What is any community about? This one's about my personal blog, my dog, books I'm reading, and superheroes.
First Star I See Tonight
This book, if nothing else, proves I will forgive a great deal for good banter. Finished reading it in two nights after attending the author event, and for the most part enjoyed it, though I found myself skim-reading toward the end. It's the story of a retired football quarterback starting up a nightclub, and he hires a private investigator whom he of course falls in love with over the course of the book. Characters from previous books show up to really ground this as a Chicago Stars novel, and it's both a classic SEP book and trying to push boundaries, more or less successfully.
Background: I started reading SEP books in 2010 when I stayed with my grandmother for a week and she had a box of them. I inherited that box and looking around, I can spot six right away on my shelves. SEP is a funny author. She's witty and her characters can be so delightfully mean and sharp, which results in the most wonderful banter. But sometimes her books are a hard pill for me to swallow because they feature a lot of my least favorite things:
1) Alpha male heroes
Ughhhhhh I hate alpha male heroes so much (with notable exceptions). They're all about dominance and everything and it's so close to rapey awfulness for me, which is definitely not my thing. SEP's tend to be these big dudebros that are also sports heroes/famous so they're kind of "Can do no wrong." Luckily she winds up tearing them down by the end of the book, and I'm generally here for it by then.
2) Humiliated Ladies
She talked about this during the signing—somebody had asked if twins from a previous book would ever be SEPpie heroines, and she said that for a woman to be one of her heroines, she has to start at the lowest possible place and rise up throughout the book, and generally I do enjoy these storylines. But over the course of the books, it feels like there's definitely a humiliation kink at play. These women get torn down SO MUCH and it's never equal to the men. They make me squirm occasionally.
3) Puppets
Granted, this is just one of the books, but I can't get through it. The puppets are many and the heroine hears their voices all the time.
4) Overly silly situations
Occasionally, and this goes hand in hand with #2, you have to have a good tolerance against secondhand embarrassment, and I definitely do not have that. These characters march headfirst into situations where I can see the oncoming train at the end of the tunnel but somehow they can't. And frankly, I kind of admire authors that can write that, as I do not consider myself to be one of them. If there's an embarrassing situation coming up for a character of mine, you can just hear my "oh nooooooooo" in the background for miles.
These are all common themes in SEP books, but the dialogue and the banter usually help me overcome them (though I struggle with #1 and #2 the most). First Star I See Tonight has a lot of them, but toned down. Coop is still an alpha male, but his alpha male choices aren't supported by the narrative for once because Piper is an action hero on top of being a sensible woman and doesn't take any guff from him (classic for a SEP heroine). Piper is regarded physically as his equal, as she's had training in aggressive driving, shooting, and krav maga type things. Coop, naturally, turns out to have layers: he seed-bombs and looks to start an urban-gardening program, he gets attacked and gets injured rather than having a big he-man moment.
Piper's considered something of a ballbuster with a more androngynous haircut, which undercuts her femininity to everybody but those in the "know" about how awesome she is. Like, if you acknowledge how awesome Piper is, then she's sexy to you, a point that's validated by at least three very "manly" characters. She even has this speech that she's sad to be heterosexual because she likes women more than men. It straddled this weird line for me about trying to subvert some of the stereotypes, but not doing enough to rise about them to be considered truly subversive. It was truly strange to behold. Women can do anything! Being yourself makes you sexy to men!
But as strange as it could get, I did appreciate the attempt, and that's one of the things I love about SEP's work. She walks a line between the traditional het romance tropes and breaking free of them. Her characters end on an even footing, even if sometimes those endings take a bizarre turn (as this one did). And her dialogue is top-notch, as I've said before. I'm not alone in thinking that; one of the events at the signing was her reading dialogue from various books and giving out prizes to those who correctly guessed the book. I regularly reread some of her books (usually not from the beginning—see above) and deeply enjoy her secondary characters and zany subplots. This one will go into the pile of "Pretty good, worth a reread in awhile."
Still can't get through the puppet book, though. shudder



