I am so glad I read this book. I had never read any of Beverly Jenkins’ novels before and didn’t know what to expect, but I came away from this story very impressed. Jenkins does a wonderful job of balancing passion, emotion, an exciting story, and a masterful command of history, and, while this did…
Normally, I love big, gritty historical sagas since they are just the sort of stories that make me want to suspend disbelief and fall into the twists and turns of a larger-than-life epic plot. Crosswinds opens with the promise of just such a story, but, unfortunately, it failed to hold up. As Crosswinds opens it…
Seen By Moonlight by Kathleen Eschenburg features likable protagonists, an unusual plot, a great sense of place and history, and is written in a beautiful style. There’s just one problem: it’s kind of boring. Annabelle Hallston is an unconventional young woman in 1860s Virginia society. When her scholarly father dies, she and her two brothers…
Midnight Silk is set in Texas during the Civil War, a pleasant change from historical England. It features a road romance between a planter’s daughter and the overseer’s son who has loved her for years. I wanted to enjoy it, but was unable to muster any enthusiasm for such a bland pair as the hero…
The Longing is an example of that increasingly rare creature, the non-Western Americana Romance. Good examples of that particular sub-genre are getting hard to find, and I am happy to say this one did not disappoint. The Longing began well, and moved along quite nicely, but it petered out a bit toward the end. However,…
I’ll give props to Elizabeth Butler for tackling a sticky subject: the truth about slavery and attitudes toward it in the Border States just before the Civil War. The conflict at the center of the book is pretty strong, too: two people embarked on a Noble Cause who feel they must not fall in love…
Romances set during and after the Civil War are scarce as can be these days, so I was really looking forward to Magnolia Creek, particularly as it is set in Kentucky, near where I live. While it has many qualities to recommend it, I found it sadly lacking in the main thing a romance novel…
I hardly know what to say. In reading Dance On The Wind I was bewildered throughout by the amateurish nature of the writing, the one-dimensional characters, and the literally hundreds of clichés that passed for dialogue. It was almost as though somebody had taken all the overused phrases from every romance ever written, put them…
I’ve enjoyed other books by Linda Devlin, who usually writes as Linda Winstead Jones. Something about the way she writes appeals to me, even when, as in Sullivan, the story she’s telling isn’t actually all that good. Eden Rourke is an ever-so-nice young lady from Back East who has come to Texas to find her…
There’s a special kind of disappointment in a book that starts out with promising characters but fails to deliver an interesting plot to sustain them. Trust to Chance has two of the most intriguing characters I’ve seen in awhile – and one of the worst, most un-romantic plots in recent memory. What a waste! Rebecca…