A great book is a always a welcome find but one recommended by a friend is even better. My Love, My Enemy is this kind of book. When her name was first mentioned to me, I thought, “Jan Cox Speas – who”? Now I think, “Jan Cox Speas – great author”! Everything about her writing…
I hope I won’t need my fire extinguisher, but here goes – I found the romance in Titanic to be contrived and artificial. So when I began this book, a romance set aboard another real life doomed sea voyage, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Thank goodness Brenda Hiatt created the characters of Kent and…
If you are ready for something different – a bit off the beaten track for historical romance – take a look at His Stolen Bride by Judith Stanton. It features both an unusual time period and setting, taking place in the rural North Carolina and Pennsylvania Moravian community in the 1790s. It’s an engaging story…
The hero of The Portrait is Jonas Whitaker, the leading artist of his day in New York City, 1855. Jonas is forced by his patron to take on as his student Imogen, “Genie,” Carter, his patron’s godchild. Genie’s out-of-state father, who wants to make her into an artist like her late sister, is behind this…
I’ve read a lot of historical romances set in Texas, but almost all of them were set in the 1870s and 1880s. When I saw that San Antonio Rose was set during Texas’ War for Independence, I couldn’t help but be interested. It was an exciting time in history that is woefully underused in romance…
This is not your typical frontier romance. It features an unfamiliar setting, a disfigured hero, a heroine who is emphatically not a virgin, and a sympathetic villain. In the hands of a lesser writer this combination would spell disaster, but Jill Marie Landis demonstrates once again that she is more than capable of crafting a…
Not all F books are created equal. Many start out with a decent plot or semi-interesting characters, only to become bogged down with stupid plot twists or an incoherent writing style. Not so with Cassie Edwards’ latest book, Silver Wing, which starts out terribly, ends terribly, and is terrible on every single page in between….
Kentucky Dream is one of the inexpensive Precious Gem Romances, available only at Wal-Mart. In a sense, the old adage, you get what you pay for, applies here. It has an interesting setting, but it’s a short book – about 250 pages. The last half of the book isn’t bad, but the first half is…
The Randolph Legacy is a powerful early-American novel that started a little slowly, but quickly picked up steam until I became totally absorbed in the story and its wonderful characters. In 1803, a young boy from an American ship is impressed on a British ship. When he refuses to obey the captain’s orders, he is…
During the Irish potato famine, Gerald Keegan, a schoolteacher of County Sligo, made a note in his diary about a gift of corn from the Choctaw Indians of the United States. Eileen Charbonneau has taken this diary entry and fashioned an unusual and compelling historical novel around it. Rachel LeMoyne is part French and part…