May 28 2013
Dear Ms. Dare: It’s fairly well known that I am suffering a historical romance malaise so I admit that my grade and response to this book may be disproportional to others. I was engaged and charmed from the first chapter to the last and didn’t hesitate to put the book down once. I’d be hard(…)
May 13 2013
Dear Ms. Graham: This book was re-released by Harlequin Presents to look less Harlequin Presents-y and more upscale contemporary romance. The inside however, is classic Harlequin Presents. A young, down on her luck waitress slash potter spends a torrid evening with a wealthy Spanish billionaire only to find herself pregnant because neither of them use(…)
Mar 28 2013
Dear Ms. Rowan: Your first book, A Study in Seduction, was the subject of intense debate between myself and Sarah Wendell of SmartBitchesTrashyBooks on the issue of the heroine’s believability as a mathematician. Spoiler: I liked it. I haven’t had great success with historicals and was eager to read the follow up featuring the musically(…)
Nov 28 2012
Dear Ms. Fraser: Jennie: I requested your book from NetGalley more or less on a whim; the blurb described a couple who hastily engaged in a marriage of convenience finally coming together after having been separated by the hero’s military service, and the obstacles they face. I’ve recently read and enjoyed several similar stories, so I(…)
Nov 10 2012
Dear Ms. Probst: As I read your book, I kept thinking about a phrase my mother uses: “There’s no accounting for taste.” The first two books in your Marriage to a Billionaire series–The Marriage Mistake is the third–have sold like hotcakes. Each book features a self-centered hero, a zero(ine) to heroine chick, a love spell, a meddlesome Italian(…)
Aug 17 2012
Dear Readers, Sourcebooks is having a sale on Georgette Heyer ebooks this week (August 14-20), so I thought it would be a good time for another Heyer review. I noticed that A Civil Contract is one of the books on sale, and I’ve been wanting to write about it. Heyer fans really split on this(…)
Jul 27 2012
Dear Ms. Crews: I am a big fan of your Harlequin Presents and I feel like you exploit the category length and the fantasy feel of the stories in the best way. This latest effort, however, spent so much time in the head space of one character that I felt disconnected with the hero. The(…)
Jun 22 2012
The Wedding Banquet (1993) Genre: Romantic/GLBT/Comedy Grade: B This is one of Ang Lee’s earlier movies and he uses it to show a cross cultural match up of Taiwanese and American, GLBT and straight. It’s got humor, love of many kinds, a bit of pathos and a lot of understanding – even if not everybody(…)
Apr 18 2012
Dear Ms. Probst: Your publisher kindly sent this book for review and given the recent announcement of the great sales success of this book, I was eager to read it. I can only conclude that the success of this book is due to a great hunger for category books by readers who believe that they(…)
Mar 27 2012
Dear Ms. Linden: Before I get too far into this review, I want to say right up front that I found Blame it on Bath quite likeable. I do so because the series that includes this book – The Truth about the Duke – is based on a legal issue that, even to my limited(…)
Feb 29 2012
Dear Ms. Balogh, I first read The Temporary Wife, one of your most beloved trad regencies, several years ago. At the time, I liked it but was distracted by an initial similarity to another of your regencies, The Ideal Wife, which I had read first and liked even better. The opening premises of the two(…)
Feb 28 2012
Dear Ms. MacLean: This is the first of your books I’ve read, and it’s the first in quite a while that I’ve considered applying the mistorical tag to. Given the muddled nature of Regency history in Romance, as well as my insecurity regarding how much I really know that’s true about the period, I decided(…)
Aug 30 2011
Dear Ms James: I think I have been waiting for you to write a book like The King’s Courtesan since I read Broken Wing. This book has a confidence and maturity, a depth, in fact, that impressed me, despite the numerous well-used genre tropes and devices it employs and the predictability of the overall story(…)
Aug 26 2011
I read Ried’s Gold Ring of Betrayal and The Bellini Bride after Dear Author’s recommendation several months ago and enjoyed them. When I saw that some of Ried’s backlist was being republished I purchased Marriage on the Rebound. I enjoyed the angst and the occasional humor in the story. I even liked Rafe once some of the back-story was revealed. What annoyed me was that the heroine in(…)
Aug 9 2011
Dear Ms. Reavis, The books which make up this series have been favorites of mine for years. First published in the late 1990s, they’ve also been out of print for about that long so I was delighted to notice them among the Harlequin Treasury reissues. I hope that this will allow more people to try(…)
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