The Working Elf Blues by Piper Vaughn

Title: The Working Elf Blues

Author: Piper Vaughn

Purchase at Less Than Three Press

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Cover Artist: 

Genre:  fantasy, holiday

Length:  

Formats:  Epub, MOBI, PDF

Garnet Evergreen has never heard of an elf abandoning the North Pole for a human, but he yearns to be the first. Ever since he saw Wes, the boy with sorrowful eyes, Garnet felt an undeniable kinship. Over the years, he's watched that boy grow into a man, and now he's determined to give Wes a Christmas he'll never forget. If only Garnet had thought to test his father's sleigh before leaving...

Orphaned as a child, Wes spends every Christmas alone at his cabin. When he's woken by a suspicious boom and finds a wrecked sleigh and an unconscious elf, he doesn't know how to react. Wes isn't fanciful. He doesn't give much credence to the stories about Santa Claus and flying reindeer. But a part of him wants desperately to believe when Garnet promises forever, even if life has taught him that no one ever stays... 

Cute premise: an elf from Santa’s workshop wants to spend his life with a human, and finds a way to accomplish that. However, Garnet’s not the most deft pair of hands in the workshop, and manages to drop himself from heights and get into other predicaments from which he needs rescue. Getting pulled out of snowbanks is meet cute but rather embarrassing for the guy who’s now soaking wet.

Wes, on vacation in the frozen forest, is attracted to the inept elf, but his own history doesn’t include a lot of love, so he’s not good at recognizing what’s going on. Also, other forces are at work, both to help and to hinder, so if he gets left again by this pointy-eared Christmas present, he won’t be entirely surprised.

The whole setup is one of proving oneself, which I liked, but I was rather disturbed by one element. Garnet’s always been attracted to Wes, which fine, except, he first sees Wes as a child, and the story evolution doesn’t really start with something on the order of “this kid needs a friend and I could be that friend” and progress from there; it’s always presented as “we should be together always, even if he's not gay, oh goodie he's gay”. I could have missed something, but I don’t think so, because I was looking for it, so it comes across as creepy stalkerish. Garnet reads young, but he doesn’t read young on the par with child Wes, which... brrr. Only his extreme naiveté keeps the squick factor down. Otherwise, everything that takes place in present day is cute.

I seem to be the only one with this problem, so maybe I’m the Grinch. 3 marbles

The Party Boy's Guide to Dating a Geek by Piper Vaughn and Xara X. Xanakas

Title: The Party Boy’s Guide to Dating a Geek

Author: Piper Vaughn and Xara X. Xanakas

Cover Artist: Aisha Akeju

Publisher: Less Than Three Press

Genre: Contemporary

Length: 270 pages

Ashley Byrne only wants one thing in life: to finish his tattoo apprenticeship and fulfill his dream of owning his own shop. In the meantime, he spends his nights partying, flirting, and having sex. After all, what else is there for him to worry about? Aside from his hair and his clothes, not much. He’s hot, and rest assured no one knows it better than him. He’s also used to getting what he wants—until he meets Felipe Navarro.

Fee Navarro has everything he needs: a great IT job, a nice apartment, and all the high-tech toys his geeky heart could ever want. He doesn’t do casual, and he knows guys like Ash are nothing but. Ash may burn hot for Fee, but Fee isn’t willing to take a chance on a vain, little party boy with too many tats and an oversized ego. He wants someone to share his life with, and he won’t settle for anything less. Too bad Ash has never been the type to give up easily. He has a plan, and he’s not stopping until he proves he’s more than just a pretty face—he’s someone worthy of winning Fee’s heart.

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The Party Boy’s Guide is a charming story of opposites attracting, and more to the point, of one of the opposites understanding what’s attractive about the other and why the attraction is worth working for.

Ash and Fee come together while helping Ash’s brother and his girlfriend move in together, and things do not start well. If Ash isn’t putting his foot in his mouth or doing something careless that causes an injury, he’s coming across as flighty, only interested in a good time. Being seen like that stings, even if it’s true—Ash isn’t used to an attractive man not responding to him, and it makes him work triply hard to get Fee’s attention. Used to entertaining himself with any willing comer in the clubs leaves him unprepared to deal with someone more serious.

The gimmick of having a bit of dating manual heading the chapters is funny, but definitely sound as if the advice was ripped from the pages of Cosmopolitan, with some florid “geek references.” It’s cute but the tone really made me wonder about the intended target audience, even if the advice is good and pertinent to the contents of the chapter. The geek references persist in the software manual style table of contents and chapter headings. The joke sustains fairly well. The "cool guy" wandering into geek territory and coming off as the inept one was a comic, if slightly painful, turnaround of the more usual cool/not cool situations. That first book club meeting, oh ow!

