dear isobel

When it comes to Nora Roberts, she’s reliable in a number of ways. I can count on her to be releasing something near my birthday and Christmas, so I rarely have to purchase a book on my own. I can count on her to include something supernatural in just about everything and I can almost always count on her to be entertained, even if it is only mildly. She’s one of the few authors that I don’t pay attention to reviews about because her track record speaks for herself when it comes to me.

That being said, I wish this trilogy had been better. It had a wonderful premise, a strong set of characters and a lovely touch of my favorite hobby — genealogy. (Though I wish Ms. Roberts would do some research of her own — this is not the first book in which genealogy is used. In Black Rose a few years ago, she referenced the 1890 census which…doesn’t exist. It was burned in a fire and very few fragments are to be found — none of which include the portion she used. It’s a small thing but it’s something I always stumble on when I reread.) The elements were there, so why didn’t it work?

The element of surprise was gone — you knew from the moment Cybil entered the picture in Book #1 that the pairings were set in stone and there was little suspense there. When it comes to traditional romance novels, there is very little suspense. There will very nearly always be a happy ending and your characters are together. It’s the journey that keeps it satisfying, but when I know in Book #1 that the next two books will be Fox/Layla and Cybil/Gage, it left me with a little less eagerness to read it. Though this also happened in her In the Garden — I knew it would be Roz/Mitch and then Hayley/Harper, but it didn’t matter because I loved those characters so much by the end of the first book (even Mitch, who we barely knew) I wanted to see how they fell in love. In this set…I really couldn’t bring myself to care about Cybil and Gage because…I just didn’t see the chemistry between them. They were the odd people out — but I’ll get to Book #3.

So Book #1 started off with great promise. A wonderful brash heroine who obsessed about her weight and a sweet hometown boy with a great dog. They were perfect for each from the first moment and I very much enjoyed Quinn and Cal for much of the first book. Of course, their romance wasn’t the only plot. The set up of the Big Bad, which I didn’t find all that distracting. Until Roberts began to gather the main six characters and group conversations began. And continued through the next book. And the third. My God. I barely got through them with any sort of concentration on the first read and I now skip them when I reread because they just drag and I can feel my eyes start to roll back in my head.

There are some great suspenseful moments in the first entry — the Valentine’s Dance and the blizzard with Lump, and without those dreadful group moments, I probably would have rated it an A. The only reason The Hollow rates so highly with me is because I fell utterly in love with Fox O’Dell, the male lead and I found his romance with Layla unforced and very natural. It was sweet and he was utterly charming. The side plot with his sister Sage and her partner, Paula, was also wonderful and I liked seeing Roberts explore that connection, even if only briefly. David was one of my absolutely favorite characters from In the Garden, so I’m glad he wasn’t an aberration. There were more group moments in this second book, of course, and those moments dragged for me but unlike Blood Brothers, it never dragged me away from the center story — Fox and Layla.

So with those two books, I was interested in how the story would end. Where the Big Bad would go, and how Cybil and Gage were going to end up together and then as I got into the book, I found that I didn’t care. The group conversations were even more annoying. The romance was unbelievably forced and while I didn’t find the triple pregnancies very odd I found Cybil’s reaction incredibly annoying. Roberts is not an author who uses pregnancy as a device very often so it doesn’t bother me when she did the triple whammy. It made some sense, actually, and it added to the story. It just annoyed me that it was handled so…I’m not even sure how to describe it. The Pagan Stone is the only one of the three that I didn’t go back and read a second time, so perhaps my opinion will improve then.

I enjoy the trilogies — because I like to see old characters return and update, but I like it best when her trilogies work over time. The last two were compacted in a matter of months and it showed. The Circle trilogy handled it somewhat better. The first two romances were somewhat weak but the story felt somewhat strong and the third, Valley of Silence was so wonderful, it made up for them. I very much enjoyed the Three Sisters, which took place over a year and gave you a chance to see Ripley, Nell and Mia change over the books. It made that final book so much more pleasurable to read because the connection felt so real. In the Garden worked the same way for me. I adored Harper and Hayley so much that I was very eager to see their story conclude and it’s one of my favorite novels.

In the end, while this trilogy is better than a lot of romance novels I have read in my life (I can think of a few Johanna Lindsey books I’d like to clear from my mind in particular), it’s nowhere near the quality that I have read from Nora Roberts. It’s an enjoyable read, which is why I’ve rated it somewhat high, but it could have been so much more and that was the disappointment.

I hate when one aspect of a plugin doesn’t work but the other part does exactly what you need so you can’t really discard the entire plugin. I’m using Category Pages for my Crimson Glass fanfiction archive. The plugin was originally designed to set a page to be the permanent part of a category archive. For example, if I set a page’s category to be “Daughters”, when you clicked on the Daughters category, it would take you to the page and then whatever else is on the category archive. This makes it much easier to run a fanfiction archive as you can just click on the category and go right to the page.

However, for some reason, this plugin isn’t letting me make any category connections. I tried to go to the support forums and ask for help. I got ignored. I went to the plugin’s actual support forums, but I can’t post without registering and I can’t register because it keeps telling me I’m a computer. Gah!

And I can’t find a plugin that does anything else. I may just scream.

Happy New Year I hope 2008 is a much better year for my family and my friends.

I spent the first hour of the new year arguing with WordPress and Enthusiast. I’ve finally started to work on the Nora Roberts fan site and using WordPress (I’m so obsessed with it, it’s sad) seemed like the best way to create the site quickly, efficiently and thoroughly. But of course, it’s never that easy. I had to do some creative work with Enthusiast, rename a function that I thought was supposed to fixed in the last upgrade, but eh. Enth is freaking fabulous otherwise, I’ll take what I can get.

It just struck me how thoroughly people have to design these scripts. In the three years I’ve been using Enthusiast, this was the first real script I’d had so I think that’s great kudos to Angela for designing it. I don’t know where I’d be without it.

I was watching another episode of 48 Hours Mystery on the Discovery Times Channel and I realized that I’ve got some weird television habits. My favorite channels are Discovery Times, History Channel, International History, and A&E. I love to watch all the true crime  shows (and read the books) — and one of my absolute top ten television favorites is HBO’s Oz. Do you think that makes me just a bit twisted?

Anyway, I’m off to finagle with WordPress a little more than head to bed. Happy New Year again

I love Codesort, don’t get me wrong. In fact, Codesort and FanUpdate are my two favorite scripts, right behind Enthusiast. The world is a better place with those running around, so believe me, I’m thrilled about them.

Unfortunately, Codesort 2.0 is giving me some problems with using it across three domains. I run fanlistings on scott-clifton.com and robinpatrick.net in addition to those on much-ado.org. All three use the same Enth installation, so it shouldn’t be any issue to use the same Codesort and FanUpdate. FanUpdate is working like a charm. Codesort, however, is being extremely cranky and not allowing the codes to actually show. Grr. I’ve got a post in at Codegrrl and an email to the script creator. Hopefully I’ll get it squared.

In another news, I finally dug out my genealogy files and started getting back into them. My grandmother advised me to take a month off. I was only able to put it away for about three weeks. But still — an excellent attempt on my part. I’m going through them to make sure that they’re all current and organized before going back at it. I think I’m going to make another trip to Trenton later this week. Don’t worry, I won’t use my regular blog for my genealogy talk. I opened a new blog — dearisobel.org/family — just for that purpose.

It looks like one of my pet projects is finally getting off the ground — Crimson Glass Reviews. I’m looking forward to collaborating with some of people that have volunteered to help review General Hospital fan fictions. It’ll be great to wade through the deep level of…questionable quality stories out there and help direct people to the good stuff.