skygiants | Entries tagged with courtney milan

It was extremely helpful of Rose Lerner, Courtney Milan and Alyssa Cole to jump on a pop culture zeitgeist and put out a trio of novellas right before a month in which I had a bunch of work travel and was looking for non-stressful reads; I read most of Hamilton's Battalion on a flight back from DC and it was great.

The novellas are linked together by a frame story about Eliza Hamilton's quest to Gather Reminiscences About Her Husband, although Hamilton himself actually takes up the absolute minimum amount of pages required to slap his name on the cover.

"Promised Land" by Rose Lerner features:
- a cross-dressing Jewish officer in the Revolutionary Army
- who takes her love interest prisoner when she catches him spying
- who is her EX-HUSBAND whom she FAKED HER OWN DEATH AND RAN AWAY FROM several years prior
- and then they have numerous arguments about their different relationships with Judaism and Jewish identity in colonial America while she's leading military operations and he's chained to a wall!

Rose Lerner, you didn't have to target your romance novella quite so directly to my interests. I'm super not complaining, I am A-OK being an extremely pandered-to target audience, I'm just saying it wasn't strictly necessary!

"The Pursuit of..." by Courtney Milan is about a black American soldier and a British officer who attempt to kill each other at the battle of Yorktown and then go on a ROM-COM ROAD TRIP. Their first conversation features the British officer self-deprecatingly joking about imperialism, which tells you that a.) Courtney Milan is real interested in poking at the inherent contradictions of a war For Freedom And Ideals fought between a colonial power and a slave-owning proto-nation, and b.) she is giving even fewer fucks about strict historical accuracy than usual. She is also very interested in jokes about cheese. I found this overall quite enjoyable although I was occasionally jarred by anachronisms in dialogue and by concern for the digestive health of our protagonists as they steadily ate their way through terrible un-refrigerated cheese.

"That Could Be Enough" by Alyssa Cole is about black lesbians -- one of them Eliza Hamilton's secretary who has Sworn Off Love, the other a flirtatious local dressmaker who would like to convince her to reverse that decision. It's cute and features several elements I like, including epistolary romance and a community theater production, but I wish the story did not drive the back half of its plot with a Big Misunderstanding.

I think the release of Courtney Milan's Hold Me officially marks the end of this fall's Sequel Season for me! It was also great timing because the book came out right as I was about to board an 11-hour flight from Europe to San Francisco, while plague-ridden, and having a new Courtney Milan was the only thing that made this experience tolerable.

(Well, that and the fact that my flight was practically empty so I got a whole row to myself. SUCH LUXURY.)

Anyway, Hold Me is the sequel to Trade Me, in which financially-strapped student Tina traded lives with a billionaire student Blake, resulting in romantic hijinks and -- relevantly for Hold Me -- the formation of a household consisting of Tina, Blake, and Tina's roommate Maria, the heroine of this book.

Maria is a trans Latina woman who bonded with Tina over being one of the few non-eighteen-year-olds in their undergraduate class, and who has spent the last several years writing an increasingly popular blog featuring various apocalyptic scenarios built on statistical math projections. Her current problems include:

- the fact that sharing a household with a couple who just had a whole romance novel feels a lot less comfortable than sharing a household with just her buddy Tina
- the oncoming fact of graduation and resultant need to get a sensible job as an actuary, and possibly spend less time blogging
- relatedly, an ongoing ambiguous flirtation with a long-time commenter on her blog that is taking up a lot of time and attention that she should probably be using to research sensible actuary jobs
- the fact that she keeps bumping into her brother's new bestie Jay, an asshole with a lot of unexamined assumptions about makeup/fashion/visible femininity and how those things don't go together with intelligence or scientific achievement

Physicist Jay na Thalang is, of course, both the long-time blog commenter and the romantic lead of the story, because this is an unabashed Shop Around The Corner trope with no bones about it. His problems include the unexamined sexism and a host of familiar academic woes of the 21st century (imposter syndrome, grant-writing, job instability, the dream of tenure....)

Jay also, for the record, has a tragic backstory involving suicide of a loved one and resultant family complications which didn't ... not feel real or integrated? ... but did feel like it got possibly a too-snappy resolution -- I liked both Jay and Maria's families, but I think overall Trade Me did a much better job of making me invested in the protagonist's parents/relatives and integrating them into the plot; it was one of that book's great strengths. (Tina's mom is still my favorite.) I would've liked to see more of Maria's brother and grandmother, especially. That said, I loved Maria and the loving detail poured into her nerdy math-science-apocalypse blog TREMENDOUSLY, and I like Shop Around the Corner tropes, and all the university/college/grad school stuff felt extremely well-drawn to me; overall this continues to be one of my favorite Milan series.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/455747.html

Coincidentally I've been reading a bunch of stuff lately that is somehow related to the Opium Wars. I was not expecting Courtney Milan's latest series to join the collection, but I am excited by the discovery!

