Oct 5 2011
Dear Ms. Lin: I’m thrilled that you are writing this series and thrilled that Harlequin is publishing it and giving us such in-your-face Asian covers instead headless bodies that hint at its Eastern origins. I am not super familiar with this area of history and I read this story more as if it were a [...]
Sep 26 2011
Dear Ms. Milan: Toward the end of the review it is going to sound like I didn’t like this book but that would be the wrong impression. I did like this book. I liked it but in a lot of ways I found Mark, like his older brother Ash, to be almost saintly in his [...]
Apr 28 2011
Dear Ms. Carr, Thanks again for sending an advanced copy of your newest book “Ripe for Pleasure” to Dear Author so we can get an early sneak peak at it. When I heard that it would be set during one of my favorite historical periods, Georgian England, that’s all it took for me to be [...]
Nov 16 2009
Dear Ms. Haynes: Dr. Brooke Magnati has come out as the face behind the prostitute Belle Du Jour. Dr. Magnati was finishing up her PhD and running low on cash and decided that having sex for money would be a way for her to keep her day job, make ends meet, and presumably have time [...]
Oct 25 2009
I recently reviewed His Lordship’s Mistress by Joan Wolf. It features a young woman who, instead of marrying, decides she will try to sell herself for a short time to earn enough money to pay off the mortgage on her family home. This book prompted commenters to reminisce about their favorite books using the fallen [...]
Feb 14 2009
Dear Ms. Dain: Jane has been trying to get me to read the Courtesan Chronicles for the longest time, but for whatever reason, I just didn’t get around to it. Until now, that is, with The Courtesan’s Wager, the third book in the series. Even though I skipped to this book and knew there were [...]
Jun 3 2008
Dear Ms. Chase, Huzzah! I’m definitely on a roll with you. Last year there was [insert Lady title] and this year it’s “Your Scandalous Ways.” Tired of Regency set books? Tired of English gentleman spies? Well, I would have said so before reading this book. After finishing it…nah, not so much. And a real courtesan [...]
May 8 2008
Jane: At the beginning of Lord of Scoundrels, a book that has been in print since its first publication in 1995, Lord Dain meets Jessica Trent for the first time She was not classic English perfection, but she was some sort of perfection and, being neither blind nor ignorant, Lord Dain generally recognized quality when [...]
May 7 2008
Dear Ms. Dain: Women in the Regency period had but few choices in life. A society woman had only one: be married. I see these books as showing how women in society flirted and schemed to achieve the best result possible which was marriage to a well favored man that they actually liked. In the [...]
Oct 17 2007
Dear Readers, Just as I had finished reading Forbidden Shores by Jane Lockwood (a pseudonym for Janet Mullany) and was getting ready to review it, I had a conversation about the book with my good friend Jennie F., who had also recently read it. Jennie’s comments were so insightful and thought provoking, and I enjoyed [...]
May 9 2007
Dear Ms. Campbell, Much has been said about your debut, Claiming the Courtesan. Arguments raced round and round the blogosphere; discussions sprouted from here to Jennifer Crusie's blog. After reading comments from people who reviled the book to comments from people who adored it, I decided to read it and see for myself what the [...]
Mar 30 2007
Readers were arguing about Anna Campbell's debut, Claiming the Courtesan, before it was published. An Avon historical that was actually offending readers? This I had to see. And as I sat down to read, I expected to be shocked, looked forward to it, even, because I was really craving a book that shook up my [...]
Apr 29 2006
Dear Ms. Justiss: Beautiful cover. Writing for these upper tiered lines at Harlequin must make you thrilled because you can usually expect a gorgeous, arty cover which is what convinced me to buy this book in the first place. I have a love/hate relationship with courtesan novels. Usually the courtesan is a faux courtesan, one [...]
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