Strickly a Book Review

The Iron Duke
by Meljean Brook
Berkley Sensation
5 spangles out of five
Steampunk romance

At long last I bought this book, having heard so very much about it: "It's the epitome of steampunk!" "If you get just one steampunk book, you must get this!"

Since I wasn't that interested in steampunk other than trying it out to taste the flavor, I figured the ol' Duke would do.

And what a world he lives in!

The worldbuilding is by far the star of the novel. We are in late Victorian-era England, but in another dimension where many of the British people are "buggers," infected with nanoagents. These bugs help them survive the harsh environmental conditions that pervade many parts of Britain, but in the past they also made the people susceptible to mind-controlling radio waves broadcast by the dreaded Horde.

Our heroine is Mina, a keen-brained police inspector whose birth resulted from a Frenzy—that is, a mind-controlled rape of her mother by a member of the Horde. It has left Mina with Asian features and has made her the object of derision and outright violent hatred from the populace. Now that they have been freed from the Horde, they want nothing to do with any hint of it.

And the man who freed them is the Iron Duke of the title. He is a giant of a man with an iron skeleton. He is a sea captain, an appointed lord of the realm, and immune to the bite of zombies (nanotechnology gone completely, mindlessly bonkers). He is hero to all of Britain but greatly feared by some.

You'd think the two together would be dynamite, but the worldbuilding far outshadows everything else in the book. I discovered it was rather easy to set the book down for a day or two. The characters didn't really speak that much to me, though I was greatly intrigued by Mina's social situation. Once we got into the sex of the book the character clash and plot kinda went downhill.

What will keep you reading is learning more about the world our h/h inhabit. All along I was thinking: The author can't keep inventing such outlandish ideas and not have them seriously count for anything in the story. Sure enough, this book is part of an "Iron Seas" series.

Secondary characters will certainly come forward to carry their own books. They bring with them backstories that beg for further development. We have lady air pirates, drunken non-bugger heroes, an Indiana Jones type, religious cults with cities in the sky, white slave trade, zombies overrunning Europe, and of course, the mysterious Horde.

So what if the Iron Duke is your typical if slightly overblown romantic alpha male? What you'll want to read about in this book is its world: how it got that way, how it is now, and the possibilities for its future. That's enough to land it five spangles from me.

Strickly a Recipe

My cooking repertoire is tiny. I make a few recipes far too often. The following one used to appear in magazine ads, but darned if even googling will find it anymore. Glad I chopped it out and stuck it in my recipe book way back when.

This is really easy, filling, and oozing with enough veggies to make it a no-guilt dinner. (Especially if you skip the sour cream.) The first few times I made it I thought it was far too hot, but these days I toss in a few more jalapenos. Yum!


Veg-All Chili with Cornbread Crust

1 lb. ground beef
½ medium onion, chopped
2 cans (15 oz. each) Veg-All Original Mixed Vegetables, drained
1 can (15 oz.) black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can (4 oz.) diced jalapeno peppers, drained
¾ c. water
1 package taco seasoning mix
salsa
sour cream

CRUST:
¾ c. all-purpose flour
½ c. yellow corn meal
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
½ c. milk
1 egg
2 Tbsp. oil
1 can (4 oz.) chopped green chilies

In 10-inch skillet, brown and cook ground beef; drain thoroughly. Return meat to pan. Add onion; return to heat and cook until tender. Add Veg-All, beans, jalapeno peppers, water, and taco seasoning. Cook over medium-high heat until most of the liquid is gone (while making crust should be long enough).

To make crust: In medium bowl, combine flour, corn meal, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add milk, egg, oil and chiles; stir until flour is moistened. Spread evenly over top of meat mixture in skillet. Cook, covered, over low heat for 30 to 35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in crust comes out clean. Serve hot with salsa and sour cream.

4-6 servings.

