Archive for the 'A Review Category' Category
Dear Authors and Readers.
 If you will excuse a personal history, you will see its relevance to my review. I enlisted in the Army National Guard after 9/11. I became a US citizen and commissioned (became an officer) in 2003. I accepted a medical retirement in May of this year, at the rank of Captain, after 7 ½ years of service. I never went overseas, but I served in the Katrina response in Louisiana. I was a soldier and damn proud to be so.
But I am also bisexual (with some extra kinks outside the Kinsey continuum). This is the first time I’ve been able to admit this in public (well, I came out on Twitter on National Coming Out Day) since figuring it out because of the US military’s destructive Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. My sexuality in no way affected my service. All outward appearances show a happily married, monogamous, heterosexual soldier, which is mostly what I am. But every now and then the issue came up and I had to bite my tongue. I could have been kicked out of the service if anyone had dug too deep, for a reason …
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Genre: Romantic zombie comedy
Grade: Effing hilarious
When I looked ahead on the October calendar and saw that this last Friday would be the day before Halloween, I realized I needed some kind of horror film or monster film or, well you get the picture, to tie in with it. But since that genre isn’t something I normally watch and I wanted some romance in the film, I was a bit panicked. “What can I watch?” I muttered as I chewed a fingernail. A quick check of my Netflix queue and the day is saved. I’ll watch “Shaun of the Dead!” I said.
The plot is fairly simple. Shaun (Simon Pegg) is a 29 year old appliance salesman who’s having problems with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) who is dissatisfied with their relationship, primarily because it revolves around going to “The Winchester,” Shaun’s favorite pub, every night. She wants something different, a nice dinner at a nice restaurant somewhere other than the pub. But Shaun screws even that up and tops it off by giving her flowers, complete with card, that he’d bought for his mother. She dumps him and Shaun and one of his flatmates, Ed (Nick …
Dear Ms. Wolf:
 I re-read your book recently in preparation for a year end list.  I was shocked when I checked the DA Archives and did not see a review for it.  I had to rectify that immediately.  His Lordship’s Mistress is one of my favorite books and your work in the Signet Regency line was really wonderful.  There are so many that I enjoy revisiting and I am so grateful that you decided to resell your ebook rights to Belgrave House so that I could buy ebook copies of many of them.  I do think that His Lordship’s Mistress is the best of your stellar work in that line and I’ll do my best to convey why.
As Janine noted in the review of another of my favorite Wolf traditional regencies, A London Season, your writing style is simplistic and spare. Â I really enjoy that style and it’s out in full force here. Â His Lordship’s Mistress contains all the classic elements of a Wolf book: the heroine in trouble, gambling leading to despair, Shakespeare, and horses.
Jessica Andover has just buried her stepfather, a wastrel that gambled away her mother’s small fortune and left …
Dear Ms. Austen,
I will confess right off the bat that I’m one of those readers who never “got” you. I tried to read Pride and Prejudice years ago, but gave up after a few pages because of your writing style. What can I say – I had less patience in those days with long, indirect sentences which seemed to use 20 words to say what could be easily said in five (hah! I’m one to talk on that score…). I read Emma a few years ago and honestly did not care for it. It wasn’t so much the language this time; it was the fact that there seemed to be about a dozen main characters and only one of them (Mr. Knightley, of course) appeared to not be a complete and utter twit. Emma herself was dumber than a bag of hammers, and every other character seemed to fall somewhere on the continuum between “moron” and “get any stupider and we’ll need to water you twice a week” (to paraphrase the late, great Molly Ivins).
I don’t really like reading about stupid people, so Emma frustrated me. Nonetheless, I picked up a copy of Sense and Sensibility recently, and though I …
 PLEASE NOTE: this conversational review does contain some spoilers.
Jennie: I was one of many readers mightily impressed with Carolyn Jewel’s previous historical romance Scandal, which I read in January and graded an A-.
Janine: Totally with you on that. Scandal was one of the most impressive books I’ve read this year, and it’s stuck with me so much that I recently went back to my own review and raised the grade from an A- to an A-/A.
Jennie: I was very much looking forward to Indiscreet. While I had some problems with the second half of the story, overall, it did not disappoint.
Janine: Agreed again, although, as readers will see our opinions about what works in this book differ a bit more than they usually do.
Jennie: The book begins:
How everything started.
