When I went to the bookstore recently, the manager approached me with a gleam in her eye and told me I had to read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, that every bookseller there had read it and they all loved it. So I did and I’d like to thank her for recommending…
I’ve been trying to get someone else to read Lucky Jim for over fifteen years. “You’ll love it,” I told my husband. “It’s really funny.” No go. Then it sat on my sister’s bookshelf – in three different states. “I’m just never going to read this,” she confessed (in 2001). Finally I tried my daughter,…
What’s a retired jewel thief to do when some of her most skillful forgeries begin reappearing? Marne Davis Kellogg’s Friends in High Places provides an entertaining, but somewhat uneven answer to this question. As the Shamrock Burglar, Kick Keswick, was, in her own words, the most elusive and successful jewel thief in history. While she…
My husband gave me the rare opportunity of picking out a book for him to read before we went on a recent trip. Naturally I chose a book I thought he’d like, but one that I’d not yet read myself, so I could borrow it from him. Just as naturally, I got to it before…
Some might quarrel that The Abstinence Teacher is not a romance novel because it breaks so many rules. What it really does though is break a bunch of no-nos that are not rules of the genre but are instead expectations that readers of the genre have put into place by their buying habits. This has…
Never on a Sundae is an odd book that’s more than a little difficult to categorize. The spine proclaims it to be a contemporary romance anthology, though I’d say it’s more Chick Lit than anything else. The stories are all loosely connected by a retro diner in Manhattan called Sundaes, where the characters are either…
I almost gave up during the early pages of Agnes and the Hitman. There was a lot going on, a lot being set up and, frankly, who is this Bob Mayer guy working his way into my beloved Jennifer Crusie books? I have to say I’m glad I stuck with it. Crusie and Mayer had…
The Romance Readers’ Book Club is more or less a coming of age story. Set in a small Georgia town in the 1970s, it explores the world of Tammi Lynn Elco, who lives with her religious grandmother, but lives for the moments when she can sneak a peak at a romance novel. It’s a cute…
This type of book is not a typical romance. For one, it’s not a straightforward romance novel, but neither is it quite chick lit or straight fiction. Another unique quality? It’s written by a man. That alone will make many women curious. But this book is good in its own right – it’s clever, sweet,…
Most of the books that AAR receives from publishers fall into the romance or Chick Lit categories, but it’s not uncommon for us to receive books from other genres that have some sort of romantic element. The End of the Alphabet is such a book. It’s straight fiction – a story about a dying man…
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