NOTES: I've tried both ground turkey and faux ground beef (soy) with this, and both have worked great. However, I'm leery of just how much processing those faux soy products have, so I'll be experimenting with garbanzo beans or some such in the future in an effort to make this healthily vegetarian.

Though this is a Veg-All recipe, most stores have their own brands of canned mixed veggies, and they're fine. However, I have only been able to find low-sodium varieties in the Veg-All brand.

Being lazy, I usually use a full onion for this. I also use liquid egg product. There has never been a time when the cornbread came out as toasty-golden as the picture shows, and I think the photographer/stylist cheated. It will be kinda pasty yellow-white, but still very good!

If you're freezing portions, try to peel off the cornbread from the rest of the mixture or separate it in some way when you pack it in a container, as you might want to microwave the two sections separately so neither gets over-nuked.

It's BOGO day at Subway!

Apparently Subway does this every year around Tax Day. (Which is not quite yet, thank goodness, because my accountant is supposed to call to set up our final appointment this afternoon.)

That new egg and bacon sandwich looked intriguing, so I thought I'd mosey over to Subway for breakfast, try it, and wind up with enough food to last the weekend. I love their tuna sandwich! (Sorry, Jared.)

I set off with Kindle to drive to Mebane, the nearest town. Why the Kindle? Because I get zero reception at my house—yes, with cells, too—and had two books to download. So I get to north Mebane's tiny strip mall, turn on the Kindle. Zip! Both books are there in instants. Then I get out of the car to make my way to the Subway.

There's a sign on the door: "BOGO will end at 2:00 on the dot!" Okay, that's fine with me, but too bad for the dinner crowd. I didn't recall Subway advertising that their huge BOGO event would be less than a full operating day.

Opened the door. Whoops. Didn't open the door. It was still securely locked. I checked the store's operating hours. 8 AM to 10 PM. It was then 8:30 AM. Finally caught the eye of the girl inside, who was bustling about attending to her bread. I pointed at the door, at the operating hours chart. She shook her head and went back to her bread.

Hunh. Well, I could go over to Waffle House, but I'd planned that as a treat for when the taxes are actually done. That is, if I have any money left to go to the Waffle House. Don't you love their Fiesta Omelet? Decided instead to hit the Subway at the new outlet mall.

As I arrived, I wondered what I'd been thinking. The outlet mall wouldn't open until 10, would it? Who shows up at an outlet mall before 10? There was the Subway the next major street over, but they never had unsweet tea. If I'd been awake, I might have recalled that the Mebane Wally World has a Subway in it, but I might not have, as I'm used to the Hillsborough Walmart, which has a mini-McDonalds.

But I could see the "open" sign from the street, so I stopped. At their front door the sign said: "BOGO will run from 5 PM - 8 PM ONLY!!! At 8:01, no BOGO will be honored."

I went inside. "Does every Subway have a different BOGO schedule?" I asked the guy behind the counter.

"Just us. The other four shops in town [turns out there's another one downtown] all run until 2."

I told him about the one I'd just been to, that hadn't been opened though they were supposed to have been.

"Oh yeah. We have to put those hours on our sign or they won't let us operate. We have to say we're open for 12 [I think it was 12. Could have been 14.] hours a day."

"What? You're saying the operating hours sign was a lie?"

"Oh, yeah. That's just for legalities. They open at 9, not 8."

Sheesh. Well, I was determined not to waste any more gas driving around in search of a Subway that might possibly be open and might be observing holy BOGO, so I just ordered a 6-inch bacon and egg flatbread.

Note: It's nice. You get a choice of regular eggs or egg whites. I chose to have them sprinkle salt over it (figuring the offer for such meant that the eggs hadn't been seasoned, and forgetting about the presence of bacon), so it was a little salty, but otherwise all right.

I ordered a meal. I mean, macadamia cookies would calm me during the huge storms we're supposed to get this afternoon. I gave my card to the guy and it didn't work. "It's not the card, it's the scanner," the guy said. Subway had insisted that, the day before their biggest day of the year (according to Guy), they switch out their card scanners.

