangling up of taste and moral judgment in some Romanceland discussions: the idea that a “problematic” book might be harmful.

I’m going to be teaching Children’s Lit in the fall (I’ll talk more about this, since I’m finally teaching something interesting to the general public again), and today, looking for some secondary readings to put in my coursepack, I came across this comment from editor Hazel Rochman:

The poet Katha Pollitt says that it’s because young people read so little that there’s such furious debate about the canon. If they read all kinds of books all the time, particular books wouldn’t matter so much.

Rochman’s view (which is part of discussion of historical fiction for children) is that giving children good, engaging stories is more important than giving them books with the right “lessons” about the past. Women aren’t children, of course. And we’re exposed to a very wide variety of stories all the time–stories in books, TV, movies, the news, the stories of the lives around us, the stories of our own lives. We read any given romance novel with and against all these other stories. I don’t worry too much, then, about the effect the “moral” of any given novel might have on us, especially since different readers find different meanings. By that I don’t at all mean that books aren’t up for criticism or that we can’t say we find elements of them problematic.

As someone who teaches literature, I’m caught between the idea that there’s a standard of taste and the idea that taste is purely subjective and personal, though I tend towards the latter. I just read John Cotter’s review of Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature, and I was brought up rather short by Cotter’s suggestion that “Good literature . . . cultivates taste” and his quotation of this line of Eagleton’s:

There comes a point at which not recognizing that, say, a certain brand of malt whisky is of world-class quality means not understanding malt whisky.

I don’t really think of my classes as cultivating taste, as being like wine- or whisky-tasting classes (if only). I think of myself as teaching my students to approach books analytically, not evaluatively; we aren’t judging whether the book is “good,” but understanding how it works. Increasingly, I ask students to interrogate the distinction between high and low art. And yet . . . I teach survey courses that cover the canon of British literature, even if an expanded canon. And in choosing books for my Children’s Lit class, which I am frantically trying to do right now, I’m looking not so much for the popular as for books that will reward a certain kind of reading, books that will help students form (their own? I’m not sure) understanding of what makes good malt whisky literature for children. Many of the texts I’ve taught in this class are beloved as well as “good,” that is, they appeal to many individual tastes, not (just) some universal standard. But I think I’m still “cultivating taste” in the classroom far more than I usually recognize or acknowledge.

Hey, I ran out of room for my uncomfortable feelings and where my own reader-shame lies. Excellent! Intellectualizing goal achieved.

♥

I beta-read Jackie Barbosa’s new novel, Skin in the Game. I like to think I was reasonably objective when reading it (otherwise I wouldn’t have been much use), but I’m not objective now. So I’ll just say that I really like Jackie’s voice–light and witty with a touch of sweetness. I like that the hero is a star athlete but not an alpha jerk, and I loved Angie, the high-school football coach heroine who is great at her work but struggles to be recognized. I know zilch about football but I loved watching Angie absorbed in her strategizing.

♥

Rohan Maitzen is reading the complete novels of Dick Francis for a project (that’s something like 40; she has obviously hung on to her mojo). The other day, she tweeted this:

“It began in friendship and progressed to passion. Ended in breathlessness and laughter, sank to murmurs and sleep.” A Dick Francis Romance

So here’s what I got:

You want to know more, right?

Helene Tursten (trans. Steven T. Murray), Detective Inspector Huss Why? I’ve had good luck with the Soho Crime imprint (I love Rebecca Pawel’s books set in post-revolutionary Spain). Huss, a Swedish detective, is the middle-aged mother of teens. And look at the cover image! I think this is an aspirational book choice for me. I need aviators and a trench coat.

L. P. Hartley, The Boat Why? I’ve never read The Go-Between, the best known of Hartley’s books, but his name and the cover image caught my eye. It’s a portrait of wartime village life, apparently, “examin[ing] the multiple layers of Casson’s relationships with servants, local society and friends.” I blame Middlemarch for my love of books that take in a whole community.

