Unlike most authors today, Eloisa James gets a lot out of the omniscient point of view. She uses it to provide irony and wit without confusing the reader. Also, she had the guts to rewrite her book prior to paperback publication to make it more accurate. Too bad a couple of big misunderstandings dragged the…
Danelle Harmon’s newest, The Defiant One, is a lot of fun. I sat down with it on a Saturday afternoon and finished it on the same day. It’s a delightful romantic comedy with compelling characters and a crazy “mad scientist” plot. Believable? It’s about as believable as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Frankenstein’s Monster…
Ah … who doesn’t like a tale of adventure and the high seas and of pirates and fair damsels? Generally, I do and I had high hopes for Capturing Annie but for me, it didn’t hit the mark. Annie Bonny, the heroine of the book, was born and raised on a pirate ship. The daughter…
There were many things to like about this book, including the suffragette heroine who wants to be a lawyer and the interesting subplot involving the legal system circa 1874. Unfortunately, seriously unrealistic behavior between the main characters overshadowed the better aspects of the book, rendering it a so-so read in the end. Winifred Appleton has…
Jan Cox Speas’s writing is like a wondrous time machine. If you accept the invitation to step in, she will pick you up, whirl you away and set you gently down in another time and another place, and when your journey has ended, you’ll know you’ve visited somewhere out of the ordinary. In Bride of…
A great book is a always a welcome find but one recommended by a friend is even better. My Love, My Enemy is this kind of book. When her name was first mentioned to me, I thought, “Jan Cox Speas – who”? Now I think, “Jan Cox Speas – great author”! Everything about her writing…
The book I began my keeper shelf with was Once an Angel. Rereading it, I found out why. Seamless, lyrical prose (Medeiros is truly a word artist), an unconventional setting, touches of magic realism, and a hero and heroine who need each other so deeply, I felt the world might end if they couldn’t be…
Readers who are familiar with The Scarlet Pimpernel will undoubtedly recognize the main elements in The Black Knave: A seemingly foppish, ineffectual young nobleman fools everyone around him, including his wife, into thinking he could never be the man responsible for aiding in the escape of persons threatened with execution by a merciless authority. Only…
Virginia Henley has been writing historical romance since the early 1980s. She continues to write the larger-than-life, old-style romance she is famous for. For this reviewer, The Marriage Prize features a potentially engaging plot that is undermined by prose that can only be described as the deepest purple, a hoydenish and defiant heroine who tosses…
Even though lack of period feeling in medieval and regency romances sometimes annoys me, I can understand it. Those times and places are far from our present thoughts. The history is not taught in American high schools. The thought processes are foreign, and historical errors are easily overlooked by the reader unless she is a…
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