As a plot device time travel should be used very carefully. The author’s job is made more complicated by the necessity of explaining the rules and conventions of the traveling done by the characters. To be effective, the time travel must also serve the purpose of furthering the story. Traveling through time, for its own…
One of the first romances and the first time travel I ever read was Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor. This book made a lasting impression on me, in a good way. Since then I have come to realize that as a sub-genre, the time travel is a difficult one. Believable romances are hard…
In Sixpence Bride, American Jocelyn Tanner participates in a cheesy wife auction as part of her English tour package and ends up traveling back in time to the year 1797. There she finds herself part of a real wife auction, and before she knows it she has been purchased by a nobleman. Garren Warrick would…
Midnight Fantasies is at times a very funny book, and a hot one too. The heroine is Elizabeth Carlton, the straight-laced daughter of a Texas gubernatorial candidate. She’s prim on the inside, but her business is anything but stodgy; she provides super-rich clients with sexual fantasy scenarios. She only dreams of partaking in such fantasies…
Then and Now is a perfectly pleasant but perfectly bland time-travel romance. There is nothing at all offensive about it, but there is nothing to make the reader sit up and take notice either. I kept waiting for the book to catch fire, but it never did. At the end of it I felt like…
For somebody who doesn’t normally pick up time-travel romances on her own, I’ve sure read my share of them since joining AAR. Like any other group of books, it’s been a mixed bag, but I have to say that I had very few problems with Linda O. Johnston’s latest, set in London just before the…
Jove has apparently halted purchases of new manuscripts for the Time Passages line, which suggests that the line itself is on the verge of cancellation. It may be that there are not enough quality time travel stories out there to carry a whole line devoted to them; however, the quality of this particular book, Elizabeth…
I’m a picky reader. There, I’ve admitted it. When I pick up a book, I want professional writing, a plot that makes sense, interesting dialogue and characters that behave in a psychologically believable manner. Once and Forever has a fairly interesting plot. That, however, may very well be the only thing it has going for…
I have to admit a certain personal aversion to working historical figures into works of fiction. I am so hardhearted on this fact that I even found Shakespeare in Love, the darling of the 1999 Academy Awards, a bit hard to swallow. Still, I began Forever Rose with the high hopes that it would blend…
This book had such an intriguing premise. It seemed to have elements of Outlander, one of my all-time favorite books, and Highlander: The Series, an entertaining television show that no longer airs. What I found was a story that had promise but ultimately took too long to engage my interest. Amber MacPhee wakes up in…