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

Dear Ms. Koomson:

This was a book that Karen Scott reviewed a while back on her blog. It was available only for sale in the UK at the time and while Karen’s review was compelling, it wasn’t quite enough to get me to pay for the international shipping. I was really excited to have this book land on my doorstep. It was everything that Karen said it would be. It made me cry and laugh and cry and then laugh through my tears. I adored Kamryn and her insecurities, her guilt, her anger. The reason, though, that this book does not get at A is due to the last third of the story.

Kamryn Martika and Adele Brannon were best friends despite wildly different backgrounds: Kamryn being standard middle class with a loving family and Adele, the poor little rich girl. From the moment that they met, though, Adele and Kamryn found a commonality with each other and forged a bond that seemingly nothing could sunder. Adele and Kam both had issues with the opposite sex. Adele slept around, finding satisfaction with no …

Dear Ms. Long,

Of the authors writing historical romance, you are one of my absolute favorites. Not too long ago, I sang the praises of your previous book, The Secret to Seduction, in what is one of the longest, most detailed reviews I have ever written.

After I finished reading that book, I was tremendously excited to share my enthusiasm for it with the world and to try to understand the reasons it had been such a magical reading experience for me. In contrast, after finishing your newest book, The Perils of Pleasure, I find this review far more difficult to approach.

How does one do justice to a book that had all the potential to be sublime, but instead was better than average, good, worth reading, but not quite all that one was hoping for? How do I balance out its weaknesses and its strengths and convey to readers both my frustration that this book fell short of greatness and my hope that they will give it a chance nonetheless? I suppose the place to start is with the plot summary:

Colin Eversea is both a gentleman and a …

Dear Ms. Donnelly,

When I opened the package containing the arc of your latest book “The Winter Rose” I gulped. Reason one: it’s got a very nice cover. Reason two: it’s a hella lot of book. 700+ pages of trade paperback sized book to be exact. It’s the type of book that requires a big time commitment from a reader. Not only because of the length but also because of the plot and intensity of the read. Readers who have longed for a return to the sprawling sagas of days past will rejoice, I think. That is if they really want to read this type book again. As I read it, I unfortunately found that that type of reader is not who I am anymore.

After a trip over to the Big Internet Bookstore to check out reviews of the prequel to this novel, “The Tea Rose,” I found that a lot of readers must want to read this genre again or for the first time. Reviews ran heavily towards five and four stars. However it was the three and under ones I chose to read and I found that they eerily mirrored my …

Dear Ms. Shaw:

This was the second bestselling Harlequin Presents at eharlequin.com. I read it after The Virgin’s Wedding Night and while the two books had similar emotional character arcs, my response to them was extremely different. While Craven’s book interested me enough to buy others, The Frenchman’s Marriage Demand made me wish I had a paper copy so that I could throw it against the wall.

Zacharie Deverell set Freya Addison up as his mistress for a few months in Monaco. She claimed that she was pregnant after one of her bodyguards reported that she was cheating on Zac. Zac kicked her out. Freya returns to London where she struggles to raise her daughter with help from Freya’s bitter grandmother. When Freya is injured in a motor vehicle accident, she begs her grandmother for help. Instead, her grandmother finds out that Zac is in London and takes baby Aimee to Zac. Zac has his reasons for not believing that Aimee is his and goes to the hospital to drop Aimee off and confront Freya again.

The whole sordid backstory is told in a “Did …

Dear Ms. Stuart,

The latest book in your Ice series, Ice Storm, opens with a bang. Literally. In a prologue set sometime in the past, we are introduced to nineteen-year-old the heroine this way:

Mary Isobel Curwen had never shot a man before. She stood there, numb, unmoving. She’d never fired a gun before, and the feel of it in her grasp was disturbing.

A paragraph down is there is some more terrific writing:

Had she blown a hole through his head? His chest? Was he dead or just wounded? She knew she ought to check… She’d had every reason to shoot him but you couldn’t very well let a man bleed to death, could you? she thought dazedly. Even if he’d been trying to kill you?

Or maybe you could. Maybe you could drop the gun, turn and run, as fast as possible, before he suddenly stood up and came after you, before one of his buddies came running to see where the noise had come from. Maybe you could take the gun with you, just in case.

I love the creative use of second person …

Dear Mrs Munroe,

While I’m not a recent Ellora’s Cave virgin like Janine, I’m still not a “rode hard and put up wet” veteran either. Since my tastes don’t run to BDSM, a lot of EC offerings leave me less than enthused about trying them. But your book with its mix of history and tenderness fits my criteria nicely.

Margo Harrington and her flatmates, fellow WAAFs, are out on the town in war torn London. Just for a night they want to forget air raid sirens, bombs, rationing and the war. While dancing with a young soldier, Margo thinks for a second that she saw Johnnie, her first love and the man her parents made her give up. At the end of the dance, he does appear, cutting in on the other man and dancing Margo away. Since she was the one to break off their relationship, Margo is unsure of how he will react. One thing she’s learned in the 6 months since Johnnie went away to war is that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed to anyone and she has to live up to her new resolve to grow a backbone and tell him now she …

Dear Ms. Joyce,

I've been reading your books since The Veil of Night came out. I thought it was a bit above average for a debut, but conventional. The two books that followed were somewhat stronger in my opinion. All three showed a talent for conjuring an atmosphere, and main characters of diverse personalities and backgrounds. But in the first half of your fourth book, Voices of the Night, you have for the first time succeeded in riveting me.
Fog pressed down upon the city, smothering it, pulling the smoke down from the chimney pots to swirl in the streets under the weight of the brown and breathless sky. It was a black fog, a killing fog, and Maggie and the other chavies had coughed up soot every morning that week when Johnny kicked them awake.
This bit of description on page one was the first clue I was reading something truly different. Here was a London not often seen in the romance genre, a tough, sooty metropolis in which the weak often perish and even the strong don’t …