When one reads a lot and in a specific genre, after a while, there is seems to be a sameness about books that makes one almost indistinguishable from another. So when I picked up Sherry Thomas’ My Beautiful Enemy, I immediately knew this book was out of the ordinary. Think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets…
After you read romance books for a while, some of the books run together, so I suspect all of us look for uniqueness, whether in the plot or characters. This book easily fit that qualification with its Chinese-American heroine. However, when you can’t relate to the characters or their actions, then even that distinction can’t…
Starcrossed lovers show up often enough in romance, but rarely with such convincing emotion as in The Sleeping Night. Barbara Samuel’s tale of an interracial couple in postwar Texas takes readers through a rollercoaster of emotion as we see her characters dealing with love, loss, and poisonous bigotry. I felt absolutely wrung out after reading…
Impulsive is an enjoyable contemporary romance set on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. It’s a nice twist on the good girl/bad boy storyline, with a reforming bad girl heroine falling for an uptight hero. Eric Kimura is a button-downed deputy prosecutor with political aspirations to be the island’s next prosecutor, an elected position. Katie Long…
To be honest, I had my doubts about this story. I didn’t really know if Harlequin could pull off a historical novel set in a foreign nation. (I don’t think of Regency England as a foreign nation. Guess it has become such familiar territory I consider it home.) But I was intrigued enough by the…
NOTE: Originally a Harlequin SuperRomance, this book has been reissued by the author as The Gambler. There are about a hundred romances each year about a bad girl who returns to the small town where she grew up and gets entangled with the local sheriff – but very few where the bad boy returns to…
I thoroughly enjoyed this book to the point where I could not put it down to attend to such routine things like eating. I was riveted from the first page to the last. This second book in Quinn’s Ivory Nation trilogy should go on everyone’s must buy list. Botanist Laura Clark and her history professor…
The Object of Love is a May-December, interracial romance with a ghost as one of the secondary characters. I would call that unique. While I’ve read a number of May-December romances, interracial romances, and ghost romances, this is the first time I’ve seen all these elements in one book. We meet Lacey Burnham at the…
If you’re looking for something different in historical romance, Jade Lee’s Tempted Tigress is certainly that. Set during the Boxer movement at the very end of the Qing Dynasty, the story features the romance between a white drug runner and the Emperor’s Enforcer. It is a gritty story that does not gloss over the turbulent,…
The hero and heroine of Unfinished Business couldn’t be more different: black and white, bleeding-heart liberal and ultra-conservative, urban and rural, peace activist and war hero. I admit that some personal politics made me wary of the book, as I didn’t see myself liking the hero. Erica Johnson teaches school in Washington, D.C. She’s sick…