It’s tricky to review a book in a series you’ve followed as a reader since the beginning. I first read Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten in 2002, and it’s become one of my favorite novels. Sadly, Personal Demon, the 8th in Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, has only cemented something that has grown clearer for the…
Bedlam, Bath and Beyond sounds like the title of a cute and cozy mystery, but it’s a fantasy romance. It has its virtues, but I can’t really recommend it. Samantha Jones (actually Dorringer) lives in a beautiful McMansion in the most exclusive gated community in town. Her rich husband Marshall adores her, and showers her…
After reading only three chapters of Distracting the Duchess by Emily Bryan, I decided I would have to submit the book’s heroine to the Mary Sue Litmus test once I had finished reading. Come on! The woman has raven hair, moss-green eyes and a voluptuous figure. She shares her home with two cats. Her father…
Sophie Kinsella’s newest book, Remember Me?, dangles from an interesting premise: What if you woke up tomorrow and everything that you didn’t like about your life was transformed? In 2004 Lexi Smart had a crap job, a crap boyfriend, crap teeth, and a crap future. She was a bit pudgy, more than a bit unfinished,…
I often bemoan the fact that a book either doesn’t pull together a suspense plot or that it lacks something in the romance department when reading romantic suspense. Catch a Shadow is one of those rare books managing to balance the two elements. The romance moves a tad too quickly to be entirely believable, but…
One of my favorite devices in romance is the juxtaposition of character types. I love it when a too-serious hero or heroine is confronted with a partner who knows instinctively how to deflate those over-inflated egos with surgical precision. Think Lizzie and Darcy. Or, more to the point here, Wulf and Chrstine from Mary Balogh’s…
Take a Navy SEAL and his troubled son and put them in a house with a woman who’s a family therapist. Now add a hurricane to strand them there and presto! Instant cabin romance. SEALed with a Kiss would have made a very good cabin/series romance, but it’s padded to the gills, the writing style…
A word on word count: At approximately 200 words per page, this one comes in at just about 72,000. In direct comparison, another Avon historical I picked at random adds up to more than 92,000. Big difference. Which begs the question: Would an additional 20,000 words have resulted in a better book? Probably not much,…
Many know the history of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony – how he initially dedicated it to Napoleon, whom he admired as the embodiment of the ideals of the French Revolution, only to scratch out the name “Napoleon” so violently that he tore a hole in the manuscript when Napoleon declared himself Emperor. (You can see the…
While reading How to Propose to a Prince, the third in the Royle Sisters trilogy by Kathryn Caskie, I found myself cutting my lunch hour short. Since this is my prime reading time, I knew I was in trouble. This particular story didn’t hold my interest. In a word, it was boring. Even though this…
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