This incident took place at about two o’clock the morning of September 3, 1809. The location was the back parlor of a town house owned by the Duke of Buckingham but lived in by the Earl of Crosshaven on a ninety-nine-year lease, presently in its twenty-third year. It should be remarked that Lord Edward Marrack, the younger brother of the
…
This guest review is brought to you by Jill Myles, author, friend and blogging partner of Meljean Brook. We will have a review of Demon Forged by Janet (aka Robin) next week.
****
Dear Meljean Brook:
 I’ve struggled to write this review a little. In fact, this is the second time I’ve tried to write it on paper, and probably the ninth draft from my head.
Disclaimer – you and I blog together and we are friends, but…I was a friend to your series (does that sound lame? Can I say that?) long before we’d ever said hello. I was first introduced to the Guardians when Jane Litte of Dear Author raved about DEMON ANGEL. Hello, angel story? I am there. It wasn’t until much later that we became friends, but I wanted to throw this out in the open lest someone think I have bias, and I guess I do.
Some of your books I have loved more than others. DEMON BOUND was my absolute favorite, and some of the others were less…favorite… (I’m looking at you, DEMON NIGHT) but were still excellent reads. For me, your books are …
Dear Ms. Carlyle:
 I have read you since your debut in 1999 with My False Heart. My False Heart remains high of my favorite romances of all time and it is the book against which I measure all of your other titles. The story was so fresh at the time. The heroine, Evie Artevalde, was not a virgin. The hero, Eliot, the Marquess of Rannoch, was a surly, disreputable lord. He lies to her. She turns him off but ultimately they have a memorable happy ever after. Wicked All Day tells the story of of Eliot’s illegitimate daughter, ZoĂ«. ZoĂ«’s mother was an opera dancer whom Eliot paid off. Eliott was not a good father. He had good intentions, but up until his marriage to Evie, he had left ZoĂ« in the hands of a succession of governesses.
ZoĂ« was incredibly spoiled because Eliott didn’t know how to be a good parent. His response to a governness that treated ZoĂ« badly was to cast her out without a reference and order his servants to make sure that ZoĂ« never had another unhappy day. ZoĂ« grew …
WARNING: this review may not be work safe as it includes profanities and sexual situations. Carry on.
Dear Ms. Byrne:
 I hadn’t even realized that this book, the third in the Faustin brothers trilogy, was set for release until I received the Samhain reviewer email. I jumped on the chance to obtain a review copy because I had enjoyed Bound by Blood quite a bit.
I thought this was a great, fresh vampire romance. It wasn’t fresh because the vampire myth held anything new. The freshness was totally based on the characters themselves. Mikhail is the eldest of the Faustin brothers. He and his family rule over the East. His mother calls him home to tell him of a prophecy of his mate. It is Alya Adad. I’ll just let the book do the talking:
Helena’s shrill whistle cut through the sludge of noise. Mikhail lifted his head and looked around the room with fresh eyes. In just a few seconds his world had collapsed and been rebuilt in a terrible new form. Helena threw out her arms in frustration. “Excuse me. I’m new here. Could somebody please tell me who this Alya Adad is?”
His father said, “The eldest child of Prince Zouhair Adad of Morocco.”
His mother said, “Mikhail’s first love.”
Gregor said, “She’s the fucking queen of the damned.”
Mikhail stood. That surprised them all, he could tell, and he hated their worried glances. He cast a long, slow gaze around his family circle, warning them against pity. “You should know her name, Helena. She rules the entire West coast. And we’re at war with her.”
Dear Authors:
 I only opened this volume when Dreamspinner sent it to us because Madeleine Urban had a co-written story in it. I adore her longer co-written stories with Abigail Roux, and the volume started off with “Reluctant,” so I thought I’d have a great little story and then skim through the rest. Instead, “Reluctant” was truly awful and the rest of the stories saved me from chucking the volume off my computer.
At 332 pages, this is a seriously hefty volume (electronic, of course). And with only 12 stories, that’s between 25-30 pages a story, much longer than the usual short stories crammed into an anthology. This gives enough time to actually flesh out the characters, plots, and themes. Or time for the story to move from blah to boring and awful.
The theme for the volume is sex industry workers: both low- and high-end prostitutes and strippers, mainly. What was fascinating to me more than anything was how each story used the sex industry angle—as a meet-cute, as conflict, as a moral failing, as a perfectly legitimate profession, with or without comment. I’m strangely fascinated by this particular profession and by how …
Dear Ms. Hart,
 Two of the many things I enjoyed about your erotic novella collection, Pleasure and Purpose, are the setting and the heroines’ background. All three novellas take place in a fantasy setting which resembles mid nineteenth century Europe in terms of its technological development. As far as I can tell, this world does not seem to contain magic, but underlying all the stories is a fascinating mythology that plays an important role in the characters’ lives.
