Dear Joanna Lowell, Your Victorian-era historical romance, Dark Season, came to my attention via this article in Publishers Weekly. The article mentioned that you are a professor who writes literary fiction under the name Joanna Ruocco, and that you have received the prestigious Pushcart Prize. This, in addition to the ... more >
In the mid-2000s, Lisa Kleypas published a series of historical romances set in mid-Victorian England, featuring the eccentric Hathaway family, four unconventional sisters, their charming wastrel of a brother, who had unexpectedly inherited a viscountcy, and the surly Romany man their parents all but adopted. I read none of the ... more >
Dear. Ms. Sherwood, I bought this 109-page Christmas novella around the holidays and it sat on my kindle until July, when I decided to read it. The novella, set in England a bit before Christmas of 1879, begins with a conversation between Hugo Lowell, Viscount Saxby, and his sister, Charley. ... more >
Janine: This epically long disucssion is the second of our joint reviews of Patricia Gaffney’s Wyckerley books, originally published in the mid 1990s and recently reissued in electronic editions. The review of the first book, To Love and to Cherish, can be found here. Angela: To Have and To Hold ... more >
Janine: I was initially going to review Maire Claremont’s debut, The Dark Lady: A Novel of Mad Passions, alone, but when I discussed the novel with Sunita, she caught a couple of historical errors. Since she is also knowledgeable about India, where part of the book takes place, I invited ... more >