Reviews by Dabney Grinnan
A-
I'm not sure why I decided to re-read Unforgiven. I'd read it years ago and thought it was good but not great. This go-round, it impressed the hell out of me. It resonated in a way contemporary romance rarely does with me.Adam Collins and Marissa Brooks grew up in the small town of Walker’s Fo ...
I don’t read many category romances—I like longer stories. Sarah Mayberry’s, however, are the outstanding exception to that rule. I’ve read twenty of her novels. Suddenly You is my favorite. It’s funny, sexy, feminist, and wonderfully real.Harry is a nice guy who likes to take it all e ...
B+
But for the first time, I feel the power of praying words alongside someone else, the power of praying words so familiar and ancient they come from some hitherto unknown part of my mind. The part of my mind that isn’t consumed with accounting and finance, the part that isn’t even rational or ent ...
Genevieve Eversea, of Pennyroyal Green, has been in love with Lord Harry Osborne for three years. Harry is all that Genevieve wants in a man — he’s funny, handsome, shares her knowledge and love of Italian art, and makes her smile every time she sees him. She is certain they make the perfect cou ...
Jane Harper had been a journalist for a decade when she decided she wanted to write fiction. So, she did what many of us do when we want to learn a new skill: She took an online course. It must have been a hell of a course because her debut novel The Dry--which she wrote in 12 weeks--became an award ...
There are books I read once and there are books I read again and again. Having Her is one of the latter. I read it for the first time two months ago and, since then, have read it again... and again. It's sexy, unexpected, romantic, smart, and, in places, achingly sad. The novel meets my criteria for ...
I loved this book when I first read it in 2012. I picked it up again for our blog on Activist Heroines and fell hard all over again. This is the story of Lulu Davies, a pilot for the English Air Transport Auxiliary, the only organization that allowed women to fly planes in WWII. She falls in love wi ...
B+
Lady Katarina has been holding the Irish stronghold Rardove for Queen Elizabeth. (The Virgin Queen is a slyly drawn character in this book!) The year is 1589 and Elizabeth has decided to give the barony to an English lord. This does not go over well with Aodh Mac Con who believes he is the rightfu ...
A
Stephen King once said that publishers disliked novellas because they "they were too long to be short and too short to be really long." And it's not just publishers, is it? Read through reviews of novella after novella here at AAR and you'll read of similar dissatisfactions. I can think of no one ...
C
I wanted to love this book. I've liked the other two books in the series despite my normal "eh" response to most New Adult. I've liked the hero, Zach, in the other books and love the "virgin hero" trope.But, it was not to be. For starters, the premise of this book didn't work for me. The heroine ...