Taken by itself, Once Upon A Marquess is cute but not the strongest of Milan's romances. Our Heroine Judith is the daughter of a disgraced former member of the nobility who was convicted of treason in China, along with her beloved brother, and has spent the last nine years desperately trying to support her younger siblings and achieve for them the opportunities they've lost; also she makes clockwork. Our Hero Christian is her former suitor, who also happens to have been her brother's best friend, who also happens to be the person whose testimony got her father and brother convicted of treason; also he has a history of opium addiction and what seems to be some form of OCD; also he's incapable of not making jokes.

(I spent the entire book hearing the voice of Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins doing all Christian's dialog. I don't know if there's any evidence that Courtney Milan has played Dragon Age but if she does I refuse to believe there wasn't an influence.)

Christian and Judith, as mentioned above, are reasonably cute, and I tend to find romances with significant emotional backstory more plausible than lust at first sight. But honestly the weight of the book is not really on their dynamic so much as it is on Judith's relationships with her siblings (as we all know sibling stuff is my favorite stuff!) and on setting up SIGNIFICANTLY MORE ONGOING PLOT, and specifically geopolitical/worldbuilding/history plot, than I think Milan has ever really done in her romance series before.

( Spoilers )

Also I read Her Every Wish, the companion novella about Judith's friend Daisy, a flower-shop girl who's entered a competition for seed funds to open her own business, and Daisy's ex Crash, a mixed-race bisexual bicyclist and numbers man. I liked everything about the outlines of this plot, which is about how layers of toxic assumptions can work at cross-directions to hurt people who care about each other, and thought it needed about four times the page space to actually do the emotional arc justice -- like, there were enough real issues in Daisy and Crash's initial split that fixing all of their internalized prejudices and insecurities with one or two mildly anvilicious clue-bat conversations didn't quite feel believable or satisfying to me.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/445487.html

Over the past two weeks, I have been on - I think eight different airplanes? THINGS HAVE BEEN HECTIC. The most dramatic event was last week's family-plus-

genarti trip to Jamaica, the departure date of which unfortunately happened to fall on a day that the entire East Coast was due to be out of commission due to a major snowstorm. I managed to reschedule our flights the day before so that we would leave 7:30 that night instead of the following morning. Of course at this point I had not yet packed.

ME: It's fine! I'm a quick packer, and home is only 15 minutes away from the office! I'll run home after work, do a quick packing job, and be ready to go!
THE UNIVERSE: Hahahahaha you think it's going to be SO EASY, do you?

So of course when I got home at 4:30 it turned out I had lost my keys and could not get into the house.

An hour later -- after a panicked call to my roommate, who valiantly battled her way through the city at rush hour to come to my rescue -- I finally managed to run into the house, throw everything into a backpack, and flee to the airport. We got there! WE DID IN FACT GET THERE.

However what I didn't have time to do until our layover was put any books on my Kindle, so instead I comfort-reread some of the Courtney Milan Brothers Sinister books that I liked best from last year and as it happens never wrote up. WHICH I WILL DO NOW.

The books I reread were The Heiress Effect and The Suffragette Scandal. The Heiress Effect is the one about Jane Fairfield, the heiress who turns her own tactlessness and amazingly terrible taste into a POINTED WEAPON to stop ANYONE from trying to marry her EVER, so that she can instead stay home and act as a buffer between her sister and all the terrible doctors her guardian keeps engaging to try and cure her sister's epilepsy. Unsurprisingly, I think she is amazing. The romance is between her and a rising politician who is struggling up from a low-class background, and the conflict is because he thinks he needs a quiet political wife and Jane decides she likes being tactless in terrible clothes and does not want to squash back down into appropriateness. Oliver the politician is fine but less interesting. He is also less interesting than the sweet but too-short B-plot romance between Jane's sister and an Indian law student with complicated feelings about colonialism, but I am still glad that we got the B-plot romance at all.

