Cover of "Stay" designed by Moriah Jovan. Used with permission (kind of)

Book Title: Stay
Author: Moriah Jovan
Available at: B10MediaWorx

Most people who know me know that I’m a voracious reader, crossing all genres. I tend to go through phases, where I will read (for example) sci-fi and nothing but sci-fi; then I get over that and I read adventure, and nothing but adventure. Every book I ever read from “Oprah’s list” nearly put me to sleep or so disappointed me I wondered if disliking a book Oprah was gushing about meant I’m a shallow reader. Anyway, I tell you that so you know where I’m coming from when I say what I’m going to say next.

Stay by Moriah Jovan is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Ever, not recently – ever.

This is the second book in what is known as the Tales of Dunham series by Moriah Jovan. The first was The Proviso, which I reviewed then accidentally lost in a database deletion here at my blog. Never fear, however – Moriah saved it at The Proviso website. Follow that link and scroll all the way down to the end if you want to read it.

You don’t have to read The Proviso before you read Stay. Some of the characters overlap, but Jovan has done a wonderful job of letting the characters from one enter into the next book without the need to read the first book. Oh, you might want to go back and read The Proviso anyway because you’re going to fall in love with Knox (don’t worry – everyone does, apparently), so you’re going to want to know more about him – and The Proviso is his story. But it isn’t essential before you read Stay.

Here’s what I liked most about The Proviso – the characters. And that goes ten times over for Stay because now those characters are combined with a much better (in my opinion) story line and writing. Not that the writing in The Proviso is bad – it’s good – but Stay is better. Again, my opinion. Because I don’t want to give away any of the story, I’m going to mostly talk about the characters and the setting and the writing. If you want to know what the story is about – get the book and read it!

When you read Jovan’s books, you just know these characters are like real people to her. She knows them like she knows her own family. Actually, she knows them better than her own family, since she knows their motives and what they’re thinking. If you get her talking about them, you’ll forget that they are just the imaginary people who live in her head. She makes them real, however and wherever she presents them. And because of that, she also agonizes over their lives – to the point where sometimes it seems like she forgets that she’s the one in charge of their lives! All of this familiarity and love for these people comes out in the writing and the story. Because she believes in them, you will start to believe in them. She writes the characters and the stories so well that you, the reader, will become wrapped up in their lives and care deeply about what is going to happen to them.

Finishing this book brought back the same feeling I had when I finished the third book in George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series – and I realized it wasn’t just a trilogy, as I had thought (hell, he’s just getting started!). I literally  screamed with frustration. I didn’t scream when I finished Stay, but I came close to it! I was so completely drawn into the story and the characters and their lives, I felt impatient when it ended. But… but… what happens next? what about these other characters? what happens to them? You finish Stay not only wanting to know if you will pick up more of Eric and Vanessa’s stories in subsequent Tales of Dunham, but NOW you also want to know about all the other characters that were introduced! Jovan demonstrates her mastery of the admonition always leave them wanting more. The worst part of it is, we have to wait until April 2011 before the next in the Dunham series will be published. I may be re-reading Stay a couple more times, to tide me over! And by the way, if you mosey on over to the Proviso website, you will find a bonus in the Dirty Little Secrets section. If you want something to tide you over until the next book, satisfy yourself with getting even more character background – these are freebies that tell some of the back story of the characters.

What I really like about the story is that there’s no subterfuge or manipulation of the reader. In most many stories involving romantic relationships, the conflict between the two romantic characters is artificially (IMO) created by a “misunderstanding.” Which is why I stopped reading most romances – that “misunderstanding” and manipulation of the reader really gets old and tiring. Stay is not a typical romance. Eric and Vanessa, our two romantic characters, have no misunderstanding about why they aren’t together – can’t be together. Those reasons are very clear from the beginning, as soon as grown-up Eric and grown-up Vanessa meet and fall in love. I like it because it makes me feel like Jovan understands that adults are reading this book. (Given the sex, I sure hope only adults are reading this book!)

But don’t dismiss this as “just a romance,” and don’t skip it because you “don’t read romance.” If Jovan writes “romance,” then it’s romance like nothing you’ve ever read. Her books don’t neatly fill into the “romance” slot. Yes, they involve romance and romantic love, but Jovan is very deep and she writes very deep. Her characters are multilayered and her stories are multilayered and it all goes deeper than and is entwined with the romantic aspects of the story.

