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…
The Love Knot is a story for readers who really want to sink their teeth into the medieval period and experience everything, almost as if they were there. Although Catrin and Oliver’s love story is well told and with a HEA, the reader should be at least inclined to also enjoying historical fiction and not…
I usually run far, far away from baby and amnesia stories. So you’d think I’d hate You Were On My Mind, Margot Early’s first novel in her Midwives series. It features a midwife who has lost all but the last ten years of her life, and who also appears to be about ten months pregnant…
This is the story of two people who have been to hell. Together they find, not heaven, but seemingly more hell. Tara Marcus is a prickly radical whose ethical causes have brought her several jail sentences, including one incarceration in Chile during which she was raped and tortured. She now works as a midwife at…
This book is a great example of how a bad choice for a cover blurb can spoil a book for some readers. The blurb on the front cover of The Baby Farm gives away an important plot point – one that is hinted at but not revealed until many pages into the book. Readers who…
Midnight Sun is a book of squandered possibilities. The Alaskan turn of the century setting isn’t made vivid, a mostly interesting cast of characters fails to engage the reader, and a plot-line full of promise falls flat. There’s an enervating lack of excitement in this romance between an idealistic woman doctor and the wealthy mine…