Size 12 and Ready to Rock by Meg Cabot is the fourth in the chick lit cozy mystery series starring Heather Wells, dorm monitor extraordinaire (available July 10, 2012).

Back in the days when the publishing world was going chick lit crazy, I read a couple of very enjoyable light mystery novels by Meg Cabot called Size 12 Is Not Fat and Size 14 Is Not Fat, Either. I hoped for more, but none seemed to be forthcoming and Ms. Cabot seemed to have abandoned Heather Wells, the teen-pop-star-turned-dorm-advisor protagonist.

When I saw Size 12 and Ready to Rock on the LibraryThing early reviewers list, I was excited and went back to look . . . and indeed, I had missed one of the books (Big Boned), so I read it while I was waiting for Ready to Rock to appear in my mailbox.

For the full article on Meg Cabot’s Size 12 and Ready to Rock, visit our sister crime and mystery blog, CriminalElement.com.

Christina Dodd
Secrets of Bella Terra
Signet (Penguin), August 2, 2011, $7.99

Dark, brooding, and sexy, Rafe Di Luca has returned to Bella Terra for one reason: to find out who attacked his beloved grandmother… and why. Owner of one of the world’s leading security firms, he has his prime suspect: the beautiful Brooke Petersson, manager of Bella Terra. Years ago, he and Brooke shared a powerful passion before he walked out of her life. She swore the affair was over forever, yet they find themselves drawn into an erotic web neither can escape. Now Rafe must decide if he should trust the desire Brooke ignites in him—or if seduction is her revenge…

[Revenge sex? Love it!...]

It started, I think, with Team Edward vs. Team Jacob. Or at least, that’s when the pervasiveness of YA fiction in the adult marketplace began to infringe on my consciousness.

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and its sequels held no appeal for me, but everyone else in the world seemed to find them absolutely fascinating. Yeah, I could see why teenage girls would find them attractive—there’s a pretty big wish-fulfillment component to those stories for a miserable high school girl—but their mothers were reading the books and going to the movies, too, and I just didn’t get it.

At first I thought the problem was the Twilight trilogy itself. I’m not a fan of vamps and weres in general, and these supernatural heroes seemed particularly vapid. So I tried some other books in the same category. I looked into what was selling. I read books by people I know who write YA. I went for realistic high-school life YA and for paranormal (but without vamps) YA. Nothing moved me. Or at least, it didn’t move me in the right direction. I still couldn’t understand why so many grown, independent female friends of mine chose to read books about teenagers.

[Has the world gone mad?...]

What defines a romantic hero? Does he have to be sexy? Strong? The most important man in the room? Or can he merely be “the one who gets the girl”? If a story has a strong, intelligent heroine, do readers—or viewers in the case of movies—just go along with the heroine’s choice of hero? If you consider the Harry Potter movies fantasy or adventure, Harry is the hero. But if you consider the cycle a romance, it is Ron who steals the focus.

More than any factor that defines a romantic hero, after all, is that he is brought closer to the heroine by the arc of the story. He may start out less than worthy, but he grows to deserve her. He may not believe he cares about anything or anyone, but by the end she is the center of his world.

[Could you fall for a redheaded boy? . . . ]

Once upon a time, in the long-distant past, movies were made from books.  You remember that, right?  Everyone would say, “Oh, sure, I saw the movie, but it was nowhere near as good as the book,” even if they didn’t necessarily believe it to be true, because that was conventional wisdom. (In fact, it still is. I rarely hear anyone admit to preferring a movie over its book.)

Another odd idea that seemed to have become accepted as fact was that television audiences didn’t read.  (Radio audiences were a different matter entirely—The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, for example, began as a radio program.)  Television audience went to the movies—after all, both were visual media—so they could be trusted to attend Star Trek movies or The Blues Brothers (which started out as a Saturday Night Live skit), but they weren’t likely to actually read books based on television shows.

[Harry Potter was 10 times better OFF the big screen . . .]

What is it with the intersection of knitting and fiction? You put the keyword “knitting” into an Amazon book search and get something for just about every genre lover: Romance, chick lit, mystery, even children’s literature.

[Spin me a yarn . . .]