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….
“It was difficult to conduct a sparkling, seductive interaction while both parties carefully hoarded their secrets, guarding every word to prevent giving too much away.” This sentiment describes my feelings throughout the first part of reading The Most Wanted Bachelor – although I liked the story overall, it was difficult to quickly warm up to…
Sometimes when you read a romance novel, you can imagine it adapted as a movie. You invent casting choices for the main characters, and envision sets and even background music. I didn’t do that with Night Raven. Instead, while reading this romance, I kept picturing a graphic novel. The characters all speak as if they…
Frankly, it was all I could do to get through this book without nodding off. Actually, I did nod off a couple of times; thank God for Starbuck’s which I took intravenously while doing jumping jacks and popping NoDoz. Leigh Greenwood’s latest installment of The Cowboys, the continuing saga of the adopted offspring of Jake…
You’ve heard the phrase “never judge a book by its cover”. This is especially true in romance novels because the covers often misrepresent the story. The Gentle Season has a very nice cover: great-looking man, pretty woman, Grand Canyon backdrop (no, they never go there). You may wish to look at this cover often if…
I picked up The Women of Primrose Creek: Christy because I thought it might be a fun, quick read. Well, I got the quick part right; at 162 pages it was a breeze to finish. Parts of it were fun too, but in the end there just wasn’t quite enough story to make the book…
I don’t really mind romance novel premises that are a little ancient, so long as they’re freshened up with interesting characters and original twists. I don’t shy away from those heroines with amnesia, those secret pregnancies, or those good and evil twins – but if an author’s going to start with howling clichés like that,…
Reading Prairie Song is the mental equivalent of swallowing a whole jug of maple syrup. Maple syrup is great stuff — in small, calculated doses. Masses of it, however, can be overpowering, even make you sick. This book contains too much sentimentality and too many cliches that, taken individually, would have been barely noticeable, perhaps…
There’s nothing quite so awkward as catching yourself laughing at what you know isn’t meant to be funny. And boy, did I feel awkward while reading The Outlaws: Rafe. I just couldn’t help but laugh at many of the ridiculous things the cardboard characters did, or their stilted dialogue, or the incredible plot. It was…
One of the reasons I seldom read American westerns is because the characters and situations are so consistent. The cowboys, ranchers, spinsters and schoolmarms, all seem to have been born and raised on the prairie or on the plains. I wonder where the immigrants are. Willa Cather or Laura Ingalls Wilder often wrote about the…
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