Hummingbird was LaVyrle Spencer’s second novel, first published in 1982. It’s a western historical romance featuring a bad boy hero and a prim spinster who bicker and fight and fight and bicker and finally become friends and lovers. Abigail MacKenzie is the town spinster. She is 33 and has spent the past 13 years nursing…
Pampered French girl inherits New Mexico cattle ranch, meets dashing Mexican cowboy, sparks love-match destined to last forever. Paints a pretty romance, don’t you think? However, Rosemary Rogers’ All I Desire is packed with quite a lot of action along side this main story-line. While much of the book worked fairly well, it suffered somewhat…
Midnight Sun is a book of squandered possibilities. The Alaskan turn of the century setting isn’t made vivid, a mostly interesting cast of characters fails to engage the reader, and a plot-line full of promise falls flat. There’s an enervating lack of excitement in this romance between an idealistic woman doctor and the wealthy mine…
Nothing pleases me quite like a good Western. I’m not sure what it is: maybe the lure, for this city-dweller, of wide-open spaces, maybe the idea that living in the 19th-century West was not for the faint of heart. More than a few of the books on my keeper shelf are Westerns. Unhappily, Texas Proud…
With All My Heart is the weakest in the Thorne Brothers trilogy. Its problems permeate all three books to some extent, but they stand out more in novel for some reason. If you’ve read the first two books in this enjoyable series, you’ll want to read this one, which is frankly just slightly better than…
“Oh, no,” I thought, when I got a copy of the uncorrected proofs for Sweeter than Wine. “Here’s a book that wasn’t good enough to be accepted by one of the mainstream publishers, and I have to slog through it.” I have rarely been more delighted to revise my initial impression. This is a marvelous…
Tracy Hill has not been blessed in love. And, during every one of her past eight lives, she has died in some freak accident. In 1320 her beloved accidentally rode her down, on the Titanic she drowned in a beer barrel before the ship even hit the iceberg; and in 1998 greasy fries caused a…
One of the first romances I ever read was Rebecca Brandewyne’s Across a Starlit Sea. I remember thinking it was a little dramatic, but I liked it anyway. That was quite a few years ago, and while I’m not sure I would like it as much if I read it today, I’m sure it was…
Sometimes an author gets too ambitious. In a series romance, due to length restraints, there really is only room for a story about a developing relationship, with maybe a tiny bit of subplot thrown in. In Springwater Seasons: Savannah, Linda Lael Miller attempts the impossible – to stuff a book with fewer than 150 pages…
Carolina Rose is an impressive debut for author Tracy Sumner. The hero and heroine were believable and likable, and the circumstances which brought them together worked well for me. There were some problems with the technical aspects of the story, however, that detracted somewhat from my overall enjoyment. Adam Chase has come to the small…