Every now and then, a review will make me blush. This one from Chris Jones at Fresh Fiction certainly did:

Alright readers, find a quiet little spot, grab your favorite beverage, and prepare for a treat. Stephanie Draven is a very talented writer, and you will not want to put this book down. When you open POISONED KISSES, you are entering the rich world of mythical War Gods and their offspring… Kyra is a heroine with attitude, searching for meaning and a true purpose for her life… Stephanie Draven is fearless in her writing. She draws you in, leaving you at the crest of the wave wanting more…This book has everything, and I hope she has many more stories for us. She has a new twist on the paranormal, and I greatly enjoyed it. This will be the book you tell your friends about.

New review from Dirty, Sexy, Books. It might be my favorite so far.

Plot Summary:  Marco Kaisiris supplies guns to rebels in Africa, and an immortal nymph named Kyra is determined to bring him down.  Unfortunately it won’t be easy because Marco is a war-forged hydra, a mythical creature who can change his face and kill demigods with his toxic blood.  When Kyra’s assassination attempt backfires and she’s mortally wounded, Kyra decides to switch strategies and trap Marco instead.

I liked how this paranormal romance went a bit deeper than I had expected, and it wove together Greek mythology and the civil wars in Africa into a cohesive plot.  Poisoned Kisses was about more than the romance between Kyra and Marco, and that worked in its favor because it held my interest throughout.  Stephanie Draven chose some exotic supernatural creatures for her story as well.  Kyra is a nymph who is literally a torch for lost souls; she can light the way to the other side, and see through any artifice.  That’s why she’s uniquely suited to track Marco, who is a hydra with the power to wear a thousand faces.  His blood is deadly poison and his misguided sense of duty is helping to fuel a destructive war in the Congo.

Of the two leads, I thought Marco was far more interesting.  He knew that society counted him as a criminal, but he believed that gun-running gave the victims a way to fight back.  Even Marco’s own family back in the U.S. thinks he’s scum, and he doesn’t bother to explain himself to anyone.  He’s a bad man who thinks that he’s doing good, and when his illusions are shattered, he wants to do the right thing even if he has to sacrifice himself.  I found his relationship with Kyra believable, and even though the sex scenes were a little vanilla for my taste, I thought it was well done.

Poisoned Kisses is a tight little story at 229 pages, and I admire the Harlequin imprints for delivering stories that can be enjoyed in a single afternoon.

Cross-posted from Bitten by Books

The ancients thought the heart was the source of all human emotion and passion. This is probably because of the way our heart thumps when we fall in love, and the way our heart seems to seize inside our chests when we’re frightened or grieving. The heart is a wonderfully resilient muscle, soft and fleshy, yet we describe the fracturing pain of loss as heartbreak?

The strange thing about heartbreak is that almost everyone experiences it at some point in their lives, but almost nobody can explain what it is. Still, since love, heartbreak, and redemptive happy endings are a romance writer’s stock-in-trade, it behooves authors like me to try!

Heartbreak is an emotional distress, but physically painful, even though no physician would ever be able to find the wound. And it can seldom be cured by anything but true love.

If you’ve ever experienced heartbreak–true heartbreak–you know that it changes you. After a bad breakup, people aren’t just depressed. They tend to internalize their feelings as a loss of self. Divorcees often describe a sense of alienation from themselves, as if they don’t know who they are anymore in the world without the love of their spouse. Heartbroken people talk about having a hole in their heart that they fear will never be filled. They have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, as if they had woken up without a limb and weren’t sure how to walk again. They might think they’ve forgotten how to laugh. Their taste in music may be changed forever. Their sense of identity, warped beyond recognition.

Today we have many fancy clinical ways of explaining these changes in personality, but when the ancients couldn’t explain something, they turned to mythology. They knew what heartbreak does to a person–how one shattering moment can take away everything you’ve ever believed about the world and your place in it. They took that knowledge and shaped it into their stories about nymphs.

Nymphs are ubiquitous in Greek mythology. They’re wild feminine demi-goddesses. Representations of woman at her purest, outside the realm of societal structure. But none of them seem to be immune from heartbreak, and in the oldest stories, when a nymph falls in love, it almost never turns out well. Nymphs not only seem doomed to suffer heartbreak, but they are changed by it. Literally.

