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

Dear Ms. Mallery:

The benefit of reading books out of order is you don’t get all that messy character build up. Yes, that is a bit tongue in cheek, but the truth is, if I had read Sweet Talk first, I don’t know if I would have liked Sweet Spot as much (again with the virtually meaningless titles).

Nicole, the heroine and oldest sister of the Keyes trio, appeared in Sweet Talk and was pretty mean. The things that she told her sister Claire (I wish you had died instead of our mother) might have been honest, but were super painful for Claire to hear and for me to read. Nicole is fairly intractable and has an always right demeanor (those two traits are reportedly commonly found together in the homo sapien species according to a MTV study called Real World: Bakery).

Yet for all Nicole’s faults, I found her to be very likeable. Nicole’s fraternal twin, Claire, left the family at age 6 which was a loss that Nicole never really got over. This loss was compounded by the fact that her mother left the …

Strike Zone by Kate Angell

I love sports so any half way decent sports book is going to please me. I give this caveat because there is probably alot wrong with this book (including the baseball stuff) but I still enjoyed it. I think it was a combination of Sports + Estranged lovers = Win for me.

Brek Stryker is the headline pitcher for the Richmond Rogues. Taylor Hannah was his fiance who stood him up at the altar. He has a new fiance but he’s never really moved on as evidenced by the emotional gut shot he experiences when he sees Taylor for the first time in three years. Taylor has heard about Brek’s new engagement and came to spy on him for the last time before he gets hitched. Taylor hasn’t really gotten over Brek either.

Taylor is a thrill junkie. She is constantly challenging herself by engaging in the most extreme sports such as competitive paragliding, rafting down the Brahmaputra, or cross-country skiing in Longyearbyen. She can’t be tied down even though she loves Brek and Brek is a home and heart kind of …

Dear Mom:

I am going to buy this book for you for Christmas. I know you aren’t a Packer fan and that your idea of relaxation does not include anything that is sports related, but I think this is the perfect book for you. Well, okay, maybe it is more the perfect book for me since it seems to marry the love of sports that Dad imparted to me and the love of reading for which you are responsible.

However, I think you will find that you have some things in common with Deanna Favre - that all women will find something familiar in Deanna’s story despite the fact she obviously is married to a living legend. Deanna was a single mother, pregnant at the age of 19 and in community college on a basketball scholarship. She struggled on a daily basis to pay her bills, care for her child, and simply exist. Favre was in college too and making no money and neither family had an excess of funds that could ease Deanna’s way.

Faith is a big part of Deanna Favre’s life, much as it …

Dear Ms. Lee

Football season is right around the corner and I thought this book would be a perfect fit given that the hero is a football player. Unfortunately, the football aspects were merely window dressing for this average story.

Bobby Mac is an injured star quarterback for the Texas Lone Stars hoping to make it back before the playoffs. Lacey is a prissy, prim woman who has been hired by his sister to manage Bobby’s Place, a bar in Bobby Mac’s home town of El Paso. Bobby Mac’s enlightened response to that news: “You know I don’t want some woman in here running my business.”

Bobby Mac is a backward neanderthal. He calls Lacey, his employee, “sweet thang”, “miss priss”, asks her about her sex life. She says that’s sexual
harassment. He says no, it’s not because he isn’t asking her for sex which is incorrect. (heard of hostile work environment?)

Lacey is an unwed mother and acts as if there is some social stain on that position. In this day and age, does anyone even care? In her attempts to provide her daughter a good …

Dear Ms. Jones:

I can’t pinpoint exactly why I bought this book. I think, honestly, that I got you mixed up with a different author (*cough Lisa Marie Rice cough*) whom I wanted to read but hadn’t. So I bought the book and had no idea what it was about at all. Color me surprised when I realized it was a book about baseball. I love sports. In fact, as I sit here writing this review, I am watching the NFL channel. SportsCenter is over. The few books I have read featuring sports heroes have invariably been wrong and I confess to thinking before I had even read the second page that this was going to be a disaster.

Anyone who liked Rachel Gibson’s See Jane Score or Diedre Martin’s Body Check, will find Hard And Fast enjoyable entertainment.

