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

Dear Ms Leone,

Most American Civil War books I’ve read are set in the South so finding that takes place in Pennsylvania is a treat, especially when it deals with the Underground Railroad.

As the Civil War rages, Kay Lane does what most women do–she works to keep her country home intact, struggles to manage her family’s small shop and waits for word that the chaos that’s invaded their lives will soon come to an end. She hopes, too, for word of the man who has claimed her heart. Marsh was one of the first to volunteer for duty, and now that he’s gone Kay wishes they had married before he left. But regrets won’t win a war, and as Marsh fights his battles, Kay wages her own crusade for freedom. She becomes a conductor for the Underground Railroad, using her ancestral brooch to signal the arrival of new fugitives. But will Kay and Marsh’s shared love and unerring belief that freedom belongs to all be enough to shelter them through the next big battle? Gettysburg looms and the hands and hearts that hold the brooch will be …

Dear Ms Cummings,

Thank you for finding and taking the time to edit and publish what might have remained a little read glimpse into the daily life of David Day. Day, though a middle aged man at the time and also one having a wife and four children to support, didn’t hesitate to answer his country’s call to arms. Enlisting for a three year term of service, he saw action in now little heralded encounters along the coasts of North Carolina and Virginia. His diary shows him as a hardworking man who never shirked his military duty yet also a man of intellect and education who possessed a dry sense of humor much appreciated by the men with whom he fought. His thoughts on citizenship and a man’s duty to try and preserve the union for which our forefathers had fought so hard were forthright and strongly stated without turning into a sermon.

His daily accounts of the differences between North and South were delightful to read and truly showed how distant the regions of the country were before the age of mass communication. As a resident of North Carolina, I found it amusing that …

Dear Mr. Hicks,

I read somewhere that after being involved with Carnton Plantation and its Civil War cemetery for years and trying to interest any author in telling the story, you finally decided to write the book yourself. It’s a fascinating step back in time to a war tearing a country in half and how one woman dealt with having it literally come to her back yard. I just wish that I had known the approach you intended to take to tell the story.

The Battle of Franklin is not as well known as many Civil War battles but it has the dubious distinction of having a higher casualty rate in five hours than the 19 hours of the first day of the Normandy invasion, more deaths than Pickett’s Charge and sounding the death knell to the Confederacy. When it was over, a town of 2500 people struggled to cope with three times its number of dead and dying soldiers. Many were brought to the large plantation house which was visible from some of the battlefield and here Carrie McGavock, her family and slaves …

Dear Ms. McKade,

As other reviews have stated, it’s hard to sell a Western romance today. Everyone wanted Regencies and now they want paranormals with vampires, werewolves and whatnot. I’ve always had a special love for Westerns and am glad to see such a nice addition to the genre.

The story of Laurel Covey and Creede Forrester is gently told but has a powerful impact. Set in post Civil War America, it’s about a broken country coming back together and two broken people who just might be able to help heal each other. Laurel, though born in Massachusetts, married a Southern man and was a nurse for the Confederacy. Creede used to be a hired gun before marriage settled him down. Then he learned of the death of his only son in the waning days of the conflict. After he journeyed from Texas to Virginia, a doctor told him that Laurel might be able to tell him more of his son’s death. So he sets off after her on her mission to relay messages to the families of men she nursed yet ultimately watched die.

Laurel is a wreck. The ghosts and nightmares which haunt …

Dear Mrs. Poff,

I tried. I really tried to finish Chase for an Angel. But I just couldn’t. The book starts too slowly with a whole chapter of flashback. Then your style, more telling than showing, distanced me from the characters and the story. Then you separate the hero and heroine for years. The way I had the book paginated in my IPAQ, at one point you spend 25 pages telling those years from the heroine’s POV then about 40 pages with the hero. You’ve obviously done your research into the American Civil War but by putting so much of that in such a dry form into the story, it turns it into some kind of CW battle travelogue.

And then once the story picks up, it gets incredibly hard to read because of the villains and what they do to the heroine. I must warn readers of this. The heroine is raped, abused, raped some more then kidnapped by the villains and taken with them on their terror spree from New Orleans through Texas. You do not spare readers from the extreme viscousness, brutality and horror of her weeks in the hands of these monsters.