Keeper of the Light is a frustrating book, one that often shows glimmers that it could be more than it is. As published, it’s a modestly diverting tale. Its characters are likable, if not very deep. The story has its charms, but is very simple, which ultimately is the book’s main flaw. The final third,…
Heart of Fire is a paranormal romance about a fictitious country dealing with real historical events. Josie Litton did something similar (in concept, not in execution) with her Dream Island series. Heart of Fire, like Dream Island, owes much to Regency-set Historicals, even though its setting is imaginary. Lennox tossed aside the actual map of…
Based on the rather generic cartoon cover and title, you’d expect Kristine Grayson’s most recent novel to be a perfectly ordinary contemporary romance. It doesn’t take more than a page or two, however, to realize this isn’t the case. Simply Irresistible features a psychic heroine, along with a hundred-year-old hero who can perform complex magic…
Jinissa is a citizen of the nation of Calavria, exiled for political reasons and living in the neighboring kingdom of Lendiil. Like all Calavrians, she has paranormal powers. When she displays these in order to save a child’s life, she is immediately seized by the Lendiili and condemned as a witch and a spy. Moments…
Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most acclaimed authors in modern science fiction, having won numerous Hugo and Nebula awards for her Vorkosigan series. In The Curse of Chalion, she moves her trademark adventure and great characterization away from space and into an intricate fantasy world. When we meet Lupe dy Cazaril, he is…
The Forest Lord is a faerie paranormal that gets bogged down in its own melodrama. The book has an interesting premise, but most of the magic is lost in execution. Six years ago Eden Fleming was the victim of a cruel deception. Her father, caught hunting in the protected lands of Hern, the Forest Lord,…
Okay, so maybe this isn’t the most artful romance novel I’ve ever read, but, as fantasies, go, it’s a darn good one. As someone who obsessively read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology in my early teenage years and who sighed endlessly over that original Star Trek episode in which the history officer got to do it with…
Sometimes when I’m reviewing a book, especially a book I know isn’t a keeper, I fold over the upper right corner of a page to remind myself that something there bugged me. My copy of Night Pleasures looked like an accordion before I was even a third of the way through. Amanda Devereaux is the…
Sometimes I wonder what an author or publisher is thinking when they assign titles. Other times I wonder what they could be thinking when they assign labels – for instance “romance.” By the time I’d finished reading Melanie Jackson’s latest release, Dominion, I realized that both these decisions had to have been completely arbitrary. The…
Kathleen Nance’s previous book in this series, More Than Magic, got B grades from AAR reviewers Marianne and Katarina – no softies. They were both initially skeptical, but both were won over by the book’s charm. While I enjoyed parts of the follow up, Enchantment, there’s nothing here to charm me. Leila is a djinni…
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