Rebel Spies, royal ancestors, and a marriage of convenience. Beverly Jenkins’s Through the Storm is a typical romance with a few twists. I liked the interactions between the characters but I did not like the way Jenkins presented historical facts. Sable Fontaine was born a slave on a southern plantation. Her mother was repeatedly raped…
Although I would be hard-pressed to say this is one of the best romance novels ever written, I will say that I enjoyed it enough to lose sleep over it. I started reading it at ten o’clock at night and didn’t quit until I finished it in the wee hours of the morning. The best…
I do like ships. And I love roses! So when I noticed that Linda Windsor’s Border Rose is about a ship, I was excited and I hoped the book would be good. However, I was somewhat disappointed – Windsor came up with a good story, (interesting characters, unique setting) but she is not a storyteller….
(Sigh) Gosh, I don’t know…this is one of those books that’s hard to review, because there are probably many readers who will like this book a lot, probably better than I did. Not that I didn’t like it; I did. The Drifter is very well written – beautiful imagery, vivid descriptions of the Northwest and…
The Plain People are a religious group, similar to the Amish or the Mennonites. A member of their sect, “Plain” Rachel Yoder, lives peacefully on her Montana ranch, tending to her sheep and enjoying her “straight and narrow” way of life. She is not truly happy, though, and every time she looks at her ten-year-old…
Sandra Brown is well-known for her contemporary novels, but Hidden Fires is an example of one of her attempts at a historical romance novel. The characters, plot, setting, and conflict of the novel are very typical, nothing special or out of the ordinary. Not too complicated, not too sensual, and not too surprising, Hidden Fires…
Well, I have to say that I liked Ward better than I liked Jake, but this series still lacks the spark of the Seven Brides series. I feel like I’m going to harp here but again, Ward lacks tension; it lacks some real interest to get things going, and this does not bode well for…
Jake Maxwell has just returned from the Civil War to find his family’s land stolen and his cattle scattered all over Texas. While Jake was off fighting for what he believed in, mean-spirited and greedy farmers have destroyed what he had set out to build. Now they want Jake to pay reparations for the damage…
If you’re looking for a good mail-order bride romance, I can recommend several. Shotgun Groom would not be one of them. Somehow the author takes a surefire premise and shoots a blank. Lily Towns has wanted to marry Matt Logan since she was a child in Tennessee. After Matt came home from the Civil War,…
If you want a fast paced novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat, don’t bother with this one. But if you enjoy a leisurely book that captures the life of a bygone time, you will probably enjoy Then Came Heaven. This is LaVyrle Spencer’s last novel and I am going to miss…