The Suffragette Scandal is the one about Oliver's sister Free, who runs a feminist newspaper that is being targeted by an EVIL DUKE who has a CRIMINAL BROTHER who was LEFT FOR DEAD and then CAUGHT IN A WAR ZONE and TORTURED and FORCED TO BETRAY HIS FRIENDS and is now full of PETTY CRIME AND PTSD. Yes, he is the love interest, how did you guess? I mean, he's not boring! And Free, whose life story borrows liberally from Nellie Bly, is pretty amazing. I do constantly appreciate Courtney Milan's dedication to giving her heroines interesting and unusual fears and traumas, and "still haunted by that time she checked herself into a prostitute's lock-up for the big scoop!" ranks high on the list. It has the same problem that The Duchess War did for me, with a third-act betrayal that I feel was probably not narratively necessary, but is highly enjoyable nonetheless. Also: the B-plot in this one has lesbians! (A-plot with lesbians, MAYBE SOMEDAY, we live in hope.)

The one I did not reread: The Countess Conspiracy, the one about the secret science genius who discovers heredity and the dude she pays to publish her work for her. Given givens, I should have really liked this one, and it didn't actually work for me very well, but I read it long enough ago that I can't really remember much about why? This is not a very helpful review.

(I also did not reread Talk Sweetly To Me, the concluding novella with a black mathematician heroine, but that's mostly because by that point I could actually download all the books I had meant to put on my Kindle for vacation to begin with. I did like it though! Again, largely for the heroine and her family, I don't remember terribly much about the love interest. But that's OK.)

I had never read a billionaire romance before reading Courtney Milan's Trade Me, so while I have lots of respect for Courtney Milan as a romance writer and a human trying to write progressively, I had a sort of vague expectation that this probably wasn't going to be my favorite of her books.

But weirdly, it turned out I was wrong and actually this might be my literal favorite of Courtney Milan's books?

(Well, maybe with the exception of Unraveled, which I have a very deep fondness for, for reasons that I can't entirely explain. -- OK, socially awkward protagonists and plucky urchins and found family and DEDICATION TO JUSTICE!!!, I actually totally can explain it. Unraveled was a really enjoyable book for my id.)

Anyway! Trade Me is set at Berkeley; our heroine, Tina Chen, who is working herself through college as well as financially assisting her family. Also attending Berkeley is Blake, the super-rich and super-famous son of the super-rich and super-famous guy who founded a start-up that is TOTALLY not Apple. They clash one day in class when Blake says something privileged and condescending in a discussion about food stamps; Tina, possibly the only one in the class whose family has ever been on food stamps, finally snaps and calls him on it, and Blake is smitten.

This leads to an elaborate deception plot in which Blake attempts to flee the pressures of his responsibilities at Totally Not Apple and his dad's expectations by convincing Tina to trade lives with him: she gets his house! his car! the income from his truly enormous portfolio! the responsibility of taking charge on the launch of his company's newest super-snazzy tech device! Meanwhile, he gets her crappy apartment! and a crappy job that has equivalent crappy income to her crappy job! and the absolute minimum level of contact with Totally Not Apple!

This seems like the setup for a lot of HIJINKS!! but actually it's mostly just the opportunity for a.) a lot of exploration of class and privilege and b.) for each of them to get involved with each other's families, which, it turns out, is the reason I liked this book so much: Blake and Tina's families, but Tina's especially, are both so interesting. Milan does a really amazing job writing parental relationships that feel complicated, genuinely loving, and genuinely problematic. Tina's mother is a brilliant, funny, dedicated woman who throws herself into volunteer legal work for her community, but the financial needs of her own family -- including stuff like her younger daughter's ADHD medication -- come terrifyingly low on her priorities list; Blake's affectionate asshole of a father takes enormous amounts of time to incorporate his son into his life and makes sure he knows he's a priority to him, but he also puts the same kind of enormous and unhealthy amounts of pressure on him as he does on himself. The great thing about these family portraits is also how they deftly avoid the usual stereotypes about "overbearing Chinese immigrant mother!" and "work-obsessed billionaire father!" The cultural expectations and pressures of Chinese-American communities and Silicon Valley start-up land do play major roles in the family dynamics, but in a way that (to me at least) feels very real and not at all paint-by-numbers.

Also, personally speaking, I love metafiction and explorations of staged 'real life,' so I was really into the whole "Blake's life has been turned into commercials and product launches since he was an adorable child!" thing. I also love gallant, unstoppable fighters for JUSTICE, see above, and TINA'S MOM IS SUCH A GOOD CHARACTER, would happily read a whole book about her.

But instead we're getting a whole book about Tina's awesome trans roommate Maria, which, ALSO DOWN FOR THAT.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/407057.html

So there was a period of time last month when I was capable of doing not much of anything except wheezing on my sickbed and reading library e-copies of historical romance novels on my Kindle.

