Dear Ms. Thomas:
Your books remind me acutely how much of the relationship between reader and book depends on some chemical, perhaps even alchemical, reaction, indescribable yet potent in its effect. They also remind me of how possible it is, even now, for a compelling storyteller to make stock characters and situations come to [...]

more animals
Do you remember the movie “Election,” with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick? In the first scene Mr. McAllister asks his high school class about the difference between ethics and morals. Ironically, of course, the one student who eagerly attempts to answer the question is also the one who proceeds to make mincemeat [...]

Dear Ms. James:
It is tempting to compare Duchess By Night with those Shakespearean cross-dressing comedies, and indeed, there are some superficial similarities among the novel, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It. But it is not fair to push the comparison too far, because Duchess By Night is a different type of romantic [...]

Dear Ms. Dahl:
Had you not sent Dear Author the ARC of this book for review, the cheesy cover, hackneyed title, and curious cover quote from Eloisa James - “So hot the pages smoke . . . ” - would have thoroughly deterred me from picking it up on my own. Which would have [...]

Dear Ms. Medeiros:
Although I have Heather and Velvet sitting on a bookshelf in my house, I have not yet read it. In fact, Some Like It Wicked is my very first Teresa Medeiros book. That may have been a good thing, as I really had no expectations, but it also turned into a [...]

more cat pictures
That was the end of Grogan… the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!

If you’ve ever seen “Romancing the Stone,” you’ll recognize this line as the last one in Joan Wilder’s latest Western, the one she’s narrating at the beginning [...]

Dear Ms. Malone:
Thank you for submitting your debut Samhain Red Hot, “Lady Sings the Blues,” a short story featuring an interracial Romance between club owner Alina Gabriel and Blues musician Joshua Hanover. I am a big fan of short stories and novellas, because when they are done well, they are a perfect portion of [...]

Dear Ms. Walker:
I know it has taken me a long time to complete this review, but the truth is that it took me a long time to complete Through The Veil. At first I kept thinking it was just that I couldn’t sit down and focus long enough on the story [...]

Dear Ms. Moran:
I can trace my fascination with Ancient Egypt back to my middle school days when I saw a picture in my social studies textbook of an Egyptian battery. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over the amazement I experienced as I devoured information on Egyptian methods of embalming and [...]

Over the past couple of months I have read a handful of books in which the heroine resists a relationship with the hero. I’m not talking about the ‘Oh, I really shouldn’t’ women, or the ‘no means yes’ girls, the females who are just playing coy so as not to appear desperate, or even [...]