Christina Lauren’s holiday romance In a Holidaze is like a carousel: the tale goes smoothly around and around, up and down, at a nice speed until it drops the reader off an efficiently short time later. Maelyn Jones and her “chosen family” of her brother, parents, their college friends, and their kids are in their…
Usually, when I’m choosing a book to read for the TBR Challenge, I pick one I already own that’s at least a year old. I can’t remember if that’s a stipulation of the challenge or if it’s one I’ve imposed on myself – after all, the point is to read something from my ever-expanding TBR! …
This Wicked Gift is, I believe, Courtney Milan’s first published work, and is an introductory novella to her Carhart books. In it, Miss Lavinia Spencer is caring for her sick father and her younger brother as well as running their family business, a circulating library. Money is incredibly tight, but Lavinia has been scrupulously saving…
Mr. Right Now is a sweet, sexy novella featuring neighbours – a former marine and actor-turned-event planner – that takes place between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m not the biggest fan of novellas as I often find them rushed and lacking in characterisation and relationship development, but fortunately, that isn’t the case here, and Annabeth Albert…
Christmas With His Wallflower Wife is the sixth and final book in Janice Preston’s two trilogies featuring two generations of the Beauchamp family, and it focuses on Alex, younger son of the Duke of Cheriton and his struggle to find out the truth of his mother’s death almost two decades earlier. If you’ve read any…
A Tale of Two Christmas Letters is a conventional, traditional, competent and entertaining romance about two co-workers who fall in love thanks to a twist of fate. Rehab nurse Bess Monroe has been working with handsome surgeon Jack McCabe for years; they’re good friends, and she is used to his teasing. But when two letters…
Christmas from the Heart has a charming sense of humor, a do-right-in-spite-of-himself hero, an understandably – and yet totally annoyingly – pushy heroine who uses another man’s attention to get what she wants, and painfully outdated gender roles masquerading as unquestioned, unexamined reality. Sigh! Olivia – Livi – Berg, head of the Christmas from the…
In the Carla Kelly tradition of holiday shorts that make you smile, these three sweet short stories (set in the Edwardian Caribbean across Christmas, New Year, and Reyes Magos) are a lovely addition to any holiday romance fan’s library. These are gentle, realistic stories about the holidays of ordinary or even poor historical people; it’s…
Some novels are five-course meals – some are boxes of petit fours. Royal Holiday is a petit four incarnate – sweet, light on disagreeable ingredients, simple, quick, fluffy and uncomplicated. But while Royal Holiday is a fun treat of a book, it’s not quite up to the high watermark of the rest of the Wedding…
Sunny, warm, touching and sweet – you can pick any of these three words to describe Puppy Christmas, the second book in Lucy Gilmore’s series about a sisterhood of service dog trainers. A good story that combines a light heart with reasonable emotional heft, it’s a darned good romance novel. Lila Vasquez would do anything…