Over those two days or so, I read:

1. The entirety of the Brothers Sinister series by Courtney Milan as published so far, which currently consists of ( two novellas and a novel )

2. What Happens in London, by Julia Quinn, which is probably ( the most hilariously plotless romance novel ever )

3. His at Night, by Sherry Thomas, which ( did not have as many hijinks as I wanted )

As a sidenote, I am sure this is something that the romance novel-reading community has come to terms with well before I did, but it never fails to be hilarious to me how little the titles of romance novels have to do with their actual content. What Happens in London is my new favorite, though, because, as I have explained, NOTHING HAPPENS IN LONDON. NOTHING.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/337035.html

I am far from the first person to discover that stressful finals period is a great time for reading fluffy romance novels. At the recommendation of everyone and their sister over on my last post about romance novels I got some Courtney Milan out of the library recently and have been reading her trilogy, Unclaimed, Unlocked and Unraveled.

And obviously I enjoyed them all because I read all three, even though I started with the one I liked least!

This is one of those series that is about a set of brothers and every one of them ends up hooked up with someone by the end. Ash is the oldest and the protagonist of Unclaimed; the backstory is that Ash & brothers had a neglected childhood and abusive mother and Ash went off to seek his fortune and came back and found his brothers on the streets and is super guilty about that. According to the book, he went off and made his fortune in India, but since where he went has no actual impact, I have decided that where he actually went is to THE FUTURE, where he absorbed ideas like "class systems are silly and outdated!" and "explicitly enthusiastic consent is great!" Please don't think I'm complaining about this. Ash's Trip To The Future was GREAT.

Ash thinks that his love interest is a servant -- she's not, she actually the sister of his WORST ENEMY in disguise -- so he spends a lot of the book trying to convince her to NOT BE BOUND BY CLASS RULES and LIVE FOR HERSELF and DO WHATEVER THE HELL SHE WANTS. "Damn their bonnets," he says to her, encouragingly, "damn their rules!" (Best line in the book by far. DAMN THEIR BONNETS.)

Sadly, Ash did not learn about ( somewhat spoiler )

Anyway I enjoyed this reasonably well, especially since most of the development at the end is about heroine Margaret finding herself and claiming her value and worth while still figuring out how to maintain relationships with her imperfect family! But I was extra super curious about Unclaimed, which features baby brother Mark, THE MOST FAMOUS VIRGIN IN LONDON. Mark has written a book about the importance of chastity! Now he has a knighthood and a huge horde of fanboys, much to his embarrassment and chagrin, especially since his fanboys are all "GET YE GONE, TEMPTRESS WOMAN" and Mark is like "uh, actually, I wrote the book because of the huge societal double standard around sex and because I thought that dudes should be better to ladies and take responsibility for their actions? . . . anybody?" Again: I appreciated this.

Heroine Jessica is a courtesan who has been hired to seduce Mark and ruin his reputation and most of the book is about her dealing with her Dark Secret and Tragic Backstory. (Mark is like, "I'm not intending to put out before marriage, but talking and flirting and maybe making out is awesome! :D") I wish there had been even more role reversal and exploration of the usual dynamic of experienced-man-inexperienced-woman than there was, but it made up for it at the end when Jessica got to call out the villain to PISTOLS AT DAWN and FIGHT FOR HER OWN HONOR and it rocked.

But the third book, Unraveled, was definitely my favorite. For one thing, it had the most plot. The protagonist, middle brother Smite, is a magistrate with no social skills and no interest in anything but JUSTICE. Heroine Miranda, on the other hand, works for the Patron, mysterious city crime boss!

The Patron stuff is actually really interesting, the examination of justice and responsibility is great; especially great is the fact that Miranda (who is twenty or so) has a sort of adopted twelve-year-old younger brother, and she's like "yeah, when I took him in, I thought, it'll be great! Found family! Warm fuzzies! No one told me that RAISING AN ADOLESCENT BOY IS TERRIFYING. He speaks entirely in monosyllables and I spend all my time freaking out that he's going to kill himself or get himself arrested! AHHHHH!" I LOVED THIS.

Also, loads of sympathetic gay characters; also, Smite's PTSD is interesting and well-handled and not magically cured, nor does he want it to be; also, I like that it is the least sentimental of the books; also, I both like and find hilarious the fact that Miranda is like "I am unfortunately attracted to danger! . . . so I went and found the guy who is intimidating and dangerous TO CRIMINALS! Well played, self. :D" I agree, Miranda; well played.