As I write this review, I’m really trying to keep my temper under control. With few exceptions, the heroine of A Christmas Promise is the most irritating, pig-headed, unreasonable, whining twit I’ve ever read. I couldn’t get through this book fast enough and get that woman out of my life. Lady Juliana Archer married the…
Cold. Distant. Uninvolved. Odd words to use to describe a book that is largely set in the beautiful Tuscan region of Italy. Yet that is exactly how I felt as I read The Fifth Daughter. The story was engaging enough, the setting was unusual and different, and several of the Italian seconday characters were very…
What a find! The Wildest Shore is really different from anything else I’ve read lately. The pirate is not a handsome, devil-may-care swashbuckler. The ladies’ maid is not bosom friends with her sweet-tempered employer. The tropical island paradise features leeches, headhunters, and bugs the size of your fist. Different is good. Anne Hazlett is a…
I thought pirate romances went out some time ago, along with the clichés associated with them: forced marriages, family feuds, women who stamp their feet but are always out-maneuvered. Minus the raping hero, Night Shadow is a throwback to a time when headstrong heroines clashing with outlawed swashbucklers was a popular formula. It’s fun to…
A Love For All Time is arguably one of the last good Bertrice Small books out there. A re-release of one of the early novels in the famous Skye O’Malley series (falling chronologically between All The Sweet Tomorrows and This Heart Of Mine), it falls into the “golden era” for Small fans, just before she…
For those who have been griping that all romances are cookie cutter with the same settings and time periods, I highly recommend picking up this little gem by Martha Schroeder. It is part two of her Angels of Mercy trilogy about three Englishwomen, from varying backgrounds, who follow Florence Nightingale to the front during the…
This book started out so well. The exotic beauty of Egypt, dramatic events of life and death on the river Nile, the hint of a strong and likable heroine. And then it all went downhill. The exotic locale gave way to the comparably bland English countryside. The drama slipped into mind-numbingly bland and distasteful plotting….
The Sheik was an instant best seller when it was first published in 1921, and it gave Rudolph Valentino his best known movie role. It also spawned a multitude of imitators – sheik books are being published even now – and it was the grandmother of all the sweet/savage romance novels where a feisty, proud…
If the heroine, Grace Fisk, had not been working so hard to achieve Too Stupid to Live status, this story could have been a must-read, if not quite a keeper. Grace Fisk is the youngest of three sisters who became pirates in an attempt to save their homes from being destroyed in the Seven Years’…
A little over a hundred years ago, there was a tremendous interest in all things Egyptian. Archaeology had advanced to such a degree that important finds were being discovered on a regular basis. Who wouldn’t find fascinating a culture that had flourished on the desert five thousand years earlier which had left behind artifacts crafted…