According to the author biography provided, Irish Rogue is Candace McCarthy’s eighteenth book. This is a fact that astonished me. The uneven pacing and stilted dialogue would make me guess that this was a first novel, if pressed, and one that could have used the efforts of an honest critique group and an editor. Conor…
Every once in a while the tried and true is set slightly askew to great effect. Carla Kelly is famed for her ability to take oft-used regency characters/settings and make them fresh and thought provoking. She’s able to make you think of the people and the times they lived in a different light. Yvonne Jocks…
I had mixed feelings about Gifts from the Sea. One minute the characters would be refreshingly honest, and the next they were having very clichéd misunderstandings. It was this inconsistency that kept me from truly connecting with the story. Goodger transports the reader back to the 1800’s and the tiny coastal village of Truro on…
Based upon the fairy tale “Rapunzel,” Let Down Your Hair took what could have been a charming fairy tale retelling and absolutely ruined it. I’m lucky to have any hair left to let down after pulling out most of mine while I struggled to finish this story for review. Rachel Sommerville is a sheltered, virginal…
Total amnesia from a bump on the head, while rare in real life, is fascinating enough that most of us will put up with it in a romance heroine. I will put up with it when it’s done right. I am fascinated by the thought of what it must be like to have to figure…
The Nightingale’s Song is author Kathleen Eschenburg’s debut book, and as debuts go it is quite encouraging. Taken as a whole, though, it’s no more than average; the pacing is off, especially in the first half of the book, and the hero and heroine engage in some aggravating behavior towards the end. Still, there are…
Desert Rain is an “Indian Romance,” but it’s quite different from a run of the mill Indian Romance. For one thing, the author is Native American, for another, he is male. The hero and heroine of the book are both Indians and the romance takes a backseat to an exploration of the lives of the…
I was very, very impressed with the beginning of this book. It’s set in 1839, and the country in general was reeling from the Panic of 1837. I can’t recall many books set in America during this time, and I’ve never seen one that discussed this particular economic disaster, which was huge at the time…
Halfway to Heaven is a book I’ll not soon forget, not only because it was a good book, but because of the circumstances under which I read it. I read it during a time of national tragedy, when I was stuck in another state, without my family. When I couldn’t watch the news anymore, I…
As I finished the latest installment in Susan Edwards’ White series, I looked at the fiery cover painting and elegant lettering, thinking that like the book design, White Dove is striking in some ways. And yet I winced as I realized that I was going to have write an ambivalent review, despite the handful of…