Crooked Hearts begins exceptionally well, with a gorgeous step-back cover illustration. The two lovers are sexy, they’re good-looking, and they match their text descriptions pretty well. Best best of all they both look like they’re having fun. The step-back sets the tone for the book perfectly – this is a high-spirited, sexy romp; one look…
I don’t require pinpoint historical accuracy, but I have a hard time getting into a book if people keep doing and saying things that are completely out of character for a period. A 15th-century legendary Robin Hood-like figure with a 1930s radio serial name like the Midnight Shadow? A heroine named Bria, a future noblewoman,…
“You must lose something you can’t afford to lose, trust someone you have no reason to trust, and love someone with no hope of him ever loving you in return.” These are the words that eerily greet Cassie Bowen as she enters her Aunt Flora’s home in Lyman’s Gap, Pennsylvania. Quite an auspicious beginning and…
Manon starts out with an oft-used premise: the heroine disguised as a boy. It manages to plod along in predictable fashion for about a third of the book – until the hero discovers the heroine’s gender. At this point the book goes from ho-hum to bad, descending into incomprehensible writing and plotting that is alternately…
I have been glomming Ruth Wind/Barbara Samuel for a while. The results have been quite successful, but locating her full-length historicals as written under her real name has been difficult. I searched longest for A Bed of Spices, the book I had been most eager to lay my hands on, since it is one of…
Dark Sapphire, Lisa Jackson’s new medieval romance, has a good sense of its time period and a memorable villain. Sadly, those are the only good things I can say about it. Bland characters and bad writing made this book a chore to finish. Sheena and Keegan met as adolescents when their fathers, who loved the…
I will say this for Nan Ryan – she knows how to keep a plot moving along. The characters may all be paper-thin, and even the ostensible hero and heroine are disturbingly amoral; the villains may be ludicrous stereotypes who mostly serve to have the kinky sex that the hero and heroine don’t engage in;…
It seems that every time I read a humorous romance, I end up wincing instead of laughing. So many romances rely on clumsy characters and painful slapstick to create humor. Luckily, in A Little Scandal, Patricia Cabot avoids those devices. Her humor comes from her characters and their reactions to the world around them. For…
When I started this book, I thought I had never before read anything by Bertrice Small. But with each new plot development I became convinced that many years ago I had read one. That book, I believe, was A Love For All Time, third in the Skye O’Malley series. I remember it so clearly because…
How do you feel about romance novels where one of the parties is in disguise? Stephanie Lauren’s A Secret Love has two distinct parts. In the first part, which lasts for about two hundred pages, hero, Gabriel Bar Cynster falls in love with a mysterious disguised woman, who is, in reality, an old friend, Lady…
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