RAview: Jill Nelson's Let's Get It On

I would call Jill Nelson's Let's Get It On women's fiction or chick lit. It's a sequel to Sexual Healing, in which three single Black women friends open a spa that also sells safe, women-focused sex from hot male sex workers.

Both books are quick reads, employing lots of dialog and first-person narrative chapters from various characters. Sexual Healing focuses on Lydia and Acey, and Let's Get It On pays more attention to Wanda and Odell (a partner hired to manage the sex workers). I thought the characters were better established in the first book, and I found Lydia and Acey more likable and relatable than the primary narrators in the second installment.

Story line themes in Let's Get It On include politics and parody (e.g., the President is trying to pass "No Child, No Behind," which would outlaw sex except for procreation to build an antiterrorist Christian army), the Black social elite, Martha's Vineyard high-class island lifestyle--golf, clam bakes, etc.--and the historical lineage of white supremacist groups.

Details of clothing and dialect are used to portray characters. There are also detailed sex scenes, and details of running a small business. The tone is generally light and humorous, righteous, proud. Language is not particularly distinctive, but it does help with characterization, as the narratives from Odell, Wanda, and Lydia are written in their manners of speaking and thinking (e.g., from one of Lydia's sections, while a stranger's loose dog is humping her leg: "Frankly, the spectacle of a Yorkie creaming on my leg, not to mention my cashmere sweats, takes me past disgust, fear, and anger to homicidal rage and self-preservation...I'll beat the little pooch's paws with my pocketbook until it lets go and topples into the ocean, hopefully to die an unnatural death being ground into shark chow by the rotors of the ferry.").

Setting is relatively important. Martha's Vineyard as an elite vacation town helps define the character cast. The new spa franchise they open in Let's Get It On is on a boat just off the coast, and nautical themes play a role. Also, good food, drink, and company (which is easily associated with a place like the Vineyard) helps forward the book's themes of relaxation, pampering, and sexual satisfaction.

As far as readsalike go, nothing in my personal library jumped out at me, and I'm having little luck searching around online. Brenda Jackson's Solid Soul is on my TBR list, so I'll get back to you on that one.

Neal Wyatt on the ideal tool

Serendipitously, after my post on Drinkers, watchers & listeners' advisory, Library Journal ran Redefining RA: The Ideal Tool by Neal Wyatt.

She considers Netflix, Pandora, and Project Steve (a museumgoers' art classifying tool that I hadn't heard of previously) in an exploration of how to make the best Readers' Advisory database. Basically, ideas I was pondering in a previous post with a lot more meat and expert opinion.

She concludes:

RA has the human experts; what we need now is a database that manages to meld rich RA-infused data with an algorithm that lets us use it as we will.

If the day comes when a reader can open an RA database, input the title of a beloved book, and get back a list of suggestions that was collaboratively developed based on appeal, a range of expert input, and the books other readers suggest who also loved that title, then we will be well on our way to a database that supports our work.

Now we just have to get more people to be computer scientists/readers' advisors.

I have to apologize in advance for a hiatus here. I've been reading a lot of nonfiction for work and have let my pleasure reading slip. I shall return with verve next month, I hope!

RAview: Tessa Dare's Goddess of the Hunt

Tessa Dare's Goddess of the Hunt is a historical romance, the first of a trilogy in which each title focuses on a different woman protagonist/couple.

Lucy was essentially raised by her brother (e.g., not as a lady) and hung around with his hunting buddies when they'd vacation yearly at his home. This makes her a fantastic protagonist, as she fancies herself not as naive as ladies, but still, at 19, is far from grownup. The book is narrated primarily from her perspective, although the male lead, Jeremy, gets maybe 30% of the book devoted to his thoughts and feelings. Of course, his thoughts and feelings are all about Lucy. That is to say, this is definitely a character-driven novel, as I suspect most romances are (what, with such a similar plot and expected happily-ever-after ending).

The language does not significantly add to the book's appeal, but it illustrates pace and mood well. The pace is quick but slows down a bit as the book doesn't end when many romances do--at the wedding. Details highlight period clothing, natural scenery (hunting), the class relations among a lord and his tenants, and the role of a proper lady.

The tone is exciting, anticipatory, sexy, witty, defiant. Tone has to do with how the book makes readers feel, so I would also say this book could be somewhat frustrating. We get the perspectives from the man and woman, and there's a lot of misinterpretation of emotions and misreading of actions, so near the end, the tension is somewhat grating. Some readers will enjoy a drawn-out dance, though.

I haven't read enough romances for readalikes. Eloisa James blurbed the book--"The sweetest, sexiest romance you'll read all year"--and she's one of the few other romance authors I've read, but her books seem more traditional, more formulaic (but not in a bad way!). The protagonists aren't as individual or relatable to modern readers (at least in Desperate Duchesses and An Affair Before Christmas), perhaps because her historical detail is more carefully cultivated and emphasized.

RAview: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a mystery, with a main character sleuth, Flavia de Luce, who is a 10-year-old girl who's obsessed with chemistry in mid-20th-century England and lives in a decaying mansion--her mother died when she was a baby, her father is so distant he might as well not even be there, and her two sisters' relations to her revolve around pranks and torment.

The setting is primarily a mood evoking backdrop of dusty, mysterious chemistry mechanisms, a decaying manor, a marshy wetness that is somewhat dickensian. This is a character-centered book; Flavia narrates, and we experience the disjointedness of a 10-year-old's thought processes complete with her morbid curiosity at finding a dead man in the family's cucumber patch, her fearlessness, and the simple, absorbing, distracting joy at the freedom of riding a bicycle.

