I found a ‘must read’ in debut novelist Erin Kellison’s latest release “Shadow Bound”.  This book has been categorized as an urban fantasy/paranormal romance.  Personally I don’t think it can be categorized.  The plot and the writing are fresh and captivating, making this a book to put at the top of your list this summer.  See my review at the Barnes & Noble, Heart to Heart blog.

I recently read Rosemary Laurey’s Kiss Me Forever and was swept away by the characters she created.  I was also delighted to have found this ‘new-to-me author’.  You can read my full review at Barnes and Noble Heart to Heart Blog.

Read More…

Pieces of Sky, the first in the series was released last year.  Open Country, the second in the series was released this week.  I loved both books and I’m talking about them over at the Heart to Heart blog at Barnes and Noble.

If you’re looking for PJ, Andrea, Gannon or Buffie, visit them at their terrific new site The Romance Dish.

Stacy can be found on her own blog at Stacy’s Place on Earth.

Kate – a soon to be newly published author can be found at Babbling About Books and More.

And last, but certainly not least – you can visit Kati by going to Katidom.

We’re looking forward to chatting with you about romance.

I’ll tell you why – it’s because they spit.  You read right, they commit the one heinous offence that both Marisa and I find beyond reprehensible.  Might I also state, that you never see women spit.  Men spit on the street all the time.  Most women I know would rather choke on their own saliva than have it leave their mouth.  Are men born with a with a spit gene?  Or is it something their taught in grade school, because I must have been absent on the day the teacher was giving that lesson.

And when it comes to getting straight A’s in spitting, no one gets higher grades than the professional baseball player.  I’m a diehard Yankee fan and I find it almost impossible to watch a game and eat dinner at the same time.  From the pitcher to the manager, it’s just random close ups of guys hurling balls of saliva from their mouths.  Some of them just purse their lips and spit it out, others go through various gyrations of hacking up the most gosh awful flemmy mucous you ever saw.  EWWWW!  It’s disgusting. I cannot even imagine what the floor of the dugout or the dirt on the field must be like after a game.  I can only assume that the grounds keepers hose the entire place down, because it’s got to be one big saliva mini stream.

It begs the question – at least in my mind – Why is it that you never see other sportsmen spitting?  Imagine if they spit all over a basketball court?  It would be nothing but mayhem with size 14 sneakers slipping and sliding.  Or football – imagine those pros trying to hurl spit through their face masks?  Or even jockeys taking the time to spit while riding on the backs of an animal whose main objective is to fly like the wind – imagine the back wash on that?!

So, I ask, and I really want to know – What is in the throats of most major league baseball players that make them compelled to hurl saliva and flem all over the place like it was confetti at a New Year’s Eve party?  It ain’t appetizing and it sure as hell ain’t sexy. And that’s why I don’t think they’ll be doing a romance series on baseball players.

The author states in her blog, I never wanted a girl’s face on the cover. Micah’s identity is unstable. She spends the book telling different version of herself. I wanted readers to be free to imagine her as they wanted.

But the art department at Bloomsbury obviously felt differently when they created the US cover.  The author explains their reasoning:
The US Liar cover went through many different versions. An early one, which I loved, had the word Liar written in human hair. Sales & Marketing did not think it would sell. Bloomsbury has had a lot of success with photos of girls on their covers and that’s what they wanted. Although not all of the early girl face covers were white, none showed girls who looked remotely like Micah.

I strongly objected to all of them. I lost.

Every year at every publishing house, intentionally and unintentionally, there are white-washed covers. Since I’ve told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all. How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white? Why would she pick up Liar when it has a cover that so explicitly excludes her?
The book’s Australian cover just contains words.  No misrepresentation there.

Certainly the YA genre has exploded – and there’s no doubt there are many, many more books for a young teenager to read then when I was in school.  But I put forth the question – are we teaching to segregate from an early age?  While people of color read books that feature ‘white’ characters all the time, do ‘white people’ read books that feature multi-cultural characters?  It would seem to me, that the publishers don’t think so, why else categorize them so specifically?  While publishers are improving in their selections of what they offer African American and Latino young readers, why make the distinction.  To me, it’s blatant racism.  It’s saying we’re writing books that only represent you and these are the books only ‘your kind’ will read.  As a Latina – I read them all, and I am transported by a book regardless of the color of the characters in them.

In ““Myths of Teenage Readers” written in 2000 Marc Aronson he states:
Not very long ago, I would come to the editorial meetings in which new book acquisitions were approved by the higherups and marketing management. There I would hear: “blacks don’t buy books.” This was astonishing. Important people running large companies were living in a myth-suffused haze in which prejudice defined perception. Hearing something like that stops you in your tracks. It is so far from reality, yet it is expressed with complete authority. And these beliefs matter”

It would appear that Bloomsbury hasn’t really changed their views in the 9 years since Mr. Aronson’s book was published.

In a 2008 PW article, Andrea Pinkney, v-p and executive editor at Scholastic was quoted as saying: “We want teens to look at the jacket and say, ‘Yes, that is me,’

Yes, people want to know they’re represented in the world.  But when I buy a book, it’s based on the story – does the story speak to me, is there something in this story that I want to know more about, will the story transport me to a place I want to go, or never dreamed of.  When I choose a book I want to learn something new, or be inspired, or think about the world or people in a way I hadn’t thought of before.  And sometimes I buy a book because an author’s language and pacing is so remarkable, I’m in awe.  Do I buy a book because the characters represent me?  Hardly ever.  In looking over the list of books I’ve read in the last year, not one of them represented me, and yet I enjoyed many of them.

So I ask, are we teaching racism at an early age?  Why do we segregate books?   Why don’t white readers cross over as often as multi-cultural readers?  And why do publishers and booksellers still insist that a black face or a Latino face or an Asian face or any face that isn’t white won’t appeal to white readers? Why not say, this year, there will be no differentiation, we’re just selling books, and they’ll be on the shelf alphabetically by author and in the sub-genre of YA, or romance, or mystery or whatever.  In my opinion, let’s start early – no lines, just young adults, who want to read stories about being a teenager and about finding out how other teenagers live – their struggles, their triumphs, their hopes and their dreams.

I recall Eloisa James’ heroine Josephine Essex in “Pleasure for Pleasure ” being  described as  lush with unfashionable curves – basically she was overweight.  And I certainly remember the brouhaha  the followed when the book was released.  Pleasure for Pleasure was the fourth book in Ms. James’ Essex Sisters series -  and by the fourth book, we all knew Josie was ‘big’.  We were happy she wasn’t Scarlet O’Hara – thin and struggling to get her 20” waist into 18 inches of corset.  BUT, the publisher saw things differently and when the book was released it featured a size two heroine on the cover – no unfashionable curves there.  The cover model bore NO resemblance to the heroine of the book.  Now, that’s not unusual, however, if one of the main character descriptions of your heroine is the fact that she is overweight, it’s like putting a 6 ½ foot man on the cover of a book, when your hero is an elf. The two don’t correlate, they don’t corroborate, and basically that dog won’t hunt.

As  I sit here I can’t recall another book I’ve read where the heroine was plump, overweight, fat, or had more than her share of curves.  They’re usually a size 2 – if I had to stretch they’d be a size 4 – but really, don’t fat girls have sex?  What’s wrong with having a heavy heroine?

Can anyone out there name me a book where the heroine was heavy?  Would you read books where the heroine wasn’t your idea of a svelte goddess like creature?