"During Mercury in retrograde?" I gasped. "What were they thinking?"

The guy started to dismantle the connection between scanner and cash register. "They're idiots," he muttered. Then he said, "Guess instead of BOGO, you get your sandwich free today."

I thanked him (forgetting that I might have had enough cash in my wallet for the job. Cash? Who uses cash any more?) and went to get my tea.

No tea had been brewed yet. Not unsweet, not even sweet. I settled for some pink chemicals in water that said they contained vitamin C.

So a happy BOGO day to us all!

More Than Strickly a Book Review

Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives
by Michael Newton, Ph.D.
Llewellyn Publications
5 spangles out of five

Let me digress. Waaay back in high school, I stumbled upon The Search for Bridey Murphy, a book in which an amateur hypnotist first took an Arizona housewife back to a previous life, as part of (iIrc) a party entertainment in 1952. As soon as she said, "Scratched the paint all off my bed" (she remembered being a little girl who was being punished by having to stay in her room and was feeling rebellious), I was hooked. Why, I even bought a record of the first session.

Bridey was supposed to have been a 19th Century woman living in Ireland, and during a series of hypnotic sessions her modern incarnation recounted that life, right up to death and slightly beyond. Researchers have said they've debunked the "facts" of her life, and the hypnotist did admit to leading his subject.

But just because one amateur doesn't conduct an investigation in a scientific method is no reason to completely dismiss the entire concept of reincarnation.

Ancient Greeks believed in it. Just about all cultures do, come to think of it. Why, the Catholic church even had to work to expunge mentions of reincarnation from their "official" Bible. (Though they missed a few "Elijah will be reborn" verses, especially in Matthew 11:7-14.)

I'm not talking transmigration here. That's where human souls can go into the bodies of animals. I'm not sure at all about that, but I have seen transcripts of hypnotic sessions where this has been claimed to have happened.

It just seemed to me that more scientific investigations should be made. Eventually I stumbled upon Dr. Helen Wambagh's wonderful books (except the last, Mass Dreams of the Future, which relied on one subject in particular, though I'll have to reread it as I just noticed it mentioned Obama).

But Dr. Wambagh dealt with large groups of people. She'd get a gym-full and regress them. Then they'd fill out a form. Then she'd regress them again; again, the form-filling. Then she took her results, graphed them and researched historic trends, etc. That's what I was talking about! It's all fascinating stuff.

She did a separate book on one of her "specialty" regressions she had her groups do: that of telling her what had happened before these people decided to incarnate. The book is Life Before Life. Incredibly interesting and enlightening! I wanted to know more but didn't see anything on the bookshelves.

Oh, the Internet! What a wonderful thing it is. The other week I discovered Journey of Souls, and have since ordered both followups to it. But let's talk about Journey of Souls.

In it we find Dr. Newton has regressed many, many people to all kinds of past lives. They come to him after medical doctors can't find the source of their problems, and sometimes the answers have been found in past lives.

Dr. Newton here presents what happens to us when we die. What the process is, what our life "Out There" (it's our true home, unlike Earth) is like, and how we go about getting back into a new body. The book is organized into steps that his subjects agree on.

When we die, we usually jump out of the body before any pain can get too bad. Suicide is a huge source of guilt, unless it's to alleviate physical pain, in which case it's okay. Young souls who abruptly die and are pissed off about it, and those who bear a lot of guilt can linger on as spirits instead of getting to where they should be going. Many souls linger just long enough to try to soothe the grief of their loved ones. They try to tell them that they're doing just fine.

Then they're off! Younger souls are confused by the journey and require friends and familiar souls to greet them. Older souls know where they're going. We get showered in positive energy to renew ourselves. We get a non-judgmental life-retrospective. There's a kind of central station that newly-arriving souls zip through, carried on currents of... something. This carries us to our "pods," which are places where the souls we will spend all eternity being BFF (literally!) with reside.

