This was a Best Book of 2020 for us. Have you read it? originally published in February 2020 A generation past, the western realms were embroiled in endless war. Then the Destroyer came. From the blood and ashes he left behind, a tenuous alliance rose between the barbarian riders of Parsathe and the walled kingdoms…
Virginia Heath has done it again. I could end my review of the delightful How Not to Chaperon a Lady there, but I won’t. Just know that it absolutely suffices for me to say that much and let you read the whole book by yourself. Go read it, you’ll be doing yourself quite the favor,…
Narrated by Josh Dylan and Eleanor Tomlinson The Road Trip opens in the PoV of Dylan Abbott, just after he and close friend Marcus set off on a road trip to northern Scotland to attend a friend’s wedding. Dylan’s sort of listening to Marcus struggle to apologize (for what we don’t know – yet), but…
Under the name Megan Crane, Caitlin Crews has plenty of experience writing faux-Vikings in her dystopian Edge series. I was curious to see how she’d do with an actual Viking in a genuine Dark Ages setting. The answer? Pretty well! In 918, the real-life Lady of the Mercians (daughter of Alfred the Great), Aethelflaed, died…
I love sci-fi romance, but I find it the hardest romance subgenre to navigate. Marketing is more disorienting, quality is highly variable, and the best reads seem fewer and farther between. While searching my library’s Libby app under ‘romance’ and ‘science fiction’, I picked A Conspiracy of Whispers on a whim, and what a fortunate…
My best read of 2020 thus far comes off like a highlights list of AAR’s recent reviews and tags. Sports romance? Got it. Diverse couple? That too. Feminist heroine desperate to succeed at something bigger than herself? All right here. Plus, Stef Ann Holm’s Honey isn’t just any sports romance, but an historical baseball romance…
I want to find a Viking romance that immerses me in the setting and blows me away. Conveniently Wed to the Viking is competent, which makes it stand out in this subgenre, but not exceptional. Sandulf Sigurdsson is on the trail of the assassin who murdered his sister-in-law, whose death led his widowed elder brother…
Narrated by Greg Boudreaux and Michael Ferraiuolo L.A. Witt’s The Road Home is a tender, poignant and sensual romance that combines a number of familiar tropes to produce a story that transcends all of them. The author tackles some difficult issues – PTSD, addiction, living with chronic illness, the stigma of being HIV positive –…
Western romances used to be a staple of my reading life, but over the past several years, I’ve kind of drifted away from them. However, when I learned that Amy Harmon, one of my very favorite authors, was coming out with a new novel about a wagon train on the Overland Trail, I knew I…
When I saw that Whiteout is set in Antarctica, I found myself instantly intrigued. The place fascinates me and seeing Antarctica is a not-so-secret dream of mine. However, amazing though the continent may be, I know it’s a pretty unforgiving place in terms of climate and terrain, so the idea of people being stranded out…