When I came back to romance in the early ’90’s, finding a good read was something of a hit-or-miss proposition for me. Back then, there was nothing like this site to help me find a well-written romance, so I spent a lot of time in used-book stores, picking up anything that looked remotely interesting. Needless…
On his way to fight in the Crusades, fifteen-year-old squire Royce de Warrene finds a young girl hiding after the brutal murder of everyone on a French estate. Calling herself Ana and saying nothing more, Royce assumes she’s the peasant daughter of the miller slain nearby. He therefore gives her over to the care of…
Want something rich? You can go out and buy a couple of pounds of Godiva chocolate, you can splurge on a new car, you can hook up with Donald Trump (on second thought, forget that), or if like me, you are counting your pennies, you can buy A Woman of Virtue and have a richly…
As you may guess from the title, these stories all have heroes who are younger than their heroines. Intriguing, to say the least, I thought, and for the most part I wasn’t disappointed.
One day I was in the bookstore staring at the shelf containing the JD Robb books. It’s almost as though, if I stood there long enough and stared hard enough, an Eve and Roarke adventure I hadn’t read would magically appear. No such luck. Fortunately, there was a series of books next to them with…
This book reminded me of a song in the musical A Chorus Line: “Dance Ten, Looks Three.” The story was terrific, but the writing just didn’t cut it. Too elaborate, too long-winded, and I couldn’t even skim it because the writer has the habit of hiding important information in the middle of densely-packed paragraphs that…
The Merry Widow reminded me of a vaudeville act, a dozen plates kept spinning magically in the air when by rights, every one should crash and shatter on the ground. Again and again, I found myself thinking “This shouldn’t work, but it does.” A Greek chorus of Arctic explorers? Flowery, purplish prose? A hero who…
Fortune’s Bride isn’t all that bad, really. It has a certain exuberant energy that (barely) saves it from a full-on D grade. Unfortunately, almost everything else about it – plot, characterization, dialogue – is trite, occasionally bordering on childish. As I read this book, I kept feeling that I wasn’t reading a real romance novel,…
This book has everything. Too bad this includes just about every tired plot twist and cliché available in romance today. This includes, unfortunately: A reluctant bridegroom determined to not love his wife because of his tragic childhood, who nonetheless lusts madly for her on every other page. Is he tortured or just melodramatic? You be…
The heroine of Once A Rebel by Tammy Hilz plans to steal from the rich and give to the poor. However noble her motives, she’s still a person who takes it upon herself to decide who gets to keep their money and who doesn’t. That’s just one of the problems I had with the book….
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