April TBR Challenge – Old School
“Old School” is one of those terms that can have a lot of meaning. After all, the romance genre has evolved quite a bit over the decades and different threads of the genre have gone in…
Let’s talk about Mary Balogh
Guess how many times AAR has reviewed Mary Balogh? 20? 30? 50? 60? Nope–we’ve written 69 reviews of Balogh’s works. She’s written 120. Our first review was in August of 1997, over 23 years ago, a…
Anticipating Matilda – Mary Balogh’s next heroine
When I read Mary Balogh’s Only Beloved, the seventh and final book in Mary Balogh’s Survivor’s Club series which took as its heroine Dora Debbins, a thirty-nine-year-old spinster, who had “lost all hope of marriage,” I…
TBR Challenge 2016 – Kickin’ It Old School
August’s TBR Challenge prompt is “Kickin’ it old-school” and it’s a prompt I always enjoy as it gives me the opportunity to pick something from the TBR Pile of Doom, which still looms large next to…
audio books | Caz AAR | DIK
The Audiobook of Beyond the Sunrise is a DIK!
Mary Balogh’s 1992 novel Beyond the Sunrise boasts a storyline quite unlike those found in the other books of hers I’ve read in that it’s mostly plot, rather than character driven. That isn’t a criticism, however, because…
A Pandora’s Box: Mary Balogh’s Only a Promise
Today, Dabney and Maggie tackle the latest Survivor’s Club by Mary Balogh, Only a Promise. The book comes out on Tuesday, June 9th. We’ve tried to avoid overt spoilers. Maggie summarizes the novel here: As a schoolboy Ralph…
Romances I Want to See on the Large or Small Screen
Recently we’ve seen a spate of books made into movies – Ender’s Game, Catching Fire and The Book Thief being three of the most recent. Which got me to thinking about romance novels I think would…
AAR Staff Top Ten Favorites – Blythe’s Picks
I put off writing my top ten until the last possible moment for a variety of reasons. I wanted some time to think about it, but I knew even though I had lots of time I’d…
AAR Staff Top Ten Favorites – Alexandra's Picks
Although I know other reviewers and staff have had a lot of trouble deciding upon their top ten romance novels, I have to confess it was mostly easy for me. This likely has something to do…
AAR Staff Top Ten Favorites – Pat's Picks
Coming up with a list of my top romances is not romantic at all. In fact, it can be downright unromantic as I found out the first year I tried to compile a list of my…