Nada Review

I think I love you, SPYMASTER’S LADY. I think you are my new favorite book of the year now! Or maybe you are tied with Demon Night. I don’t know yet. I am too fresh from bed with you.

Sometimes when I love a thing, I want to talk and talk about it, and other times when I love a thing, I sort of don’t want to talk about it. I just want to sit quietly and enjoy it. That seems to be the case here. I don’t want to tell what the plot is or say what I liked it.

So apparently, not only am I a crap blogger this week, but no kind of reviewer either.

I will say this: you know how you sometimes catch of scent of something, and you don’t know what it reminds you of right away, you only know it was something wonderful? Like it fills you with a good feeling. And eventually you remember—oh, that day at the bakery, that summer at the lake. I sort of had that a lot with this book, not with scents, but more conceptually. Little things would evoke a pleasant feeling, and then I’d think, oh this scene or that scene. Sigh.

Also, I shamelessly pimped this to not only my mom, who tends to go for more literary fare, (though she loved The Outlander years before I did), but also to my pal Lauren, AND even to Mark! I hope that wasn’t a mistake. Mark is always looking for exciting books to read on planes. I pimped Janet Evanovich’s One for the Money to him as plane reading recently and he hated it. Isn’t that weird? He found the whole “bad girl voice” as he called it annoying. Anyway, he might read it for an upcoming plane trip based on my oh-so-strong recommendation, but he imagined he might get his own copy and rip off the cover and the inside color picture. And then he was like, what if the plane goes down and everybody finds out I was reading a book called The Spymaster’s Lady? Like it’s clutched in his dead hands. However, if the plane started going down, he could pitch it across the cabin.

Enough about Mark! Back to my non-review. The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne. Oh, what a pleasure this book was!

Spymaster update and More about Lust Bites

The Update
THE SPYMASTER'S LADY is so enchanting and exciting, I can no longer read it before bed, because as soon as I turn the light out I just think about it excitedly, replaying all the delicious scenes in my head when I should be sleeping. Marveling, replaying, churning.

I am losing serious sleep, Ms. Joanna Bourne, and it is ALL YOUR FAULT! You have made your book too enthralling.

I am quite new to historicals. Is it possible they are all this good? This is such a good life to have one excellent book to read after another. I feel so lucky.

More about Lust Bites
I never considered myself an anthology reader, but I have certainly gotten a ton of pleasure out of this one. Maybe I have been transformed into an anthology reader now. We’ll see! Maybe I’ll wake up soon with glowing red eyes, craving another anthology, running madly through the streets to Barnes and Noble, frightening the clerks with my strangely elongated reading glasses.

I finished it a bit ago, but I never got to talk about the Kristina Lloyd story. Tumperkin, who generously gave me this book as a prize, enjoyed the exquisite writing in this story, and I’d have to agree. Both this and the Portia Da Costa story are startlingly well written.

Ah, a bloggerly pleasure
Tumperkin excerpted one of her favorite passages, and it was really fun coming back across that passage in context. That happened with a passage that lisabea excerpted from Demon Night, too. It is a unique pleasure to revisit passages that my online friends have pointed out.

Anyway...
What I found remarkable in this story was the collision of worlds, or more, of thought processes. You have Arctic trekker Esther, who is an intelligent, likeable and highly reasonable heroine trekking along with her wholesome, sophisticated, outdoorsy Arctic group.

Esther’s scenes alternate with scenes featuring these debauched and sex-crazed vampires, two men and a woman, and their equally crazed vampire cat, cavorting in their freaky arctic outpost, making weird decisions about things. Their mad ways are exactly what you’d expect from isolated vampires in the arctic tundra. Wonderfully written. Delightfully dirty!

And you have the hero, vampire Billy, their leader sort of, struggling to raise up out of his chaotic mad ways and do the right thing for once, regarding Esther, who he was in love with centuries ago. It’s absolutely wonderful. This story is crazy and wonderful.

The Spymaster's Lady: Two views