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Post by devogirl on Feb 21, 2011 23:40:28 GMT -5
Ok, here it is! This month's selected book is The Morning Side of Dawn by Justine Davis. What did you think? Post your reactions here.
Live chat will be Wednesday Feb. 23 at 8 PM EST. Feel free to schedule another chat if that time/day doesn't work for you.
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Post by ruthmadison on Feb 22, 2011 4:25:56 GMT -5
I found it weird and confusing that the minor characters all had such complicated back stories that we never fully got.
Then Emma told me this was a sequel and there are other books telling those stories.
Overall I enjoyed the book, I found the characters pretty like-able.
I was bothered by part that I mentioned earlier where Cassie talks about "of course" she would rather him not be disabled.
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Post by Emma on Feb 22, 2011 13:17:13 GMT -5
I enjoyed the book as well. While I think the author is not a dev, she did a good job portraying Cassie as seeing his disability positively. I think some of the things Cassie said throughout the book imply that she may not only be into Dar but find disabled guys attractive in the same way. I think I have said here before that after doing some looking online I found that Justine Davis consulted an online disability discussion board when writing the book.
Anyway I look forward to hearing what others thought and talking with you all tomorrow.
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Post by devogirl on Feb 22, 2011 21:33:03 GMT -5
It's very common for romance writers to start with a novel about one couple, then spin out a second novel with a secondary character, then a third one and so on. That's what's happening here. IMO it's not exactly a sequel per se, but the other two couples have their own novels and the author seems to expect that we have read them. It's a feature of romances I don't like so much, because it's so rigid: one couple per novel, and they must live happily ever after. That's why in this novel she goes on and on about how perfectly in love those other two couples are. Life doesn't work like that, but it would ruin the fantasy if we revisited the perfect couple and found they were arguing about who should wash the dishes.
I agree that Davis is definitely not a dev, but she does like the wounded hero. Sean is also an amputee, and Chase has scars and I believe suffered from amnesia or something.
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Post by dolly on Feb 23, 2011 12:19:54 GMT -5
i liked dar!  i wish there had been more dev details, of course. i'd read a whole book of just dev details! lol but i actually enjoyed the story quite a bit. i'm not much of a romance reader (probably because romance novels with they type of guy i like in them are so rare) but i was happily surprised at how engaged i became with the story. i agree the author is definitely not a dev, but it did seem like she'd done some research. stuff like describing dar's chair and how it was designed differently from a paraplegic's for the counter-balancing of weight. it makes more sense to know there had been other books about the other couples. but i kinda skimmed over some of that stuff anyway.  |
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Post by ruthmadison on Feb 23, 2011 14:31:10 GMT -5
i liked dar! i wish there had been more dev details, of course. i'd read a whole book of just dev details! lol but i actually enjoyed the story quite a bit. i'm not much of a romance reader (probably because romance novels with they type of guy i like in them are so rare) but i was happily surprised at how engaged i became with the story. i agree the author is definitely not a dev, but it did seem like she'd done some research. stuff like describing dar's chair and how it was designed differently from a paraplegic's for the counter-balancing of weight. it makes more sense to know there had been other books about the other couples. but i kinda skimmed over some of that stuff anyway. I just finished reading another romance novel with a disabled male lead, and I have to say that the lack of those is not why I don't read romance novels! This one, with all its faults, is much, much better than the one I just read. |
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Post by devogirl on Feb 26, 2011 14:43:48 GMT -5
Thanks everyone for another great book club chat. Just to recap some of my own reactions...
Favorite scene: where Dar crashes on the hiking trail and has to pull himself back up the hill. I first read this book a while ago, and that scene stood out in great detail in my memory, but I was surprised to realize on rereading that the author actually skips over the details of him getting back up the hill. I had supplied most of the detail in my own devo imagination, haha.
Least favorite scene: where Dar braids Cassie's hair. Seriously?! What grown hetero man would know how to do that, let alone volunteer to do that for a woman he barely knows? That totally killed the mood for me. I suddenly felt like I was reading bad slash fanfic where the guys act exactly like teenage girls. The excuse in the book was that Dar often braided the little girl Katie's hair, but if anything that made it worse. Several of you pointed out that his relationship with Katie was creepy and wrong. It was clearly supposed to show his sensitive side, but the author just didn't pull it off.
The general consensus seemed to be that although the author is clearly not a dev, she did a pretty good job of portraying disability realistically and making Dar an attractive character. I also really liked the detailed discussions of the racing and hiking chairs he builds.
Despite its flaws, the more I read romances, the more I appreciate how unusual this one is. There are a ton of wounded hero romances where the disability is only decorative--the author only mentions it to heighten the pathos, then leaves it out or cures it when it becomes inconvenient. But here I really liked Dar's insistence on using a wheelchair rather than prosthetics because he values functionality over appearance.
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