Hey there! We have some fresh and tasty Lightning Reviews ready for you! There’s a mystery set in Antarctica and a YA fantasy with a warrior heroine. Plus, a dive into Kristen Callihan’s backlist.
Firelight
author: Kristen Callihan
I’m a huge fan of Kristen Callihan’s contemporary romances. So when I saw Firelight sitting on the shelf at my local library right before I left for a reading retreat, I just knew it was fate. And hot damn, why did I wait so long to start The Darkest London series?
Normally, I don’t reach for historical romances. But with the added elements of magic, curses, and demons, it felt like a decent compromise for a reader like me who still rides or dies for paranormal romances.
Lord Benjamin Archer hides his face and most of his body away. Some say he’s disfigured while others think it’s a peculiar trait used for attention. He stumbles across Miranda Ellis in an alleyway, three years prior, about to be attacked. He doesn’t know that she can harness the power of fire and she doesn’t know immediately that he’s there to kill her dad. Awkward. Fast forward and he’s asked for her hand in marriage. That’s the basic setup and I’ll leave it there. Just know there’s a bigger mystery that is tied to Archer and his “curse.”
I loved Archer and Miranda’s relationship. They easily become friends and their back and forths are so snarky and cute. Archer isn’t a hero who is afraid of his emotions either. He cries without shame! He’s so in love and devoted to Miranda; he made me all gooey with his heart-eyed feels. Meanwhile, Miranda is tough and very “mama bear” when it comes to her husband’s feelings.
There were some quibbles from me that keep this book from reaching A-grade territory. There were frequent threats of sexual violence against Miranda. There’s the bitchy jealous lover trope, which always lowers the grade for me. I also wanted more fire. When in doubt, more fire!
Despite these issues, it didn’t stop me from buying the entire series rather than borrowing the rest from my library. The only bummer is I bought my editions on Book Depository because I’m in love with the UK covers and it’ll be ages before they get here.
– Amanda
Romance, Historical: European, Paranormal
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The Last Namsara
author: Kristen Ciccarelli
The Last Namsara is a YA epic fantasy that I think will appeal to a lot of readers, including those who are a little leery of the genre. First of all, there’s no cliffhanger ending. We get full resolution, although I can certainly see the book being part of a larger series. There’s also a romance, but no love triangle.
Add to that a completely badass warrior heroine, a forbidden love story, dragons, and storytelling depicted as a powerful magic. Win!
Asha is a princess of Firgaard, a totalitarian kingdom with expansionist desires. Her father is the Dragon King, and Asha is his terrifying right-hand. She is called Iskari after the goddess of destruction. Asha has never been bested in battle, and she hunts dragons to prove her ferocity (thereby transferring some of that power over to her father).
Asha isn’t really comfortable with all of this, however, and as she gets closer to the day she’s supposed to marry the leader of her father’s militia, she begins to question what she’s always accepted as truth.
I really loved the world building in this book. Stories, specifically ancient tales, are portrayed as powerful (and thus forbidden). Also, dragons love stories, both hearing them and telling them (telepathically) and that made my heart so happy. However, some dragons were hurt in this book and that I wasn’t crazy about. I also love stories where the main characters have to reconcile that the world they think they knew and the things they accepted as true, might be lies. There’s a lot of that here.
Also
If you’re a fan of epic fantasy and of incredible heroines becoming more incredible, you may want to try The Last Namsara. It’s a truly fun addition to the genre.
– Elyse
Young Adult, Science Fiction/Fantasy
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Out of the Ice
author: Ann Turner
Out of the Ice by Ann Turner is a deliciously creepy mystery set in Antarctica, and while I loved the first 80% of the book, I found the ending to be a little compressed and unbelievable. That said, it was enjoyable and chilling enough that it made for a Bad Decisions Book Club moment and I stayed up finishing it until 1:45 a.m.
Laura Alvarado is an environmental scientist stationed in Antarctica. She’s selected to pair up with a German scientist to evaluate an abandoned whaling station near South Safety Island to determine if its possible to reopen it to human habitation without overly disrupting the local wildlife. Except her partner gets flown out for emergency surgery and Laura has to go it alone.
