Paranormal Romance Reading Update #1: Temperamental Dragons, Copyright Law Loopholes, Demonic Crime Procedurals, and my First DNF of the Challenge!

What do you mean, it's late May? Last time I checked, we were zipping through Winter at an alarming pace. Don't tell me we're nearly done with Spring, too? 

Yes, yes, the earth is finally waking up, my garden is showing distinct signs of not-dying, and I'm reminded of the fact that the sun exists every morning only a few hours after I've actually managed to go to sleep. 

Just this morning, I realized that in a little over a month, I'd be called upon to be a part of the first family camping trip of the season, and spent a good twenty minutes over breakfast daydreaming about being a private chef in the Hamptons instead, and whether it would be possible to give my own kitchen a much-needed Nancy Meyers makeover, rather than spend so many days in a tent. 

But all of this activity hasn't exactly manifested itself here. And you might be wondering when I was going to start delivering on promises made at the start of the year.

I'm talking, of course, of the 2023 Big Box of Paranormal Romance. 

For those not in the know, back in 2020, my younger brother gifted me a giant box of 20 backlisted Paranormal Romance paperbacks for Christmas. I spent 2021 reading through as many as I could, to varying degrees of success, and the final favorite of the challenge ended up going right back to my brother to read, too.

(He loved it. We reference Judson and his affinity for "guns over psychic ability" often. Including a Paranormal Romance between a psychic investigator and a psychic counselor that was published in 2013 in regular conversation, is fairly par for the course in a family that routinely references Muppet Treasure Island, "Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf," and a Danny Kaye medieval comedy from 1955 as often as we do.) 

But fret not, friends: this year's challenge is still alive and well. It's just that this particular box is a very different beast than its predecessor. I think I'm going to have to stop asking my brother to pick out my next upcoming titles for me, because he somehow manages, from several hours' worth of a drive away, to maintain a laser focus on making me read all of the dragon shifter books first. 

So far, in the last five months or so, I've managed to tackle four of the books, three of which I finished and did NOT give 1-star reviews - which, if you followed the last (incredibly problematic) iteration of this challenge, is an absolute miracle - and only one of which I DNF'd (because it was boring, not because it was racist, homophobic, or worse. Again, a very different box than last time). 

Without any further ado, here's what I thought of them: 

What a Dragon Should Know (Dragon Kin #3), G. A. Aiken

"'We have a problem.'

Briec glanced up from the book he was reading and into the face of Brastias, general of Annwyl's armies, and one of the few human males Briec could tolerate. 

Closing his book, he asked, 'What did Gwenvael do now? Do I need to contact my mother? Are we already in war, or is it simply heading our way?'

Brastias, whose scarred face looked grim at the best of times, smiled. 'Anytime I start a conversation that way, all of you ask me the same questions.'

'My brother starts trouble the way horses shit when they walk. And we all know that.'" 

Okay. So. My first title in the challenge, read all the way back in January, and I did not enjoy this book. But I did get through it! And unlike the first title in the last challenge, it did not use the n-word anywhere in its contents, so. Let's take the wins as they come, small though they may be? 

My main issue is that this book employs a sense of faux feminism that is clarified by its 2008 publication date, in a sort of "bikini chainmail" way: if the female characters are loosely implied to be badasses, then they may freely be oversexualized, overemotional, and as oversimplified as necessary. 

(To the point: in the first chapter or so, we are introduced to a battle queen - whose character hallmark is a love of learning, accompanied by a hulk-like war rage that renders her unstoppable in combat - by her bursting into tears at being called fat. She then cries a second time after she gets a half-hearted apology for being called fat. Then gets all giggly when the same person who called her fat compliments her chest size and pretends to peek down her shirt. The person in question is the main romantic Hero of the novel.) 

Women are either prized like cattle in the Northlands, or fair game for abuse down below in the dragon-primed Southlands. At various odds, women are routinely called whores, overprotected - to the point of allowing for regular violence towards their chosen romantic partners, excused by way of "brotherly respect" - and either yelled at or spoken down to, in turns. 

I get the impression the author might not like women a ton, or at the very least, women who weren't of a certain sarcastic, all-suffering, moderately-prone-to-violence type. The vibe was very Disney-Princess-wearing-thick-rimmed-glasses-and-sporting-tattoos thing, if you clearly remember the year 2014. 