Though some of our friends probably don't reside in our pod, we can merely think of them and be in instant close contact with them. Though some souls may also be on Earth incarnated, they leave a part of themselves back in the pod, though they're at lower operating levels than usual. (Souls can also reincarnate into two concurrent lives. I've read that elsewhere as well.)

In the pod we have direct access to our personal guide and teachers. There are junior and senior ones. There seems to be a definite hierarchy of souls to the Source. (They say don't call it "God" because that makes it human when it's not.) Prepare yourselves to have your mind blown when the author makes a theory about the Source of our universe at the very end. It was something I was thinking about after having heard all the stories.

Anyway, in the pod we figure out what we did right and wrong—with both qualities being those we deem good or bad for our soul's evolution—in our previous life and what we could be working on, how we could be helping our podmates improve themselves, etc. There seems to be a lot of fun, humor, and even play as well as serious study.

Souls are at all different levels of advancement, though those in our own pod are right around our own level. To my surprise, this book said that there were new souls being born all the time. Some people truly are "old souls," and here I'd thought that was just some frou-frou goofball romantic phrase.

Eventually we decide to reincarnate. We talk to our guides and podmates and we do a lot of thinking. Then we get to go to a theatre to view possible lives. We usually have some definite location in mind. We're presented (by a council of Elders, who keep our wants and needs very much in mind) with choices of bodies and what their lives will be like. (There are turning points in lives that can make them go in different directions. We have free will.)

Then we go back to our pod and discuss/think. When we make a definite decision, we go into a meeting with the people who will be in our new lives. There are close friends and soulmates, yes, but also others who need the interaction with us to accomplish something. The Elders make sure we have a series of signs (!) that will signal to us our turning points. There are backup signs. One guy even said that the Elders knew he had a tendency to miss signs, so they arranged a bunch of backup signs.

One "sign" was a flashing of a woman's necklace. When the boy noticed the flash, he met her and she taught him important ways to approach life. Later, when he met his wife-to-be, he recognized her by her eyes, by her perfume, and one of his signs to her was that he stepped on her toes during their first dance. Aww!

Then it's off to be born. Being born is supposed to be a LOT more traumatic than dying. Good to know. Ah, you're wondering about abortion now, right? Most people report that very young fetuses don't have a human soul merged with them yet. The souls have to incorporate with the (animal soul?) that is there in the body. (The book says that animals have half-souls. I want to know more about this!)

The soul floats in and out of the fetus (if a fetus doesn't live until birth, the soul comforts it; the death was known before the incarnation), only really settling in at birth—and even then the stories say they don't really go gung-ho into their incarnations until about age 5. There was a cute bit about the soul trying to work to settle family negativity by getting the baby to reach out and touch someone's face during an argument, etc. Everyone was so busy saying, "Aww!" that the argument dissipated.

But the whole purpose of studying reincarnation is this: to realize that we indeed are immortal beings and that we are all on a learning journey. We should always strive to improve ourselves and help those around us. Life is a classroom, but life is also to be enjoyed by loving and helping others.

The book itself can be just a trifle on the dry, analytical side at some points, but they pass quickly and the text is usually clear. The examples, given in script form as the subject tells the doctor what's going on and why, is riveting. So I'd say that this book is a definite don't miss. Your mind will spin but your curiosity about "Why are we here?" will find a few wonderful answers.

Let's get small!

Last November at Art of the Carolinas I was introduced to the idea of working on smaller canvases. First, they allow you to simplify if you wish. Second, they sometimes are available in quantity discounts, so getting a bunch costs a little less than your usual canvas. Third, they encourage working on series.

And I do want to work on series!

I've only done two or so flower paintings and had been wanting to do more, so I reached into my supply closet to the new stack of small canvases, and began. How fun it was to try three different versions of the same flowers that had bloomed in my window boxes last year! (I'd been so gratified to find a spot finally that salvia would thrive in. I do love red salvia.)

