TBR Challenge – Old School Romance month
I got a bit carried away with this months’ prompt of “Kickin’ it old school” and read several books which were published more than ten years ago. I’ve chosen to post reviews of two; one is a Traditional Regency which, unusually, tells the story of an older couple whose marriage has fallen apart, and the other is a perennial favourite in the AAR Top 100 although it’s clearly a “marmite” book – people love it or hate it.
The latter is Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold, published in 1995, the middle book of her Wyckerley trilogy. Its male protagonist, Sebastian Verlaine is twenty-nine, handsome as sin, rich and morally bankrupt and the whole story has some very dark overtones that make it hard to read at times.
Sebastian’s pleasure-seeking lifestyle has reached the stage where he’s so steeped in dissipation that he doesn’t feel anything […]
Grading books is not always straightforward. For me, there is no rubric, no check-list of Do’s and Don’t’s. I have a few deal-breakers, but not many. When I assign a book a DIK grade, though, I often feel like it has to be perfect — or at least very, very close. The writing must be flawless. The characters, well-developed. The plot, exciting, believable, and interesting. But I’ve found that some of the books I go back to, the ones I re-read over and over again (the true test, in my opinion, of a DIK), are objectively problematic in some way.
“I don’t like THOSE kinds of stories.” Admit it. You’ve heard those words or said something similar yourself at some point. Hang around any romance site long enough and people will start talking about their favorite plots or going on about types of plots they just can’t stand. One person just can’t enjoy secret baby books while another will proclaim that marriage of convenience plots are enough to keep her from picking up a novel. When I come across these discussions, I’m more than happy to dish on plotlines that just don’t thrill me. We all have our preferences, and the fantasies that work are as different as the readers who choose them. These conversations also make me think about good writing, though. After all, even if we don’t like a particular plotline, couldn’t there be an exception to our […]
Earlier this year, Leigh blogged about