Barbara Lambert, The Whirling Girl Why? An inherited Tuscan house (Goodreads showed me ads for Tuscan villa rentals on the book page), a heroine who’s a botanical illustrator, archaeology, and a blurb calling it “a fairytale for grown-ups.” I’ve been enjoying literary fiction that treads some of the same territory as genre romance, but from a different point of view. This sounds like it fits the bill. When I was paying, the bookstore owner said she’d met the author, who was lovely in person. That never hurts!

Jean-Claude Izzo (trans. Howard Curtis), Total Chaos Why? Marseilles-set noir! I love travelling via mystery fiction. And I’m a sucker for the beautifully-produced Europa Editions (it seems they have a new “World Noir” series. Israel? Algeria? Ooooh). This is probably darker than my usual fare.

Suzanne Joinson, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar Why? I’m shallow enough to grab this for the title and cover alone. But I also like dual-timeframe novels, and the Central Asian setting of the historical part is unusual. I’m hoping for something I’ll love as much as Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love rather than a colonialist disaster, but the Goodreads reviews aren’t entirely promising. 

Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project Why? The Australians I follow on Twitter have all been talking about how this would be marketed as romantic comedy or chick lit if a woman had written it. The hero is a socially-awkward scientist who designs a questionnaire to help him find the perfect wife. I’m guessing Rosie upends his plans. I had a library hold on this, but it’s “on order” at the library and those can take forever to come in (I’m waiting for one that’s been “on order” for six months already). So when I saw it, I grabbed it.

It could be years before I actually read and review any of these, of course. Less time until that blissful new book feeling turns into nagging TBR guilt.

Literary Fiction

Finally finished Zadie Smith’s NW. I find it hard to talk about a book if I don’t have a ”reading” of it. I just don’t know what I think about NW, or what I think it was trying to do. I found it easy to put down and forget about, though I liked the ideas about place and origins and whether we can ever leave home. This would be great for a digital humanities project mapping the characters’ movements through London. I’m a reader who likes plot, and though I found the formal experiments here interesting, it lacked the narrative verve and forward drive of White Teeth. Yet each of the episodes did build to a climax, and in retrospect I could see the clues that it was going to.

Carlene Bauer’s Frances and Bernard is an epistolary novel featuring a pair of writers. Yes please! My gold standard for this kind of thing is A.S. Byatt’s Possession, and Bauer didn’t hit those heights for me. But it’s hardly fair to compare a 200-page book entirely in letters to Byatt’s huge, dense novel. Frances and Bernard are apparently loosely inspired by Flannery O’Conner and Robert Lowell, two writers I know as little about as is possible for someone with a PhD in English. A writer who bases her characters on famous writers invites invidious comparison, and Bauer wisely doesn’t include any of their fiction or poetry. Whether or not her fictional letters rise to the level of her inspirations, I really enjoyed them. The early letters made me nostalgic for those late-night college talks that ranged from big ideas to aspirations to that hot guy in your English class. A couple of favorite passages:

I don’t ever want to feel touched or gifted spiritually. Or sense God moving about on the face of my waters. What a burden! . . . I think I prefer to live at the level of what the British call muddle. (Frances to Bernard, early on)

Ted says there’s no better time than losing your mind to cleave to the decencies and unremarkable sentences of the Victorian novel, sentences bearing plot to the reader like freight car after freight car carrying cargo to its destination in Leeds. (Bernard to Frances, from a mental institution after a manic episode)

I feel related to her still, familial, because she knew me when I was at my most Bernard and I knew her when she was at her most Frances. We’d read each other like books we were endlessly fascinated by. (Bernard to Ted, on meeting Frances a few years after the end of their affair)

As Frances and Bernard go from friends to lovers to ex-both, they move from writing to each other to, increasingly, writing to other people (their best friends, their mutual editor) about each other. One thing this shift suggests is that friendship can be more intimate and emotionally open than romance. As two friends talking to each other about art and faith, Frances and Bernard were more interesting than they were as lovers. The novel suggests that their love for each other consumed energy needed for their art, and that both were better off in marriages to quieter partners. This is sort of a coming of age story–it follows them from their mid-20s to mid-30s–and they are wiser and more accepting of their limits at the end, if also sadder and lonelier. I wished they had stayed friends; it’s not easy to find friendships of the mind and heart in books (or in real life). Failed love affairs are a dime a dozen.