As Ares reflects in my debut paranormal romance novel, Poisoned Kisses:

She was a nymph; love would change her like it did all her kind. Love changed pretty Galatea, who turned into a fountain of tears when her mortal lover died. Pitys’ heartbreak transformed her into a tree that weeps whenever the wind blows. And who could forget Salmacis? She was so desperate with love for Hermaphroditos that she melded her body with his and became a new creature, half woman, half man!

The nymphs of ancient mythology were transformed by love. Their essential place in the world was so shaken, that they lost their essential womanhood and became something else entirely. An observation about human nature, or simply a cautionary tale? It’s hard to say. But either way, these stories illustrate the depths of our emotions as human beings in a way that all our modern, clinical diagnoses fails to capture.

The sad stories of nymphs spoke to me, and that’s why I chose one to be the heroine of my romance novel. I wanted her to have a happy ending…one that shows how love can mend a broken heart. How love can give us all second chances, because love also changes who we are; it makes us stronger. And I can think of nothing more romantic!

So, let’s hear it. How has love gotten you through your first, or worst, heartbreak?

Cross-posted from My Overstuffed Bookshelf

The Westermarck effect is an observed biological phenomenon demonstrating that children raised in close proximity may shy away from one another as romantic mates once they reach adulthood. This is apparently true whether or not the children are related by blood. This might be because, as the old adage goes, familiarity breeds contempt. Or it might be because part of adult sexual attraction is that our partner is, in some sense, a stranger.

If all the movie montages in romantic comedies are correct–and Hollywood would never lie–part of the pleasure in falling in love is turning a stranger into an intimate. All those romantic walks in the park, the games of strip poker, the cooking together in a kitchen that’s too small…they’re romantic encounters because they help us to know our mates, perhaps as they’ve never been known before.

People have been known to fall in love at first sight. Sometimes over the course of a weekend, or after a few weeks of dates. This seems like a remarkably short time to really get to know someone. Given the compressed nature of falling in love, a cynic might ask, how can any woman ever know her man as well as the family that raised him? How can she truly know him better than he’s ever been known before?

Quite simply, I would argue. Because on the day he falls in love with her, he isn’t the same man he was the day before. She too, is completely changed. Love is a transformative experience. An evolution of personality. At its best, it opens our minds to new experiences and ways of thinking we’ve never allowed before. At its worst, it can make us more insular and selfish. Either way, in subtle but real ways, lovers become strangers to everyone else, even as they become more transparent to the person they love. What’s more, they divulge secrets to one another–secrets they’ve hidden from others, or perhaps even from themselves.

No where is this issue of identity in romance addressed more effectively than in the genre of paranormal romance. The sense of otherness is almost immediately established. Lovers aren’t just different genders, or from different worlds; they might not even be the same species. Vampires, werewolves, animal shifters, angels, demons, and various immortals…they are fundamentally other, and that alone may account for their sexual appeal.

In spite of technology’s ability break down all social boundaries between what we would like to keep private and what the world must see, we all still wear different masks for different people. And for some of us, that can be quite isolating. Paranormal romance takes this idea and exaggerates it. Often, paranormal romance heroes and heroines have been hiding their otherness from the world. Being able to finally confess it–to be loved not for the facade they show the rest of the world, but for the very strangeness that would make them an outcast in society–those are some of the basic building blocks of true intimacy.

Another identity-based theme in paranormal romance is the acceptance of self, in order to find love with someone else. Most paranormal creatures labor under dark and angsty self-loathing. Oh, woe is me, I’m going to be beautiful, if pale, forever, and I have the desire to drink blood…

Then along comes a heroine (because let’s just admit it, it’s usually the heroine who comes to the emotional rescue) and she helps him to see who he really is. He isn’t just a brooding malcontent…he’s a fierce predator who can use his vampiric powers for good! Why, she makes him see his own inner god. And in turn, he helps acquaint her with her own inner goddess.

In my debut novel, Poisoned Kisses, I played with the issue of identity in an open and notorious way. My hero is a shape-shifting modern-day hydra who can wear the face of anyone who has ever hurt him. My heroine is a dark nymph of the underworld who can make mortals see whatever she wants them to see. When she meets our hero, she chooses to appear to him as a woman he once loved, and it’s a terrible deception. Throughout the book, the heroine and hero transform themselves into people of different coloring and races, all in an effort to shield their own hearts. When they finally kiss for the first time, without any masks, with their real selves exposed, it’s magic. I’m not sure I could have accomplished that in any other genre.