Three pages into How To Seduce A Duke, I groaned. The opening scene: three girls (triplets, no less) are posing as garden statuary in order to spy on the man who has caught the attention of one of the sisters. They are covered in powder, wearing togas, and hiding behind a hedge. Better yet, we…
There’s something so thrilling about reading a really good debut novel and, while Michelle Styles’ debut is not perfect, there is something quite compelling about it. The setting is one not often seen in historical romance and she manages to create characters who are strong without coming off like 21st century people in fancy dress….
No Man’s Bride is the first book in a new series called Misadventures in Matrimony. It features four friends who form the “Spinsters’ Club” and swear never to marry. They all have different reasons for this. Some are strong willed. One wants to be a pirate (yes, really). The heroine of this book, Catherine Fullbright,…
Can we call a halt to that cover? You know the one I mean, the one with the shirtless man standing in an inappropriate setting with a woman clinging to his leg with her dress about to fall off. Robyn DeHart’s Deliciously Wicked has a particularly bad version of this cover redeemed only by the…
Elaine of Corbenic has a crumbling castle, an insane father, a crippled brother, and a slew of poor villagers who all depend on her. (Making her, thus far, your pretty typical romance novel heroine.) Lancelot du Lac is the greatest knight in the world, gifted by the magical Lady of the Lake with inhuman, invincible…
The Slightest Provocation is an “Anything But” book. As I waded through it, I kept wishing I was doing anything but reading it. At one point, I was so bored I decided to take a break and scrub my bathtub. The half hour I spent doing so was more interesting, satisfying and enjoyable than any…
The early sections of The Book of True Desires set up a premise so tantalizing I actually experienced a giddy rush of anticipation. But while Betina Krahn takes readers on an interesting journey in this romantic adventure, I ultimately couldn’t help thinking that some better company would have improved the trip. In order to fund…
Those of you who have been complaining of cookie cutter romances – run out and get Hope Tarr’s Vanquished. It may be set in England during the Victorian period, but it’s very far from the usual historical romance. This is a serious and sometimes gritty book with a most unusual hero and heroine. Harry Stone…
Now that the tenth and final book has been published in Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series – one of my favorite series of connected books of all time – has been published, it seemed like the right time to take a return trip back to where it all it started. The Duke and I always comes…
The Amazon description of Step Into Darkness called the book “a Gothic romance” and its hero “an infamous thief.” That was all I needed to know to ask to review it. It didn’t take me long to discover this isn’t really a gothic romance, nor is the hero truly a thief. Normally, such dashed expectations…
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