I can see bits of Bauer’s biography in Frances and Bernard; I’ve added her memoir to my library wishlist.

Contemporary Romance

I listened to Jayne Ann Krentz’ Absolutely, Positively, first published in 1996. It’s kind of goofy and over the top, which reminded me that taking the romance genre seriously doesn’t have to mean “serious” books. Krentz is reliable fun for me, even when I don’t think her books are great (and I didn’t with this one). I liked seeing things like her love of the word sleek and interest in paranormal talents in embryo form.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Amy Andrews’ Innocent ’til Proven Otherwise, once past the clichés of the opening scene. I’ve been skimming sex scenes and regretting their seeming dominance in romance fiction (or at least discussion of it) lately, and there is a lot of sex and sexual tension in this book. It worked for me, though, I think because I enjoyed the way the characters talked to each other and because Andrews took a light-hearted approach, despite some serious issues (the heroine is a surgeon and the hero a lawyer defending her and her hospital in a malpractice suit). I think I’m a sucker for characters whose noble attempts to resist each other fail, too.

There was some annoyingly sloppy editing (c’mon Harlequin!), like this clanker of a misplaced modifier:

An errant [curl] flopped down to brush her eyelashes, which she absently blew away as she swished a straw in her glass.

She blew her eyelashes away?

During a phone sex scene, the heroine thinks “It had been many years since she’d done any kind of self-exploration” and feels “juvenile” for doing it now. This kind of thing is so common, and I think romance-writers are going for symbolism, since a partner is the goal of the story. But the idea that solo sex is a sad substitute for “the real thing” rather than a normal part of people’s sexual repertoire is not exactly sex positive.

Mystery

I listened to P.J. Tracy’s Monkeewrench, which I’d had in my TBL forever after hearing good things. My Goodreads review, because I am lazy: This was fun. Liked the slowly-developing puzzle and, especially, the Midwestern cop characters who weren’t cliches. Just the right amount of kookiness. The ending exploded into the kind of action scene that’s excruciating on audio because you can’t go faster and faster. (it was the most conventional bit, too, and while well-done, was less interesting to me than the rest).

What Now?

On audio, I’m not sure. Maybe time for more Bujold? I’m almost halfway through Gaffney’s To Love and to Cherish. I love her fully populated village–and yet, in the midst of all that life, Christy and Anne are still lonely and in need of each other. About to start Liza Palmer’s Nowhere But Home. And I’ll need something short and light, like another category romance, in there somewhere.

Louisa Clark, a rather aimless young woman, takes a job as a caregiver for Will Traynor. She’s working-class, wears kooky clothes, and has hardly ever left her small town. Will’s rich and before his spinal cord injury (he’s quadriplegic) he was an adventure travel, business tycoon, alpha player kind of guy. They change each others’ lives. The novel is (mostly) not melodramatic or manipulative, but it is a tear-jerker and I am constitutionally averse to that. Part of my mixed feelings were because I resisted the book. For balance, here are two glowing reviews from people who surrendered to the tears: AnimeJune and Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times Book Review. I can’t really discuss how I feel without talking about the ending, but I’ll put that at the end of the review with spoiler warnings (I will say I peeked and that didn’t “spoil” the book for me). [ETA: Comments will be spoilery too!]

There’s a lot to love about this book. The low-key, conversational narration (first-person by Louisa, with a few short sections giving secondary character POVs) helps to dial back the melodrama and make the emotion feel earned. The characters are all more than they first appear, especially Louisa and Will: at first I thought this was going to be all Manic Pixie Dream Girl Brings Joy to Bitter Crippled Man and it kind of is but is also way more complicated and interesting and real than that.