Enter super creepy abandoned whaling town. As Laura (and her eventual replacement partner, Kate) survey the village they find odd things. Some of the houses look as though they’ve been frozen in time since 1957–down to long frozen coffee in cups and cigarettes in ashtrays. Others were clearly packed up. So why did some residents seem to know they were leaving and others not? Also the local penguins, who should have had no human interaction, are oddly aggressive, attacking the women as though they’ve met and had bad experiences with people. To top it off, Laura sees a teenage boy out of the corner of her eye, making her wonder what’s truly going on or if she’s hallucinating from being isolated so long.
I really liked a lot of this book. When Laura isn’t at the whaling town she’s staying at another scientific encampment where it’s clear she isn’t welcome by the (mostly) men who live there. I think a lot of women have been in situations where they are the only woman in a group of men, and they feel uneasy, othered, and threatened. It kept me on my toes as a reader because there’s no sanctuary for Laura to return to, and I sometimes wondered if she was safer in the scary-as-shit whaling village that might be haunted.
Also this book features a lot of women supporting women. In fact the only characters who do believe Laura and assist her, with the exception of one love interest, are other women. And, while a small detail, I loved that Laura and Kate forgo separate rooms to sleep in the same bed because everything was really spooky. It’s exactly what I’d do in that situation and I liked that the characters were able to admit how vulnerable they felt.
I felt the final resolution to the mystery was a little too big to wrap up in the pages given, and it also felt fairly implausible to me. That said, the journey getting there was delightful and creepy, and I’d highly recommend this book to other mystery lovers.
– Elyse
Mystery/Thriller
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Welcome to the Darkest London party Amanda, where you been? I know Moonlight got big raves on the site, and I did a RITA review on the fourth book Shadowdance. How have you denied yourself for so long? I’ll warn you that, while I enjoyed it immensely, some found book 3 rage inducing. Books 2 & 4 are the best of the six. If you think book one is a B, you’re going to be in book heaven during book 2. The last two had problematic endings for me. Nonetheless, they are on my keeper shelf. YMMV. I envy you the many happy first read hours you have coming.
@DonnaMarie: I know! I think since I’m not a big historical reader, I was worried about that. My UK copies arrived last week and I’m itching to started with book two!
Love the Darkest London series and the UK covers. Evernight(#5) is my favorite.
Ooh, the Darkest London series is great! I loved 1 and 3 the most, but all of them are good. 2 bothered me for having a rather ditz heroine, but I would still definitely recommend the series!
I LOVE Lightning Reviews! Thank you.
I’m really surprised at the amount of love for Kristen Callihan’s series that suddenly reveals in one that the heroine is a quarter black right at the end only to show how “bad” it is to the hero that he kept her in chains. Not that any kind of slavery of is bad- it’s just bad because of her (never mentioned once in the book before this) heritage. This is the main female character who is suddenly revealed in the last chapter or so as a woman of color solely to make the hero all of a sudden “feel bad” about literally keeping her in chains. Nothing else about the heroines experiences as a woman of color or her heritage are explored. It’s all about being black= slavery and how it made the hero feel.
Compared to a few lines in the latest Kleypas book that brought in statements comparing her usage of an unnamed woman from India to being complicit in “rape culture”, this seems like a pretty big thing to overlook.
@Christine, do we damn everything that came before because of the last part of the last book of a series? I don’t expect every book a writer produces to be perfect. I’ve read A LOT books that are egregiously more offensive, both thematically and technically. Kristin Callihan is an immensely talented author and deserves the love we throw her way.
The premise of Namsara sounds a lot like Graceling by Kirsten Kashore (definitely a book to recommend to people leery of YA fantasy), but in Graceling the heroine declares her independence from the king using her powers in the first few chapters.
@Christine: Thanks for the heads up about future books! I’ve enjoyed Callihan’s contemporaries, but this is my first dip into the Darkest London series and my grade is entirely based on that book alone.
The Last Namsara is totally my catnip. And that was before we got to the “Dragons like to tell each other stories” part.
I’ll have to look deeper into “Graceling”. Thanks vasha!
@DonnaMarie
You said “I’ve read A LOT books that are egregiously more offensive, both thematically and technically. Kristin Callihan is an immensely talented author and deserves the love we throw her way.”
