all book related reviews
Ready for another vampire series? I think you just might be when said series is by the enormously gifted Susan Squires. However, while I decidedly enjoyed this first entry and certainly plan to keep reading, I wasn’t quite as enthralled here as I have been in the past by the author’s complex and challenging prose….
Nicholas Sparks says that “Romance novels have happy endings while love stories are not bound by this requirement. Love stories usually end tragically or at best, on a bittersweet note.” One of the best love stories ever written is Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which is bittersweet indeed. Read it or watch the movie sometime…
Ruth Wind’s Countdown is a brisk page-turner that I tore through in a couple of hours. The latest in the Athena Force miniseries, it has its flaws, but was also entertaining enough that they didn’t really bother me. In the attention-grabbing prologue, a bruised and bloody Kim Valenti arrives at FBI headquarters in Chicago late…
The Mommy Fund is not my first foray into Mommy Lit. I recently very much enjoyed Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes and thought I’d be up for another tale of modern mommy woe – being a new mommy myself, this new sub-genre is suddenly relevant. Unfortunately, Madeleine K. Jacob’s story wasn’t nearly as its cute as…
Candace Schuler’s Good Time Girl was one of the better early Harlequin Blazes, offering a strong combination of truly hot sex and a good love story. Its long-awaited sequel, The Cowboy Way, only gets it half right. If you’re looking for a really red-hot read with sex that’s much steamier than most Blazes, then this…
Rebecca Hagan Lee’s fourth book in the Free Fellows League series, about a boyhood club whose members took an oath to be heroes for England in the fight against Napoleon, suffers from two of the most dreaded maladies in romance: Implausibility Syndrome and Sequelitis. Daniel, Duke of Sussex, has always pined to be included in…
I have one good thing to say about Caitlin Scott-Turner: she does not write wallpaper history. The Queen’s Fencer takes place in the England of Queen Elizabeth I, and Turner has obviously done a great deal of research on that period. So have I, and I find no fault in her portrayal, either in the…
Even though Falling For Gracie contains a rather weak suspense plotline, the interactions and the intense emotions between the characters make for a fun and interesting read. Gracie Landon grew up in a small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business. That, combined with the fact that fourteen year-old Gracie was very vocal about her…
If I had to use one word to describe A Woman’s Innocence, that word would be shallow. Shallow characterization, shallow historical detail, shallow plotting: this book has it all. It’s a paint-by-numbers job. I could hand this book to any reader as an example of why I’m currently so dissatisfied with the historical romance market….
Lately it seems as though historical fiction is succeeding in doing two things for me that many historical romances no longer do: Delivering a strong sense of time and place set against real life events and sending the reader on glorious flights of fancy. Marrying Mozart is just such a tale. Though it is fiction…
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