Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Chapman:

Maybe in my salad days a story about an innocent, vulnerable, walking mess of a woman, and all the men that love her (only bad guys want to harm her) might have appealed to me. However, now that I am a hardened cynic, I can only respond with eye rolls, groans and sighs, along with a few WTFs.

“That Man Must Marry” started out inauspiciously with a contrived and likely illegal conditional will bequest. “Either get married to one of three people and have child within a certain amount of time or my entire estate is given over to the man I hated most when I was alive”. Willa, the heroine, protests this and instead of giving actual sound advice, the lawyer in the book says “Oh no, this will stand up to a challenge.” Um, no and no. Conditional will plots seem a very lazy way to go about setting up conflict and tension particularly when they are accompanied by bad lawyering. As someone I know once said, there is a resource out there called “Wills for Dummies.” (This is a WTF …

Dear Mr. Moore,

A few things I know for sure when I start one of your books: it’ll be different, it’ll be funny, and somebody will die. In the case of this book, lots of people will die but then when the main character is a Death Merchant, it kind of goes with the territory.

I feel “Dirty Job” is a cross between the film “Jack and Sarah” and the short lived cable show “Dead Like Me.” Charlie is left to raise his daughter alone after his wife’s sudden death following the delivery and it’s at the moment of her death that he joins the others in San Francisco whose job it is to retrieve the object containing the soul of each dying person. No soul retrieval equals horrific Underworld upheaval. Like George, the teenage soul releaser who didn’t understand her job and didn’t initially want to do it, Charlie is left to flounder around until he finally gets his hands on “The Great Big Book of Death” (”The cover was shiny, like a children's picture book, with a colorful illustration of a grinning …

Dear Ms Didion,

I found your account of your first year after the sudden and tragic death of your husband, all while dealing with your critically ill daughter’s many admissions to various hospitals, to be deeply moving yet in some ways offsetting and disjointed. I guess that’s due to intermixing the two narratives in a kind of stream of consciousness but at times it was very difficult to follow or make sense of.

It’s the telling of the story of a 40 year marriage that’s filled with joyous highs and unbearable lows and musings on death and grieving which ultimately show how wonderful a man you married and how happy you both were. I think it was the little details that struck me most: how you couldn’t let go of some of his clothes because he’d need them when he came back, how it would be the first time he wouldn’t be there to edit one of your stories, wondering what word he’d been looking up that day in his dictionary, happiness that he’d been there for your daughter’s wedding, the fact that due to her illnesses you had to tell your …