It is rare when all the stories of an anthology please, but Hamilton’s Battalion is one such collection. It’s an inspiring book for our time and one of the most heartwarming and hopeful books I’ve read this year. These novellas are set during the Revolutionary War in the year 1781 when Colonel Alexander Hamilton led the siege against Yorktown…
Paranormal plus historical. Yeah, I wasn’t sure what to think either, but I couldn’t resist the lure. Isabel Cooper creates a historical world based in fantasy with the elements of a more contemporary paranormal and kept me entertained for over 300 pages with it. It’s the fourteenth century, and Sophia Metzger seeks a dragon. Well,…
I agreed to review this anthology entirely because “the devil’s doorbell” is the best euphemism for “clitoris” I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Thankfully, the anthology was fantastic. There were far more hits than misses in the seven short stories, including two stories I gave DIK As (one by Jeffe Kennedy and one by…
Ms. Lerner’s romances are set far from the glittering ton, her main characters are often working class men and women, not every character is wealthy, explicit depictions and conversations about sex are common, and sexuality isn’t limited to m/f. I like her books for those reasons, but mostly because she’s a terrific writer. In All…
Obsession can be a powerful thing. It can help us do great deeds or it can be the cessation of greatness. An obsessed character can be a fantastic, multifaceted personage or a cardboard cutout with only one side painted in. In the case of this novel the author manages to land her obsessed character somewhere…
While the title Rivals for the Crown adequately captures the major historical backdrop for this book, it somehow does not do complete justice to the rich tapestry formed by the lives of Isabel de Burke, Rachel de Anjou, Henry de Boyer, Rory MacGannon, and Kieran MacDonald. From the opening scene in which the reader is…
The cover for Hostile Makeover makes it look like a romance, but really this is Chick Lit in disguise. Shelley Schwartz has played at being an account supervisor at her father’s advertising company for a good long time. The problem is, she regularly sabotages herself in her father’s eyes. Rather than take her job seriously, she…
The Bible contains any number of riveting stories, and my personal favorite is the story of Esther, wife of the Persian king Xerxes, known as the Purim story to those in the Jewish faith. This story has a little bit of everything in it: murder, treachery, palace intrigue, brave deeds, and love. Hadassah: One Night…
The Queen’s Fool shows the plotting, spying, and intrigue that lay at the heart of the court of Queen Mary of England, as seen through the eyes of a woman who was an outsider. If you like that sort of thing – as I do – you really should pick it up. It’s the kind…
When I was given the chance to review the new Sue Margolis book, I jumped at it. I’m not a big reader of chick lit, but who could resist a title like Apocalipstick? While the rest of the book, it turns out, is as clever as the title, it clearly can’t be taken seriously, since…