romance novel

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Michaeline: A Meeting of Minds and Hearts

a couple embrace passionately on the streets

A meeting of mind and hearts is more than first attraction and admiration of one’s beloved. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

So, tomorrow is the big day! St. Valentine’s Day, when we can indulge in all sorts of sentiment about love and loving: soppy poetry, vinegary commentary, a wistful look at what was or could have been, and a belly-laugh about what silly old things we humans can be when under the domination of love.

I met up with a friend this week for tea, and she pointed me to “The Ideal Marriage According to Novels” by Adelle Waldman in The New Yorker which talks about the different ways men and women write about romance. Basically, Waldman says that women like Jane Austen or Elena Ferrante have an ideal partner in mind who is the woman’s match in intellect and feeling towards the world. And men tend to describe romance as a mysterious thing, and the ideal partner provokes feelings in the male breast. She’s pretty, and her intelligence is a crowning glory (but what she says isn’t really the point; it’s her fitness to be his partner that is the important thing). Continue reading →

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Michaeline: Bujold’s eARC, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (also: What’s an eARC?)

a Holliday Junction -- some sort of DNA thing. In four colors. Should be three for this book.

Genetic manipulation is a little bit scary — if we set it 800 years in the future, it’s a little easier to look at.

First, the biggest news of my week. On October 21, 2015, Lois McMaster Bujold’s new book, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, went up for sale as an eARC over on Baen.com (her publisher’s website here).

GJ&RQ is a wonderful book. If you love the Vorkosigan series, I heartily recommend it. If you haven’t sampled the Vorkosigan series yet, I suggest you start at the start with Cordelia’s Honor (an omnibus of Shards of Honor and Barrayar) and work your way through the entire saga. Not because it’s necessary, per se, but because you’ll be able to really appreciate Bujold’s fine sense of nuance. She’s a master of backstory, of showing how past events continue to echo throughout a life. On the one hand, the parts of GJ&RQ add up to a beautiful wholeness in a territory we don’t see much in either speculative fiction nor romance. But when you know what came before, you get something even bigger than the book in your computer files. You get a life. A life that isn’t finished at 76 by any means. Continue reading →