I tried combining two different techniques of painting on these, and am quite pleased with the results. Which doesn't mean that I'm not primed to start going a little more outrageous using the same subjects and new canvases.

My coworkers convinced me that these would best be sold as a group. As a triptych, they can be hung closely together. Or they can be scattered around a room, two here and one there, or maybe separately, to create a cohesive eyeflow.

I hope you like 'em!


The price for all three together is $250. "Salvia Triptych" is done in acrylic on canvas. Each picture is 8" square, with image wrapping around to the 1.5" sides. Click on the picture at the top of the blog for a closer look. Shipping and handling is free within the US. For other locations, drop me a line (through my website or on Facebook) and we'll talk. All materials are archival. And yes, I know I need to paint my porch. Again. (sigh)

Strickly Another Book Review

Take a Chance on Me
by Susan Donovan
St. Martin's Paperbacks: Romance (2003)
5 spangles out of five
Contemporary set in Baltimore/DC area
Heat: Just a couple scenes, but oh, baby!

It's always a delight to read a good book after one has just finished a dull one. But it's even better when that good book is flat-out excellent!

The novel was on the trade table at the last Heart of Carolina Romance Writers meeting. We bring in books we've finished reading, and everyone gets to fish through the piles until they find something interesting.

"It's got a doggie!" I squealed and realized I'd said that out loud. At least I'd said it softly. The book does indeed revolve around one Hairy, a Chinese Crested, who has witnessed the murder of his master.

Our Hero, Thomas, is a burly lawyer who works with the police and sometimes with said master. He's found he has a talent for posing as an assassin for hire. He feels guilty about possibly having been the cause of said murder, and takes anxiety-ridden Hairy in. It's too much for him, and Thomas is finally reduced to taking the dog to a doggie shrink.

Said shrink is Our Heroine, Emma, who has recently (1) gotten divorced from a real stinko, and (2) taken guardianship of her newly-deceased best friend's 12-year-old daughter. Everyone has been badly hurt by life, but this book shows that love is a great healer as long as it is accompanied by patience.

But there's also a heaping helping of humor. Thomas' attempts to de-anxiety-ize tiny Hairy are hilarious, and sometimes involve having to buy maxi-pads. Or explaining why the dog always has a pair of his boxer shorts in his mouth.

The sexual tension between Hero and Heroine is spectacular. It starts from first look and strikes deep, but is never overdone. The author prolongs our agony in getting them into bed. One hysterical, magma-hot scene has the two on their first date, sitting on opposite sides of an outdoor picnic table at a crab shack. For various reasons, they never even touch each other. You'll laugh until you cry.

Did someone mention sex? The primary scene is a helluva scorcher! It runs the gamut of emotions and yet dishes out steaming, gooey, all-day man-woman action. Woof! I can't recall reading a better one.

One bit at the end on the hero's part struck me as not being true to the hero, but things were wrapping up and our couple probably needed one final Bad Bump before things straightened out again. Of course it takes a little terror, a culmination of a plot that's been brewing throughout the book, to tie up all the ends and give us the Happy Ever After that romance demands.

The prose is sparkling, the repartee delightful. The characters are people you'll take to your heart. I'm putting Ms. Donovan on my "must buy again" list, this time with something a little more recent. I do hope she's managed to keep up the excellent work!

The book is a real keeper. Buy it!

Strickly a Book Review

Midnight
by Beverly Jenkins
Avon Historical romance
3 spangles out of five (and I'm being generous)
Historical romance set at the beginning of the American Revolution
Heat: It has one explicit scene and a few others that are so-so

At last I not only found a fairly recent novel to review (late 2010), but an author I've been extremely curious about and a sub-genre that I'd been wanting to try: Black romance. Plus it was set in Revolutionary times, an era I haven't seen in many romances. How exciting!

