Goblin Fruit by Celia Lake. Mysterious Charm #2. Reread, aged well. Same objection to the sex scene as in the next two, the scene itself is unobjectionable but whyyyy?
Magician’s Hoard and Wards of the Roses by Celia Lake. Mysterious Charm #3 and #4. Taking these together because I read them in one day (in various trains and waiting rooms) and they run sort of parallel: man and woman get thrown together by circumstances and/or superiors to do a job of work, they’re wary of each other initially but develop a friendship while collaborating (I love this trope), get the work or at least most of it done, THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN JUMP INTO BED AND HAVE HOT STEAMY SEX. I don’t mind these sex scenes, they’re okay as het sex scenes go, but I don’t think they’re needed either.
In the Cards by Celia Lake. Mysterious Charm #5. This one is slightly different as most of it is a murder mystery (spoiler: good riddance, both the victim and the perp) with the love story twined around it. And the protagonist got the right one, not the slightly wrong (good, but wrong) one. A slightly less sudden but equally uncalled-for sex scene at 91%, on the late side, they usually come in the 80%s (Argh. No pun intended but now it’s there I’ll leave it in.) Het sex isn’t my catnip, but I know to expect it now, and there’s enough in the books that is my catnip that I want to read them anyway. I like it that the conflict mostly stems from external things in the world rather than Failure-To-Communicate, and that most of the characters are real people, not all equally nice, sometimes trapped in obsolete cultural structures, different enough to be interesting.
Then I was all NOW I’M GOING TO READ SOMETHING WITHOUT ANY SEX so I reread the These Are The Voyages series by Chanter, Young Wizards/Star Trek TOS crossover. Six wonderful stories in which (most? all?) officers of U.S.S. Enterprice and U.S.S. Excelsior are wizards. My current favourite is New Life about Yeoman Mears’ communicator/manual.
The Kangaroo Story by Deborah Fitchett, a sort-of-nearly-finished NaNoWriMo story that happened to be on my ereader. Hilarious! The witch can’t turn the people-turned-horses back into people because they’re already people and you can’t turn people into people. Also, one pair of twins get separated before birth and another pair of twins exchanged with each other. The prince has been cursed with blindness and the princess with deafness and a marsupial pouch (also not reversible, but they cope, and invent Braille while they’re at it).
Leave a Reply