Society is becoming woke to the decades, centuries – millennia – that women have endured as silent victims of a predatory culture. This is a good thing. But such birth does not come without pain and blood. As the pendulum swings in a corrective direction, the risk that it will swing too far is real….
So, I’m reading a book that’s pretty decent (my review is either forthcoming or already posted, depending on when this blog post goes live), but there is simply one aspect that I cannot get past. The hero’s name is Laird. Laird. When my eye catches it, I want to read “Lard” but then I think…
I admit that I love to read romance novels for pretty much one reason – the swoon-worthy heroes. Be they Navy SEALs, roguish pirates, Scottish warriors or powerful tycoons, their confidence and swagger and charm all draw me in and allow me to escape to a fantasy world where the good guy will always save…
Welcome again to our new semi-regular feature wherein a group of AAR staffers challenge themselves to pick up a book by an author they’ve never read before, either one they’ve never heard of or one they’ve been meaning to get to, and give it at least fifty pages. For AAR, our additional rule is that the…
When I heard that there was going to be a live-action version of Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson I was incredibly excited. Disney’s cartoon version was a childhood favorite of mine and, even though I was disappointed with the live-action take on Cinderella, I hoped that the the choice to keep the film…
(This column will not be the only piece we run on the best books of 2014. We will still run a separate Buried Treasures piece and several staff members will be sharing their lists of the best books they read this year.) Each year, we ask the AAR staff to pick one book as the best…
New Years Eve is the traditional time for most people to make resolutions; plans they have to improve their lives, old habits they’d like to break, more healthful habits they’d like to adopt. Some people make bucket lists of things they’d like to accomplish or experience over the course of the coming year. This is…
“Among the signs that more particularly betray the uneducated writer is inability to see when a comma is not a sufficient stop. Unfortunately little more can be done than to warn beginners that any serious slip here is much worse than they will probably suppose, and recommend them to observe the practice of good writers.”…
Before romance novels there were love poems. Sometimes sweet, sometimes tender, sometimes raunchy but always intimate and direct. Most love poems are from the author to a specific lover, a genuine communication that wasn’t necessarily intended for commercial consumption. That authentic, sincere emotional communication can often capture the essence of love in far fewer lines…
A few months ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide to writing a successful New Adult novel. I wrote this piece after reading yet another book that seemed to follow such a formula as to be suspect, that this Mad Libs method of simply filling in the blanks with different names, locations and minor details had…
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