The Mam­moth Book of Para­nor­mal Romance by Trisha Telep

My review

rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars
I’m extreme­ly sur­prised by how much I enjoyed this anthol­o­gy! I picked it up intend­ing to just read the sto­ries by authors I know I like—Kelley Arm­strong, Ilona Andrews, Car­rie Vaughn, Hol­ly Lisle, Jeaniene Frost, Maria V. Sny­der. I had nev­er heard of some of the oth­er authors. A few names I remem­bered see­ing in oth­er antholo­gies and not enjoy­ing their work.

I did, how­ev­er, delib­er­ate­ly put myself in a tol­er­ant mind­set: this is a book of romance sto­ries. It would­n’t be fair to judge them as any­thing else.

That worked rather bet­ter than it has in the past. I still got a lit­tle annoyed at hav­ing so much of each sto­ry ded­i­cat­ed to cou­ples (and all het/mono cou­ples, at that!) rather than some intrigu­ing world ideas, but man­aged to stay on track.

In the end, I only skipped one story—I just don’t like the Weath­er War­dens stuff at all. I found a cou­ple of oth­ers sub­stan­dard, but all in all, Telep chose very well. I def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend this book to any­one who enjoys para­nor­mal romance (maybe even those who usu­al­ly stick to just romance), and most urban fan­ta­sy fans.

View all my reviews.

Hot­ter Than Hell, the lat­est “Hell” anthol­o­gy is edit­ed and has an intro­duc­tion by Kim Har­ri­son. I don’t know if the sex­i­er trend is her choice, a response to mar­ket demands, or some­thing else again.

The anthol­o­gy is thick­er than most, with longer pieces–short novellas?–by each of the 13 authors. I read a copy from the library, but it’s one of the few antholo­gies that I’d con­sid­er worth the $7.99 cov­er price.

Sam and I had a very nice date night while Katie was out with her beau. He had start­ed mak­ing chili last night, fin­ished it tonight, and added corn muffins. I’m not a big fan of chili (I won’t eat it if Sam did­n’t make it), but it was a very sat­is­fy­ing meal.

The girl is doing very well in the online course she’s tak­ing, and I’m hap­py to say that my semes­ter is going well, too. It’s hard to believe that my baby will like­ly start col­lege cours­es this sum­mer or fall!

I real­ly need­ed anoth­er fic­tion author to fol­low, right? But I’ve seen this series of books about a were­wolf named Kit­ty, and I final­ly got a chance to read them. I fin­ished the first, Kit­ty and the Mid­night Hour, today and jumped right into Kit­ty Goes to Wash­ing­ton. I have Kit­ty Takes a Hol­i­day all lined up and ready to go, but I’m already wish­ing that I had the next vol­ume, Kit­ty and the Sil­ver Bul­let. And that, my dears, is a sign of a fine author spin­ning a very good yarn, con­sid­er­ing all the oth­er books wait­ing and ready on my shelf.

The library has the books labeled as hor­ror, but I’d put them in the para­nor­mal romance/dark fan­ta­sy cat­e­go­ry. Hap­pi­ly, the “romance” part isn’t the most sig­nif­i­cant one, and does­n’t get in the way of good plot. There was a moment today when I won­dered if “>Vaughn and Kim Har­ri­son had shared a brain to a small extent, but they’ve dealt with a super­fi­cial­ly sim­i­lar issue in very dif­fer­ent ways.

If it weren’t for the fact that I just final­ly got done with my school assign­ments for the week, and must get up when Sam does in the morn­ing, I’d prob­a­bly be sit­ting up read­ing!

Now I real­ly need to find a source for these short sto­ries, though. Any of you have the rel­e­vant mag­a­zine issues?

• “Kit­ty Los­es Her Faith” Weird Tales, #333, Fall 2003
• “Kit­ty and the Mosh Pit of the Damned” Weird Tales #338, Jan-Feb 2006
• “Look­ing After Fam­i­ly” Realms of Fan­ta­sy, Feb­ru­ary 2007
• “Kit­ty’s Zom­bie New Year” Weird Tales #345