What a charming, imaginative book! The League of Gentlewoman Witches continues the Dangerous Damsels series with fun and aplomb. Want a romance about a witch and a pirate? Then look no further. Miss Charlotte Pettifer is the future leader of the titular league, and prophesized heiress of Black Beryl, and thus she has the awesome…
Cat Sebastian takes readers back to Georgian England with her latest novel, The Queer Principles of Kit Webb. It’s a lively tale laden with wit, sparkling dialogue and insightful social commentary; the two leads are superbly characterised and there’s a vibrant secondary cast, too. In fact, when I was only a few chapters in, I…
Last night I finished Gilded Cage, and moments ago, I finished reading the latest batch of responses to the ask@AAR: Does Historical Romance have a quality problem? Well, if you’re exclusively reading K.J. Charles, the answer is a resounding ‘no.’ This is an author absolutely getting historical romance right, and the quality of this story…
Murder and mayhem! Betrayal and revenge! Dastardly dukes and scheming criminals! Roll up, roll up! K.J. Charles has another winner on her hands with Any Old Diamonds, a fabulously entertaining and deftly plotted tale of intrigue and suspense in which our hero – son of the aforesaid dastardly duke – sets in motion a plan…
The Historicals prompt in the TBR Challenge is my Busman’s Holiday, but it can nonetheless be quite difficult to choose a book from the many still sitting unread on my Kindle. In the end, I decided to go for something I was pretty certain would be a winner and picked up Emily Larkin’s My Lady…
One of the things that long-time readers of historical romance frequently discuss is the fact that the genre is awash in heroes and heroines from the aristocracy and that we’d really like to see more historicals featuring lower and middle class characters. I think anyone who has been around romancelandia for any length of time…
Fool Me Twice is easily my favorite Duran book of the last few years. After having loved a few of hers in the past, I struggled with the last three as they had themes that didn’t really resonate with me. Happily, her newest effort really worked, and I finished the book a happy reader. The…
I’m not really the biggest baseball fan in the world (read: at all), but I like sports romances and was lured in by the cute cover of Stealing Home. As it turns out, I did like the pro baseball player hero – very much. But I certainly could have lived without the thief heroine with…
The best historical romances are those that draw you into another world and make you see, smell and touch what is going on, sharing the emotions and the mindset of characters who are thousands of miles and hundreds of years removed from your own experience. This is what happened to me when I read (in…
There’s a line in Jeannie Lin’s novella, Capturing the Silken Thief, that evokes the effortless, lyrical beauty of her tale. A man – a scholar – and a woman – a musician – meet at night. Ms. Lin writes, “The moon was high and round, with that faint harvest gleam that marked it as a…