I enjoyed the patterning of the narrative; at first Lou and Will seem like opposites, but gradually their similarities are revealed. Both are trapped in their lives, neither feels free to make choices, each pushes the other towards a fuller life. Each, at times, resents being treated as a “project” by the other: “God, Will. I wish you’d stop telling me what to do,” Louisa cries. He feels the same. They understand each other in a way no one else can, and it’s no surprise that they come to love each other. I didn’t think this parallelism ever became too tidy or obvious, nor does Moyes fall into the trap of making Will’s disability some kind of metaphor–paraplegia? No big deal, we’re all trapped by life in some ways. It’s always clear that Louisa has the power to remake her life in ways Will no longer can.

So there’s the good. Now my problems. The characters are more than they first appear, but they’re also grounded in some (stereo)types that the book doesn’t really question. For example, Louisa’s working-class family is loving and argumentative and crammed together in a messy house. Will’s upper-class one is cold and distant, perfect on the surface but messed up underneath.

Will never gets a point of view, except in the shallow 3rd person of the prologue. This is so even though there are short POV scenes from Lou’s sister and Will’s parents and nurse. I do think that Will emerges as a whole person through his words and actions, but the fact that we’re kept at a distance from him makes this to some extent Louisa’s story (even the title, Me Before You, suggests that). Given the trajectory of the book, that troubled me.

SPOILERS START HERE. GIANT SPOILERS. Highlight to view.

Part way through we, with Louisa, learn that Will has attempted suicide. He’s asked his parents to take him to Switzerland for an assisted suicide, and they have agreed provided he waits six months. Louisa’s been hired in the hope that she’ll cheer him up and give him the will to live. She throws herself whole-heartedly into this project. She falls in love with Will, and he with her, but in the end that isn’t enough to make him choose life.

I support people’s right to make that choice. I think Moyes established Will as someone who would make that choice. And I appreciated the message that love is not enough (it’s kind of an anti-genre Romance message, in some ways, but it’s true). He recognizes that he could have a good, happy life with Louisa, but it still isn’t the life he wants, and he’s someone who has previously made of his life whatever he wishes to. He faces increasing pain and frequent infection. The only choice he can make freely is to die.

I don’t think that any one fictional character has to stand in for all disabled people everywhere. Louisa has online conversations with others with spinal cord injuries who have adapted to life with a disability. I didn’t feel that Moyes ever suggested there were easy answers. The ending is fittingly messy.

But the fact remains that Will’s death quite literally sets Louisa free, though by then it isn’t a freedom she wants. He leaves her money to buy a house and pay for college, to start a new, fuller life. One way to read this book is as the story of a disabled character who exists simply as a catalyst for the able-bodied character’s growth and change. I don’t think that’s the only way to read it. But seeing that reading was part of my resistance to this book, and what left me torn about it. Will and Louisa seem very real; I loved them and I’ll be thinking about them for a while. But part of me is also angry–not about Will’s death, but about his role in Louisa’s life. Moyes is a great storyteller, and I’ll read her again. This book, though, is troubling, and not always in ways I think she intended.

I agree with a lot of what Jane says about how stale the subgenre has become and how few new authors are breaking out (forget talking about why this is so, which only seems to lead to arguments among people who basically agree that variety would be nice). I don’t want to launch a campaign to save historical romance in its current narrow form, but I would like a campaign to reboot it. What can I do?

Today’s discussions led me to this post by Evangeline Holland, and one of the things she suggests is that historical romance needs a Fifty Shades, a breakout book from outside the genre, to shake it up. I’m not sure that’s the only way to change, but it’s one way. Evangeline also got me thinking about the rise of New Adult, a genre for which there was supposedly no market, which no publisher would buy. Authors wrote books, they self-published, and they created a market (I suspect by building on the strong online community of YA readers/writers/bloggers, from which some of them came).