Other problematic elements also skeeved me off, including the main romantic couple's predilection for nonconsensual voyeurism, and something that I'm pretty sure was just the communicated threat of homosexuality as a kind of mental warfare. And a ton of gratuitous violence. 

That being said, parts of it were kind of funny. Hence, two-and-a-half stars. 

Bustin', Minda Webber

"The monster ripped off his boxers, sporting a Doric column so big that Sam thought she was seeing things. Now she understood the expression 'hung like an ox,' and Nero wasn't even a minotaur!

'Talk about cock of the walk,' she muttered to herself. No way was that getting anywhere near her. Still, what was a girl to do? She despaired momentarily, caught between the moon, New York City, a werewolf, and a giant gorgon penis." 

At 323 scant pages, this should have been an easy read. But because it was so jam-packed with random pop culture references - especially in regards to Humphrey Bogart's canon of work - I spent as much time googling obscure phrases and movie titles as I did actually paying attention to the plot. 

Distracting though it was, I can honestly say the book would have been significantly more boring without them. 

THAT being said, ignoring this book's quirky delivery makes some structural issues all the more glaring: while the front half is fairly sedate - but spookily-occupied - generic Romance, the second is an about-face, completing changing both setting and theme towards more of a Mystery angle. 

The characters were equally strange. The Heroine spoke in the model of a fast-talkin', Pan-Atlantic moll from Hollywood's Golden Age... and came equipped with some severely anti-Communist sentiments to share, relatively unprompted. The Hero - a gruff Russian, one gold chain short of straightforward stereotype - plays the lover with equal parts malice and apathy, and enacts a revenge plan so jaw-clenchingly awful that its absolutely shocking that the only thing to come out of it is a substandard apology (couched within phrasing that suggests it as the most low kind of ego-sacrifice, and therefore the Heroine's obligation to accept). 

There's a third act reveal that feels like it counteracts other previous sections of the book. There's a movie-referencing final scene involving a piano that wouldn't make nearly as much sense for someone who hasn't a solid understanding of Casablanca. For some reason, the Heroine just cannot shut up about how she always wanted to be a hairdresser. 

At the end of it all, it's almost impossible to parse out what feels strange because it's a pop culture reference, and what feels strange because it's just a bizarre narrative choice. 

But we all know how I feel about making weird narrative choices in these kinds of books. Three stars. 

Never Dare a Dragon (Boston Dragons #3), Ashlyn Chase

DNF @ 17%

"Ryan was actually the oldest - until he'd met with a near-fatal accident at the age of seven. Jayce had been only five, but after witnessing the family secret in action that day, the image was burned into his brain. Literally. Mommy and Daddy quickly explained what was going to happen and dumped lighter fluid on his big brother - then lit him up. Ryan didn't yell or scream. He just sort of went to sleep, and they watched until there was nothing but a pile of ash left. Then the ashes stirred... and the brilliant phoenix arose." 

If you're confused as to why the title references a dragon, while the blurb I chose features a phoenix family, then let me clear some things up for you: there are both. When a Boston firefighting phoenix shifter hits it off with a NYC firefighting dragon shifter, you've got a lot of promises about "heat" and "sparks flying," to live up to... but unfortunately this, for me, suffered from a lack of both character and romantic development. 

Our Hero, Jayce Fierro - eye roll - is bad at communicating emotions, and an awkward mix between obliviously snarky and 2023 levels of chivalric. There's nothing about him that feels believable or human - in a "not an invention" kind of way, rather than a "not a mythological creature" kind of way - like he was constructed from spare parts of a personality that didn't mesh together that well upon application.

Our Heroine, Kristine Scott, lives alone with her single mom, and the two of them are the only ones who know their dragon-shifting secret... so to speak, as within the first 15% of the novel, someone is already using this information against her. She's postured to be relatable and current by the fact that she does things like wear "satin granny panties" on a date, and focus on putting her career first; upon being asked by a work colleague if her erratic emotional behavior is due to getting her period, she screams "You are never, ever, ever allowed to ask a woman that - ever!" while exiting from a parking garage "with more speed than was prudent." 

