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

Dear Ms. Godberson,

I admit I passed on the first book in this series, The Luxe, when it came out earlier this year. The tagline of Gossip Girl does the Gilded Age turned me off. Young adult novels featuring catty, backstabbing characters do nothing for me. And while the Gossip Girl TV series is watchable, I find the novels they’re based on unreadable. But then I read a few reviews that piqued my interest so when I got the chance to review Rumors, the second book in the series, I jumped on it. I’m glad I did.

Although I haven’t read The Luxe, I didn’t find that a problem. I think you do an excellent job including enough details to clue in new readers without resorting to mindnumbing infodumps. At the same time, I think you left out enough details that I feel I can go back and read The Luxe without finding it boring or repetitive because I already have an idea of what happens.

Set in Manhatten at the end of the 19th century, The Luxe series follows multiple younger members of the upper society elite. When Rumors opens, it’s mid-December 1899 and society is …

Dear Ms. Alers,

Long Time Coming is the first book in your trilogy about the Whitfields of New York. For the Whitfields, weddings and other celebrations are a family business. The book’s heroine, Tessa Whitfield, is an event planner and owner of Signature Bridals, the company through which she orchestrates dream weddings. Tessa’s sister, Simone, is a floral designer, and her cousin Faith is a baker who specializes in wedding cakes. The three have a warm personal and working relationship, although tension sometimes flares up between Faith and Simone, requiring Tessa to play the role of peacemaker.

As the book opens, Tessa arrives at her home and business (a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights) and finds a message from Bridget Sanborn on her answering machine. Bridget, a young bride, was to come by that evening for a wedding planning session, but can’t make it because she is on a sequestered jury. The problem is that it is now mid-October, and Bridge’s wedding is scheduled for New Year’s Eve. The meeting with Tessa was an important one, so Bridget sends her brother Micah in her stead.

Micah, an assistant DA …

Dear Ms. Giffin,

Exactly one hundred days to her marriage to her husband Andy, Ellen Graham literally crosses paths with her ex-boyfriend Leo. Ellen describes their encounter this way:
From the outside, say if you were a cabdriver watching frantic jaywalkers scramble to cross the street in the final seconds before the light changed, it was only a mundane, urban snapshot: two seeming strangers, with little in common but their flimsy black umbrellas, passing in an intersection, making fleeting eye contact, and exchanging stiff but not unfriendly hellos before moving on their way.

But inside was a very different story. Inside, I was reeling, churning, breathless as I made it onto the safety of the curb and into a virtually empty diner near Union Square. Like seeing a ghost, I thought, one of those expressions I’ve heard a thousand times but never fully registered until that moment. I closed my umbrella and unzipped my coat, my heart still pounding. As I watched the waitress wiped down a table with hard, expert strokes, I wondered why I was so startled by the encounter when there was something that seemed utterly inevitable about the …

Dear Mrs. O’Reilly,

You came close to a trifecta. You really did but it’s with sadness that I’m going to have to grade this book down. Don’t worry, it’s not a D grade because so many things are still right about it that were right about the first two books in the series. But a few things missed and that’s enough.

It’s not that Sean O’Sullivan changes radically from the easy talking, female pleasing man we’ve seen already. The guy knows how to talk, kiss and finesse his way through relationships, racketball games and courts of law. Want something fixed? Sean’s the man who can. And he’ll leave most everyone with a smile on their face after he’s gotten his way.

It’s not that I don’t like Cleo Hollings, one of the Deputy Mayors of NYC who’s got a pair and who isn’t afraid to show that she does. This woman gets off on negotiating union contracts, thrives on the pressure of getting a strike bound city moving again, enjoys Town Hall meetings in which she knows she’s going to get yelled at. And she’s sexually aggressive too.

The dialogue is still wonderful. As I read the book, …

Dear Ms. Cohen:

Your book, Driving Him Wild, came to my attention when it was announced as one of the RNA nominees for best category romance of 2007. As Sarah from SBTB notes, the lovely Harlequin folks decided that they would change the title for us Americans to His For the Taking. Driving Him Wild was a much more apt title and I kept wondering throughout the story how the heroine in the book was EVER for the hero’s taking.

But aside from the title, this was a very surprising Harlequin Presents. First off, the heroine is the one with money. Zoe Drake finds Maine forest ranger Nick Giroux, sitting outside her great-aunt Zinia’s Park Avenue apartment. Nick believes that his father, who left his family 16 years ago, is hiding out inside the apartment and he is not leaving until he gets inside. Zoe is partially turned on by Nick’s aggressiveness and partly creeped out. After all, Nick is a gorgeous specimen of a man. On the other hand, it is New York.

Zoe explains that she is there to get the clothes that recently deceased …