My recent Roku obsession has been Island at War. Sadly, this British TV series was only one season long, but what a season! Dealing with Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, this gem of a show captures the horrors of being invaded by a foreign power. As the citizenry settles in for a very long…
This book sounded trite: A recently dumped heroine lands a dream job in Rome and meets a gorgeous Italian Count. Fortunately, trite is the last thing it proved to be. While it started off light and pleasant, by the end I realize just how textured and deep the characters are, and how lovely the story…
Miranda Jarrett is a hit-or-miss author that I rediscover every five years or so. She’s not terribly prolific; when I checked, I’d actually read more of her books than I thought. Her forte is definitely her unique settings and thorough research. Her weakness can be characterization – which is the case with The Duke’s Governess…
You might need to suspend some logic when it comes to enjoying The Treasures of Venice by Loucinda McGary. But if you do, enjoy it you will. Sam Lewis was supposed to be on her honeymoon, and when her fiancé broke things off at the last minute, she decided to go to Italy anyway. While…
Fans of old school romance a la Kathleen Woodiwiss will take Veiled Passions to their hearts. Unlike Woodiwisses’s tomes though, this book is not overwritten although it is lush. It features larger than life characters and one of the most romantic, wounded heroes I have ever encountered. If only the heroine hadn’t been such a…
When I was a child, a friend’s mother decided that we had insufficient exposure to “culture” and she set out to remedy this deficiency. We spent many Saturday mornings being marched off to well-intentioned poetry readings, lectures, and art openings in my hometown. I remember endless cheaply tiled rooms filled with beige furniture. Works were…
Conceptually, The Rossetti Letter is similar to Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series: Both tell the modern day stories of doctoral candidates in Europe, searching for a mystery lost in the crumbling papers and bound books of the past, and at the same time recounting the historical story about the people they are researching. However, this…
Writing reviews is normally pretty easy for me. But I’ve been putting off writing this one for days now and I think I finally figured out why. When a book is this good, it’s a challenging task to make certain I’ve adequately conveyed that fact to readers. To put my reaction to this book into…
How much you enjoy Lessons of Desire by Madeline Hunter will depend very much on how you relate to her heroine, Phaedra Blair. I found her slightly annoying at first, but step by step grew to like her hugely. The masterful way in which Madeline Hunter changes the reader’s perception of this character is one…
Lessons of Desire is the second book in Hunter’s Rothwell Brothers series and details the complex relationship between the scholarly Elliot and Phaedra, the scandalous daughter of an even more scandalous mother. Phaedra is the daughter of the infamous Artemis Blair, a brilliant Roman scholar and outspoken proponent of “free love.” Artemis spent most of…