Lately it seems as though historical fiction is succeeding in doing two things for me that many historical romances no longer do: Delivering a strong sense of time and place set against real life events and sending the reader on glorious flights of fancy. Marrying Mozart is just such a tale. Though it is fiction…
The Blessing Stone makes those sprawling intergenerational sagas and inscrutable epics seem like rank amateurs with the sheer scope of its coverage spanning over 100,000 years. Barbara Wood is an engaging writer, but her themes, played out in the history of a precious stone, are not. Her research is superb, some of her stories are…
When this book was first assigned to me to review, I was excited. At four-thirty this morning when I finished reading it, however, I knew that the review process was not going to be as easy as I supposed. How to convey the brilliant complexity of the story, the unexpected revelations, the thought-provoking intricacies, without…
Carolyn Rose’s A Love Through Time would have been a far better story had it not been “through time.” The time travel aspect weakened the story considerably, since it really didn’t work. There is also a serious lack of chemistry between the hero and heroine, and some problematic believability issues. Despite these flaws, however, the…
I have been glomming Ruth Wind/Barbara Samuel for a while. The results have been quite successful, but locating her full-length historicals as written under her real name has been difficult. I searched longest for A Bed of Spices, the book I had been most eager to lay my hands on, since it is one of…
Mercedes Lackey is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read most of her work and enjoyed it immensely, except for this book. It is presented in almost a fairy tale manner (considering it is based on the story the ballet Swan Lake itself was based on, that’s not surprising). While fairy tales engage the reader…