It is the prevailing religious belief that each time a soul finds perfect solace, even if only for a moment, an arrow appears in the god Sinder’s quiver. According to legend — and many people’s faith — when the quiver is full, Sinder, his wife and his son, The Holy Family, will reunite, bringing peace and harmony to mankind.
To that end, the Order of Solace was created. The women who enter the order, called handmaidens, make it their task to bring solace to the patrons who engage their services. Sometimes doing that involves sex, but there is more to it than that. To give an idea of the handmaidens’ outlook, here are …
 So yes, it seems like everyday is a giveaway but it just kind of happened that way. Â I don’t want Jo Goodman’s Never Love a Lawman get lost in the shuffle. We have 10 ARCs to give away to 10 random commenters. One of the books is the copy I read but I wanted to give it away because if even one more person becomes exposed to Goodman, all the better.
I do not envision Wyatt looking like this. ——>
Robin facilitated getting us these ARCs and I hope, come September, she shares her thoughts about the book as well. Â I knew this was a good book because the minute I finished the book, I started paging through it to re-read passages and ended up reading the entire book twice in the space of 24 hours. Â Now, this isn’t a perfect book. I had some issue with the villain and how that part of the story wrapped up, but for the pure joy of reading a romance, this book comes close to being some kind of perfection.
Jo Goodman’s books are not quick category reads to be devoured in an hour. Her stories are more …
Dear Ms. Lin:
 I don’t review many non romance books here at Dear Author because it’s a) a romance oriented blog and b) I rarely read anything that isn’t romance except for the books I read to my daughter. For the most part, the books I’ve read to my five year old are mainly old classic standbys such as Dr. Seuss stories and the Magic Tree House series which are educational but nothing to write home about in terms of storytelling.
My husband read an excerpt of Where the Mountain meets the Moon and bought it. (You can hear an excerpt here read by the author). Â We are always on the look out for any girl positive stories.
We started the book about three weeks ago, reading a few chapters every night in alternating succession. I would read one night and my husband, the other. My tot was mostly interested in the dragon, but my husband and I were so captivated with the book that we would give each other recaps after we had finished. Sometimes we would ask the tot to tell us what had happened when Mommy or Daddy had read the …
Cluny Brown – 1946
Genre: romantic comedy
Grade A-
Here’s another older movie I’d love to see on DVD – at least in the US. You European readers are lucky enough to have a region 2 version available. I’m so happy for you.
::smiling:: ::still smiling:: ::snarling actually, if you want the truth::
“Cluny Brown” is a little known gem from Ernst Lubitsch which features two outsiders who find each other in prewar England. Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is the niece of a London plumber who answers the call of the plumbing pipes one Sunday afternoon when a society gent has a backed up sink. There she runs into Adam Belinksi (Charles Boyer) who is a Czech writer who has left Europe to find refuge in England after running afoul of the Nazis. After successfully fixing the sink, she and the men toast each other just a bit too much which is when her Uncle Arn arrives. Horrified that Cluny has forgotten her “place,” he makes arrangements to ship her out to the country as a parlor maid at the home of Sir Henry (Richard Owen) and Lady Carmel (Margaret Bannerman).
Meanwhile, Belinski meets up with their son Andrew (Peter Lawford) who is in awe …
 Starting this month, all of the Dear Author recommended reads will be given a discount at digital bookseller, Books on Board. Â The discount page is here. (In the future, we’ll always try to post this on Tuesday so you can get the discount the day of the release).
- Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran (recommended by Jennie, Janet/Robin and Jan)
- Hot Under Pressure by Kathleen O’Reilly (recommended by Smart Bitches, Jayne and Jane)
- Mistletoe Mommy by Tanya Michaels (recommended by Jayne who also recommends forgetting what the title is because it has nothing to do with Mommy or Christmas)
- One Week As Lovers by Victoria Dahl (recommended by Janet/Robin and no, I don’t know what it will take for Victoria Dahl to get an A here at Dear Author)
- Goddess of the Hunt by Tessa Dare (recommended by Jane because I loved the immature, big hearted Lucy who had to have that fearless belief in life in order to bring about the brooding Jeremy).