Amanda Wright just landed her dream job as the sports reporter for a major LA newspaper. Her predecessor is her competition and has been …

Dear Ms. Foster:

It’s probably unfair for me to have read this book for you are an author that “I gave up on” or rather “to whom I have never felt a connection”. Unfortunately for both of us, I kind of got sucked in by the cool cover and the idea of a fight club hero.

Simon Evans is a retired ultimate fighting champion (known as Supreme Battle Championship in this series) who comes home to find a picture of his girlfriend having sex with another man. He breaks up with Bonnie who turns out to be a villianness from Sluts-R-Us central casting and plans to return to the fighting arena. In the first of many character inconsistencies, Simon tells the reader that he is emotionally untouched by Bonnie’s cheating “So… was he okay? Simon queried himself, his mind and his heart, and actually… yeah, he was A-OK.”, but this event spurs him to re-enter an aggressive and physically taxing sport. So I guess what I learn right off the bat is that I should either a) not believe anything that Simon says (despite the …

Dear Ms. Halliday:

When I saw the blurb for your book, I had to have it. Jake Sims was a retired baseball star who was trying to make a new life for himself and his thirteen year old daughter in the suburbs of Chicago. Alicia Greene was a woman who had suffered a bad divorce, took the husband to the cleaners, and lived her happy life child and animal free. The start of the book made me think that this would be a different, fresh take on a straight contemporary romance.

While there were moments of likeability with the atypical heroine, the romance felt contrived and the characters lacked depth.

Alicia Greene grew up in Chicago and formed an unhealthy attachment to a baseball star by the name of Jake “The Rake” Sims. Early on in his career, he had an interview with Barbara Walters wherein he dashed Alicia’s crush to shreds by coming off as a macho jerk. Fast forward several years and Alicia finds herself living across the street from her former dream man. Determined not to be a number on …

March Madness is full upon us and while there will be very little down time between games, there should always be time for a good book. Unfortunately, the literary world, particularly the area in which I inhabit, is not bursting with basketball themed books. I’ve got two recommendations of older books. Maybe the readers can come up with more.

One on One: A Novel by Tabitha King. This powerful story addresses how young people can use sports as an escape from the horrors of home life. Deannie Gauthier is a troubled young woman who finds refuge on the basketball court. She leads the girl’s team at her local high school in a quest for state title. Sam Styles, a straight living, well loved, young god of a man, is the captain of the boy’s team, also seeking a state title. These two are inexplicably drawn to each other: Deannie is dangerous and unknown. Sam is good and safe. Both, however, face peer pressure from others that will not only bring down their dreams of championships but possibly their grip on life. It’s a book that is chilling …

Dear Mr. Greenberg,

I haven’t laughed out loud this much while reading a book in months. My cat was eyeing me. Even my dog, who is usually the world’s most placid (and enormous) sofa throw (unless he’s in the back yard and sees a rabbit at which point he becomes jet propelled), raised his head and looked at me as I clutched my stomach and laughed until it hurt. But I had a pretty good idea I’d enjoy this when I bought it and mentioned it to my blogging partner. “I listen to him every day, ” she said, “I love his show.” Well, I loved your book. Read it Jane. Read it everyone. It’s not just about sports, though a lot of it is, but about life and men vs women and how to get your children’s diapers changed. A-

~Jayne

Boys of Summer

This whole “acknowledging your illness as the first step to recovery” is not working for me. I have already said that I don’t like anthologies but I keep buying them. I blame this mistake on the fact that I love sports and who can resist the ass on that guy? No straight woman or gay guy that I know of. Boys of Summer is a compilation of three short stories featuring heroes who are employed by the Louisville Slammers, a major league baseball team. The sex scenes are quite explicit in this story, as explicit as the ones sold at Ellora’s Cave. Do Elizabeth Bevarly or Jill Barnett or Jan Butler know about this? Because these stories and the authors who wrote them are every bit as pornographic as those accursed epublished books.

These stories all suffer from the same problems

1) lack of showing
2) minimal dialogue
3) attempt to fit an entire romance into a compressed space
4) a blushing herione

Dear Ms. Leto:

Your story set the stage for the entire collection and involved baseball errors so large that I could not get past it to enjoy the …