Author Archives: sadie

Dance With Me

Book Review of Dance With Me (Dancing #1), by Heidi Cullinan

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I bought a copy of Dance With Me, by Heidi Cullinan.

Description from Goodreads:
Ed Maurer has bounced back, more or less, from the neck injury that permanently benched his semipro football career. He hates his soul-killing office job, but he loves volunteering at a local community center. The only fly in his ointment is the dance instructor, Laurie Parker, who can’t seem to stay out of his way. 

Laurie was once one of the most celebrated ballet dancers in the world, but now he volunteers at Halcyon Center to avoid his society mother’s machinations. It would be a perfect escape, except for the oaf of a football player cutting him glares from across the room. 

When Laurie has a ballroom dancing emergency and Ed stands in as his partner, their perceptions of each other turn upside down. Dancing leads to friendship, being friends leads to becoming lovers, but most important of all, their partnership shows them how to heal the pain of their pasts. Because with every turn across the floor, Ed and Laurie realize the only escape from their personal demons is to keep dancing—together.

Review:
I found this to be enjoyable, but a fairly standard M/M romance novel. It was trope heavy and some of the characterization cliched. Of course, I like a lot of M/M tropes, that’s part of why I read it. But I also like a book to go beyond them too and I’m not sure how much Dance With Me managed that.

I liked Laurie, Ed, and their stereotypically unexpected pairing. (Though it’s that same real-life stereotypical lack of expectation that makes it so very expected in an M/M romance book.) I liked Oliver and Christopher as side characters (really just Oliver, as Christopher is fairly characterless, but they’re presented as a pair). However, I really felt that Laurie’s wealthy, dismissive, pushy parents and Ed’s working-class , accepting, emotive, loving family was painfully cliched. I liked that they got their happy ending, but the proposal felt like a pat, expected conclusion.

Really, I could go on like this. Cullinan providing something nice in the book, but then having to note its common, overuse in MM romance. It made the whole book feel a bit formulaic, no matter that I enjoyed it.

Lastly, I have to address the hot tub scene, as many other reviewers have. I too thought it felt out of place, not because I’m a prude, but because Laurie expressed several times that he wasn’t into public displays of sex and, even in the scene itself, he’s scared and nervous. Yes, I see that Cullinan was trying to use this to show Laurie accepting himself as a gay man and his sexuality. However, it didn’t fit him as a character, gay or otherwise. It felt like a poorly done bit of kink thrown in there at the end for no reason but spice.

Like every book I’ve read by Cullinan, the writing and editing were fine and I’ll almost assuredly read another one.

Welcome to the Madhouse

Book Review of Welcome to the Madhouse, by S.E. Sasaki

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I won a copy of S.E. Sasaki‘s Welcome to the Madhouse through Goodreads. The ebook was also free at the author’s website and Amazon at the time of posting.

Description from Goodreads:
Doctor Grace Lord, a lieutenant in the Conglomerate Medical Corps, has come to the medical space station, the Nelson Mandela, as the new surgical fellow under the renowned Doctor Hiro Al-Fadi. Though she earned her commission as a combat surgeon in the field, she is unprepared for the scope and pace of what awaits her in the Conglomerate’s Premier Medical Space Station. The countless cryopods that come into the Nelson Mandela are filled with the casualties of the Conglomerate’s animal-adapted military forces. Traumatically injured and disfigured in campaigns spread across the galaxy, it is up to the staff of the Nelson Mandela to patch up the wounded combat soldiers for redeployment. For Grace, it is a trial by fire, as she familiarizes herself not only with the routines and protocols of life on the Nelson Mandela, but also with the eclectic community of professionals with whom she works – not the least of which is an android that has taken an almost human interest in her. When disaster strikes the space station, the Nelson Mandela must race against time to stave off annihilation, and it becomes clear that, regardless of the outcome, nothing will never be the same again.

Review:
Going into this book, I didn’t expect it to be a comedy. The humor was a pleasant surprise. At times it reached a little too far and came across as trying too hard to be funny, but it usually managed to walk the line and I enjoyed it.

I liked all the characters too, Bud especially. The back and forwards banter between the surgeons was amusing and was nicely balanced with the obvious affection the characters had for one another. Grace was a little too perfect in all ways, but I managed to look over her lack of faults.

However, I thought the whole plot-line with the closest thing to a villain the book has was unnecessary, distasteful, distracting, and predictable. It was painfully obvious who they were from the first moment they were introduced. Their character lacked depth, was evil just because they were evil and their plot arc didn’t tie well into the primary plot-line. In fact, it had nothing to do with it and was an unappreciated distraction that was wrapped up too quickly and easily to fee satisfying in any way.

Further, I felt the introduction of inferred rape and mental abuse (described as easy, at that) was unnecessary and detracted from my enjoyment of the book. I am so sick of victimized women as plot-points that I almost just gave up on the book after reading the prologue. I was pleased the subject didn’t come up again. I understand that this particular plot-point probably just set up the sequel, but I REALLY wish this book had done without it. In fact, it reads like it did and the author went back and added it just for book two.

The writing/editing was unusually good for an indie. I did think some of the dialogue was on the stiff side, even when allowing for android-speak and there was an excess of exclamation marks. But I was mostly pleased.

All in all, however, I enjoyed the book. I laughed and was interested enough to read until the end. I’d happily read book two to see how Bud progresses.

What I’m drinking: Bentley’s Oolong tea.

The Mortifications

Book Review of The Mortifications, by Derek Palacio

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I received a copy of The Mortifications, by Derek Palacio from Blogging for Books.

Description from Goodreads:
In 1980, a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal Encarnación—father, husband, political insurgent—refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife Soledad takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. But instead of settling with fellow Cuban immigrants in Miami’s familiar heat, Soledad pushes further north into the stark, wintry landscape of Hartford, Connecticut. There, in the long shadow of their estranged patriarch, now just a distant memory, the exiled mother and her children begin a process of growth and transformation.

Each struggles and flourishes in their own way: Isabel, spiritually hungry and desperate for higher purpose, finds herself tethered to death and the dying in uncanny ways. Ulises is bookish and awkwardly tall, like his father, whose memory haunts and shapes the boy’s thoughts and desires. Presiding over them both is Soledad. Once consumed by her love for her husband, she begins a tempestuous new relationship with a Dutch tobacco farmer. But just as the Encarnacións begin to cultivate their strange new way of life, Cuba calls them back. Uxbal is alive, and waiting.

Review:
This is what I would classify in my own taxonomy as a Book Club Book. It’s one of those books that takes itself very seriously, is beautifully written and every single person in it is miserable from start to finish. The specifics of their misery might change in the course of the book, counting as growth for a character, but everyone’s still miserable. That is The Mortifications  for you.

Despite how it might sound, I did like the book. More so now that I’ve finished than as I crawled through it. (It’s quite slow, inhabiting the characters mental space more than anything else.) But I can’t say reading it was as enjoyable for me as having digested the story as something to contemplate. I liked Ulises and Williams and I liked their relationship to the women in the novel. But the women are the objects of the book, while Ulises and, to a lesser extent Williams and Uxbal, are the subjects, in my opinion. And I could never quite wrap my head around the decisions and personalities of Soledad and Isabel.

The writing is beautiful, though entirely told, rather than shown—to such an extent that there are no quotation marks in the book. Nothing is said directly, the reader is just told that someone said something. It took a little while to get used to the style. But I did eventually and it was very cleverly done.

If you have a book club or happen to like book club books, this is worth picking up.