Janet
 isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!
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 disappointment, because the book did not at all wow me.
When we first meet Catriona Kincaid, she is dropping in - literally - on her cousin’s clandestine seduction by dashing young Naval officer Simon Westcott. Catriona is a ragged 15 year old who must suffer the cruel bullying of her cousin Alice, but who will gladly endure all the pinches and insults in the world for another moment with Simon, for whom she spends the next five years secretly pining, all the while growing into a lush and plucky Scottish beauty. Having been sent to live with her uncle and aunt after her parents were killed in Scotland by the English, Catriona harbors two secret dreams: returning to the Highlands and assisting her older brother in reclaiming their family heritage and land, and marrying the beautifully wicked Simon …
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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 of the movie. One of the most amazing things for me about that movie is the way it makes fun of Romance stereotypes, all the while reaffirming them left and right, ending up a perfect cinematic replica of genre Romance (albeit without the Bible). Joan Wilder, who may have sighed wistfully over her heroines’ adventures, gets a story to surpass them all, full of anger, passion, villainy, and jungle humor, happy ending included. A fantasy come true.
Which some apparently believe to be the heart of Romance. If you saw the trailer featured on the Smart Bitches for an upcoming Romance documentary, you might have caught several authors talking about the genre:
“It’s a fantasy; it’s how you really . . . you want your life to …
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 character and plot, able to be read and enjoyed in one sitting. While “Lady Sings the Blues” didn’t blow me away, it was competently written and had some interesting elements.
Alina Gabriel has named her club “The Scarlet Lady” after her alter ego, a seductress par excellence who was trained in the exotic dance clubs and who still emerges on occasion to strut on top of the bar in a red corset and sexy boots. She has some serious lust for Joshua, whose good looks, guitar skills, and sensual voice make him a favorite at the club. Although Alina doesn’t realize it, Joshua shares her feelings, having even written her a song, “Red Letter Woman,” which he hopes will encourage her to dance during its performance. Joshua can’t actually see Alina dance, since he …
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 to feel engaged, but after a hundred pages or so, I realized that it didn’t matter what the cause of my underwhelmed response was, because that feeling wasn’t going anywhere, and in fact persisted until the last quarter of the novel.
Lee Ross is afraid she is going crazy. Plagued by dreams of battle in a strange land, and of a compelling man who she only sees in those dreams, she often wakes bruised and battered, as if she has traveled during her sleeping hours to do battle in that realm of her nightmares. Little does Lee know that the land of her dreams is really her homeland, and the realm to which she is connected heart and soul, her existence essential to its survival. As the novel’s titular veil between worlds becomes thinner and thinner for …
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 the building of the pyramids. I’m still a little obsessed with mummification and have spent hours upon hours in the Egyptian wing of the British Museum, which houses the largest collection of artifacts outside of Egypt. So it was with excitement and trepidation that I approached your ambitious debut novel, Nefertiti, not knowing quite what to expect in a novel about a historical figure whose known history is incomplete. For the most part, I enjoyed Nefertiti, feeling it was true to the knowledge we have of her life and time, and appreciative of the broad scope of the story.
Nefertiti is narrated by the title character’s younger (half) sister, Mutnodjmet (Mutny), and picks up just before the fifteen-year-old Nefertiti is married to Egypt’s new pharaoh, Amunhotep IV. Amunhotep’s brother Tuthmosis has just died after a chariot …
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 the heroines who are shy of love from some past trauma. I’m referring to heroines who truly don’t want to make a romantic commitment because of a desire to be independent or from a strong career focus. These are women who seem to be resisting the very structure of Romance, because they resist the narrative path to True Love, marriage, and children. The anti-Romance heroine, I have begun to call them.
Take Tessa Hart from Kathleen O’Reilly’s Shaken and Stirred, for example. She was the first heroine who really started me thinking along these lines, because I was moved by both admiration and frustration for her struggle. A woman who had been terribly hurt by a man she had given up a college education for, …
Dear Ms. Cole:
 As soon as I finished Dark Desires After Dusk, I went back to track rage demon Cadeon Woede’s character in Wicked Deeds on a Winter Night and Dark Needs at Night’s Edge (am I the only one who’s starting to feel these titles are blending into one long tongue twister?), curious to see if I would regard him differently now that I’ve read his whole story. Happily, the answer is no: Cade is still the swaggering, demon brew-swilling rage demon who loves his big old truck and his pay per view porn almost as much as he regrets the youthful decision that lost his brother crown and kingdom. Cade is no suave intellectual, no ethically upstanding Lore citizen. He is a blunt instrument, and one sexy demon, with, as Nix likes to point out, seriously “lickable horns.”
Holly Ashwin is one great heroine, too, a mathematics genius with serious (medicated) OCD, who remains in complete emotional and physical control through punishing rituals of cleaning, counting, swimming, and designing computer code. She possesses one of the most original excuses for remaining a virgin I think I’ve ever seen in Romance: …
Dear Ms. Harris:
 First I have to admit that I adore this series; I feel very connected to the characters and to the world of the novels. Although I’m not old enough to be Sookie’s mother, I have very protective feelings toward her and wait impatiently for my yearly fix of her continuing saga, cheering her on as she becomes more independent and confident, feeling sharply the bittersweet sacrifices and compromises she so often has to make. And quite honestly, this is one of the few series of books I inhale rather uncritically. However, since this is a review, I have to say that while I am every bit as hooked in emotionally to this series as I was after reading Dead Until Dark, as a crafted work of fiction, From Dead To Worse is not the strongest book in the series.
Recently returned home to Bon Temps from the disastrous vampire convention in Rhodes, Sookie Stackhouse is dealing with the usual combination of human and not-so-human problems. Her boyfriend Quinn has not returned, having been injured badly in the hotel explosion that claimed the lives of numerous vamps and gravely injured the queen …
Dear Ms. Cole:
 Somewhere in the middle of Dark Needs at Night’s Edge I felt that this book occupies a very important moment in the Immortals After Dark series. As Jane said previously, this is a series one can pick up at any point and not be completely confused. But for those of us who have been reading it since the beginning, the world-building is complex and multi-layered, not only with different species of immortals but with different families and other kin relationships to keep track of, and various mythologies, alliances, aversions, grudges, and other intersections among the immortals. It is a challenge to keep the reader engaged with the central story as well as giving ample attention to the world building for both novice and initiated readers. Dark Needs at Night’s Edge reminded me of how difficult that challenge can be, because the book’s main strengths and weaknesses relate to this balancing.
Conrad Wroth is a Fallen vampire, turned by his desperate brother against his will into the creature he had made a sacred vow in life to destroy. And now, in his Fallen state, eyes blood red and …
Dear Ms. Napier:
 This is the second of your books I have read, and it was selected purely by what was available on Fictionwise. Luckily for me, Price of Passion was a winner, an entertaining and smart interpretation of the enduring Harlequin Presents equation of plucky but overset heroine + darkly passionate and misunderstood hero = operatic drama and fiery loving. I loved every overwrought page of it.
Kate Crawford has a secret, a growing concern, and she’s come to Oyster Beach to figure out what to do about it. The vacation property she has rented is right next door to famous author Drake Daniels, who has shared Kate’s bed and commanded her heart for the past two years. But Drake, itinerant and unsettled, both physically and emotionally, does not seem happy to see Kate. When Kate — accidentally on purpose — stops by Drake’s super-secret writing haven, casually inquiring about a spare cup of sugar, she proves an irresistible disruption to Drak, catalyzing an anger and lust-fueled game of cat and mouse, although who acts and cat and who acts as mouse changes over the course of the book.
Most of the …
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