Is it risky? Yes. But I think it’s a way forward for new kinds of historical romance if writers want to take that risk. There’s an online romance community, many of them are saying they want change. Is it a giant-best-seller-size audience? Perhaps not, but it could be a sustain-your-career-size audience. That audience needs to do their–our–part. Romance-readers discovered New Adult because a few hardy souls started reading it. They read a lot of not-great books to discover a few they felt were gems. And other readers followed them. There are some unusual historicals out there. And I think there would be more if authors and publishers believed there were an audience, if they saw readers talking about such books. (I might be arguing that if we build it, they will come. What other clichés can I spout?)

I don’t want to read a lot of crap. But I will read some “good C+” books. The good C+ is what happens when a writer takes a risk that doesn’t quite work. (I see it in student papers all the time). There are C+ books where everything is kind of “meh” and there’s not much hope for better, and then there are C+ books that are really just a step from a B+/A, once the writer has better mastery of her craft. Books with some real flaws, but also some great stuff. I think that will be what the best “different” historicals mostly look like, at first. They’ll be from new writers.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to pay more attention to small (probably e-only) press and self-published historical romance, and to historical fiction that might have a strong romance plot but isn’t being labeled “romance” because it’s not Regency. When I find books that are somewhat out of the frothy-Regency-Duke mold and make it to at least the “good C+” level, I’m going to talk about them.

I don’t hate Regencies. I’ll still read them. I just want more variety in my historical romance. Too much of the same thing (and packaged/marketed to elide any differences) = jaded reader= focusing on the bad in books rather than the good.

Feel free to suggest the new and “different.”

I had my reading for last weekend/this week all planned out, but it turned out I needed something emotionally lighter to intersperse with JoJo Moyes’ Me Before You. What I chose was nothing on my list or even on my TBR, but Siri Mitchell’s The Cubicle Next Door. I’m not sure exactly what in this post by jmcbooks inspired me to check it out, because usually the words “inspirational chick lit,” even followed by “in a loose sort of way,” would send me running. I suspect it was her statement that the heroine’s voice makes the book. 

I enjoyed The Cubicle Next Door. Heroine Jackie is a bit exaggerated, perhaps–abandoned the day of her birth, she’s never really attached herself to anyone but the grandmother who raised her. The book is her journey. Joe, the charming hero, doesn’t change; he’s the patient catalyst for her change. I appreciated that she didn’t change fundamentally, but became a version of herself who would take the risk of loving someone and experiencing new things. She’s a tomboyish geek who doesn’t blossom into a “real girl.” Joe finds her desirable as she is. And she works out her feelings partly by blogging.

The inspirational part is pretty light, but to my surprise (this is my first inspirational romance) I found it too light. It’s not that I wanted to be preached at, but Jackie wasn’t entirely believable as a Christian and Joe was less so. I did like and understand her environmentalism as faith-based: God made the world, and loved it enough to send his son to die for it, and so we should love and care for it too. Beyond that, I had problems.

Detour: Where I’m Coming From on Faith 

Because this explains why I can’t read inspies. I was raised as an Anglican (well, Episcopalian), and my dad went to seminary when I was in my early teens. Tradition is important to Anglicans. I can imagine leaving the church, and I’ve shopped around for Anglican churches, but I can’t imagine joining another Protestant church, particularly one that didn’t have a liturgical or eucharistic tradition. Worshipping with others, in a form–more or less–handed down for centuries, is meaningful to me. I get that this is not the case for others.

So anyway, Jackie considers herself a Christian, but she doesn’t seem to pray much and she hasn’t been to church for ten years. I don’t really believe you can be a Christian in isolation. From the very beginning, Jesus gathered a community around him. Jackie and Joe shop around for churches, and they mainly focus on the preaching. They end up at a Catholic church, because it’s friendly; it’s the only one that seems to have room for new people. Which, fine. But they don’t really participate in the service and they don’t receive communion. I don’t understand–like, mind-bogglingly don’t–why anyone would be drawn to the Catholic church if its liturgy and theology meant nothing to them. So . . . half-hearted Christian that I am, I seem to be too religious for inspirational romance. Or just the wrong kind of religious. Aside from Jackie’s environmentalism (and her virginity, which really has another explanation), her faith is largely passive. This is true of me too, but I don’t admire this about myself. I would have found the book more interesting if growing in faith, not just finding a church, had been part of Jackie’s journey. I didn’t really think it was.

