Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Mrs Gunning,

A friend of mine told me about your first book in this series. Raved about it in fact. And I had put it down on my TBB list but just never got around to making the purchase. When Jane sent me the arc for “Bound,” I got all excited and told myself that this one would be a book I was definitely going to try.

I love how you unobtrusively slipped in the everyday details of life in mid 18th century America. From producing cloth to sailing to Cape Cod to disseminating information in a world with no Internet nor 24 hour TV newscasters. I learned a great deal about indentured servitude, politics, how important religion still was in the Massachusetts colony and the many varied ways that women could be screwed over by men and the system. Literally. It’s almost enough to make a modern girl weep.

Alice Cole has only the vaguest memories of London, nightmares about the passage to America which cost the lives of her mother and two brothers, and dreams about the life she would like to have with her father in Philadelphia. …

Dear Ms. Delors,

First, I must compliment you on your mastery of the English language. It wasn’t until I was over halfway through the book that I went to your website and read your bio. Are there plans to translate the book into French? Second, I must say brava for managing to convey what was going on without the book turning into a history lecture - and this is five years of madly shifting politics and complete social upheaval. You are also able to show the changes from not only the viewpoint of the aristocracy - those for whom things are getting worse - but also of the peasants and bourgeoisie - those for whom things were looking up.

There are really two stories here: first about Gabrielle’s life and second about late 18th Century France just before and during the Revolution. It’s bittersweet story of love found, lost and found again. I don’t think it has so much a happy ending as a realistic one. The times were uncertain and it seems that most of the major Revolutionary figures ultimately came to brutal ends. While reading it, I tried …

Dear Ms Rae,

Your book, “Marike’s World” sounded so interesting. Set during the turbulent years of the American Revolution, I had hoped to see it through the eyes of this young Dutch-American woman. Instead what I got was literally only Marike’s world and not much else.

The story reads more like a soap opera about Marike’s life. We see her as a young woman scrubbing the house, falling in love, getting in trouble, having a child, finally getting married then living with her awful mother-in-law, then the troubles with her sister-in-law. Okaaaaay.

Yes it’s a historical and we see how cold the winters were and how hard Dutch women worked but it could almost have been set in any time before the mid 19th century. Very little of the momentous events going on, the Revolution and the early setting up of a new nation, seem to affect these people and precious little mention is made beyond “we heard later that…” or “it was said that…” It was like watching someone skip stones - random mention was made of these events and with about that much depth. Philip fought for a year but all we hear …

Dear Mrs Gabaldon,

I put pen to paper to tell you how much I have enjoyed the latest batch of short stories about Lord John Gray. I think he is, by far, my favorite character you’ve invented and I dare to hope that you have several more stories in mind for him beyond the one you’ve already promised us. As always your writing is filled with great period feel and historical details which are so nicely fitted into the storytelling that there’s no awkward “take note of this class” feel to them. The information flows and the story flows with it. I feel that I am in the house of a celebrated London hostess as dark undercurrents of the Hellfire Club ebb and swirl. Or in a dank German graveyard with a tipsy band of soldiers trying to discover in which grave a succubus is lying. And finally waiting in the Arsenal, trying to stifle my startled jumps as cannon are fired mere yards away.

Each story starts with Lord John being presented with a mystery to be solved, none of which he can ignore. Who killed a young man John met once …

Emma by Kaoru Mori. Published by CMX. Retail: $9.99 2/7 Volumes released in English. Series complete in Japanese. Rated T+ (teens and up; female nudity in a matter of fact manner, mild sexual references, kissing) . A-
Note: I feel distinctly uncomfortable addressing a frank letter to a Japanese mangaka. It’s so… Ugly American. So I will be addressing readers for the most part in these reviews so that I don’t have to be so circumspect.

Dear Readers,
One thing you’ll discover if you read much manga is that accuracy in setting isn’t something that really concerns most mangaka, if a story is set outside Japan. But there are exceptions. Emma is one of them.
Admittedly, there are a few things used here and there that are slightly anachronistic, such as having a model airplane in a few panels well before the first one ever flew, but they are used to make the story a little more colorful and are not major plot points so they don’t bother me. It’s the feel of the story I love….

Dear Ms. Kleypas,

I realize I’m probably the last person in the solar system to read this book, but read it I did. It took me a while to get to it because I was disappointed in the previous entry in your Wallflowers series, It Happened One Autumn, so I am happy to say that I enjoyed Devil in Winter very much.

