Flashback: August 2020 - Expanse + romance novels = weirdness

2025-01-13T06:03:25Z

possibly spoilers!!

Monday, August 3, 2020
So I'm still reading Nemesis Games, and also The Arrangement, which is another romance novel that goes with the last one I read. I'm at about the 80% mark on both, but of course the romance is much shorter. (In novels, anyway!) Nemesis is probably one of my favorite Expanse books, on a par with the first one. The way the puzzle-pieces of the plot fit together is just so awesome. And also I like that the female characters start to drive a lot of plot.

Tuesday
Finished Nemesis. Also finished The Escape, another romance. I really do like this particular series, although I like everything of Mary Balogh's written after 2000 or so, and a lot of what she wrote before that. Earlier on her writing style was spotty, and even after she got over that she had a thing for alpha-males (which I don't) - or maybe that was just what was in at the time - I suspect it was. (In fact it was never all her heroes, only some of them, even in that period.) "Survivor's Club," this series, is possibly an attempt to have it both ways, in a sense, because the heroes are all military men, but they are all PTSD victims in one sense or another - I suppose nearly all soldiers are! - so they are vulnerable. (Very much so.) It's mostly the women who do the rescuing in these books.

Thursday
Now I've moved on to Only Enchanting, another romance in the same series. The last several titles in the series have "Only ___" as a title, and what happens is that I can't remember which is which. I know "The ____" is not a title that works for everything, either (that's what the first part of the series uses). You kind of have to have something dramatic to justify it. ("The Proposal" is only interesting as a title because the guy bungles it!)

Anyway, this one is about a woman (Agnes) who's the friend of one of the previous heroines,and a viscount who had a head injury and now stutters. I have trouble with all these noblemen - in this series I get the viscount (Flavian) mixed up with the one who is an earl (Ralph) - they were the two out of the group at the beginning who didn't stand out. Agnes is a widow, and a nobody next to a viscount (not that most American readers know wtf a viscount is, anyway), but she's a very likeable character. Flavian is too, once you get past the "blond god" aspect of him. Actually this is one of my favorites of this series.

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Flashback: August 2020 - Expanse + romance novels = weirdness