Tag Archives: romance review

The Hooker and the Hermit by L.H. Cosway & Penny Reid

book review March 10, 2015 1 Comment

I have really enjoyed and recommend Penny Reid’s Knitting in the City Series and plan to try out other novels she writes, but this one confused me. It’s a bad sign when one is wondering if the contemporary romance one is reading is in some way meant to be the questionable elements of 50 Shades of Grey (which, admittedly, I haven’t read) done right. What a mess. I was making notes by the end of the first chapter.

Working with L.H. Cosway, Reid has written a book about a pig-adjacent man who falls in love with a woman who has major social anxiety issues. By day, Annie works for a PR firm. At twenty-three years old, and a recentish Masters graduate, I found her status as one of the best in the business silly. She *just* finished school. On the side, she writes a hugely successful and profitable blog for which she tracks down and secretly photographs male celebrities (she even gives tips on how to do so), then mocks their fashion choices. Ostensibly, this turns the tables on the way women in the media are criticized, but the fact that she hunts these people down and, unbeknownst to them, documents them was a record needle scratch for me. Moreover, I have some small experience in this area as part of an online community (Pajiba) for several years and having written for its website. From what I have seen, there is NO WAY Annie’s clever little posts are going to make her any kind of income without constant effort and hours of content creation on her part.

Ronan is an Irish professional rugby player taking time off after trying to feed a teammate his fist upon discovering the man’s infidelity with Ronan’s fiancee. Said woman, by the way, is a repellent, avaricious hoochie vilified in the way that anyone other than the good girl heroine is in questionable fiction. He was engaged to her after all, before she turned into a slutty, plastic-surgery-victim bad girl. Anywho, choosing New York City to lay low, Annie takes one of her privacy invading photos of Ronan and he responds to the resulting blog post. Simultaneously, his management wants his image to undergo a transformation and Annie is assigned to help him with social media and his public persona. Juxtaposing the work relationship – which involves pretending to date – and their blog-based email correspondence allows everyone to express their true feelings without taking too many risks. Annie is guilty of a lot of comeheregoaway, the authors are guilty of an inconsistent and confusing characterization.

It’s not that the book was badly written, Reid is always funny and articulate, it’s that I was surprised by the character choices. In addition to those issues, the [insert funky bassline here] left me a bit perplexed. Ronan has a kink that he is pleased to discover Annie shares; however, there’s enjoying sexual play and then there’s warning signs that you are being pursued by a potential abuser. The Hooker and the Hermit had both and I found that combination odd, as surely there is a difference between behavior in the bedroom and being a controlling boyfriend. Ronan says and does every single overly aggressive thing women complain about and it’s NOT CHARMING, especially for someone as social anxiety ridden as Annie is portrayed to be: he’s in her personal space, he cages her with his arms in an elevator, there’s inappropriate touching, comments on her physique (in a professional context no less), ignoring “no”, telling her there are “rules” now they are together. These are all red flags.

Penny Reid’s Catalogue gives an overview of her published works , some of which I recommend and some of which I dislike intensely.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful.

Knitting in the City Series: Beauty and the Mustache by Penny Reid

book review March 9, 2015 Comments: 2

A HERO WITH A BEARD! My first lumbersexual after 3 years and 300 books. I may need a moment.

Penny Reid’s great Knitting in the City series continues with Beauty and the Mustache, a book that also happens to introduce a family of brothers (Cletus, Beauford, Jethro, Billy, Duane, and Roscoe) set for their own stories. They all have beards, too! Huzzah!

Ashley Winston is a nurse living in Chicago and she has just come home to rural Tennessee to learn why her mother is not returning her calls. She’s in hospital, no one has been allowed to see her, but Ashley is let in only to learn that her mother is dying. The story follows her mother’s decline and Ashley’s incipient relationship with Drew Runous, although the two never overlap inappropriately. She has never met Drew before, but she’s been gone for 8 years and missed the period in which he developed close ties to her family and, in particular, her mother.

Beauty and the Mustache starts out with regional stereotypes and moves on from there. Ashley’s memory of her six brothers as a group of troublemakers who tormented her during a difficult childhood is inconsistent with the present. She clawed her way out of her limited life in Tennessee and everyone has grown up since then, including Ashley, so now she has to figure out what she wants and where she wants to be.

Game warden Drew is a classic protector/warrior hero and like all Reid’s men fits neatly into an idealized male type. He is the still water that runs deep, a mountain man with a PhD and the soul of a poet. He has issues from his childhood, too, but he is a good, honest, and trustworthy man. As Ashley observes, he is also “fiction handsome” and “romance novel”/”viking conqueror” gorgeous. Tall, muscular, be-plaided, deep, and bearded. Sign. Me. Up.