Evangeline “Evie” Jenner is shy, prone to stuttering, and the daughter of an ex-boxer and gambling club owner, so despite her considerable fortune, no gentlemen have offered for her. Evie lives with her mother’s nasty relatives, the Maybricks, and now the Maybricks have decided to keep her father’s fortune in the family by marrying Evie to her cousin Eustace. Not only is Evie not even a little attracted to Eustace, she knows that she will never get out from under the Maybricks’ thumb if she marries her cousin. And getting away from the Maybricks has become imperative: Evie’s father is close to death, and the Maybricks’ won’t let her go to him.

So Evie takes matters into her own hands. She escapes the Maybricks’ home and goes unchaperoned to see Sebastian, Viscount St. …

Dear Ms. Johnson:

Long before there was Jaid Black and Ellora’s Cave. Long before the rise of erotic romance and the publication of lines like Aphrodisia, Spice, and Avon Red, there were authors like you who wrote historically rich, emotionally deep and impossibly erotic romances. There are three of your books that I re-read with some frequency and this is one of them.

Forbidden is a book full of rule breakers. The book itself is a rule breaker because it features a heroine who is a minority, an Absarokee Indian; a hero who is married and then proceeds to get a divorce; a heroine who lost her virginity well before meeting up with the hero; a hero who actually has adult children and one grandchild; and a long separation; it’s set in 1891 and its in France and America. You would think that all of those things would tend to irritate the crap out of people but Forbidden is still in print today, some fifteen years after its original publication in 1991.

But it is your rule breaking that makes this book so wonderful. Daisy Black is a serious person, not …

Dear Ms. Abé,
Imagine a place so ripe and thick with the promise of magic that the very air breathes in plumes of pearl and gray and smoky blue; that the trees bow with the weight of their heavy branches, dipping low to the ground, dropping needles and leaves into beds of perfume. A place of white sparkling mountains and black forests and one high, ancient castle. Of diamonds that churn up raw from the marrow of the earth to lace the woods, unseen, in necklaces of ice and fire.
The first book in your drákon series begins in this fashion, with a prologue that tells of a species of dragons who, in order to survive the encroachment of mankind, took human shape and traveled from their home in Eastern Europe to England. Although I am usually a fan of luxurious language, the descriptions in the prologue verge on being too rich for my blood. They are very effective at conveying that drákon’s origins are the stuff of fables, but I am nonetheless glad when the prologue gives way to chapter one and The Smoke Thief settles into a lovely style that is still poetic, but more …

Dear Mrs. Macnish,

Reviewers who have said your book “Veiled Promises” is a step back to the sweeping sagas of yesteryear with lovers who endure much to be together yet are separated for a lot of the book, but without the asshat hero, are correct. I can’t recall reading anything like this, at least that was written within the past 15 years, in a long time. But I do have to ask, did you hate your heroine? Were the trials and tribulations you put her through a cathartic exercise or therapeutic revenge on someone? Because I closed this book thinking to myself, “Sheesh, I’d hate to be one of her heroines.”

Camille Bradburn is a woman most people would think has it all. She’s young, beautiful, cultured, educated and the daughter of a Duke when that really meant something. But in reality, her life is hell on earth. Her father couldn’t care less about her and her mother is one bitch-ass, whack job. The FBI profilers would have a field day with this woman. Camille has been controlled, through beatings and deprivation, all her life. She yearns for freedom but knows she’ll never get it. …

(Being the account of Angelica TenBroeck’s flight from New York City during the late War of Independence, her would-be lovers, and a bluebird quilt)

Dear Mrs. Waldron,

I’m a sucker for 18th century historical romances and novels so finding your books was a delight for me. So far, I’ve read two but am saving the last. I hope you have plans to publish more as I hate to finish the last of any author’s books.

The above description is listed at the beginning of the book and it about covers the plot. Angelica is a daughter of an old Dutch New York family who has fled the frontier where she was born and raised and is staying with an aunt in New York City, recently lost to the British. It is here she meets one Major George Armistead who proves himself to be no gentleman when he attempts to kidnap her and force her to marry him. A man to whom she’s recently been introduced at a ball comes to her rescue and together they set out to return her to her home. But to get there, they will have to …