Details of stamp collecting; chemicals, elements, and poisons; and magic pepper this world of academia and all the secret guilt and unshared thoughts and emotions that go along with a stereotypically upper-class British stoicism. But Flavia, being a kid, smashes through all that with endearing, precocious wiles to solve the crime.

This may appeal to nonmystery readers, as the focus is more on Flavia than on the clues themselves. It doesn't feel as though the reader should or could have figured out the whodunnit before the characters.

Looking through what I've read recently, I'd say Flavia shares some appeal with Bod, the young main character from Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book. That's YA, though, and I'm assuming young protagonists are much more common there. Any plucky young narrators in adult fiction you can think of?

Drinkers, watchers & listeners' advisory

Although I've been quiet recently, I assure you I have been reading. I'm at work on Tessa Dare's Goddess of the Hunt and Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (two genres--romance and mystery--I haven't tried to tackle here yet).

While I was home sick with a cold this week, I noticed on the back of my Twinings ceylon orange pekoe tea box "If you enjoy Twinings Ceylon Orange Pekoe Tea, we recommend that you try English Afternoon Tea or Prince of Wales Tea." What a brilliant marketing idea! Keep people coming back by suggesting what to consume next from a position of authority (derived from individuals like librarians, brands like Twinings, computer systems, or a combination).

This got me thinking of other Readers' Advisory-like services outside the world of books. Pandora and iTunes Genius do it for music. And Netflix does it for movies, although not very well, I think. (Though they just announced the winner of $1 million prize competition to improve its recommendation matrix and began a second competition for an even better system.)

Yet these are all primarily computer based. I suppose a sommelier is a kind of human corollary. Librarians, too, can use databases like Fiction Connection or NoveList for RA support. But it is refreshing to see everyday counterparts to RA, a concept that can be so intimidating because it seems so ephemeral and personal yet is also complex and codified.

Readers' advisory & series

I just returned from a vacation to Seattle and realized I brought two sequels with me to read. I think I was, however consciously, looking for things I knew I would like and that would be an easy read.

I finished Jordan Summers' Scarlet (book 2 of her Dead World series, which began with Red), and I started Suzanne Collins's Catching Fire (book 2 in her Hunger Games trilogy) on the trip. I have to say, I think I would write up Red and Scarlet differently in an RAview or annotation/shelf-talker. Scarlet seemed to use a more paranormal romance construction (a new couple, a periphery and a nonexistent character from the last book, get the longest, final sex scene), and the fear and tension weren't as palpable to me as in the first book. Catching Fire does not have the shock and tension present from the very beginning simply because of the premise of Hunger Games. (More later.)

Do RA librarians generally recommend a series or simply a title or two from it? I know I read somewhere (likely in Joyce Saricks' Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library) that readers' advisors should recommend the best title in the series rather than the first. This seems problematic to me. First, in my personal efforts trying to pick what to read next, it seems near impossible to figure out which book is the best (although librarians do have more knowledge and resources than me). Also, some series can be entered at various points (especially mysteries, I'd think) and others will loose a lot without background. But publishers seem somewhat reluctant to sell things as series titles, probably because they want to attract new readers, which can make finding the first in a series while browsing in a bookstore or library really hard. And, let's face it, not everyone will take the time to ask their bookseller/librarian.

All in all, I'm somewhat baffled. I need to pick up an RA book on a specific fiction genre, which may help. In closing, here is a post on a fun book blog from Entertainment Weekly, Shelf Life, in which the blogger wants to skip ahead in Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series (on which True Blood is based). The adamant, exclamatory comments are the best.

RAview: Tipping the Velvet

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters is a character-driven novel that explores six years of Nancy's new adult life as a lesbian in 1880s England.

Although Nancy narrates in past tense, she presents her experiences like she felt them--we only understand her feelings by descriptions of how she felt her throat tighten or her heart beat out of her chest. It's a leisurely paced novel that follows her experiences closely, skipping weeks or months only when she falls into a routine that would pass in one's memory similarly quickly. As Nancy takes in surroundings as she moves to drastically different situations after leaving home for London, readers get all the details of her environment and personal (often sexual) understanding of herself. Nancy is sympathetic but flawed and inadvertently cruel to other people in her life at times. The other characters are all presented through her experiential lens, so they are generally only of temporary interest and not always entirely fleshed out for the reader.

Settings are evoked with rich, descriptive detail--the oyster restaurant/shabby home in which Nancy grew up on the Kentish coastline, London theater life, the poor and filthy Dead Meat Market neighborhood with blood literally running in the streets, wealthy "Sapphist" lady society, burgeoning Socialism and outreach to exploited workers. The language is fairly nondescript, save the evocative use of period vocabulary ("tom"-a derogatory term for a lesbian, "trousers," "gay girls"-prostitutes, "spit black"-eye makeup).

The tone is difficult for me to identify because it changes so much throughout Nancy's story. Overall, I suppose it's nostalgic, a little sad, exciting, feelings of discovery and understanding. Storyline elements include sex (and it's not shy, so this isn't for anyone who is squeamish about gay lovin'), theater, outward appearances vs. reality, coming of age, self-discovery, youthful journey, harsh reality, class differences, discrimination.

Although I read these two books as a teen and don't have a great memory, when trying to come up with readalikes I'd look at Emma Donoghue (I read Slammerkin, although What Should I Read Next? recommends Life Mask) and Lisa Carey (I read The Mermaids Singing and distinctly remember it as one of those youthful "whoa sex!" moments). Maybe Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, if a little more literary flair or lyrical style doesn't bother you. Other ideas? And tell me if I'm off base because I'm really reaching here!