Friday, May 9, 2008

Where's My Hero? an anthology, Julia Quinn, Lisa Kleypas and Kinley MacGregor

I finished Where's My Hero (3 stars), a 3 novella/short story anthology, and started a re-read of Susan Andersen's Baby, I'm Yours.

The premise of Where's My Hero is taking secondary characters from other novels and writing his/her story. Julia Quinn did a story for Belle's (Dancing At Midnight, which I had just re-read, coincidentally!) brother Ned who is getting married - not a love match until he meets the betrothed's sister, and finds his love match in her instead.

Lisa Kleypas's story is about Derek Craven's daughter Lydia and her love match, Dr Lindale. However, although the back cover blurb leads you to believe we are following the Dr Lindale from Someone To Watch Over Me, anyone who has ever studied any MATH at all could tell you that, since it's Craven's daughter (not yet born in STWOM), surely she wouldn't be in love with the doctor from that story who would easily be 30+ years older than she is. Nope, it's his son, who is also a doctor now - 20 years or so later. So Kleypas's story doesn't exactly follow the formula...

The 3rd story is a followup on Kinley MacGregor's MacAllister trilogy, which - also coincidentally - I had read. I didn't remember that when I got the book. I got it mainly for the Kleypas title, while I was getting her backlist, before I realized I didn't like her writing enough to bother. I didn't like MacGregor's all that much either, although I did remember, vaguely, the characters. I believe they're medieval - the writing for them was a little awkward.

I'm so tired of authors not knowing to say "between you and ME" instead of "between you and I".

Anyway, the anthology gets 3 stars from me. Not awful, just not great - and all 3 were about a couple getting ready to marry, and in all 3 cases the planned marriage had to be halted and changed around a little, which, uh, was a sort of awkward premise and one I don't think I've seen in a novel-length romance.

I can't recall if I gave Baby, I'm Yours 4 or 5 stars the first time around - it wasn't perfect, but it was a lot of fun. I realized after my 3rd re-listen to all the SEP books that even when they weren't perfect and one or both of the characters (or their actions) drove me nutz, they were so much fun that I now consider them favorites anyway, which surely must make them 5 stars.

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