I adore Lucy Gilmore – y’all know this much about me at this point. I Hate You More is another adorable dog-centered romance from her, and while it’s not my absolute favorite among her many books, it’s still worth a recommendation and a read. Ruby Taylor is a former beauty pageant queen who raked in…
A Spot of Trouble is one of those dreaded too-bad-to-recommend-but-just-funny-enough-to-avoid-a-D romances. If it weren’t for its heroine I’d rate it a bit higher, but our lead is a bit of an immature chore to deal with. That the narrative (falsely) thinks that we’ll find her charming is a cross that it cannot successfully bear. On…
I picked up Love and the Silver Lining because the description mentioned dogs, music, and romance, and I was ready to read something from a new-to-me author. I got started late on a Sunday morning and eventually looked up to find that several hours had passed. This second book of the State of Grace series…
The Hunger Games meets The Bachelor in Strange Love, a romance about an abductee who decides to make the best of it when she finds herself fighting for her survival – and a mate – on a foreign world. On Barath, you can’t just meet someone, fall in love and start a family. You must…
Lucy Gilmore’s dog-centered romances are such a weak spot for me – mostly because she knows her stuff when it comes to running rescues and manages to make her human characters flawed but likeable. Ruff and Tumble is no change from that winning formula, and involves a fictionalized version of The Puppy Bowl. If this…
Julia London’s You Lucky Dog is funny, sweet and charming, but gets a couple of points dinked off for the author’s preference for outside conflict versus internal conflict in the romance. It’s a tough day in Austin, Texas. The arrest of a dog walker in an undercover drug sting has resulted in two seemingly identical…
I like dogs and cats, and I like shifter stories that center ‘pack’. Unfortunately, despite these things – and my fondness for this author’s work – I didn’t really like Better Than People. No, it isn’t a shifter story. But animals and pack are at its heart, and if you aren’t a big time dog…
High Heat, book two in Annabeth Albert’s Hotshots series, picks up the story of Garrick Nelson, one of the crew of Smoke Jumpers based near the fictional town of Painter’s Ridge in central Oregon. Garrick was badly injured during a jump at the end of book one, Burn Zone, breaking both his legs and incurring…
Christina Mitchell’s Bad Girls of Cherry Lake series opens with a splash in How to Stay, the story of a tough rock-and-roller and a tough photographer whose past romance becomes a present entanglement. The first time we meet rockstar Adelia Winters – famous under the pseudonym Lia Frost – she’s eagerly attending the burial of…
Sarah Mayberry is an author well known to those who read contemporary romance. It’s been a while since she’s released anything new so when I saw that she had a romantic comedy novella coming out, I made sure to pick it up. She’s good at evoking a lot of emotions in both her characters and…