all book related reviews
How do you combine Hollywood, the South, a movie very like Gone With The Wind, a mystery and a romance? Those are a lot of ingredients to combine in a novel, but Kathleen Gilles Seidel makes the mix shine in More than You Dreamed. The heroine, Jill Casler, has just inherited a huge sum from…
Crafting a love story set amidst tragedy is always a chancy proposition. In A Time for Dreams, author Jen Holling succeeds, to a degree. Although I had some difficulty with the writing style, and found the hero and heroine less than totally engaging, the story was compelling enough to keep me going to the believable…
I’m sure you can think of any number of romances that are based on fairy tales – Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast are very popular candidates for transformation. But Jack and the Beanstalk? I was skeptical when I picked up Jackie and the Giant, but Linda Jones gives the old story a few new…
I haven’t read too many historical romances that take place in Australia. At first, I thought September Moon was going to be just like those American Historicals that take place on the frontier – lots of hardship, wildness and danger. It is. And yet, it is different. Ms. Proctor brings all the strangeness and wildness…
A few months ago, I had a brief online chat with author Karen Ranney after I had reviewed her last book, Upon a Wicked Time. She told me a bit about her upcoming release, My Beloved, and emphasized that she truly believed in the healing power of love to the point where her heroes always…
Trust No One is romantic suspense with the emphasis on suspense. While there is a believable romance and an enjoyable hero and heroine, the romance is ultimately overshadowed by the various threads of the suspense plot. Julia Bradshaw is a single mother struggling to make a success of her Monterey Bed-&-Breakfast. It’s not enough that…
In Lisa Gardner’s The Other Daughter, we meet the Stokes family, a wealthy Boston family with, as it turns out, a lot to hide. When Melanie Stokes was nine, she was found in a Boston hospital. She didn’t know who she was or where she came from. Harper Stokes, a brilliant cardiac surgeon, helped to…
Clarissa Feeney in Fair Game is one of the most charming and utterly lovable heroines I have met in a Regency Romance. She is beautiful but is not puffed up about it, she is intelligent without being a bluestocking, slightly naive but not missish, and has a high standard of morals without being puritanical. She…
Despite promising sparks early in the book, The Brightest Flame fails to live up to its name, ending with more fizzle and smoke than fire. Lively but shallow characters with questionable ethics, writing that glows lavender, and an implausible plot filled with invented conflicts left me burned out long before the end. The year is…
My Valentine is the latest entry in Jove’s “Friends Romance” line. Like the others, it says on the cover, “In matters of the heart, you can always trust your friends.” Like the others, it has absolutely nothing to do with friends. Memo to Jove: Table this line until you get in some manuscripts that actually…
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