I was surprised by how strong my feelings about this were. I enjoyed the romance, I liked Jackie as a character and the slow, thoughtful development of her journey. But the religious part failed for me in a totally unexpected way. I don’t want fiction to preach to me, but I’d love to see a more in-depth portrayal of a practicing Christian. What else is inspirational romance for? Just for no sex?

Up Next:

Here’s my recent library haul, to go with my Patricia Gaffney reading:

Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard (because of this–scroll to end; I’ve been waiting for my hold to come in)

Liza Palmer, Nowhere But Home (because Brie recommended a different Palmer book on Twitter, but I spotted this one at the library. And then it showed up in Clear Eyes, Full Shelves’ April recommended reads)

Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower (because Willaful recommended it to me and anyone who loves librarians and children’s lit)

What about you?

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.

Ridley’s posted a list too. I’m afraid this will add to my TBR, but I love the idea.

I know what I’m reading next: Me Before You, by JoJo Moyes, because I have to return it to the library in a week. 

After that, Patricia Gaffney’s Wyckerley books, which I’ll probably post about in July and August so that others who haven’t read them before can do so, if they wish, when they’re digitally released in June.

What I’ll mix in with that, I’m not sure, but I’ll post a list when I’ve had a chance to think about it. I think I have the Meg Maguire on Ridley’s list in my TBR, and I’ll definitely be reading Cecilia Grant’s next book, which comes out at the end of June.

I just finished Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting. I enjoyed it but I didn’t love it. And I am too lazy for a proper review. Here’s some bullet points (and they are spoilery because it’s an old book–although I think no spoilers that are not utterly predictable):

• I love the prose. It’s not purple or over the top, but there’s some rich, atmospheric description. It’s a natural voice for Linda’s first-person narration. And it’s, you know, correct. There weren’t sentences I had to give the side-eye. That seems so rare now. (There were a few typos).
• I love the quotations and literary allusions, including those the characters make to Jane Eyre, apt for a Gothic-y novel with an orphaned governess heroine. Linda is not unlike Jane, independent, self-possessed, but also lonely.
• This is another book with a great heroine (I’ve had quite a few of those lately). She was my favorite thing about the book. I liked that a character who, in another book, would have been the shy little mouse was variously described as an adventurer, a bit of a tiger, and gallant. Go, non-doormat ingenues! That’s a fitting heiress for Eyre.
• The whole Gothic suspense plot was predictable and kind of silly. But it didn’t matter because I liked Linda and was having fun.
• Gothic mysterious heroes are not really my bag. Raoul is kind of cardboard. Even Linda admits this: “for the first time, I began to see him as he really was–not any more as a projection of my young romantic longings, not any more as Prince Charming, the handsome sophisticate . . . .” Which is all very well, but that’s one paragraph on the penultimate page of the book. If you want a fully developed romance, this book won’t satisfy. I didn’t really care, but I saw a glimpse of a more interesting relationship.
• William Blake, the diffident, anxious, but in the end quite nobly heroic forester, was a more developed and to me more interesting character than Raoul. Not that I thought Linda should have chosen him. She picked right for her, I think. But I’d love to see more romance heroes like William. I’m so tired of “tough, arrogant” alphas. Or just guys who must be slotted into one of two boxes. I don’t think William is a beta hero either. He’s just a guy.

I know some people looooove this book and will think my “pretty good” verdict wrong-headed, so have at it in the comments.

No Proper Lady is a time-travel fantasy historical romance. Joan travels back from a post-apocalyptic future, knowing that she is leaving for good the people she loves, to save the world from an evil magician, Alex Reynell. In late-nineteenth-century England, she meets Simon Grenville, a former friend of Alex’s, and Simon’s sister Eleanor, whose reputation was called into question when something happened between her and Alex (Alex got a demon to possess her, but as most people don’t know about magic, that’s not what they guess; Cooper parallels possession and sexual assault in really interesting ways). Together, the three save the world (that’s not a spoiler, surely).