What is the criteria then for these authors that are singled out like Lisa Kleypas and Mary Balogh who didn’t put a name to a background character? Is it because they are amongst the very big names in the genre and a fuss about them garners more attention? Aren’t they immensely talented as well? ( I would argue Kleypas and Balogh are much more talented, but that’s personal taste.)
Why is Lisa Kleypas used as someone who needs to be “taught” and punished with authors like KJ Charles weighing in that she needed to get an F grade no matter how good her book was because it wouldn’t have gotten her attention if it didn’t?
Why does Kristen Ashley who writes about pimps and drug dealers as heroes get lots of praise and essentially a free pass when surely glorifying a pimp has a lot more to do with rape culture than what I saw in Kleypas or Balogh’s work?
Is there a criteria for the criticism and outrage? Is the same standard used for all authors or just cherry picked at random?
Who needs to revise their books and who gets a pass?
The Callihan book is nothing new, it was a part of a review I did that was posted on SBTB some time ago. Many people including yourself commented on it.
http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/soulbound-kristen-callihan/
I am assuming someone at SBTB read and edited it before it went up and I am genuinely curious why Kleypas’s work was so much more egregious. Is she held to a higher standard than other writers?
I am being totally serious because I can’t reconcile how other authors, (Callihan is just one of many many examples) with arguably much more problematic content are treated.
@Christine: We’re reviewing individual books, not authors. At no time did any of us say an individual author needed to be taught or instructed. We didn’t demand rewrites of anything. We aren’t trying to grade authors. We’re looking at individual books as we read them. I’m honestly confused by your comment. Am I misunderstanding?
@SB Sarah: From chapter 1 of the Handbook: “If everyone isn’t perfect, then no one can ever be criticized, so shut your mouth, hypocrite.” Biblical in origin (“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone”) and therefore unassailable in the minds of adherents who want a particular criticism to go away. Demanding performative equal-rights allyship at 100% 24/7 is a distraction, shifting attention from the issue currently under scrutiny to the activist’s “failure” to single-handedly address and solve everything.
That Kleypas book has a 4.6 on Amazon and a 4.2 on Goodreads. She’s a keystone for her publisher, so she’s in no danger of being dropped as too-controversial-to-handle, even if she hadn’t responded with the grace and sensitivity she did. That one review isn’t harming Lisa Kleypas or her book in any way. She is not being threatened, nor is she being defended. The subject being championed is a way of thinking that is so deeply ingrained in some people’s identity that they feel personally attacked when it’s pointed out as problematic, and that is why anyone would come out in public to defend “someone else’s” right to write/say/do anything others are able to recognize as racism.
I read all six of the Callihan books back to back, because they sounded interesting and everyone spoke favourably of them, so I’d bought them all at once. I’m honestly not sure how many of them I’d have read otherwise. For me, the first one was sort of low-key problematic, but I could chalk it up to “some things about this genre that are standard are things I don’t appreciate.” But then each one after that had more problematic things and by the end it was just problems problems problems.
Shout out for the Antarctica thriller! For some reason, Antarctica is always immediate catnip for me.
Anonymous #14 – I don’t read a lot of paranormal (or are the Callihan books para-historical? historical urban fantasy?). Could you give a newbie some hints as to what the problems are? (I know I appreciate the heads-up people give re: how rapey Patricia Briggs books can be, for example.)
@demi Antarctica forever! For me I think its a mix of penguinsand fronteirsy science, but my love of Antarctica definitely had its roots in reading Troubling a Star.
I liked the first two books of the Callahan series, but the main problem I had with the rest was that each book in the series spent more and more time on the next couple in the series. It’s one thing for characters from previous books to show up occasionally, but by book 5 ( which was the last one I enjoyed), the book spent significant amounts of time and pages on the characters for book 7, in a completely unrelated subplot!!
Also the premise of book 6 was bad and the first few chapters I read of book 6 did not change my mind in any way, so that’s where I got off the train.
Book 1, 2 and 5 are worth reading. Just skip the parts of book 5 that aren’t related to the main couple, they don’t contribute to the story. Also I didn’t like how book 5 was resolved, but the tension and conflict between the couple in the first 90% was terrific.