I'm afraid the book let me down. Although I'd previewed a couple pages from the "look inside" feature on Amazon, they hadn't prepared me for the—sorry—sheer dullness that awaited. This is a romance that lacks emotion. The only ones who display any are the bad guys, and they are so over the top you expect them all, even the women, to sprout mustaches so they can twirl them. Wait—there's the part where Our Hero punches the main bad guy. So we have anger represented.

With a romance, though, I want positive emotion. I want to see love bloom, and not just because both parties like sex or because they respect each other in a very proper fashion and so have a very proper and orderly demi-love. I want the heavens to swirl, the surf to crash; I want to see these people's souls torn apart because of their love and rebuilt through it.

In a historical, I want to see how people really lived in those times, how they were affected in a day-to-day way. Best yet, in a historical that didn't have any lords or ladies about, I wanted to finally be able to see people actually working to maintain their living. In this book when it comes to showing us how the times were, the narrator usually takes over, steps back several paces from the action, and gives us a scholarly view of How Things Were.

For the Black sub-genre I was particularly interested to see how Blacks lived, especially free Blacks located in the city of Boston, as these are. You're going to have a clash of cultures, of people either trying to get along or trying not to. We did get told that Quaker churches let Blacks come in, unlike other churches, but that even there the Blacks were relegated to the back or balcony.

Other than that, these might as well have been white people living very ordinary lives and not having to deal with any particular day-to-day injustices. There's a mention of Redcoat soldiers harrassing Our Heroine in her past, but other than that everyone gets along very fine. It's not until late in the book that we find that the neighbors, or at least the wife, must be white because she has red hair.

When did Old Boston turn into Sesame Street? Even the Redcoats seem to have taken their war rations of valium.

As it is, the villains provide what little spark of drama there is. They are all, bar none, OTT. I was confused that the very young slutty woman who marries the villain was not being portrayed badly enough to be a villain in the book, when it was then mentioned (one of the few examples, as I said) that her skin tone was very light, and in fact her sister had passed and married a white man. We then get a hint that the villainess's yet-to-be-born baby is actually a white Redcoat's child. This villainess gets her own brief OTT exit near the end.

But our stoic, never-complaining Heroine is Cinderella, forced by her Evil Father (nyah-ha-ha) to work in her neatly-darned rags from 4 am until well after dark, and then hurry through Boston conducting her own spy business. This leaves her with about an hour's sleep every day, I figured. She is "Lady Midnight," the mysterious messenger of warnings to Minutemen leaders. Unfortunately, the book drops this promising idea less than halfway through.

Our Hero is Prince Charming, the exotic man of the world who has lived for some time with the local Noble American Indian tribe in the Noble American Wilderness doing Noble American Indian things, but then was kidnapped to serve on evil British ships in exotic locales only to escape not only with his skin intact, but with a thoroughbred stallion in hand. He returns with infinite amounts of wealth, and of course, Our Heroine is his chosen woman.

"Beverly Jenkins has reached superstardom," the cover blurb says. But I found this book (4 glowing stars on Amazon) to be lifelessly written and bereft of any real plotline. The characters are one-dimensional; the situation, which should reek of adventure, danger, and intrigue if not a bald examination of race relations and the role of free Blacks at the birth of our nation, is plodding and missing any punctuation points. Everyone's dialogue is extremely stilted and sounds like everyone else. No one uses a one-syllable word if they can use five syllables instead. Perhaps this was to avoid any kind of demeaning dialect? At least the villains occasionally got to sound human with a contraction or curse.

Someone will have to point me to a good Jenkins novel, one that helped her make her rep, for this one is enough to keep me far from her works. But I truly am fascinated with the possibilities of Black historical romances; it seems a very rich sub-genre open to all kinds of fresh new approaches and ideas and characters I haven't seen elsewhere. Suggestions? Please???

The book has a gorgeous cover, though.