Ash remains the POV character through the entire novel, which is unusual in something of this length, and it’s he who is changed most. Not because Fee is trying to change him, but because he recognizes the worth of Fee’s methods, including the go-slow-don’t-rush-into-sex-or-anything else important way Fee allows himself to engage with Ash. Any pushing from Ash makes Fee withdraw, but he will come closer if allowed to choose his pace.

As an apprentice tattoo artist, Ash has some vague plans for the future, but he’s drifting along, saying he wants something but not really working at it. It isn’t until Fee demonstrates what his own efforts have brought him and gets involved in small ways with Ash’s dreams, such as by configuring a computer for him, that Ash stops dreaming and starts making progress toward his goal.

In some ways I liked the leisurely approach the two men take, because Ash has the chance to rediscover that sex can be more important than the random assisted orgasm, but there were a few places I wanted to tap my toe and suggest they move a little faster. Now and then the slow unrolling was a little too slow. At least one side plot concerning Ty, Ash’s prospective tattoo parlor partner, seemed to wander off into nothingness after eating enough page time to seem important.

The story is as much about Ash’s maturing as it is about the relationship, and if he didn’t grow up, he would not have become a worthy partner for a man who actually has his act together aside from a bit of social ineptitude. Fee isn’t that big a geek—imagine him on The Big Bang Theory for one scene to see exactly how much being computer savvy isn’t geekhood personified. But he is the polar opposite of a frivolous party boy, and eventually, so is Ash.

We don’t see Fee’s POV in this story and he’s not terribly communicative, so Ash is left to flounder sometimes and Fee comes off as a little cold. Fee is Hispanic, but his ethnicity is an under-under-under current aside from some delectable food, and may show most strongly in a scene that is not actually on page. His level of “doesn’t get it” on relationships exceeds the believable in one or two places, but it’s very clear that he’s a worthwhile person to be involved with.

The writing is smooth and contains some excellent lines and observations on the human condition, although Ash utters them thinking of the smaller canvas of his life. It’s in keeping with the mostly light tone of the book. I enjoyed the story, even if I wished for a faster pace now and again.

4.25 marbles

Title: Zombie Wonderland
Author: Piper Vaughn
Cover Artist: Aisha Akeju
Publisher: Less Than Three Press
Genre: paranormal
Length: 34 pages

Nothing says Christmas like droves of the undead…

All Emery wants for Christmas is someone to share it with. It looks like he might finally be getting his wish in Ross, the sexy customer he’s been crushing on for months. But neither of them counted on the zombies, or on being caught in the worst blizzard in half a century. Even with a plan for contending with the zombie hordes, surviving will take a miracle.

It’s not exactly how Emery dreamed of spending Christmas with Ross, but he can’t think of a better way to spend a zombie apocalypse.

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Emery’s just hanging around the empty diner on Christmas Eve, waiting for the moment he can lock up and go home. The holidays aren’t terribly cheery for him: he’s alone, and even the handsome customer hasn’t shown up. Ross has been in every day for three months to write, fortified with pie and coffee. When Christmas rolls around, they’ve barely gotten to the “what’s your name?” stage.


Everything happens very fast. Ross turns up, pursued by the very quick-shambling undead. Emery’s role seems to be in slow motion: while Ross has already figured out that something is dramatically wrong and he’s got to move if he wants to survive it, Emery’s stuck in “wait, what?” even after he watches a zombie nearly kill Ross on the diner floor.

The contrast between fast-reacting Ross and disbelieving Emery is pretty stark. Ross does what he must to win through to safety; Emery tries to process what he’s seeing and experiencing, then getting bogged down in asthma attacks and nausea. For two guys who barely know each other, all the danger has to fast-forward the relationship, which they’ll have plenty of time to explore if they can just reach the cabin out in the country.

No one knows how or why the zombies have appeared; the focus is on the two men who are trying to escape the hordes of flesh-eating undead. The zombies are pretty danged lively, too: they run, beat on windshields, snarl with rage and eat whoever they can catch. The horror of them is strong, because not only are they relentless and hungry; they are fast.

Emery would have had no chance at all without Ross, who takes care of him during and after their flight from the city, and refrains from exasperation when Emery does something really dumb; he just fixes the problem. A little too good to be true, and his odd collection of skills don’t quite match the bookish exterior. There are a lot of unanswered questions about him, and no place in the story to explore them, not while they’re running, and not in the collapse afterward.

While I could see the solidification of a budding relationship in the face of danger, I just wasn’t convinced by the great vault from a waiter serving a customer without any conversation to Ross’ wish for Emery to spend Christmas with him. That they’d do it accidentally because of the zombies would make sense, but they’d never had a first date or even a real conversation, so Ross’ plans of a holiday together before the zombies came along seemed really premature. That they’d draw together in the face of danger was sweet and almost inevitable.

It may be that there is a sequel planned, because this does have the feel of being only part of the story arc. What’s here is good, just unresolved. 3.5 marbles