“I woke in such a good mood this morning. There was a dress floating about in my head; almost ready, almost there. Cream silk, the skirt trimmed with tiers and tiers of rough cream lace and the bodice tuckered but unadorned except for a single rose.” So begins 36-year-old Susanna Weber’s diary and Eva Ibbotson’s…
The Countess is a rewrite of one of Catherine Coulter’s old Regencies. I’ve had a sketchy history with those. The first one I read was too padded. The second one I tried had a rapist hero. Luckily, The Countess avoids those pitfalls because Catherine Coulter does something different with this one. Instead of trying to…
Honey is a sweet slice of late Victorian Americana. It deftly mixes comedy and angst and features a spunky (but ladylike) heroine and a strong (but tortured) hero along with a fine group of supporting characters. Best of all, for a sports lover like me, most of the book takes place during the baseball season…
Anne Stuart’s To Love a Dark Lord is aptly named, for the hero is about as dark and tortured as a reader is likely to find. He’s well matched, however, as Stuart is wont to do, both by an equally tormented heroine, as well as a set of secondary characters whose romance is nearly as…
Lately, in historicals, we’ve seen a lot of families headed by heroines. There was the desperate family in Jo Beverley’s Forbidden Magic, the needy family in Julia Quinn’s How To Marry A Marquis, the witty Shakespeare-quoting family in Jacquie D’Alessandro’s Red Roses Mean Love and the irresistibly multi-lingual, intellectual family in Liz Carlyle’s My False…
Strangers at Dawn is one of those books that begins wonderfully, only to sag in the middle and never fully pick up speed again. The opening volleys are full of passion and intrigue, but after the initial conflict between the hero and heroine are past, the actions and attitudes of the heroine seem forced –…
Dearest Max is an intriguing book that just misses the mark. Some of its elements seem fresh and creative, especially at first. Unfortunately, The book takes a rather dark turn about half-way through. It acquires a somber tone that permeates every aspect of the story, and the nastiness gets to be a bit too much…
Do you adore heroes who make repeated assumptions about the heroine? Boy, have I got the book for you. Lord Maximillian Chartwell learns that his cousin, the Duke of Penrose, is about to be trapped into marrying a conniving American heiress, Virginia Blair. In truth, Virgie has no interest in marrying a duke. She wants…
Reading the back of Jake Walker’s Wife, you would assume it was a Western Romance. The hero is a wanted man from Texas, and the heroine’s father owns some kind of ranch. Actually, it’s set primarily in Maryland in 1850, but if you’re looking for historical authenticity, you won’t find it here. And although the…
I was never much of a history student. Dry textbooks just didn’t hold my interest. Because of my love for adventure, intrigue and romance, much of what I’ve learned about medieval England has been gleaned from historical romances. I believe Roberta Gellis is one of the best at producing vivid and accurate portrayals of history….
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