Book Review: The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life

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Even a romance without explicit sex scenes, can still be written for a grownup audience. Which explains today’s book review of Sharon Pywell’s fabulous venture into the genre, The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life.

Unlike many romance authors, Pywell read her first romance novel as an adult. Which may be why this novel is written with enough complexity to cross over into literary novel territory. I’m grateful for that, because I’ve read a lot of simplistic romances recently and they were starting to make me nervous.

I don’t want to write like that. I want to write like Sharon Pywell.

The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life is multilayered. There’s an entire romance novella embedded in the story. There are fantastical elements to it also.

For instance, there’s the family dog who, in the afterlife, wears dress whites, walks around in the types of shoes he used to chew and serves as a sort of spirit guide.

This sounds truly weird, but it works.

But the distinctive quality to the book is how philosophical it is in its approach to romance and to the beliefs about romance, especially in its exploration of the shifting balances of control between the two parties of a romantic relationship.

It’s not that Pywell turns the traditional romance upside down. Romance heroines nowadays are usually capable, spunky, even gritty. It’s that she is so contemplative about the nature of romance both through her heroine Neave’s  love for the genre and through how that love impacts Neave’s adult life and decisions.

Neave and Lilly’s relationship with each other as sisters who build a Mary Kay-like cosmetic business together is central to the storyline. It was fun reading tidbits about the history of the industry, especially how it was influenced by the movie industry. But really this is a story about growing up. About owning one’s adult self.

It has something to do also with the struggle to match belief to reality. Not just the quandary of whether or not one is seeing ghosts, although that can be mighty awkward, but the question of whether one should let go of dreams in the interest of being “sensible”.

I’d say no.

But then, I’m a romantic. It appears Pywell is one too.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online. Waiting For You is coming soon.

Book Review: The Bookseller’s Tale

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Personally, I would never consider moving to Oxford, England. Like Gotham City, it is home to way too many fictional murders. But I love reading about them. Which is why today I have a book review of The Bookseller’s Tale by Ann Swinfen.

The Bookseller’s tale is (spoiler alert) a tale of a Bookseller in medieval Oxford who finds himself sucked into a murder mystery. But the mystery itself is not the most interesting part of this book.

Many historical novels I read use the history as a colorful background, sometimes even as a way to move the plot along. One might, for instance, set a story in revolutionary France and move the plot along by having one’s heroine bear a remarkable and unfortunate resemblance to Marie Antoinette.

Sometimes the setting proscribes the plot so strictly, it can only move in certain directions if it is to maintain structural integrity. Regencies, for instance, focus heavily on the social protocols of a specific subset of British nobility. The rules and whether a hero obeys or flauts them are almost as significant as the actual physical setting.

So I do respect the significance of setting and time in a novel. It’s just that many historical novels can be a bit wearisome in their determination. It’s almost as though the author is trying to demonstrate the depths of her research by using absolutely every jot and tittle of it in the book, whether the information applies or not.

This is not the case with The Bookseller’s Tale which is why it won this week’s book review contest.

Ann Swinfen winds up her characters, places them in a medieval college town just after the plague has backed off, and lets them go the way they must. As a result, the historicity is organic.

Swinfen doesn’t lecture. She just lets the story unfold.

And in the process, the reader develops a fascinating picture of the challenges and also the good things about life during that period.

There are some things I wished for when I was reading. I’m not usually a fan of maps in books, but I would have liked one in this case.

I would also have loved a glossary of some of the terms. Swinfen is good at slipping unfamiliar words in contextually so you can guess what they mean. But that’s not the same as knowing.

I understood cotte was a garment but I had no clue what type. Similarly I was sure pease pudding was food. But I had to look it up to figure out how it might be a sliceable food.

Still, these are minor complaints. Because now I’ve read one, I want to read more. If I’m lucky the next in the series will be illuminated and I can settle down to read it while sipping a stoup of ale.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online. Waiting For You is coming soon.