OK, I brought it up – I’ll talk about the sex. There’s much less of it than in The Proviso. I admit that the sex in The Proviso nearly tired me out, just reading it. It’s there in Stay, but (for me, at least) it was less emotionally exhausting to read it. Probably this says less about the sex in Stay than it does about the difference in the characters and their backgrounds – those Dunhams are stormy, emotional and physical people! Eric and Vanessa aren’t Tribe members by blood, only by inclusion. Eric and Vanessa are healthy, sexually active young adults, so there’s no doubt (other than the fact that this is a romance story) that there will be sex, but it’s also clear that Eric and Vanessa lead busy lives outside the bedroom. (Raise your hand if you’ve never fallen asleep during sex. Yeah, that’s what I thought!) The sex is erotic, tender, touching. It will make you laugh and cry, which is good.

I also like that Jovan sets her stories in a location we typically wouldn’t see. I mean c’mon – how many stories have you read that were set in Kansas City? Yeah, that’s what I thought! In much the same way that Jovan knows and loves her characters, which brings them to life on the pages of her books, she also knows and loves the Kansas City area. Read this story and then come back here and tell me if you don’t think someday there are going to be Tales of Dunham tours going on all over the Kansas City area, with side trips down to the Ozarks. You heard it here first, folks! (She used to have some fabulous pictures of KC on one of the web sites but I couldn’t find them – maybe she’ll come comment and provide a link, if they’re still there.)

As you can probably tell (was I gushing?) – I loved everything about this book. If this represents the kind of growth we can expect to see with each new book by Jovan, it’s going to be exciting to watch her and it’s going to be a joy to continue to read her books.

Disclaimer: I didn’t get paid to write this review nor do I make any money if you go order it. But I am going to tell you – go order it! NOW! There’s no accounting for taste but I’m pretty sure mine is pretty mainstream, so I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you that you won’t regret it. Now, if you click on that “Song of Ice and Fire” link and go to Amazon and buy something, then I get paid as an Amazon affiliate – just letting you know. But I have read those books at least twice now and they’re cheap at twice the price if you like sci-fi sagas and court intrigue.

Every time I fix Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, it brings to mind memories of family dinners of the past. My favorites were at the farm in Orem, where there was usually a huge gathering of family and lots of food and tradition.

One tradition, as previously discussed here, was Grandma’s cookies, which were like rocks. But last night, as I cleaned my kitchen, I thought of another – the post-dinner cleanup. At Grandma’s, cleanup commenced immediately following dinner. All the food had to be put away, the dishes washed, dried and put away. The silver had to be counted, washed, dried and put back in the chest. Everyone pitched in (voluntarily or otherwise) until the kitchen was, once again, spotless – and then you could kick back and relax.

Part of this was due to the sheer number of people. Some years, the tables took up the entire covered porch next to the kitchen, with barely enough room to move around the table. I remember one year when there was actually a table in the basement because there were so many of us. At the very least, the tables had to be cleared and taken down – there simply wasn’t room for anyone until that happened.

My in-laws do things very differently and it took me a couple of years to get used to it.

First of all, dinner doesn’t start with dinner – it starts with – starters. Chips, dips, vegetables and dip… you kind of have to pace yourself or there won’t be room for dinner. If you’re told dinner starts at 4:00, that means dinner actually goes on the table at about 6:00 or so. The only food that’s put away after dinner is anything that will spoil. Dishes are piled in the sink, on the counter tops and dirty pans are left on the stove while presents are opened and everyone retires to another room. Nobody helps clean up – the cleaning is done by the host/hostess after everyone leaves.

This was quite unusual to me. I mean – being naturally lazy, I like it when I’m not the hostess. But it was difficult to adjust to just walking away and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. However, as I cleaned up last night after everyone left, I reflected that I kind of enjoy this way of doing things.

I left the mess in the kitchen and we went to the living room to open presents and visit. And after everyone left and I was exhausted, I made sure whatever might spoil was put away – then I went and watched TV (and fell asleep a couple of times), completely ignoring that my kitchen was a disaster. I wonder how Grandma would feel about that. (My mother would laugh out loud if she knew some of my friends consider me the Queen of Clean.) After I rested (ibuprofen helps) and when my husband came to bed, I got up and started to clean the kitchen. I loaded the dishwasher and ran it, then organized the rest of the mess so I knew what needed to be done the next day. I put food away. I left bags of rolls and cookies and appetizers out for anyone who wanted to keep picking away at it. I left roasting pans full of juices on top of the stove. I ate a couple of chocolates. Then I went to bed.

