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

Dear Mrs. Admirand,

One of the first true “romance” novels I ever read was the granddaddy of all Saxon/Norman pairings, the groundbreaking “The Wolf and the Dove” by Kathleen Woodiwiss. Since then, I’ve read my share of (usually bastard) Norman knight x (usually a healer) nubile Saxon maid. At this point in my reading life, it takes something different to interest me in this tired old chestnut of a plot. I don’t want to read about any more illegitimate men with hidden angst who end up taming the fiery, foot stamping, half dressed young thang pictured on the book cover. That’s why when I read the description of your novel “The Saxon Bride,” the fact that the heroine is an older woman with grown sons who forces the marriage with an (also older) Norman knight made me sit up and take notice. Wow, I thought, something different. Let’s see how this plays out.

So, okay the setting is nothing unusual: 1072 England, filled with knights in chain mail but right off the bat things looked good since you set it in Northumbria. Thank you, there are English counties north of Yorkshire. …

Dear Mrs. Lancaster,

Thank you so much for submitting your book, An Endless Exile, for consideration in our July ebook contest. I’m always looking for a good historical novel and yours is excellent. I had heard of the name Hereward “the Wake” (Hereward the Watchful), the only Englishman to defy and defeat William the Conqueror, but didn’t know much more about him than that. After reading your novel, I’ll find it hard to ever forget him.

It must be difficult to have a folk hero for your hero and balance the adoration he must receive from his followers with enough flaws to make him human. When you add the fact that you must stick to known historical information about the Norman Conquest, its aftermath and the people involved as well as the few facts known or suspected about Hereward then make the tale told in first person by his wife, well, you’ve done a heck of a job.

While I was reading the story, I couldn’t help but think of Lymond and Phillipa from the pen of the late great Dorothy Dunnett. Hereward has the same indolent charm, natural charisma, intelligence, cunning, and problems …

“A Norman heiress was a chattel to be sold in marriage to the highest bidder. If one husband died she was up for sale again. Only the first of Matilda de Risle’s husbands gives her anything back. His is the customary Saxon morning gift — the present to a wife if her lord finds her sexually pleasing on their wedding night. Matilda’s morning gift was Dungesey in the Fens…”a bolt hole my, dear somewhere to hide should trouble come.” And come it does. As the war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda in the 1140s tears England apart, Matilda de Risle has to fight for her land, her son’s safety–and her own life. Matilda, snobbish, bossy, inquisitive, realistic, competitive, and tough, is at once a powerful and endearing central character in Diana Norman’s splendid new novel of medieval English life. It is set in a barbarous civil war and is by turns violent and very funny. Above all it fills the pages with real people, with the scents of the Fens in all seasons, and tells in the end a heartwrenching love story.”

Dear Mrs Norman,

This blurb really tells why I’ve enjoyed all of …