Each chapter starts with a quote appropriate to the story and, as I happen to collect quotations, I loved this element. Told from Ashley’s perspective, but with Reid’s usual inclusion of the hero’s voice in the final chapter, the book performed a nice balancing act with Ashley’s emotional turmoil about losing her mother and Drew’s sudden presence in her life. The final portion of the story had some of the heightened reality that each of the Knitting in the City books has when things take a turn for over-the-top, but Reid somehow manages to prevent it derailing the plot, likely because I am so involved by that point that I just go with it.

I will continue to read Reid’s series. The female friendships are a delight, each of the women have a distinct personality and their relationships have the closeness that I have experienced in my own life. Also, having gone through a somewhat similar parental death, I thought those elements of Beauty and the Mustache rang true, even if they did make me want to cry.

The next book in the Winston Brothers series, Truth or Beard, was not as strong.

Penny Reid’s Catalogue gives an overview of her published works , some of which I recommend and some of which I dislike intensely.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful.

The Backup Boyfriend, The Boyfriend Mandate, & Brad’s Bachelor Party by River Jaymes

book review March 9, 2015 Leave a comment

I found these contemporary romances through the magic of KindleUnlimited. The Backup Boyfriend and The Boyfriend Mandate are the first two books in the Boyfriend Series by River Jaymes which also includes Brad’s Bachelor Party (see way below) and the upcoming novel The Boyfriend Makeover.

The Backup Boyfriend

Opting against the more traditional tattoo or radical haircut, Alec responds to his break up with Tyler by going full-on midlife crisis and buying a vintage motorcycle. He’s done all of the research and none of the riding which is why he ends up pushing the bike into Dylan’s garage. A misunderstanding, and the lightning fast presence of a man in Tyler’s life, leads to a Boyfriend of Convenience plot with Dylan playing at being Alec’s new beau. Being a romance, the playing part soon takes on a different meaning, but the boyfriend part takes a bit longer as they move from fraud, to a one-night stand, to what is this we are doing exactly?, to a relationship.

The obstacles that Alec and Dylan face are their own baggage. Alec has been busy trying to be the perfect son and Dylan has a painful past and issues of sexual identity to struggle with. They find their way and resolve everything in time for Alec’s ex-boyfriend Tyler to have his chance at lasting love.

The Boyfriend Mandate

Tyler and Memphis (!) were roommates in university who had a two-year relationship before Memphis walked away without a backward glance. They both moved on with their lives, Tyler to a long-term but now over relationship with Alec, and Memphis to a marriage which has ended in divorce. Thrown back together by Maguffiny plot machinations, they work their way through their old hurts and toward finding a new life together.

Memphis (again, I say, “!”) is a stuntman/underwear model (that warrants another “!”) whose personal life (read: sexual identity) is under scrutiny in the press, a fact that amuses him until Tyler and his ex-wife are drawn into the fray. Finding ways to provoke Tyler into letting down his guard, and thus release his emotions, allows Memphis the same freedom to deal with their horrible breakup and how they can be together again now that they have both grown up.

These books are fairly standard romances with a heightened reality about financially secure, beautiful people finding love. In both novels, one of the partners addresses his identity as a bisexual and I would welcome an LGBT romance in which both characters are secure in this aspect of his or herself from the outset and with no wrangling involved and sticking to just two people falling in love.

Sidebar: The love scenes in the books, while they were incredibly

blanche

I did not actually find them all that romantic, and because, as Paul Reiser once said on Mad About You, “I agree with both of them,”, I did wonder if I was fetishizing a M/M relationship in much the same way popular culture so often does with two women. It made me feel a little icky when I looked at it from that perspective, but it didn’t stop me from reading… even when it should have for general quality reasons which brings me to Brad’s Bachelor Party.

The title says most of it and the rest you can likely guess. Brad is getting married in Hawaii and the festivities are a chance for him to spend time with his closest friends, including Cole. While college roommates, Brad was attracted to Cole, but when he made a move Brad freaked out and the friendship was severed. Coming back together during a family emergency, their friendship was rekindled and nothing hinted at romance for them until too much time in close proximity tipped the scales.

Brad’s Bachelor Party was a middling romance novella. Everything about it was okay and nothing about it was special or interesting. Cole and Brad find their way to each other at just about the worst possible moment, but it works out well in the end. I did wonder about the poor jilted virtually invisible fiancee though. I hope she finds a nice man just like Brad did.

LGBT romance recommendations can be found here.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful.

