Dirty Letters works as a good romance and a good character study, but had some annoying flaws that kept it far away from the higher grades. Which is too bad, because I definitely think parts of it are worth a read, and the style of writing is excellent. With the encouragement of her psychiatrist, Luca…
The Bookish Life of Nina Hill is a gem of a book! Abbi Waxman has brought us a delightful heroine in Nina Hill – she’s smart, sassy, quirky, and charming. I fell in love at first read with Nina and her bookish ways and swoonworthy book shelves. Nina Hill is the only child of a…
College is a much better fit than high school for odd, self-contained Penny Lee, getting her away from her bland high school boyfriend and her teenybopper mom. While getting a fresh start at the University of Texas, she meets Sam Becker, who’s living above the coffee shop where he bakes and makes hot drinks. Sam’s…
Foxglove Copse is the fifth book in Riptide Publishing’s Porthkennack universe, and in my opinion it’s the best so far. The books in the Porthkennack series are all standalones, set in and around the Cornish town of the same name, and this one, written by Alex Beecroft, includes all the elements I love in a…
How does a gay agoraphobic fine artist find love? In the pantheon of opposites attract romances, how artist Miles Caldwell and rock sensation Adam Craig (of Black Varen, the band of the moment) meet and fall in love might be one of the most stirring. After his parents die in a car crash from which…
It seems to me that romance readers are always worrying over the “forced seduction” book. Is it coming back? Is it really about rape? Can violent, abusive men be heroes? I loved Whispering Rock because it made those stories look shallow. Here all of the pain and suffering that someone experiences after an assault are…
Celine Fontaine, a panic-attack-prone American heiress, is whisked away from her family’s ancestral French chateau and back in time by a lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve, 1993. Winding up in the Artois Region of France in the year 1300, she immediately encounters Sir Gaston de Varennes. To be more specific, she encounters him in…
There’s nothing as irresistible as a larger-than-life hero: a demon Earl, a maurading Viking, a devil-may-care race car driver. But sometimes I’m in the mood for someone a little more – real. You know, someone who could actually interact with me. In The Master’s Plan, LaVerne St. George delivers a story with just such a…