It’s that time of year again. Whether you’re trying to find the perfect item for the office holiday party gift exchange (I recommend this.) or you’re overwhelmed with our world of too many choices, shopping for gifts can be stressful. […]
Yesterday, in the States, many of us joined friends and family for Thanksgiving. I host my large family every year and am usually too frenetic to be thankful for much until the meal is done, the dishes are washed, and my mom is making turkey stew which we freeze and then eat all year. But then, when the day is almost at its end, I do try and think about all that I am thankful for.
Somewhere on that list is always romance novels. […]
AAR readers routinely tell us they disagree with our takes on books. Over the years we’ve been told:
I don’t agree with how critical and one sided you were of this book in this review, after all this is a book that probably took long to write and a lot of thought went into it. How would Francine Rivers feel if she read this review? Not good, I can tell you that much. […]
I started reading romance novels when I was 12 or 13. I remember reading them and thinking they were enjoyable but they weren’t about people like me. Nearly all of the characters were non-disabled, as well as being white, cis and heterosexual, and the few characters that were disabled were villains. […]
What should we call books with no sex in them? AAR has a sensuality ratings system but that’s not helpful when you want a single descriptor. (It has five levels from Kisses to Burning and probably needs to be revamped.) Romancelandia seems to have settled–to the joy of few–on the term clean. […]
I’ve been pretty much sick to my stomach for the last two weeks. I spent over a year writing a collection of steampunk novellas, Tales from the Gunpowder Chronicles and I ended up releasing it to only about a third of my readership—if even that much. […]
Here at AAR, the staff is beginning to make our favorite Best of 2019 lists. Earlier this week, we asked what your favorite non-romances of the year are. Now we’d like to know: What’s your favorite romance published in 2019?
It was bound to happen.
After ten years of primarily reading romance, in 2019, I found myself gravitating away from HEAs. According to Goodreads, thus far this year I’ve only read 50 romances and many of those were books published in earlier times. I’ve read 25 non-romances, all of them fiction. Of these 25, I adored seven, five of which were published in 2019. […]
“A book is a magical thing that lets you travel to far-away places without ever leaving your chair.” Katrina Mayer
I grew up in the Philippines and coming from a poor family, I did not have the resources to travel out of my birth country until I was already a working adult. Thankfully, I had a bookworm for a father and a teacher for a mother who both encouraged me from a young age to read books that took me all over the world before I was able to actually travel to the locations in which they were set.
Judith Krantz’s I’ll Take Manhattan familiarized me with New York City landmarks prior to my first visit there in 1994. I had seen the grandeur of the Sydney Opera House through Emma Darcy’s Harlequin romances set in Australia before I beheld it for the first time in 1998. Peter Mayle’s
This week I read a historical romance novella with a love scene that did consent perfectly. Romance novels routinely show–and now more so than ever which is the best–that sex and intimacy are something two (or more) people decide on together. Consent happens when both (or more) parties agree on what sexual contact is going to be and feel like. Desire and how it is acted upon is mutual, pleasurable, and not to be regretted. […]