La Vie en Roses Series: Once Upon a Rose by Laura Florand

book review February 4, 2015 1 Comment

Welcome to my autobuy list, Laura Florand. With her newest contemporary romance, she has guaranteed that I will be making ready and willing contributions to her income for the foreseeable future, pages and reviews unseen. In the first novel in her new series, La Vie en Roses, Florand has again mixed lovely escapism with sincere romance and, for the first time, a wonderful dose of humour. Her books were not previously morose, but this one has a conviviality that just adds to the fun, Once Upon a Rose is a delightful and charming read.

Matt Rosiers is one of 5 cousins who are the owners and caretakers of the family business (more potential heroes, yay!) Growing roses for oil extraction into perfume, you can just imagine how lovely the setting must be. Matt’s valley in Provence, he is very definite about it being his, has been in the family for 400 years, so he is a more than a little taken aback when his elderly aunt gives a house and a small piece of the family land to Layla, some kind of distant family connection he was hitherto unaware of. Big, growly, vulnerable Matt gets wrapped around Layla’s little finger, and she his, in very short order. It’s what Florand does best, or I like best, one of those two, maybe both, she writes fantastic protectors is the heart of the matter, and Matt is no exception.

Layla, sweet and open-hearted, is a singer-songwriter transitioning from the success of her first CD to the pressures of matching the accomplishment with her second. Emotionally spent, she has decided to check out the house that has been left to her for reasons she can’t understand, but things go awry when her car breaks down in the hills of Provence. Stranded, she wanders through rose fields to the nearest house to find Matt’s thirtieth birthday party in full swing. Far from sober, Matt decides Layla must be his girlfriend and enthusiastically welcomes her to the fete. Despite this inauspicious beginning, and an embarrassing one for Matt, he and Layla follow the pattern of all of Florand’s protagonists, falling hard and fast with plenty of romance and smolder to keep readers happy.

Once Upon a Rose lived up to the fairy tale enchantment of the title and Florand’s allusive characters, but is not treacly or precious, and a fun way to avoid reality for several hours. She is a very deft writer and I am always amazed by authors who have so clearly found their groove, especially when it fits so neatly in to my reading niche. The settings are so romantic, they are real places, but with an unreality that takes the reader away from its own practicalities (Matt is running a farm after all, no matter how glamourous its harvest) and lets readers be a tourist in a North American’s idealized version of France without annoying the locals.

The Vie en Roses series already includes a book and a novella, the former of which crosses over with Florand’s L’Amour et Chocolat series. A complete summary of Laura Florand’s catalogue, with recommendations, can be found here.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful which includes the aforementioned observations.

A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong by Cecilia Grant

book review February 2, 2015 Leave a comment

I really like Cecilia Grant’s Regency romances, so I snapped up this novella over Christmas. She is a very strong writer and I buy or borrow everything she writes. In particular, she has a facility for changing tone and style according to the story she is telling. In this case, that means a light and droll spirit for a Yuletide sliding awry. A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong is a prequel novella for Grant’s Blackshear Family series. I read the books out of order and would recommend each of them.

Uptight and cautious Andrew Blackshear is traveling at Christmas to buy a gift for his engaged sister. Stopping by a gentleman falconer’s home to purchase a pet, he is taken aback to discover himself overwhelmingly attracted to the delightful daughter of the house, Lucy Sharp. Eager to attend a house party, Lucy overrides Andrew’s stuffy objections to the unseemliness of traveling alone together and they head out, falcon on hand, to drop Lucy off at the event on the way to Andrew’s family holiday. As is the way of things with road trips in romance novels, anything that can go wrong does. Stranded by weather and carriage trouble, Andrew and Lucy find themselves spending more time together and in much closer quarters than they had expected as they rely on the kindness of strangers for accommodations. Lucy uses logic and savvy to quickly and quietly dismantle Andrew’s priggish tendencies. He had unknowingly been on his way to a happier future from the very start.

Each of the siblings in the Blackshear books wrestles with expectations of their own behaviour and the restrictions society has taught them. Theirs is a fractured family and it is only by standing up individually that they are able to come back together. A Christmas Gone Perfectly wrong predates the family scandal which is crucial to the other books in the series and allows another view of their starchy eldest brother. Andrew and Lucy made a lovely pairing and Grant shows, as she does in the other books in the series, how a good match can help people find a balance in their lives. Grant also does very well in creating the historical atmosphere that some of these books take more seriously than others. Her Regency feels real.

The Blackshear Family series:
Book .5 – A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong
Book 1 – A Lady Awakened
Book 2 – A Gentleman Undone
Book 3 – A Woman Entangled  – I write about romance novel sex in this one.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful which includes the aforementioned observations.

