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

Dear Ms. Marchetta,
I have a bone to pick with you. I’ve got a packed read-and-review schedule for the next month or so, and I need to be able to move from book to book. But you’ve made that impossible. Yes, I blame you. It’s your fault that your book, Jellicoe Road, left [...]

The Rake’s Intimate Encounter by Ann Lethbridge
I’m still not sure I completely understand the set-up of this novella. I realize it’s a prologue, so to speak, for Lethbridge’s historical series for Harlequin but even so I felt like I was dumped midway into a story without any map to point me in the right [...]

Dear Ms. Showalter,
Even though the prequel and first book of your Lords of the Underworld series failed to impress me, I wasn’t ready to give up on such a great premise. I hoped one of the later installments would work better for me. With this second book in the series, I have to [...]

Dear Mrs. McLeod,
I have a soft spot for the unheralded people of the world finding love. People not as beautiful or dazzling, not as charming or glib as those who easily command the spotlight. Yet at the same time, I don’t want authors to pour misery on the head of a lead character thereby [...]

Dear Ms. Hart,
Elle Kavanagh wears only black and white. She counts things — not just money at her prestigious accounting job, but also stars, marbles, ceiling tiles. She buys her boss’s wife candy to assuage her guilt for sleeping with him years before. She has been celibate for three years, but before [...]

Dear Ms. Balogh,
I’ve been on a hot streak of enjoying good books lately. All good things come to an end sometime, but I’m sorry it had to end with Simply Love. I’d been looking forward to Anne Jewell’s story since I first encountered her in Slightly Scandalous, expecting that a Mary Balogh [...]