What does ‘dying with dignity’ look like, especially from cancer? What does it mean to become a parent when you weren’t prepared to be one? How does someone process early retirement from a career they’ve been working for since childhood? Do some dreams have to die before better ones can take shape? These are the…
Imagine is the story of a wide variety of characters, all bottlenecked onto an island thanks to a shipwreck just before the turn of the 19th century. First of all there’s our hero and heroine – Margaret “Smitty” Smith, a hard-working attorney who was hoping to take a refreshing cruise in the South Seas, and…
Meg Cabot always makes me laugh. What distinguishes her best books from her less successful efforts is the depth of characterization behind the humor. Unfortunately, The Boy Is Back ranks among her less successful and shallower efforts. This is a story told entirely through text sources (text messages, emails, newspaper clippings, etc) which always has…
After a car accident took at least one parent from two-year-old Curry Trent, Huck James, and Tom Winchester, the three grew up inseparable in the small South Dakota town of Gleeson. Until, that is, Curry married Huck, and both Huck and Tom went to Vietnam – but only Tom came back. Fifteen years later, Tom…
The Dark Affair is the third book in Ms. Claremont’s Mad Passions series, and features James Stanhope, Viscount Powers, who was an intriguing secondary character in the previous book in the series, Lady in Red. In fact, I found him so intriguing, that I was far more interested in him than in the hero, so…
Divorced Rand Waddell persuades his ex-wife Kat to let him move into the basement apartment of their British Columbia house to be their children’s new nanny. He wants to prove he’s changed and win back his family; she’s skeptical and wants to avoid raising false hopes in their two kids. If it’s hard to write…
The Story of Life on the Golden Fields manhwa, or Korean graphic novel, trilogy transports you to pre-modern Korea for two lyrical, sensual love stories. In the first book, The Color of Earth , a young girl named Ehwa grows from child to young teen and experiences her first crushes, and her unnamed mother falls…
A story about the love of a father and his son as much as one about romantic love between two men, this is a superb example of Grey’s command of the extraordinary in the everyday ordinary. For readers who wonder what gay romance is all about, this is an excellent place to start reading. Single…
I’m a sucker for kids. Whether in real life or in books, there’s something about children that pulls me in. I love hanging out with them, talking to them, playing with them. Grace Burrowes does a great job of writing about children, in my experience, and that’s why I picked Ethan up. <!– var browName…
In Once Upon a Tartan we renew our acquaintance with the MacGregors of Balfour, previously seen in The Bridegroom Wore Plaid, which was one of my favourite books of last year. (And which figured on my recent AAR Top Ten list). Unlike many authors embarking upon trilogies featuring siblings, Grace Burrowes chose not to allocate…