all book related reviews
First published in 2014, The King’s Falcon was the long-awaited third instalment of Ms Riley’s projected quartet of novels set during the tumultuous period of the English Civil War. The two earlier books – The Black Madonna and Garland of Straw – were originally published in the 1990s and revised and republished digitally in 2013,…
At the start of Lily King’s Heart the Lover, a novel of three parts, our narrator is in her final year of college. While the school she attends is never named, for those of us who went to either UNC (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) or Duke in the early 80s, her…
As a romance writer Kristen Callihan knows her stuff so I was confident this football-adjacent, low-angst romance would be both charming and amusing. Only on Gameday really is great fun and for the most part, has enough momentum to keep the reader entertained. [As an aside, sometimes I finish a romance and have no idea…
This one’s a gem. I’ve loved the Ravenswood series and this features Winifred (Westcott family) and Nicholas (Ware family). Both are almost engaged to others but, as they say, the course of true love…. I wondered how it would all play out and I wasn’t disappointed. The author gives us a summary of the characters…
Garland of Straw is a wonderfully written and very skilful blend of history and fiction which has, at its core, a tumultuous romance between opposites. In the highly unsettled period which followed the imprisonment of Charles I by Parliament in 1646, Venetia Clifford, a staunch supporter of King Charles, and Gabriel Brandon, a Colonel in…
If you were to ask me what the greatest fantasy series ever is, I’d not hesitate to say: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I read the trilogy when it was first published and can still feel the heartbreak that, over twenty-five years ago, left me sobbing in the grocery store parking lot as I…
Kaje Harper’s Winter Cowboy is a thoughtful and satisfying age-gap romance that acts as companion piece to the novella Cowboy Dreams (also highly recommended if you haven’t already read it). It picks up the story of one of the secondary characters in that book, Frankie Morse, a kid of seventeen, terrified that his abusive father…
This is the fourth and final book in the Rome, Kentucky series by Sarah Adams and I’m sorry to see the end. In Your Dreams is about Maddie, the fourth Walker sibling, who left her teaching job and headed to New York to go to culinary school. Her family back home don’t know, but it’s…
Originally written in 1992 and now reissued digitally, To Kiss a Thief is a well-told, well-researched historical romance which moves – unexpectedly – from the English countryside to war-torn Portugal. Margaret Somerley has embarked upon her first London season but has so far met with little notice or success, facts her mother bemoans both loudly…
Lucy Eden’s The Love Audit is a fun play on the workplace romance trope, also featuring childhood friends who’ve been estranged and a fake relationship. While I’ve only read one of this author’s books in the past, there’s plenty to choose from in her backlist. Jasmine Morgan is a PR expert whose world becomes a…
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