Devil in Winter

This is the longest I've gone without updating this blog since I started it. I've got fifteen books waiting to be written about, which is the furthest I've ever fallen behind. I was already a bit behind when the doctors said my husband might only have a month left to live. That was six weeks ago, and while my reading pace has certainly slowed, it never quite stopped. At the moment things are more or less stable. Not getting any better, but not getting significantly worse either. And in this moment of calm I wanted to try and catch up on my backlog.

But I'm starting with the most recent book I finished, Devil in Winter. I'll get to the others as I get to them. Time has stopped feeling linear in so many ways that I'm less concerned about this blog being perfectly chronological. Moreover, this book was surprisingly pertinent to my own situation.

The heroine, Evie, spends a good chunk of the book taking care of her husband, Sebastian, while he convalesces after being shot. He comes close to dying, but this is a romance novel so you know he won't. He'll recover and he and Evie will live happily ever after. I read most of this book while sitting next to my own husband in hospice, occasionally pausing to help the nurses clean him or to give him some water. It happened to coincide with a time when my husband seemed to be doing better. I began to entertain the idea that he might actually recover.

This is what romance novels do. They give us hope. Sometimes against our will.

My husband is unlikely to recover. He might be feeling a bit better lately, but that's because he's getting more rest in the hospice than he was in the hospital. It's because after months of isolation, he's able to spend time with his children and his friends and me and his mom. It's because people often seem to do a little better right before they get a whole lot worse.

But I'm glad I started thinking down those lines. It made me push the doctors a little harder and force a few conversations. I feel better informed now, and I believe my husband's care team is, too. I think our understanding of the situation has improved, even if the situation itself hasn't.

And who knows, maybe he will make a miraculous recovery. Everyone has told me that it's important to keep hoping. Maybe I'll get my happily ever after after all, instead of just a happily for a little while.

Back to the book, which is commonly considered Lisa Klepas' best. I enjoyed it. I loved watching Evie discover her spine of steel (much as I'm discovering my own lately). Sebastian was amazing, and I only wish I'd gotten to spend more time in his head. But ultimately, Kleypas' books feel a bit too unbalanced for me. She's far more concerned with her heroines than her heroes, and it leaves me wanting more. I'll finish out this series and get Daisy's story. And then I'll probably move on to other authors in the genre.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more