all book related reviews
Surrender, Dorothy is occasionally interesting, but not truly engaging. It’s a fictional study of the affects of death on those left behind, and it asks questions such as “Who has the right to mourn?” Sometimes the author has an interesting insight, but just as often her observations don’t seem very real. Sara Swerdlow is the…
Back in the days of the cattle drives when men were carving out empires for themselves in the vast Texas lands, there were some English gentlemen who showed up on the plains. They were of two types – one was a gentlemen of means who saw in the cattle industry an opportunity to make money….
When I first saw the cover of this book, my immediate thought was, “Ouch! Two cookie-cutter, plastic people, and a deformed cowboy who doubles as a contortionist in need of hip replacement.” A bad day in the art department. Well, my mama told me never to judge a book by it’s cover, and in the…
It’s probably unfortunate that Counterfeit Cowboy was paired with Tryst of Fate because the second story suffers by comparison. While it’s an okay read, it just doesn’t have the charm of the first story. As a result, reading them back-to-back didn’t work well for me. Raleigh Tate isn’t a real cowboy. He’s an undercover agent…
Manon starts out with an oft-used premise: the heroine disguised as a boy. It manages to plod along in predictable fashion for about a third of the book – until the hero discovers the heroine’s gender. At this point the book goes from ho-hum to bad, descending into incomprehensible writing and plotting that is alternately…
I have been glomming Ruth Wind/Barbara Samuel for a while. The results have been quite successful, but locating her full-length historicals as written under her real name has been difficult. I searched longest for A Bed of Spices, the book I had been most eager to lay my hands on, since it is one of…
Dark Sapphire, Lisa Jackson’s new medieval romance, has a good sense of its time period and a memorable villain. Sadly, those are the only good things I can say about it. Bland characters and bad writing made this book a chore to finish. Sheena and Keegan met as adolescents when their fathers, who loved the…
While I’m not a complete stickler for historical accuracy, I prefer that real historical figures, when present in a novel, are presented in an historically accurate fashion. For example, I wouldn’t expect Queen Elizabeth I to get married if her character were included in a story. After the death of King Henry VII in 1509,…
I will say this for Nan Ryan – she knows how to keep a plot moving along. The characters may all be paper-thin, and even the ostensible hero and heroine are disturbingly amoral; the villains may be ludicrous stereotypes who mostly serve to have the kinky sex that the hero and heroine don’t engage in;…
It seems that every time I read a humorous romance, I end up wincing instead of laughing. So many romances rely on clumsy characters and painful slapstick to create humor. Luckily, in A Little Scandal, Patricia Cabot avoids those devices. Her humor comes from her characters and their reactions to the world around them. For…
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