Anne

When You Don’t Get What You’re Expecting

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

So, I just finished all 38 pages of Cara McKenna’s Brazen.
Brazen
There.  Enjoy that cover goodness!  For about 37 pages I was in love with this short story.  It’s different.  It’s really hot.   Caroline and Sean are awesome together.  And Caroline put together an honest to goodness harem of young men who are on a schedule to come and hang out with her each evening.  (Or should I say hang out and come with her???)  But on that last page…  it’s not a happy ending.  They each go their own way.  I just didn’t see it coming and it really caught me off guard!  (Note to self: check tags on goodreads reviews to look for HEA before reading.)  I think I still would have read it if I’d known it was just about a short affair.  I think I would have liked it better for knowing what I was getting into, actually.  Which brings me to my point…

I hate it when I don’t get what I’m expecting!  I read to escape my real life.  I expect a HEA, and I appreciate some hot sex along the way.  But I’m picky about that, too.  I like to know what kind of heat level to expect before I read.  I’m generally ok if a book is hotter than I expected, but if I’m expecting explicit love scenes and I don’t get them, it leaves me disappointed.

Most of the time, reading for escape, I’m reading for an HEA.  The new 50 Shades trend of trilogies where you only get the HEA after all three books?  Drives me CRAZY.  I don’t want to wait that long!  But it makes me horribly mad to read and find a cliffhanger ending when I’m not expecting it!  That’s rare now, as I’m reading more reviews and on the lookout for such manipulations!  I’d rather think of the trilogy as one big book, and I don’t want to read them unless I can read them all.

There are excpetions, of course, because I totally love Dallas and Roarke (J.D. Robb) and I think I’ll read anything in the Kate Daniels world (though I’m a book behind!) and these are both series that stay with the same couple all the way through.  Oh, and the Adrian English series by Josh Lanyon goes on that same couple series list.  In each of these cases, the book itself comes to a pretty satisfactory ending, it just leaves you wanting more – not teetering at the edge of a cliffhanger.

So I know what I want.  And I’ll read reviews and snoop around to make sure I’m getting what I want.  And if I’m goign to step out of my usual, I like to know it going in.  (Ummm, yeah, people have mentioned that i might have some control issues.  It’s ok, I’ve got it under control.)  How about you?  Do you enjoy a surprise?  Are you ok with a cliffhanger?  What do you think?  ~Anne

Raw Heat by Charlotte Stein

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

Raw Heat
Grade – B+
Hotness Level – Inferno
Kink Level – None
Genre-paranormal, novella
Reviewed by Anne

I have been on a break from reading.  I didn’t mean to, it just happened!  I started sewing and crocheting and I had so many ideas I wanted to get to and… I just wasn’t picking up my reader!  Then when I did pick up my reader I was in the middle of a sweet Christmas romance and, as much as I wanted it to work for me, it just wasn’t working!  So, I set aside the Christmas sweets (thank you for that advice, Kate) and picked up something much darker – Raw Heat.
 
I’m a Charlotte Stein fan.  I haven’t read everything she’s written, but I’m working my way through her back list and I really enjoy her voice.  I had Raw Heat on my reader, bought at a 50% off sale at All Romance eBooks, I suspect, and I decided to try it.  It’s a novella and it’s a pretty short one, but there’s a lot of story packed into the pages.  Serena is a nurse, well, almost a nurse at an underground facility that experiments on werewolves.  See, werewolves have taken over the world to the point that just pockets of humans exist, hiding away in above ground fortresses or in literally underground cities.  But werewolves regularly attack and the humans are losing.  
 
Serena’s patient is Connor.  She cleans him up after the “doctors” have experimented on him.  Tortured him.  He is a werewolf, which means he quickly heals any damage they’ve done to him.  But healing doesn’t remove blood, so Serena comes in each day to clean him up.  And they have started talking to each other.  And Serena is falling for him.
 
The story is told entirely from Serena’s point of view, but it’s done in such a way that you clearly know Connor has feelings for her as well.  This is an erotic short, so it starts when Serena and Connor are finally taking the step to make their relationship physical.  
 
I really enjoyed the story.  It was a good hot read while being dark and complex.  All that in a short story.  From the beginning I was a bit creeped out wondering if Serena was part of an experiment she wasn’t aware of with Connor.  That bothered me, but added an edge to the story.  I think that added a bit too much suspense for my personal taste, but overall the story worked for me.

The Best Present I Ever Received

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

Personalzed romantic fantasy novel By Magic Bound

My husband has been known to be a bit hit and miss when it comes to buying me gifts.  Gifts aren’t terribly important to me, but I like to receive something  on the appropriate holidays.  (I consider appropriate holidays to be my birthday, Christmas, and Mothers Day.) It has worked well for me to just tell Mr. Anne what I want for each holiday, either specifically or with some wiggle room.  That way I’m not disappointed and we’re all good. I rarely get surprised, but I’m fine with that.  Christmas this year was a major exception though!  Mr. Anne got me the most thoughtful, shows-how-well-he-knows-me gift EVER!  He got me a romance novel personalized with our names!  SO cool!  I was laughing and crying at the same time when I opened it.  I think it will forever remain at the top of my favorite gifts list!

He ordered it from www.booksbyme.com.   The idea is pretty cool.  You can pick romance or regular fiction.  They even have children’s and young adult books.  Within the romance there were even several genres to pick.  Once he picked romance and fantasy, he put in our names, physical characteristics, friends’ names and more.   He chose a science fiction fantasy romance where he was a Water Mage and I was a self trained illegal Mage and we came together to, of course, save the world.  He chose a heat level that was “less than ménage but still hot” and that was fine with me.  (Note:  after I checked out the website myself, I asked him about this, because I didn’t see any menage books.  He said he’d checked out a few different places, and it must have been another place that offered several more risque books you could put yourself into, including books where you already started as a couple, but then explored other interesting scenarios together.  The website he bought from, Books By Me offers books that range from no sex to a Blaze level.)

I have to tell you, though, that while it was an awesome gift, it was a weird read.  First of all, I was hyper aware of all the fill-in-the-blank spots.  I don’t think they really stuck out much, but because it was about ME, I noticed when the heroine flips her straight brown hair, because it’s MY straight brown hair.  And when the hero looked at MY “athletic” body, I had to break out of the story and appreciate that Mr. Anne had charitably described me as athletic!  (It made my day again!  See, best give EVER.)

Besides noticing the physical descriptions, I also was surprisingly squicked out to read the sex scene in the book!  I mean, I never skip sex scenes.  I’m not ashamed to say I look forward to them and really appreciate a hot sex scene.  The one in my book wasn’t bad at all, but I really didn’t enjoy seeing our names like I thought I would.  It was just…weird. 

The story itself was just ok, though it’s hard for me to judge, since I was so wonderfully distracted by all the ME in the book.  It was a hoot and hands down a wonderful and thoughtful gift!