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

We gave away twenty copies of Meljean Brook’s Demon Bound.  These are the winners:

 Valarie P
Mandy Clatterbaugh
The Discriminating Fangirl
Brandy W
Gina
S.W. Vaughn
Antonella
Leslie
Cindy W
Blanche
HeatherK
ReadingIsSoMuchFun
Fionn J.
DeeCee
ms bookjunkie
Lisa W
Diane V
Jezebel
freecia
Sherry

Meljean Brook has offered 20 copies of her books to random commenters to this post. This giveaway will stay open until November 7, 2008, at 11:59 PM EST.

Dear Readers:

I first “met” Meljean Brook via her blog back in 2006. Maybe it was 2005. I found her blog to be wry and self deprecating. I didn’t realize she was an author because at that time her first book had yet to be released. Demon Angel, her first book, would not be published until January of 2007. After months of visiting Meljean’s blog, I became comfortable in her online “voice” and once I learned she was an author, I built up expectations about what her book would read like.

Reading Demon Angel was expectation dashing, but in a surprisingly good way. Meljean’s online voice (which is much like her true personality, I think) is full of sly humor and self mockery. Her authorial voice is quite different. Her books are dark with tortured characters dealing with life and death conflicts. The stakes are high and so is the drama.

Demon Bound is not my favorite Brook book. I …

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 …

We’re mainstreaming it this week – lots of broad-appeal books and a Dear Author favorite make the headlines.

Disclaimer: These books are not published yet, ergo these are not reviews. Repeat: Not reviews. If your book is snarked, it’s because your blurb failed to entice. No more, no less. Since we know the PM blurbs aren’t usually written by the authors, feel free to come by and tell us more about your book. Or be offended by the fact we snarked your blurb. Whichever you think is going to sell more books.

Meljean Brook is one of our favorite reads. Yay!
Meljean Brook’s DEMON DAWN, in which two Guardians must put aside their own tragic history after a terrifying betrayal by one of their own, to Cindy Hwang at Berkley Sensation, in a four-book deal, in a very nice deal, by Roberta Brown of the Brown Literary Agency.

This one is categorized as a romance, but…I’m guessing it’s more on the women’s fiction end of the spectrum. Three Rivers Press is Obama’s publisher, so I think they cater to a less genre market than, say, Harlequin. Also, author name? Is that her real name because if …

moar funny pictures

You might have seen the news in Publishers Marketplace that Meljean Brook sold an anthology story to Cindy Hwang at Berkley this past weekend. What you didn’t read is who else is in that anthology.

Are you ready? Do you want to make guesses? Shall I torture you with the knowledge until you send death threats?

Nah. I’m willing to spill else why would I write the post? Summer 2009 will feature an anthology collection featuring

Charlaine Harris
Ilona Andrews
Meljean Brook
Nalini Singh

!!!!!

I know! That was my response as well. It might be the most perfect anthology collection ever. My question to you would be what would be an anthology collection you would like to see offered?

Last month, Shana Abé released the third book in the shapeshifting drákon series. At the time of the release, we had not yet read the book. During January, Janine finished Queen of Dragons (The Drakon, Book 3). She loved the characters of the strong-willed hero and heroine and though she wishes the heroine’s past trauma had been explored more, she thinks the writing is just gorgeous and the book well worth reading.

Demon Night by Meljean Brook is a Jane recommendation. Brook excels at the unusual protagonists. This entry in the Guardian series is no different. Charlie is a former opera singer whose voice was lost in a drunken motor vehicle accident. Ethan is a former outlaw, turned holy Guardian, who has spent decades atoning for his sins. Each character finds redemption with the help of the other while fighting off demons, vampires, and underworld characters.

…

Dear Ms. Brook:

Thank you for sharing your book with me. As you know, I’ve always thought you were a tremendous writer and I appreciate that you bring to the genre an unusual pairing of individuals. In Demon Angel, it was the halfling demon, Lilith, and the honorable knight, Hugh. In Demon Moon, it was the unworldly gorgeous Colin and the tech genius, Savitri. Demon Night brings us still another unusual hero and heroine.

Charlie Newcombe was an opera singer whose voice rivaled the angels (real ones who know what angelic voices sound like). Her love for the bottle was greater than her love for music. A car accident that she caused while drunk stole her voice. She picked up the broken pieces and decided to make a new life for herself. She’s in the midst of studying for a degree that will enable her to get a job besides serving up drinks. Just when it seems like Charlie is on the verge of making something good of herself, she becomes a pawn in the fight between vampires, nosferatu, demons and guardians. Long lived beings view humans with some disdain and while demons …

The Courier Mail book reviewers took time to identify some of their favorite books of 2007. Kate Cuthbert, one of the romance reviewers, listed three of the best of 2007: Demon Angel (The Guardians, Book 2) by Meljean Brook; And Then He Kissed Her by Laura Lee Guhrke; and Passion for the Game by Sylvia Day.
Demon Angel, from new author Meljean Brooks, is the kind of novel you are lucky if you manage to come across maybe once a year: a thick, meaty, dig your feet in and hold on tight kind of novel with adventure, sex and an epic quality that’s rarely seen in this genre. Demon Angel is an astonishing debut, and a harbinger of great things to come. If you read one romance this year, make it this one.
You can read the rest of the recommendations here.

If Robin/Janet, Wendy, Lawson can’t convince you to read Demon Moon then perhaps the fact that Demon Moon just received an A- from Entertainment Weekly reviewers might. Congratulations Meljean and how timely that romance would get an awesome review in a print publication. Sure, it isn’t the New York Times, but somehow I don’t think Brook cares.

From fellow blogger, Sybil.

When I read Meljean Brook's Demon Angel, I was riveted by the first half of the book and slowed down by the second half. In reading Demon Moon I had the same experience but in reverse – with an almost identical overall result. Like Demon Angel, Demon Moon is an ambitious, richly layered, intense, flawed read, a book with flashes of lucid brilliance alongside patches of sluggish prose and staccato imagery. But even with its weaknesses Demon Moon is a credit to the genre, a smart book that illustrates how possible and potent it is to have an intellectually rich book that is still emotionally passionate and sexually hot.

The story of immortally suave vampire Colin Ames-Beaumont (whose grandmother "paid dearly�? for that hyphen!), and eternally curious Savitri Murray, Brook's novel starts with the beautiful, bored, oh-so-traditional English nobleman Romance hero, only to dismantle that stereotype faster than a wyrmwolf with a femur. In an ingenious taunting of the increasingly common Romance shorthand of the mutual attraction of mutually attractive characters, Brook creates in Colin an incredibly beautiful and intelligent vampire whose physical allure belies an impressive complexity, generated …