I loved the opening chapters:

In Joan’s first encounters with Simon, Cooper seems to challenge all kinds of historical romance tropes. Joan falls on Simon, for instance, and he thinks:

[He] had imagined the general situation in his youth; it was not nearly as pleasurable in fact. . . .

Joan was all angles, and one of her elbows was practically stabbing him in the ribs. Up close, she also smelled: not dirty, but rather acrid and sharp, as if she’d washed her hair with lye. . . .

She got off him quickly. It wasn’t a moment too soon.

How many scenes have you read where for some reason the hero and heroine fall down together, and he’s aware of her soft breasts crushed against him and her tantalizing fragrance of strawberry and “woman,” and he’s strangely reluctant to let her go or maybe gets hard and she notices. I so enjoyed a breath of realistic air let in on that scene.

Whenever the book was in this mode, looking at historical romance and its world through Joan’s stranger’s eye, I enjoyed it tremendously. Joan’s blunt assessment of women’s role in Victorian England (in my time, she says, “women are people”) is part of what helps Eleanor recover from the shame of her possession and insist on an active part in their mission.

So often, we (at least, my students) want to see history as progress. But Joan’s future world is one where they’ve lost not just safety and luxury (she’s overwhelmed by the abundance of Simon’s world, things like planting flowers just because they’re beautiful) but knowledge. Joan has never seen a map of the world, for instance, and has very little sense of geography. I loved Joan’s “garbled” versions of legends and fairytales; they have become stories that make sense for her world, and show how those tales belong to everyone, to be made and remade. They reflect, too, the way Cooper’s novel plays with genre. In Joan’s world, everyone is named for a hero: she’s “Joan, daughter of Arthur and Leia.” History, legend, and pop culture all mixed up together.

So far, so great, but after the first few chapters some disenchantment set in. There was still enough to keep me reading, but the spark was gone. I was bothered that Joan’s view of the Victorian setting wasn’t really challenged. She sees it as “a world in the summer of its time,” where people don’t really have to struggle. It makes sense that she’d see it that way initially, but I’ve read too much Victorian literature, non-fiction, and history to be comfortable with letting that view stand. Joan, honey, you’re living with rich people. Walk around the corner one day, and you’ll see some desperation. This wasn’t a real Victorian world, it was the world of wallpaper historical romance.

The bigger issue was that I didn’t feel the romance, and this book is definitely romance with fantasy elements rather than the reverse, so that matters. Someone recently said to me about a different book that it didn’t work because she could “see the hand of the author” or “the gears of the machinery moving to produce the emotional response.” That’s often as much a matter of what the reader brings to the book as what the author does, but it was the case for me here. I found both Joan’s and Simon’s relationships with Eleanor more moving than theirs with each other. I believed in their friendship and partnership, but as a love story, it felt flat. The emotional development wasn’t there for me.

The lust, however, was, and I think that was part of my problem. A book that began as cliché-busting fell into them in the sex scenes. “Alex was hard almost instantly.” Simon worries that he “didn’t have anywhere near enough control to do her justice. Another few minutes of this and he was going to spend in his trousers like some clumsy sixteen-year-old with his first woman;” once they start to have sex, though, he manages to go for long enough that she comes first. Joan is the tough warrior, but when they have sex Alex rips her bodice and “claim[s] her mouth with almost painful violence, startling himself.” Typing these out I see that the latter two, especially, can be read as playing with conventions of the genre, but when I was reading they felt tired; I thought “yeah, yeah” and started skimming. The sex scenes didn’t seem to advance character or relationship development. For the most part, I saw no emotion in them except desire.

I think this says something about the point I am at in my romance reading. I may be becoming the kind of reader who skims most sex scenes, because too many seem formulaic and add nothing to the story. If all they’re doing is titillating me, well, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s usually not what I’m reading romance for.

Still, there was a lot I really liked about No Proper Lady, and especially because this is Cooper’s début and because my experience may have been colored by my mood, I’ll definitely try the next in the series.