books: suffragettes and cold things

[psocoptera]

A Mad, Wicked Folly, Sharon Biggs Waller. I skimmed this rather than read it because it was due at the library, but I really enjoyed it. YA about a girl in Edwardian England who clashes with her family over wanting to go to art school and gets involved in the women's suffrage movement. Lots of stuff here I liked a lot - a romantic relationship developing through artistic collaboration, nude modeling showing up both as serious, not-sexy art study business and also erotically charged, female friendships that actually affect the plot. Recommended if you're looking for YA historical romance.

The Suffragette Scandal concludes Courtney Milan's romance series last seen in The Countess Conspiracy, my new favorite historical romance ever. I was braced for it to not be as good (because how *could* it be) and went in with the disadvantage of already shipping the heroine with someone else (because she's a secondary character in the previous book) but in fact I really liked it. Milan cleverly starts us off in the hero's POV so by the time he even meets the heroine I'd already fallen for him a little, and I liked them as a ship, and I liked the secondary pairing she came up with for the woman I had been shipping the heroine with (and eeeee, canonical lesbian secondary pairing in a historical).

Talk Sweetly To Me is a sort of coda novella to the series. It had some moments I really liked, but, I don't know, the pacing of shorter romance works usually doesn't work for me that I've found.

The Coldest Girl In Coldtown, Holly Black. It would be easy to say that I didn't like this book because I'm just too old for it, but I was already a practical, cautious, long-term planner when I was, like, fifteen, so it's not just that. Black's characters are often messed up in ways that I think are not unrealistic or even unsympathetic, and yet I just can't identify with at all. Anyways, neither "teenagers do stupid things" nor "vampires are just so sexy" is something I'm interested in reading a story about. (As far as I am concerned there are three vampire books that cover anything worthwhile anyone needs to say about vampires, Sunshine, Peeps, and Team Human. Oh, and Bite Me for farce.)

Cold Steel, Kate Elliott. Concludes the Cold Magic trilogy. I have this out from the library and... I don't even want to read it. Maybe I won't?

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

My two vampire novels worth reading were Sunshine and Fledgling, so now I'm thinking maybe I should look at Peeps and Team Human?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I like those three because they all come at vampires from very different angles; you may or may not like those angles. Peeps is "what if we tried to explain traditional vampire attributes with actual biological science, assuming infection by a parasitic microorganism" and is half little interstitial chapters about real-life creepy parasites. Team Human is partly making fun of Twilight (sparkly vampires hanging around in high schools) and partly straight-up YA about friendships and families. I don't have a good sense of your interest in either action-horror (Peeps) or YA, so can't make a recommendation, but I will say Team Human contains a scene that still makes me laugh whenever I think of it and also made me cry three times. (I haven't read Fledgling but it's probably not the Butler book that's the biggest gap in my reading?)

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I think my reaction to The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was along the same line as yours. I guess I kept on feeling while reading it that, although I had no intellectual objection to the themes, they were conveyed so programatically that the book felt more didactic than honest. But also I just couldn't care about the plot, which was odd since I read every Curseworkers book within the space of a single evening (I mean, three separate single evenings) because the plots were just so compulsive for me.

[cereph.livejournal.com]

I read the Coldest Girl in Coldtown awhile ago, and was underwhelmed. I recall finding it really predictable, and there wasn't really anything "new" about it.