One thing my mother used to say was – what if you died? Would you want people to see your house was a mess? Well golly – I’m dead! Do I care any more? Does my grieving family care that I left a mess behind? I hope the fact that I’m dead and gone overrides any mess I might have left behind!

Or, my next favorite – what if someone broke into your house? OK, I guess the sterling soaking in a bowl next to the sink might be awfully tempting and a heck of a lot easier to find than if it was in its case in the hutch (and yes, I also count the sterling before it’s put away). But in the scheme of things – if there’s a complete stranger in my house and I didn’t invite him in, do I really care that my kitchen is full of dirty dishes and there’s bags of food out on the counter? At least the cookies are easily at hand to offer the cops. And if I have to shoot an intruder – well heck, I had to clean the kitchen anyway!

I did have one benefit of last night’s cleanup. I broke the top part of my glass butter dish. I was planning on sweeping/Swiffering the floor, anyway – and I had already previously broken the bottom part and had to replace the whole thing, so i was able to just pull the top part out of the cupboard and voila – I have one whole glass butter dish again! I knew that thing would come in handy.

I hope everyone had a very happy holiday. Relax – you can clean house tomorrow.

As I prepare to leave town – and only for one day, mind you – I’m reminded of how my mother always insisted that the house be thoroughly cleaned before we left for any length of time.

Now – what she told us was that if (God forbid, of course!) we were in a terrible accident and died, we wouldn’t want anyone coming into the house and thinking “what a mess!” And for years, I thought – when you’re dead, it really doesn’t make any difference what people think, does it?

Of course, this is the same woman who told me she made marks on the walls before I cleaned them, just so she could make sure I had thoroughly cleaned them. Washing down the walls was a regular chore for my sister and I, and one that I hated (and loudly complained about doing).  At the tender age of 7, I told her if she had to mark them up in order to make sure they’d been done, then they probably didn’t need to be done at all. It was a sign of things to come.

Another thing that fell in the category of “things you do in case you die” was clean underwear with no holes in it. As an adult and a parent, I now wonder – why did we even HAVE underwear with holes in it? If she didn’t want us wearing holey underwear, all she had to do was remove them from our wardrobe. She controlled just about everything else in our lives – why not the holey underwear? And that completely ignores what happens to your clothes if you’re in a terrible accident (and with my mother, the implication was always that if you died before you made it home again, it would be in a terrible accident!).

Anyway, back to the clean house thing…

As an adult, I suspect the real reason my mother wanted a clean house before leaving town was so she could come back to a clean house. Oh, and because she was OCD about cleaning. Don’t ask why she didn’t just say that – that would be a topic for a year’s worth of blogging, or possibly even a novel. I appreciate coming home to a clean house, which is why I’m leaving a clean house. Unfortunately, I’m also leaving my husband and son, which means it won’t be as clean when I get back as it is when I left. But at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that my house was clean. And if I am in a terrible accident and people come to my home – I could give a rat’s ass what they think of my housekeeping skills!

A couple years ago, multitasking meant talking on the phone, instant messaging someone else and checking e-mails.

Now, it means something completely different.

Don’t ask me why, but dust just springs to life before my eyes when I’m on the phone. It doesn’t matter which room I’m in or when I last dusted in that room – I see more dust than I thought was humanly possible, in places I apparently haven’t looked at before. So I strap on the bluetooth headset – which used to keep my hands free to I could use the computer while I was on the phone – and continue talking while I get a cleaning cloth and some Pledge, as well as a long-handled duster for the cobwebs, and get to work. As I’ve mentioned before on Twitter, spiders seem to love the hot, dry weather we’ve been having and there’s been an explosion of cobwebs inside and outside the house.

I did decide it’s somewhat rude to run noisy machinery while talking on the phone, so I don’t vacuum. Folding and hanging up laundry is acceptable multitasking.

I don’t think I’ve discussed it here before, but I let my cleaning person go several months ago. Aside from the savings, I just wasn’t happy with the job she was doing. Here’s my philosophy – when I do clean, I do a better job than she was doing, partly because well – I do a better job – but also because I don’t leave things for that day when I know someone will come and clean, so some things get cleaned more often. Given the amount of dust I’ve discovered while on the phone, obviously there are things I don’t get to as often, but my bathrooms and kitchen have never been cleaner.