The Romance part bugged me because they were practically ready to jump each other from their first interaction, which didn't even go well for either of them. Despite this, Jayce decides to travel to New York with what is, essentially, the expressed intention of meeting her again. By the time the two make it on an actual date, both are considering how a real relationship would manage to work itself out, being that they live in two different cities, and would have to manage things long distance. Plus any actual sex scenes that may occur seemed to solely be resolved by way of fade-to-black, which makes the cover's promise of "sizzling heat" feel especially misplaced. And again, this is all within the first 17% of the novel.

Plus, with this kind of narrative subtlety in mind, of course, you knew that once a character who speaks with a pronounced Scottish accent was introduced, she'd turn out to be a leprechaun (I ended up skipping ahead to verify). 

I tried to get into this over the course of weeks - weeks! - to the point where it sent me into a mini-reading slump. 

Dream Chaser (Dark Hunter #13, Dream Hunter #3), Sherrilyn Kenyon

"Of course he was... why should anything in the world make sense? Dear lord, it wasn't like she wasn't sitting beside one of the hottest men on the planet who was a god himself. Or that she had a goofy teenage ghost in her backseat mouthing the words to Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." 

It only made sense that the hottie in the Classics department was a demigod, too..." 

I had been suffering through that dragon book for WEEKS before I decided to just try a little bit of a different tactic, and picked up this title instead. I ended up devouring it completely in less than 24 hours. 

That being said... she's still not great. In fact, I think that the three star rating I'm willing to afford to her is more than generous, and just as reflective of how happy I was to be done with another one of these as it is a commentary on the novel itself. 

I think my primary problems stem from the fact that it is just so completely of its publication year: 2008. Its general format reminds me of any number of crime procedurals, its treatment of the supernatural feels like a bad Syfy movie of my childhood, its humor feels like that kind of snarky-without-bite variety that was so ubiquitous to both genres, personified in the kinds of characters the Internet was obsessed with when I was in middle school... and displaying similar kinds of banter to the ones people tried so hard to emulate, but failed to do so with the same panache. If that wasn't enough for you, how about some more direct references to of-the-time cultural touchstones: Happy Bunny, Hannah Montana, and the Reese Witherspoon movie Just Like Heaven all got a mention. 

There was force-choking, questionable use of mythology as a point of worldbuilding, even worse dialogue, and truly horrendous sex scenes which were (thankfully) over quickly. You could have told me that this author was an expert in Supernatural fan fiction, and I would have believed you. 

My primary points of applause include having female character who actually served as dimensional figures in the context of plot, and the use of diversity in world-building, being that the book itself takes place in New Orleans. Three stars.

(I know this feels like an uneven review, and I acknowledge that I spend a lot of time calling out how goofy this book is. But to be honest, that's where most of my joy in this challenge comes from: after all, my end favorite of the last Big Box of Paranormal Romance challenge was selected because of how bonkers wild it was, too. I don't think Dream Chaser will be my final fave, but I do think it has more in common than not with what I enjoy so much about this project.)

So, those are the first four books I read in the challenge for this year. A meager showing, right? Pretty dismal to only have three titles completed, and one DNF, for all that it's nearly the end of the fifth month in the challenge? I agree.

Plus, with the onset of June just around the corner - heralding the triumphant return of Summer Book Bingo from Seattle Arts and Lectures and Seattle Public Libraries, as well as the Ripped Bodice Romance Book Bingo (careful, these links are both for 2022) - my mind is most likely going to be taken over by other tomes to-be-read, for challenges outside of this one. 

This all feels, of course, like the odds are stacked against this particular personal challenge of mine. But don't fret: being aware of your limitations is the best indication that you'll be able to overcome them. What I mean by that is, I keep stubbing my toe on the giant cardboard box every time I fuss around with my TBR shelves, and every book I take out of it makes the pain a little less. 

I really am planning on making Summer 2023 one slam-jammed with reading, honest. And besides, I personally maintain the second best time of year to read Paranormal is in the sunny months, when the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night feel like more of a novelty. 

Keep a weather eye on the horizon for further deets on my Summer reading plans. For now, though, rest assured that I'm currently suffering through a BDSM-lite Harlequin Romance between a vampire princess and a dragon shifter, and thinking of you fondly. 

Have you read any especially good Romance lately? How about especially bad Romance? Don't tell me there are dragons in it. Let me know, in the comments below!