L.A. Boruff

Read only if you are a middle-aged woman who lost the love of your life (but who also refers to your only son as the other love of your life) and want to imagine what it might be like to fall in love again with a magically handsome sheriff's deputy who has teal AND blue eyes:

"I found it hard to stare into his unusual teal and blue eyes. At the same time, it was impossible to look away. He didn't have two different color eyes. They were a mix of teal and dark blue. Teal being the dominant show more color. I'd never seen eyes like those before."

The writing sounds like something I would have tossed off for a hasty book review, minus my normal plethora of commas and semi-colons, and consists of moment-by-moment internal narration from someone totally unlike me:

"When I entered the kitchen and spotted the bottles of water, my hospitable side got the better of me. I put the bottles in a cooler and covered them in ice, then dragged them onto the porch. There. Now they had plenty to drink if they needed it...

I settled down at my desk to write, but my attention kept drifting out the window. I had the perfect view of their work truck and couldn't help but notice how young and fit several of the construction workers were. I spent more time watching them work and admiring the view. I really had to stop myself from ogling before I was caught being a creeper. Plus, none of them set my insides on fire like a certain cop I ran into at the grocery store three days ago.

And I will not think about Officer Walker.

After lunch, during which I nearly convinced myself to make sandwiches for the entire crew, I sat back down to work. Oh, I offered to make lunch, but they politely declined. It was the mother in me to make sure everyone was taken care of. Maybe I'd get a pet to care for since my son abandoned me for higher learning."

This is at 25% and the most magical thing that's happened is that the house made a sound like breaking glass and scared the construction guys away. Oh, and an undead cat has made two uninteresting appearances. I mean, it's a cat. It could have scratched someone and given it pestilent necrophages at the very least. You know what would be original? Ghouls as construction workers.

I tried to do my due diligence before buying, but was suckered anyway. There's a reason all the reviews say, "good job setting up the characters." At a quarter of the way through, I'm not even sure what our main conflict is. Selling a house that doesn't want to be sold, perhaps, except it's more on the line of Goosebumps than Poltergeist.

I'm not even going to get into the eighth-grade writing style. If this was in paper format, I'd fully expect 1.5" margins.

If there's anything that demonstrates the fallibility of Goodreads' rating system, it's the fact that this has managed to garner a 4.36 rating. I'm not saying those other profiles are fake, because they are surprisingly fleshed out for the normal sock puppet accounts. But I do question their taste: most of them have a 4.7 rating for over five hundred books. I need to go read about drug dealers to get this one out of my head.

Update: speaking of drug dealers, I have a book addiction. Because I had to know, am I selling this short? What's the deal with the five star ratings? So I moved into skim gear and finished. It was both better and worse than I expected. Literally, nothing happens until 50%. You read that right. The reviewer who said, "this is all exposition" wasn't exaggerating. The murder is kind of laughable. Relationships between the characters go from "hey, I just met you and I'm not sure I like you," to complete trust and (thematic spoiler) moving in in a chapter. Worse, the protagonist turns out to be (brace yourself) a Super-Speshul Snowflake Deluxe (as is her son. The good stuff: teamwork. A friendship with another woman who is as adventurous as our heroine is lame. A hilarious zombie butler.

I'm super bummed and irritated: why does the middle of women's lives in urban fantasy have to be so boring and full of uncomplicated emotions and experiences? I'd agree with the reviewer who thought the characters acted like they are twenty. If there's one thing life has emphasized, there's way more complexity than I've found in this sub-genre, and I'm kind of pissed that it's basically being sanitized. No kids no husband = bored and sad. Life goal is return to 'normal.' Someday I'm going to write one where a woman owns her anger, frustration and joy and embraces the shit out of the changes. show less

With Father’s Day approaching, we’re all being bombarded with adverts from retailers promoting gifts which they think are suitable for men, and we can see how tricky that is this year because the ‘sporting gift’ is not an option for states in Lockdown. These gendered approaches to gift-giving have always irritated me because (apart from the socks and hankies option) my father would never have wanted any of what was/is being promoted. He was always delighted to receive a gift of music show more or a book or a ticket to a concert—but only classical music and not tools, not sporting or political bios and definitely not gardening books to give my mother more ideas for him to implement! (Actually, his favourite gift was jars of my home-made lime marmalade, limes in my garden being so conveniently in season at this time of the year).

I thought about this while I was reading this highly enjoyable fictionalised account of the Great Air Race from England to Australia in 1919. If my father were still alive, I’d be sending Long Flight Home up to him for Father’s Day because he was always interested in history and there were gaps in his knowledge of OzHist because his schooling was in Britain. But I bet my mother would have snaffled it before he even had a chance to start on it because she had an adventurous streak, and she would have loved the combination of ‘boys-own-adventure’ and a romance sorely tested by the lure of adventure that overcomes the narrator of the story, Wally Shier.

Long Flight Home is based on the real-life story of the pioneering flight, but it’s not told from the PoV of the well-known aviation hero the pilot Ross Smith and his navigator and brother Keith Smith. Framed by storytelling at the pub in 1968, mechanic Wally Shiers narrates his story, from his reluctant enlistment during WW1 to his capture by the romance of early wartime aviation and his progress through the fledgling Australian air wing to become a sought-after mechanic for the race to win £10,000. His girl, Helena waits for him at home all through the war but her loyalty falters when Wally doesn’t come home as promised but instead goes to India with Smith and then back to England to prepare a plane for the race.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/26/long-flight-home-by-lainie-anderson/ show less

Historical crime fiction set at home is always attractive, and this one was worth the read. 1917. The first flush of World War I is over. 300 hundred wounded soldiers have returned and a popular army captain is busy drumming up another 150 recruits for South Australia's 10th Battalion. Murders are rare in Adelaide and then the Curator of the Art Gallery is murdered, throat cut, beneath a painting that has attracted a lot of attention. Kate Cox loses her assistant to the Adelaide Detective show more force, but the investigation is very slow.

The historical elements and settings of the story are credible and the characters strike home. show less

This a quick urban fantasy with cosy vibes. I enjoyed the family ties and supportive relationships. The pacing was good, with the story being one mini action scene after another to keep things ticking over nicely and my eyes focussed on each page. It was nice to see two FMC's driving the narrative. An appealing story.