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

Dear Ms. Kelly,
Our multicultural post got me digging into the older ebooks on offer at Harlequin. Readers searching for different settings and nationalities ought to look at this series (Mediterranean Nights). Our heroine is Chinese, our hero is from Israel, the ship travels across the Mediterranean and has Irish, Somali, Russian and Greek crew [...]

Dear Ms. Meminger,
On Saturday, September 15, 2001, seventeen-year-old Samar “Sam” Ahluwahlia encounters a man she doesn’t know at the door to the house she and her mother share. The man is wearing a turban, and his presence on her doorstep disturbs Samar. But he turns out to be not a menacing terrorist, but [...]

Dear Readers,
Back in July of 2008, I reviewed Tangle XY, an anthology of short speculative m/m stories. Earlier this year, Blind Eye Books, the publisher of Tangle XY, came out with Tangle Girls, an f/f anthology. As with Tangle XY, some (not all) of the stories are multicultural, and many have fairy tale [...]

In light of the very gracious post by Handyhunter about cultural appropriation, it seems that we should compile a list of books that feature multicultural characters. Please note whether the book is a young adult (YA) or romance as well as whether the multicultural characters are main or secondary.  Please also be respectful of other [...]

Cultural Appropriation in Romance
Earlier in this year of 2009, there was a Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, dubbed racefail09, that centred mainly around the SF/F genres. If you clicked on that link, it leads to a set of many, many, many links about race, racism, cultural appropriation and white privilege. (If you’ve never heard of these [...]

Dear Ms. Hewitt:
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. The thing that stuck out most in my mind at the end of the story was how apt the title was. The story really was about the sheikh’s forbidden virgin. This is part of The Royal House of Karedes miniseries.  These [...]

Dear Ms. Kery:
I really enjoyed Wicked Burn, your debut novel, enough so that I hunted down and purchased quite a few of your ebook backlist titles.  From those I can see that you have eclectic writing tastes and from those I’ve come to acknowledge that, personally, only your straight up contemporaries work for me.  The [...]