I might have already typed up one or two of these, I am tired after work and my brain is a bit loopy...
Miss Parker's Ponies by Victoria Hinshaw
This is a Regency romance. Miss Caroline Parker wants nothing more than to stay in the country and breed and train her beautiful ponies. But for rather selfish reasons of her own, her mother decides to force her into a London dubutante season in hopes she will snag a rich husband. Captain Thomas Ogden was wounded in the Napolanic Wars. He is the heir to a bankrupt estate, and needs a wealthy wife. The two of them become friends and agree to check out each other's prospective suitors. But somehow each of them keep finding fault with any potential partners for the other. How can they find happiness when neither one has the financial means to marry the other? A lot of the secondary characters are simply unlikable, and the book could have used more of the charming ponies ot make up for the less than charming humans.
Worth Any Price by Lisa Kleypas is set in the early Victorian era in England. A detective is hired to track down a runaway fiance for a wealthy (and quite insane) lord. When Nick Gentry finds Miss Charlotte Howard, he decides to marry her himself rather than return her to the horrible man she fled. Many complications ensue, including interference from the spurned fiance, before the two can find happiness. Since the two main characters both have such unhappy pasts, their romance is both touching and believeable.
Mine Till Midnight by Lisa Kleypas is set in the early Victorian Age in England. Unfortunately, this book was simply not very good. It read like half of a story, or perhaps the first book of a duology, with no notes to indicate another book will be coming. Amelia Hathaway, sister to a young peer, and handsome Cam Rohan, half Gypsy, and therefore sneered at by many in their society, become involved. However, this couple did not do much for me. The couple that actually intrigued me was Amelia's sister Win, and their full blood Gypsy foster brother, Merripen. While the first couple seemed to have little other than lust, the second couple - whose story was left hanging - seemed to actually love each other by anyone's definition. Also left hanging is the mysterious connection between Cam and Merripen. And the whole story involving the rude drunken sot of Amelia's brother was just...dumb. I have read other books by this author, and this might be the rare poor one. (Unless there is another book coming to tie up all of the loose ends).
Farthing by Jo Clayton is an alternate history set in England in the late 1940's after England made a seperate peace with Nazi Germany. The isolationist USA never entered the war on that world, so history flowed differently. The book is told in two points of view. One of them, that of Lucy Kahn, is in first person. At first, you think that Lucy is a pampered and silly litte thing, a younger daughter of a noble household. By the end, you know that Lucy has perhaps the best common sense and clear headed thinking of anyone in the story. The other point of view is in third person, and tells the events as seen by Scotland Yard Inspector Peter Carmichael, who is secretly gay. The Khans, Lucy and her Jewish husband David, have been invited to a house party at Farthing, the country estate of her parents. her parents are among the movers and shakers of British politics, and among the guests are many notables, including the man who negotiated peace with Germany after years of ruinous war. During the coure of the weekend, right before an important national election, this man (married to one of Lucy's sisters) is murdered, with obviously false evidence left behind by the killer/s to implicate a Jewish person. Throw in an assassination attempt upon Lucy and her Viscount father, and things are in an uproar. But while the mystery is interesting, the heart of the story is how a nation call fall into the evils of fascism and anti-Semitism that is both gripping and blood chilling.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman, is a story of obsessed love in Latin America in the decades surrounding the year 1900. When very young, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall in love. But Fermina changes her mind and marries a paragon of a young and dedicated and handsome and wealthy and aristocratic doctor named Juvenal Urbino instead. While Fermina and the doctor spend more than fifty years together, many of them happy, and raise a family, Florentine obssesses over her and takes on well over 600 lovers to kill the time while he waits for her husband to die. Weird story with weird characters, but so well written that Marquez keeps you glued anyway. I think I might have enjoyed it more if I could see stalking as romantic rather than creepy...
Urban Shaman by C. E. Murphy is the first novel in a fantasy trilogy (which has been completed, YAY!). Joanne Walker is half Irish and hald Cherokee. She also works for the Seattle police department. An injury that should have been fatal releases her repressed shaman powers of healing. She begins going on vision quests where she is guided by a talking coyote. And the Celtic deities making up the mythical Wild Hunt are trying to trash her city and murder innocent people. Joanne has three days to figure out how to use her new shamanic powers to save her city and perhaps the entire world from the Wild Hunt.
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