Review: Heated Up My Kindle, Nicely
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 10, 2013
4.5 stars. If you like sizzling stories, this is a happy holiday collection. ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, so some details may have changed in the final version.Play With Me by Lisa Renee Jones - 3 starsThere were many lovely, smexy details, but several things bugged me. Names: Kali (unusual but very pretty - yet NOBODY remarks on the connection to the goddess Kali? Wasted opportunity); Damion, Terrance (the alternate spellings because...?), Dehlia. Call me bitchy, but as a reader it irritates me to have to stop reading to puzzle out how a name might be pronounced.I liked that Kali was as much an alpha female as Damion was an alpha male, BUT - the whole getting bundled into lockdown at the hotel because of a security breach, after only a few days on the job, and then falling into sexplay with the man who is basically your kidnapper is a little too Stockholm Syndrome creepy for me. I'm also not a big fan of erotic fiction told in present tense (yes, I know 21-y.o. virgin Ana does it in 50 Shades). As far as this being a holiday story, there's no interwoven holiday theme, just something stapled in at the end. Still, the heat level is intense, and the hero and heroine are both likable, slightly flawed characters who fit together perfectly.Snow Fall by Mary Ann Rivers - 5 starsThis story is also told in present tense, but it's more literary fiction with erotica woven in. It begins with a gorgeous analogy about hanging Christmas lights: "It's to get some light in front of the darkness, to tell the whole world that we've made it, and that these lights, way up here? That's what we think of the New Year, what's coming - it's all going to be light and joy and flame in the blackness and none of us have any reason to be afraid." Jenny Wright is a microbiologist (a really refreshingly unusual profession for a romance heroine), and the themes of narrowing visual focus, and snowflakes, are woven brilliantly throughout. She comes to have two love interests, a macro-photographer, "C," with whom she engages in cyber-chat, and later, cyber-sex, and later realizes a growing attraction to Evan, her Occupational Therapist. The build may be slow for some readers, one snowflake at a time, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the ending felt satisfactory and sweet as well as hot.After Midnight by Serena Bell - 5 starsThis story is set around the New Year's Eve ritual of a kiss at midnight; Cleveland native and suspected embezzler Miles Shepard is at a party in Boston, and spots a woman who lights him up from the inside. She's beautiful and sexy, yes, but more than that, she seems to be overflowing with joie de vivre. Their New Year's kiss is about to lead to much more, but fate intervenes, before they can even exchange names, let alone phone numbers. After nearly a year, Nora manages to track down Sad-Eyed Guy, Miles, and when they connect... blow-the-roof-off-hot sex, via phone and in person. Both these characters felt very real and believable to me.