The week in which the only book I've finished

is one with three novellas. So I give you the revised

23. These Boots Were Made For Strutting / Lisa Cach, Gemma Halliday & Melanie Jackson

It's not that I didn't enjoy Men of the Otherworld. Or Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand. Men is hard cover and large so I don't take it to work. Kitty got put down... somewhere. It was easier to grab a book that I'd just picked up from the library than to search before work yesterday. And honestly, the three stories inside of Boots were light and fluffy and undemanding, much easier to read in short break chunks.

Besides, as the year goes on I think that you will find that it's not unusual for me to have three books on the go at once ;)

So anyhoo: Boots. The theme of the book is shoes actually, not a single pair of boots in any of the stories, but that's ok. Each story is about a magic pair of shoes ordered from a special online shoe store (which actually exists and is shamefully plugged throughout the book. Only to seriously disappoint when you go to the site and find nice shoes but nothing magical about the web design at all, but I digress...)

Each pair of shoes brings each wearer out of their shell so to speak and into situations that they normally wouldn't dream of being in. In so doing each woman learns things about herself. Quite honestly, I read the entire first story by Cach, and found myself skipping around the next two stories. Light, fluffy and well, boring.

Regular readers of Gemma Halliday's High Heels mystery series will likely enjoy her novella, though it's not the same characters. I myself could never actually read a high heel mystery all the way through, so no big surprise that I couldn't get through this shorter story.

By the time I got to Melanie Jackson's ballroom dancing inspired story I had completely lost interest in the whole book and read only to finish. That may have had something to do with having actually looked at the website oft mentioned in each story and decided that crass commercialism was alive and well even in short fiction, lol.

If I were grading this book I'd have to give it a C- as I only really got through one story, and immediately upon finishing canceled my library hold on the previous book, These Boots Were Made For Stomping.