Review: Fair Trade by Jolie Mason

Fast-paced interstellar love and peril, bright and full of verve

I've always had a soft spot for merchant-trader science fiction. Maybe it goes back to a childhood of reading Andre Norton or teenage years playing the old Traveller s.f. RPG. My point is, the summary blurb for this novella had me on its side from pretty much the first sentence, and the story itself did the same.

Fair Trade tells the story of a lonely guild trader by the name of Jexa Maru. Capable, independent, and hardened by a harsh life among the stars, Jexa owns her own ship, a sidearm to face down anyone who might try to take it from her, and not much else. Her weeks, months, and years are spent alone aboard the Misha Anton, earning just enough on the trade routes to keep herself fed and the ship in decent repair. The seedy ports of the Pisces Nebula hold little allure for her beyond their opportunities for cargo, and she never stays planetside for long.

Nor should she, given the lawlessness of the Pisces worlds, where the Calypso slaving syndicate plies its trade with impunity.

Try as she might to keep her head down and avoid the Calypso, however, Jexa instead finds herself yanked straight into the pirates' cross-hairs when an escaped slave stows away in her cargo hold -- a slave who for some reason is more valuable to the syndicate than the fragile treaties that maintain balance within the Pisces Nebula. Along with Calypso's enmity, Joss Bandalau brings aboard the Misha Anton a presence and companionship that Jexa has never known -- and a dark mystery of what befell him at the slavers' hands before he made his escape.

Author Jolie Mason populates her universe with compelling, strongly drawn characters and moves them through a corner of the galaxy rife with brutal color and stark with the emptiness of space. It's a given that Jexa and Joss will fall for each other, but it's less certain how their individual lives of isolation and suffering will fit together -- or how they can escape the hell-bent pursuit of Joss's former owners.

I enjoyed Fair Trade start-to-finish. I'm a sucker for a good romance, an underdog story, and a tale of far wandering among perilous stars. This book delivers on all those points. That's not to say that it's perfect -- it doesn't maintain the plucky ingenuity of its protagonists uniformly throughout, slipping occasionally into conveniences of plot that I'd rather have seen tightened up. There are also some typical self-publishing lapses of editing. But the book's spirit of adventure and central heart of human connection never flag. It's a breezy, fun, quick read with flashes of brilliance, thoughtful undercurrents in its depths, and a setting that's larger than any single story -- a place I wouldn't mind coming back to for future reading.

Review! An Amazon's Equal by Fionna Guillaume

A beautiful story told with passion and finesse

Everything that we call Myth, people once believed as truth. They had to – because the world around them so outstripped their ability to comprehend it, only gods and magic could explain. In An Amazon’s Equal, Fionna Guillaume returns to the mythic storytelling tradition and uses her own kind of magic to get at truths we all sometimes sense, but often fail to believe in or live to their deserved extent.

The book tells the story of Pyrena, a young Amazon making her journey into womanhood along a path tradition has laid out for her – and then traveling further still. Though she fully accepts the ways and wisdom of the society that’s raised her, Pyrena just ever-so-slightly does not fit. The Euphemindra, as the Amazons call themselves, live in isolation from the world of men, defended by their own strength at arms and the blessing of the goddess they worship. In their deeply forested land, they have built a civilization that borders on utopia, its idyllic peace disturbed only when men of the outer world make the mistake of attempting invasion and conquest, forcing them to do battle – from which they never shy nor falter. But the ways of war come a hint less naturally to Pyrena than to her sister warriors, and she lives and matures with the most tenuous sense of something missing.

When a foolhardy Greek campaign against the Euphemindra ends in a thorough rout, new captives arrive at the Men’s Tent in the great Amazonian city. Pyrena captures one of these herself: Astrastos, a young man who embodies much of the fallacy and foolishness of his patriarchal homeland – but who, like Pyrena, has always walked just a hint out of step with his people and their expectations.

Like both Pyrena and Astrastos, this novel begins with an unassuming conformity to expectations: a coming-of-age story, a love story, a pitting of the feminine soul against masculine ambition. But also like its heroine and hero, from the very start it carries a hint of something more – something that grows and blooms under the skillful touch of its author page by page until it goes far beyond romantic tropes and retold legends. Almost without the reader noticing, a rich and magnetic cast of supporting characters ease their way into the story, painted with a few quick strokes as they first appear, then brushed with contour and texture and perspective in each subsequent return. The social order of the Euphemindra reveals itself with ever-deepening complexity and inventiveness. Themes of love and family and fidelity and honor coalesce, swell, and break loose in moments of emotional thunder. The expected happens – and then the unexpected follows straight upon its heels.

