Dark romance isn’t a sub-genre I’m normally drawn to, but there’s something so compelling about the stories Karina Halle creates that draws me in every time, and Discretion, the first installment in her new Dumonts series, turned out to be no exception. Its lush setting and complex characters drew me in from the start, and…
After a few recent forays into contemporary romance, Joanna Chambers returns to historicals and to the city of Edinburgh for her latest novel, Gentleman Wolf, the first in her Capital Wolves Duet. As the title suggests, this is a story with a touch of the paranormal, although the paranormal elements are fairly low-key, so if…
Take magic and romance, mix in the tumult of Paris on the eve of revolution, and you’ll get the historical fiction delight that is Enchantée. Gita Trelease’s début young adult novel is an enchanting romp through the streets of Paris in 1789 in which magic literally winds through the city and through the story. When…
How about a fairy tale where the heroine is the fairy godmother and the prince needs a beautiful gown? Prince Sebastian of Belgium is hiding a secret: he loves wearing gowns, and dreams of donning something more bold and glamorous than his mother’s old castoffs. When he sees a ballgown by seamstress Frances, he immediately…
Shana Galen continues her Scarlet Chronicles series of novels set in the early days of the French Revolution with Taken by the Rake, in which a young Englishwoman – who happens to be a talented forger – working with the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel in order to provide suitably ‘authentic’ documentation for the aristocrats…
All warfare is based on deception. That is what Sun Tzu said in The Art of War. In The Lost Girls of Paris, we learn that deception can carry a high price. New York, 1946. When an accident blocks her usual route to work one morning, Grace Healey is forced to cut through the bustling concourse…
In 2017, Shana Galen published Traitor in Her Arms, part of the Scarlet Chronicles, a series of historical romantic adventures set during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. Now she’s following up with another book in the series – a novella – which precedes Traitor, but which can be read independently and which is…
The Nightingale is a book I’ll hold on to because I enjoyed quite a lot of it. On the other hand, I don’t plan on rereading it very often, because a certain major aspect of the story was fingernails-on-a-chalkboard grating. Too bad I couldn’t have the one without the other. The novel starts with Vianne…
News of Our Loved Ones tells the complicated story of the Delasalle family, four generations of hard-working people who hail from a Nazi-occupied village in Normandy. Since I absolutely adore novels that center around the Second World War, I was really excited to dive into this one. Unfortunately though, it ended up failing to meet…
(NOTE: This book was previously published in 1993 as The Princess and the Barbarian) It’s interesting how a person’s keeper shelf can change over time. When I was fourteen, Betina Krahn’s The Princess and the Barbarian was one of my favorite tales, kept alongside Johanna Lindsay and Catherine Coulter. I’ve still got a number of…
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