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

Dear Ms. Guhrke:

I enjoyed your last book, Wicked Ways of A Duke and was looking forward to Maria Martingale’s story.  It is hard to resist these girl-bachelors; after all, who wouldn’t want to root for these young women who seek real independence and also find the gift of love along the way.  However, despite the fact that I liked Maria quite a bit, and even had a certain affection for her upright, uptight hero, Phillip, I ultimately feel that Secret Desires of A Gentleman was not a very strong entry in the girl-bachelor series.

As a baker with dreams of opening her own upscale patisserie, Maria, at 29, seems a confirmed girl-bachelor, completely focused on her ambition and her passion for fine pastry.  For twelve years she has nursed her desires, ever since she returned from Paris as a teenager, honing her craft with some of the best chefs in England after having learned from her father, chef for a nobleman who had two sons, Phillip and Lawrence, with whom she grew up.  Lawrence was lighthearted where Phillip was stuffy, but the three played and spent many hours together together nonetheless, forming a …

Dear Ms Harris,

I’d seen your books available in a few other catalogues but it took one of the 100% rebates from Fictionwise to spur me into action. As Jane says, what’s to lose? Watching the new Ken Burns PBS series on WWII had me in the mood so I took the plunge. The book starts a little slowly but I was soon lost in the wealth of visual details about life in the countryside of France during the German occupation of WWII and how this impacted the family of Framboise, her widowed mother and two siblings. Memories of the event that shattered their small town still linger in the modern day village but some spark of the defiance and stubborness that filled her youth has made Boise return as an older widow herself.

It’s hard to like almost every main character in the book at some point or another during the story, yet I still had sympathy for almost all of them. Boise, fighting against her rapacious nephew and his wife now and against her mother’s seeming stone heart then. Mirabelle, trying to keep a roof over her childrens’ heads …