- Beloved Vampire by Joey Hill (recommended by Jane. The review will come at noon. Needless to say its a star crossed lover + vampire + love saves people
…
Dear Ms. Duran,
 Since I’ve acquired my lovely Sony PRS-505, I’ve used the handy-dandy “bookmark” button to mark notable pages in a book that I may want to refer back to when I write a review. Depending on the book, the bookmarks may be noting something that worked for me or something that didn’t. When reading your latest book, Written on Your Skin, I hit the bookmark button so many times I was afraid I was going to wear it out. All 32 bookmarks (and it easily could’ve been 132 if I hadn’t restrained myself a bit) noted bits of prose or characterization that I just loved. So it’s no surprise that Written on Your Skin is easily one of the best books I’ve read in a long while.
The book opens in Hong Kong in 1880. Phin Monroe and Mina Masters have been carrying on a flirtation for several weeks when they encounter each other at a party. Phin thinks that Mina is an empty-headed flirt and Mina thinks Phin is an American businessman. They’re both wrong. Things get interesting when Phin collapses, the victim of poisoned brandy. Each quickly realizes that the other has hidden …
 Dear Ms. Briggs,
I always approach an old favorite with trepidation. So often they were favorites because of the person I was at that time in my life, and having changed, they no longer affect me as they once did. But sometimes I’m lucky and I find that it was something more timeless and I love the book as much as ever.
I’m a long-time lover of science fiction romance, and have been reading it since the 70s, even though I didn’t have any concept of the sub-genre at the time. I’m going to be revisiting some of the classics, those books considered must reads that I haven’t read in ages. I expect that I won’t love some as much as I once did. I’m happy to say that the first I chose, a favorite of both mine and Jane’s, is one of those timeless ones, your Dragon Bones / Dragon Blood.
Honestly, I was hard-pressed to come up with any criticism of this book. I sat down after re-reading it and tried to come up with something I’d have changed had I written it …
Dear Ms. Duran,
 I was a big fan of your debut The Duke of Shadows, published last year. I can’t say how excited I was to learn that you had not one but two books scheduled for release in 2009, one in June and the other in July. Having now read the first, I can say that The Duke of Shadows was no fluke – Bound by Your Touch confirms that you possess a rare talent.
On the surface, this is the familiar tale pairing a bluestocking spinster with a profligate aristocrat. Lydia Boyce and James, Viscount Sanburne meet when he interrupts a speech she is giving before an archaeological society, hoping to drum up funds for her father’s research. Lydia is devoted to her absent father, who spends most of his time in Egypt on archaeological digs, and relies on Lydia back in England to act as his secretary, agent and fund-raiser.
James is actually at the meeting for the opposite reason – he wants to flaunt an artifact that he’s snatched from beneath his hated father’s nose at said father, who is in attendance at the meeting. Lydia is piqued at the interruption to her speech …
Dear Ms. Singh,
 Your Psy/Changeling series has me hooked. Set in a future and alternate Earth peopled by three races, humans, Psy, and changelings, the books feature dynamic characters, suspenseful plots and subplots, intricate world-building, and a lot of sexual and romantic tension. Though the world is dominated by the Psy, who are connected through a telepathic net, the changelings, who can shift form from animal to human, have slowly been gaining power, and it is they who are the focus of Branded by Fire, the sixth book in the series.
The story begins with a hot encounter between two changelings. Mercy, a sentinel for the DarkRiver leopard changeling pack, walks through the forest feeling the effects of eight months of abstinence. She is now the only one of the sentinels who is still unmated, and she worries she’ll remain that way. Mercy is dominant in her personality, and while she doesn’t want to walk all over a submissive man, she will also never allow someone else to boss her around. It’s a problem that other dominant females have sometimes been unable to resolve, and Mercy fears that even if she …
Captain Blood (1935)
Captain Blood (DVD 2005 Turner Entertainment Co and Warner Bros Entertainment)
Grade A-
Genre: Romance/Swashbuckling/Pirate
I had so much fun doing my last Friday Film review that I decided to comb through my DVD collection and see what else might be suitable. Captain Blood is one of the epic pirate movies which set the standard for Hollywood historical action films for years to come. I first saw this as a teenager. I loved it! And then I discovered it was an adaptation from a book so I hunted that down and, wait a minute!, the author, Rafael Sabatini, wrote lots of similarly styled books. I was in heaven then. So not only did I fall in love with the movie but I ended up getting years of reading enjoyment out of it. Not a bad bargain.
Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine, is caught up against his will in the attempt to overthrow King James II (boo hiss). Called out to tend to a wounded rebel, Blood cares little for the man’s politics until he too is swept up by the King’s soldiers and sent to jail to await trial with the rest of the rebels. There he’s condemned and faces death …
Dear Ms. Duran:
I was probably the only member of the Dear Author reviewing team that didn’t love your freshman debut, DUKE OF SHADOWS. For me, it read like a love story between you and India and not so much a love story between the characters. I admit that despite the urging of your critique partner, Janine, that I was reluctant to read your follow up book. I put off reading it until recently when I cracked it open just to read the first couple chapters and ended up not being able to put it down.
It’s obvious from the categorization of this post that I gave the book an A. It’s the first without qualification A I’ve given in a long time but I tried to look for flaws and couldn’t find them. This is a story that was technically masterful as well as being a great love story. I think it’s a book in which I would find new layers and meaning each time I read it.
Lydia Boyce is a spinster, living with her sister who is married to the man that Lydia thought she would marry. She’s plainer than …
Dear Ms. Krentz:
 This book was published in 1989 but I don’t think I read it until the early 1990s. My copy was used and I recall that I had purchased it used in its original Harlequin Temptation iteration. Since that time, it has been re-released by Harlequin at least twice more. I anxiously await for it to come out in ebook format. (Hint. Hint.)Â The thing that I remember most about this book is that it was the first one that started out with the hero and heroine in bed together.
Juliana Grant is a tall, confident, passionate business woman. When Travis Sawyer first met her, a relationship is that last thing on his mind but she embodied everything he had ever wanted in a woman. Travis, a business consultant, had sought out Juliana because she was the only member of the Grant he had not yet met. He begins to woo her under the guise of offering his consulting services for her burgeoning coffee shop empire. Travis plans to crush the Grant family because they promised him a part of the business when he saved their bacon but reneged when …
Dear Ms. Marchetta,
 I have a bone to pick with you. I’ve got a packed read-and-review schedule for the next month or so, and I need to be able to move from book to book. But you’ve made that impossible. Yes, I blame you. It’s your fault that your book, Jellicoe Road, left me so drained and dazed that I can’t read anything else.
I tried. I tried a sexy historical romance. I tried a contemporary erotic novel. I tried a thought-provoking science fiction story. I tried one of my very favorite books from last year. I even eyed another YA. I put them all back down after a page or two.
It’s not that they were bad. They just weren’t your book. They weren’t Jellicoe Road.
It really isn’t fair of you to write a book that’s so beautiful and powerful that everything else pales in comparison.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let me explain that when I picked up this book to read for Keishon’s TBR challenge, I was cheating a bit. Yes, technically speaking Jellicoe Road was …
Dear Mr. Asher,
 Not too long ago I wrote a review for this site, my first review. I’m a writer not a reviewer but that book moved me, almost unbearably. At the time, I couldn’t imagine another book moving me as much.
I stand corrected.
Your book, THIRTEEN REASONS WHY . . . where do I begin? I’ve been trying to figure that out for hours, trying to figure out how to tell the readers here only enough about the plot to make them read it, because once I say too much, many of them are automatically going to say Not For Me.
But this book IS for them, it’s for everyone. Yes, it’s a Young Adult. Yes, it’s about forbidden topics, especially for teens. Yes, there’s death, a tragic, horrible death. A suicide, actually.
Sounds depressing to say the least, but stick with me on this. I write romances for a living, contemporary romances with a guaranteed happy ending. Always. When I watch a movie, I demand the same. When I read, even more so. I am a …
Conversational Film Review: Silther (2007)
Genre: horror comedy
Reviewers: Jaili and Dionne Galace (a.k.a. Bam)
I asked Bam if she would do a conversational review with me. Without a blink, she agreed. She even did an awesome summary:
Slither (2007) is a splatter-horror and dark comedy about a beautiful, hapless schoolteacher Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks) and her husband, the small town’s wealthiest douchebag and the unfortunately named Grant Grant (Michael Rooker), who falls prey to the mind-altering alien slug that burrows itself into his chest after he pokes it with a stick while out for a moonlight stroll with the town slut, Brenda.
In the light of the morning, Starla feels guilty for being a bad wife and attempts to make it up to Grant by seducing him to the tune of “Every Woman in the World” by Air Supply, but Grant returns from his evening walk… changed. Suddenly, he’s a little more aggressive, ravishing Starla senseless. And then there’s his unyielding appetite meat, the bulk of which he buys from the local grocery store and the rest he takes from his neighbors and by that I mean their pets. He stocks his meat supply in the basement and puts a giant lock on …
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