Friday, March 17, 2017

Lucky in Love

Posted by: Jenny Schwartz
Happy St Patrick's Day, everyone! May the green beer not give you a hangover.

Being an Australian, the most memorable thing about the legend of St Pat for me is that he cast out snakes from Ireland. How useful would he be to have around the place?

At the beginning of summer , I was walking at the lake and stumbled across these two. They're juvenile tiger snakes (I think - I didn't get close enough to question them). Poisonous slithery creatures.



But snakes aren't actually what I meant to write about, today. I was thinking about love, luck and romance novels.

Us authors positively torture our characters before we let them have their happy ever after - and even then, if we're writing a series, their happy ever after will be disrupted! But all of that just makes for your intense reading pleasure.

The thrill of fear is arousing, which is why smart teenage boys know to take their girlfriends on scary fairground rides or to horror movies. There have actually been studies done and articles written on this phenomenon, such as Is It Love, or Just a Scary Movie?

But with so many books out now, one of my biggest challenges as a reader is to find the books that get this balance between fear and happiness right for me. I'm too cowardly to enjoy horror novels, but at the same time, I appreciate a bit of an edge to the books I read. (Not always, sometimes I'm in an LM Montgomery mood and a book like The Blue Castle is perfect).

Recently I've found myself enjoying:

Born in Fire by KF Breene
House of Bones by AJ Brahms
The Big Book of Post-Collapse Fun by Rachel Sharp
Call to Quarters by Honor Raconteur
Dance by Demelza Carlton
Etched in Bone by Anne Bishop
and (not scary, just funny) the Union Station series by EM Foner

Have you read any great books lately? What do you recommend I read next? Luck these days really is finding books you love, so hit me with those recommended reads. I'll even shout you a virtual green beer ;)



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