By a little I mean the hastily chugged remains of this morning’s second cup of coffee, still sitting on the counter. It was cold. It went down easily. (Coffee and I are rather unhappily codependent unless flavoring — pumpkin spice, toffee nut — are involved. Alas, going to Starbucks hurts, so unhappily codependent we remain.) I’m bursting with writerly energy now and I’m expending it in a post.

I just finished Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder (gosh why did she add that middle initial? Are there forty Maria Snyders publishing in the world?) and I really enjoyed it. I started this morning, finished this afternoon. (Yes, a “thwwwp” book.) The opening was weak (a reviewer on Facebook’s Visual Bookshelf application agreed; ha!) and I was at times a little annoyed with a few things (the apparent ease with which she gained the friendship of a few characters didn’t ring so true to me) but I did enjoy the love plot (I guessed it from the first time she met the guy — I feel as if a part of my mind is clandestinely looking for said love interest in every book I read and just separates him from the flock instantaneously) and the book, overall, was great.

A note on love interests with books that feature female heroes (because I would consider Yelena a female hero): the love interest has to be worthy of her. (I speak about this in my thesis.) Yelena’s love interest is very cool. I won’t reveal whom (though I am relieved I didn’t read the Facebook reviews first! Those people need to learn how to write tantalizing but not revealing reviews). You can’t just have your hero fall in love with any man. That’s the funny difference between female heroes’ love interests and male heroes’ — those women don’t need to be special, necessarily, though there is a trend now a days into making those women more than just gorgeous bodies. Most of them now have brains, talents, abilities, or other qualifications that make them better suited to the hero than any other woman. The men, though — the male love interests must be special. It’s as if the male hero can go around rescuing the semi-helpless, at times, female love interest, but the male love interest has got to be able to be a hero in his own right — just subordinate in the storytelling to the main character, making him the love interest instead of the protagonist. That’s sort of a unanimous thing I’ve seen when researching for my thesis. It was nice to see that made true in Snyder’s book.

Now I’m off to persuade Bryan into taking me out for a good time…

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