So I’m in this thrift shop, looking at the shelves of dilapidated, abandoned paperbacks, their pages yellow and acid-brittle, reading the titles on the spines with numbed curiosity – so many books, so many stories, so many of them forgotten and forgettable – when I see the name “Laura London.” My eyes widen: I know…
This is the somnolent story of a lost ivory pin and the unfunny, inept attempts to recover it. Some 200 pages after the mystery of the pin is introduced, you’ll be asking yourself why you should care: the plot meanders along the same meaningless path as the characters’ unexciting courtship. One afternoon Lady Harriet Dane…
Jenna Mindel’s latest release, Labor Of Love reads like a vaguely pleasant combination of Regency setting and faddish baby-book plot. It’s marred by a glaring hole in its premise * and a heroine whose motivations are questionable. As these flaws become apparent early on, credibility and sympathy suffer as a result. Olivia Lawton, Lady Beresford,…
Sometimes it just all comes down to taste. If you love Gypsy stories with a healthy dose of melodrama, then this is the book for you. And if you don’t? Well, you may be stuck plodding through the book as I did, with a curious sense of detachment. Simon, Earl of St. Albans, is surprised…
A Townhouse for Tessa is the straw that broke my own poor camel’s back. It had so many errors, inaccuracies, and other problems that it has caused me to reevaluate whether I want to continue reading traditional Regency Romances. Upon the death of her grandmother, Tessa Lockhard learns that she is not who she thinks…
We have all gone to movies only to discover that the trailer had all the best scenes in it. Likewise we have checked out a blurb and read the book only to find the blurb was the best part. The Devil and Miss Webster had a great blurb and a heroine who was not the…
A Kiss for Lucy wants to be a Regency Romance where true love grows from a momentary case of mistaken identity. Instead, however, a briefly promising scenario quickly degenerates into a story so flat and uninteresting that it becomes a difficult book to finish. Lucy Garwood, just turned sixteen, is adjusting to a comfortable life…
What do you do when somebody else plays with your life? You can rail at fate, or whine and moan, or seek revenge. Or you can be a grownup about it and try to make the best of things. That’s precisely what the characters do in A Most Suitable Duchess, which I found to be…
The Marriage Masquerade is a readable story with likable characters, but it moved a little slowly and the ending definitely missed. Lady Lucianne Gordon has a problem. She’s on her fourth Season, and two weeks ago she had a public spat that resulted in the breaking of her long-standing betrothal. Not only is she now…
I usually avoid books with family or children in the title like the plague. A recent At the Back Fence discussed some gimmicks that have been done to death in the romance genre, and babies and instant families was one of them. When I found A Family for Gillian in my batch of books I…
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