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

Everyone needs a new look from time to time and I felt like Dear Author was due. Frauke from Croco Designs stepped in to update our look. Feel free to add your thoughts.

September and October were bare for recommended reads from the crew here at Dear Author so hopefully you saved up your money for this month because we’ve got 7 8! recommendations.

Demon Bound by Meljean Brook. This will not be my favorite Brook book, but her writing is consistently strong with excellent visuals and a compelling conflict. She’s the best author people are not reading, in my opinion. Jake is a younger (comparatively speaking for the eternal), optimistic Guardian whose teleporting gift is always going awry. He lives for the moment and generally takes joy in most things. Alice, dubbed the Black Widow, greets each day with resignation for she has made the worst possible bargains. Either kill the leader of the Guardians or lose herself to eternal torture in hell. She’s both repelled and attracted to Jake and his youthful and vibrant sexuality. Brook excels at creating unique characters who serve as foils as their exploration of their relationship moves with the plot. Recommended by Jane. Review to come.

Flat Out Sexy by Erin McCarthy. I love McCarthy’s contemporaries …

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I invited Joey Hill a while back to do a guest opinion on the Male Submissive, a trope which I think she might write better than anyone else. I held it so that it could serve as a promotional bit for her November release, Mermaid’s Kiss. I’m thinking of soliciting other “guest opinions” on topics. Would you like to see that or do you think that it’s content you could read elsewhere and you want to read what DA has to think on Tuesdays?

On October 15th, Dear Author will host a book club event for Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. This is a book that was recommended by Jia. It’s a story about a sixteen year old girl who offers herself up as a Tribute in place of her younger sister, as a player in the annual hunger games, whereby 12 children compete to the death to win a year of boon for his or her district and a lifetime of wealth for themselves.

This is a gripping story. With twists, turns, and lots of action, it kept me on the edge of my seat. Not only that, there’s no denying the power of its themes. War and violence leave scars on the next generation. Haymitch may be the town’s middle-aged drunk but can you blame him? Not did he survive a brutal battle to the death, now as a victor he must mentor future tributes. That hurts. Imagine getting to know these children, coaching them, hoping for their victory… and then watching them die. Year after year, that has been Haymitch’s fate. Of all the things he could have resorted to in order …

You may have noticed that we have been delinquent in putting this up. The sad truth of the matter is that we have few books to recommend this month. Jia liked, but did not love, Barb Hendee’s Blood Memories. I liked Deirdre Martin’s Power Play and the upcoming Samhain release by Maya Banks, Into the Lair (reviewing coming next week).

Given that we don’t have many books to recommend, please feel free to use this thread as an open one for your reader recommendations.

Dear Author Recommends for August

Sea Fever by Virginia Kantra. This is the second in the Children of the Sea series. Regina has returned to World’s End with her son after attempting to make a life for herself away from her home town. She serves as the chef of a local restaurant and constantly runs into issues with her mother who questions Regina’s decisions at nearly every turn. Regina is tired. She’s lost her dream of being a chef at a top restaurant. Her son is missing a father figure. The one man on World’s End she thought she could love just married someone else. Depressed and a little drunk, she allows herself to be seduced by Dylan Hunt into a one night stand.

Dylan Hunt is a selkie who has come to the wedding of his brother and another selkie. He has a night of pleasure with Regina and then leaves. Humans are nothing more than vessels of pleasure for selkies. But Dylan is compelled to return to World’s End to watch for demons at his prince’s command. As he spends more time …

When I first started DearAuthor two years ago, I thought I would be just another reader blog. I had a couple of friends who had blogs (Rosario and Keishon) and I loved reading Maili’s blog (miss McVane terribly). I wanted to part of that reader network.

As DearAuthor grew, though, I began to fret about its growth. I started checking the blog’s statistics constantly, not just once a day but several times a day. I wanted to be bigger and appear higher in the google rankings. While on the one hand I was stunned and appreciative of the growth, I began to want more. The worst offshoot of the DA growth was the animosity I started to feel toward the Smart Bitch website. Around the winter of 2006, I began to resent the SB site and the SB creators tremendously.

With every accolade they received (and they have been nominated for bloggie awards, featured in Sadie Magazine, guest columns at Tango, named one of PC editor’s top blog reads and rightly so), my little green monster was fed. I would get …

Last year I kind of did a live blog from RWA using Twitter. This inserted hundreds of 2 sentence blog entries onto DA. It annoyed some people. So in preparation for this year, I’d like to hear what readers would want in terms of liveblogging the event.

I didn’t go to many seminars last year, instead I went to signings. I am thinking of foregoing the signings this year to attend some seminars. If I did attend seminars, what ones are you interested in hearing about?

I heard some people were irritated by the name dropping, i.e., I’m standing next to Judith McNaught or stuff like that. Is that beyond boring?

So, please let me know what you would like to see in terms of content and accessibility of the liveblogging of the 2008 RWA Event. Thanks guys. Don’t be afraid to be critical!

Because of off again/on again email problems, I’m changing my contact information from jane at dearauthor.com to litte.jane at gmail.com.

If you’ve sent me something that has bounced back, please try again to the gmail address. Thanks.

From Janine:

It’s really a mid May release, but I would recommend Love the One You’re With by Emily Giffin, a suspenseful story of a newlywed who is torn between her new husband and the ex-boyfriend she never resolved her feelings for. As in Something Borrowed, Giffin writes a heroine we can understand even as she considers crossing moral lines we hope we would never cross. New York City photographer Ellen Graham is an insightful narrator who acknowledges her own flaws, and the two men she is drawn to have both good points and bad points. There are no bad guys here, just real, imperfect human beings. B+.
This book can be purchased in hardcover from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.
I would also recommend Megan Hart’s Spice Brief Reason Enough. I just read and enjoyed it. It continues the story of Dan and Elle from Dirty, and my main caveat is that I’m not sure if readers who haven’t read Dirty would be as moved as I was. I definitely recommend reading Dirty first, but this was …