Fionna Guillaume renders all of this in a clean and forthright style that is lyrical when it needs to be and visceral when it must. The eroticism of her love scenes can simmer or flare, washing the reader in whatever level of heat is called for, but never obscuring the emotional crux of the storytelling.

By the end, she convinces us that the epic and the mythic are in truth matters of human spirit, there to be tapped and made use of if we can recognize them and choose a path that is right.

Review! Sea of Temptation by Suzie Jay

I've been reviewing books for an indie author group lately, and I realized I should be sharing them here, too. So without further ado, here's my review of Suzie Jay's Sea of Temptation!

Boatloads of Fun!

I found this book to be silly, and if you automatically assume that to be a criticism, then you may not like it as much as I did. It's silly in a joyous way -- with a whimsical and carefree spirit that says, "I don't care if you find this unbelievable. We're here to have fun, aren't we? Let's not pretend that believable and fun go hand-in-hand."

Sea of Temptation follows Reid Lancaster onto a cruise he would rather avoid, where he bumps into Scarlet Barrett, the ship's doctor, whom he would also like to avoid, and who would just as soon avoid him. Reid and Scarlet share a history together, and it's a history that did not end well. Although the reader will likely find them both to be sympathetic and attractive people, they loathe one another. Why? That mystery serves as one of the novel's most immediate hooks, and its answer is parceled out in careful hints and revelations as the plot advances.

Joining Reid on the cruise is his irrepressible sister, Pip, whose mission is to get Reid over an entrenched depression caused by the death of their mother. Where Reid is sympathetic but morose, Pip is a sheer delight -- full of verve and good humor, yet also dead serious about helping her brother. Meanwhile, Team Scarlet includes Dr. Barrett's friend Jane, the ship's nurse and an amicable busybody intent on finding out what's up between Scarlet and Reid once the tension between them bursts into the open.

I read Sea of Temptation in one sitting, staying up late despite being on a business trip that already had me short on sleep. It's a quick read, wonderfully good-hearted and sweet, and I'm giving it five stars because the main incentive I would have for docking it a star would be embarrassment at the notion of giving such a silly book five stars. Honestly, the way the world looks around us right now, I can't consider that a good enough reason.

Done!

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Chapter 13 Explodes Into Publication!

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What I'm Up To

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Argh! The Pressure!!!

Chapter 10 of The Inn has now been up long enough to garner a fair number of comments ... and they've sent me into a complete guilt-spiral!

"Can't wait for the next chapter!"

"I wouldn't mind if this series went on forever!"

The problem is, my original outline calls for Chapter 11 to be the finale. So I'm reading these comments and thinking, Oh, shit. They clearly do not feel like this story is building up to an imminent conclusion! I'm going to get crucified if I end it next chapter!

I'd been patting myself on the back for several weeks about coming up with an ending that would bring the romantic plot and the storyline plot to a simultaneous peak, and now it's clear my clever resolution will seriously disappoint the readers.

What to do?

First, I decided I'd better figure out whether the readers would be right in their disappointment. Literotica readers pretty much always want every decent serial to go on eternally, whereas I'm a pretty solid believer in beginning-middle-end storytelling.

But when I put myself in their shoes, I decided they had a point. The plot took a major turn at the end of Chapter 9, and if that plot twist made the book wrap-up after just two additional chapters, what the hell was the point of all the plot building in Chapters 1-8? It would feel like turning the corner and running into a brick wall.

So.

What to do about it?

I sat and thought and sat and thought.

How could I take the position the characters occupied at the end of Chapter 10 and make it lead to not one but several additional escalations of the story? They had to be real escalations too, not just drawing the story out for the sake of making it longer.

The answer turned out to be, "Don't make things quite so easy on the characters just because the end of the story is in sight."

Once I figured that out, I realized that I'd skipped right past the possibility of the Chapter-9 plot twist throwing additional challenges in Simon and Leyna's path, rather than just opening up solutions. And not only would those challenges force them to be more inventive in resolving the threat of Necromanata, they'd also provide a natural intermediary step between Simon and Leyna's relationship at the end of Chapter 10 and where that relationship ends up at the end of the book.

Success!

The book is now plotted out to run through Chapter 14, which will probably bring it up close to 100,000 words ... a pretty respectable length for an erotic fantasy novel!

In closing, though, I must warn my readers ... just because begging for more worked this time doesn't mean it will work every time! If it did, I'd end up writing one long continuation of a single series until I'm in my dotage.

Thanks, though. The Inn is going to be much better for my forced reconsideration of these last few chapters!