Another thing that jumps out at me when I’m on the phone is the fact that my windows really, really need to be cleaned. That’s one I haven’t attempted while on the phone because I feel it’s necessary to do ALL the windows once I start – and I just don’t feel like doing that just yet. On the bright side, neither did the cleaning person. OK, so maybe I don’t do a better job in all respects, but I’m a lot cheaper!

Under the rule of thumb that you should try everything at least once – as long as it’s not illegal or immoral – and if you do try it, you should do your damndest to be good at it…

I’ve been Domestic Goddessing.

And I don’t mean taking candlelit bubble baths, either.

I mean cooking, baking, cleaning, doing laundry, hanging it up and putting it away, hanging pictures, making beds – that kind of stuff.

You want to know what makes me feel MOST domestic goddess-like?

Ironing my husband’s shirts.

Oooh – how 50s is THAT?

For the records, I don’t normally iron his shirts. I don’t even wash them. They go to the dry cleaners. There are a couple reasons for that. First and foremost – they do a much better job than I can do. That’s why they’re pros. Second, they’re not all that expensive, especially if you work the discounts. If you take in 8 items, you get 1 free. (Check.) If you pay cash, you get a discount. (Check.) I figure for about $1.50 a shirt – which is what it ends up costing me – and a superior job, it’s worth the money. Not to mention the third reason this is a good idea – I soon get overwhelmed by the endless march of shirts and pretty soon I’m washing and ironing at midnight so my husband will have a shirt to wear to work the next day.

That doesn’t mean that occasionally I don’t mind wallowing in the DG of it all. On the most recent occasion, I lost track of where I was in the shirt cleaning timeline, took them in and found out the next week he needed 2 more cleaned and ironed shirts before I could pick up the ones I’d taken to the dry cleaners. Normally, if I know this in advance, I’ll hold back a couple shirts. Unfortunately, this time I didn’t realize it. I took the shirts in on a Saturday, so there weren’t even any more shirts in the basket that I could wash and iron.

After going through the closet, I found 2 shirts he just doesn’t like to wear – and one that shouldn’t even been there because the collar was so badly frayed. They happened to be clean, they just needed ironing. This is one benefit of doing the ironing myself – I get to see the condition of the shirts. He may (or may not) complain that his shirts are falling apart – but it doesn’t stop him from wearing them, just as long as they’re cleaned, ironed and hanging in his closet. I mean – I’ve made him take off shirts that had holes in the cuffs, for heaven’s sake.

“You can’t wear that!” I exclaim.

“I can’t? Why not?” He begins self inspection.

“Look at the cuffs. And OMG – the collar! Take that off.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“I’m throwing it away. Get another one.”

This doesn’t happen often, because he usually leaves the house by 5:30 a.m. and I’m still in bed.

Well, back to those 2 shirts.

When I was growing up, my mother always assigned us chores and the chores were geared towards our age and ability. I remember being so proud that she graduated me from ironing pillowcases to ironing my father’s dress shirts. My oldest sister showed me how. First, the collar, then the back yoke, careful to stretch out the seam to iron out the puckers. Then on to the front of the shirt, paying special attention to the seams and the button area, but especially the front placket, which is what shows most after the shirt is buttoned. Down the sides, pulling out the side seams and stretching them, then around to the back, being careful not to crease the back pleat, then the sleeves and the cuffs. I use lots of steam because I love the smell and the sound. I also like to spray on sizing, so the shirt is crisp, but not stiff. Because I’m lazy, I don’t take down the sleeve iron – honest, I would if I did these all the time. It’s a leftover from the “old days” when I actually sewed. When I’m done, I hang the shirt up and inspect it. I feel satisfied and fulfilled and all warm and gooey – almost like cookies, but less fattening.

Ahhh… the life of a Domestic Goddess!

Well, it was one of those classic “oops” moments. I deleted the wrong database. Yep – wiped out the contents of JulieW8.com blog.

I’ll be back to reconstruct when I have some time. Hopefully, it will be better the second time around! And maybe I’ll be smarter, too.

Update: Aha! I found one of my feeds that contains the entire text. Excuse the old stuff going back up again. I’m just glad I didn’t lose everything forever! Unfortunately, not all my posts survived. It’s very likely nobody really cares!