L’Amour et Chocolat Series: Shadowed Heart by Laura Florand

book review February 1, 2015 Leave a comment

Shadowed Heart is a follow up to Laura Florand’s The Chocolate Heart which is in itself the fifth book in the L’Amour et Chocolate contemporary romance series set in France. You could read this as a standalone novella, but I don’t really see the point as the purpose of this book is to check in on characters and have visits with the protagonists of the other books in the series. Without everyone’s backgrounds, not a lot is going to make sense.

Luc Leroi and Summer Corey have been married for a short time and they realise they have rushed in where angels fear to tread. Quickly espoused, they decide to have a child despite a. knowing each other less than a year, b. each having personal issues that seriously hinder communication and c. having recently moved to an entirely new location so that Luc can immerse himself in starting a new restaurant. Luc is frantically trying to use what he sees all he has to offer – his skill as a patissier – to secure his future with Summer and she, in turn, is desperately trying to mask her loneliness and isolation. They still need to do a lot of work on themselves and their relationship, and this book reinforced that notion.

I didn’t really care about seeing Luc and Summer again. Their story, The Chocolate Heart, was the weakest and my least favourite of the series. They are both damaged – which is fine – but I didn’t particularly like either one of them. She is profoundly vulnerable and he is a control freak. I bought Shadowed Heart for the visits with everyone else from the stories and it did not disappoint. I must tell you though that the most exciting part of the book was the excerpt of Florand’s upcoming book, Once a Hero, which promises more time with my favourite couple, Dom and Jaime of The Chocolate Touch.

A complete summary of Laura Florand’s catalogue, with recommendations, can be found here.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful which includes the aforementioned observations.

How to Catch a Wild Viscount by Tessa Dare

book review January 28, 2015 Leave a comment

Read The Scandalous, Dissolute, No-Good Mr. Wright instead. It’s wonderful.

How to Catch a Wild Viscount came as part of a 99 cent novella set. The grouping includes works by Courtney Milan, Caroline Linden, and other current authors. I quite like novellas as they are a quick read and strip the story down to its bare bones, but what I just said is the only reason to read this book. It’s an early work by an author on my autobuy list, Tessa Dare, and I just wanted to see what it was like.

From Amazon: She’s on the hunt for a hero…

Luke Trenton, Viscount Merritt, returned from war a changed man. Battle stripped away his civility and brought out his inner beast. There is no charm or tenderness in him now; only dark passions and a hardened soul. He has nothing to offer the starry-eyed, innocent girl who pledged her heart to him four years ago.

But Cecily Hale isn’t a girl any longer. She’s grown into a woman–one who won’t be pushed away. She and Luke are guests at a house party when a local legend captures their friends’ imaginations. While the others plunge into the forest on a wild goose…er, stag chase, Cecily’s on the hunt for a man. She has only a few moonlit nights to reach the real Luke…the wounded heart she knows still beats inside the war-ravaged body…or she could lose him to the darkness forever.

It’s a pleasant little novella, but certainly nothing to make an effort to seek out. Dare has published many works since this one and while it isn’t bad, they are all better. Yes, even the one I hated. The plot of How to Catch a Wild Viscount (summarized above) has a paranormal element involving a “werestag” and unless you are Kresley Cole and I can write angry, spiteful reviews of your works, I have no interest in mythical creatures be they metaphorical or literal.

One interesting note: The main characters engage in an act against the drawing room wall and while Ms. Dare writes world-class [insert funky bass-line here] and is the willing-suspension-of-disbeliefiest of all my favourite authors, there is NO WAY IN HELL they doing that in the middle of the day in a public room, Regency or otherwise.

A complete summary of Tessa Dare’s catalogue, with recommendations, can be found here.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful which includes the aforementioned observations.

Trade Me by Courtney Milan

book review January 26, 2015 Leave a comment

I have already reread it.

 

In historical romance’s greatest writer (and increasingly open iconoclast) Courtney Milan’s latest novel, Trade Me, her work steps sideways into the New Adult genre. In their early twenties, the main characters are young enough to be my children, but instead of putting me off, it created a similar kind of narrative distance to the historical elements in the romances I generally prefer. So much has changed since I was that age that this really is a different world for me. Milan brings themes of identity and the roles we are given in life, as well as family politics, into this alternate setting and builds a story around them with her usual skill, style, and charmingly memorable romantic moments.

Tina Chen is the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Chinese refugees. Her single focus in life is creating the financial security her family requires and this means she looked down the list of secure, well-paying professions and her finger landed on doctor. Tina has bills to pay and aspirations to fulfill. She works all the time on her university courses and at her job, she has no time to play.

Tina’s classes bring her into contact with Blake Reynolds. The only child of a Tech billionaire, twenty-three-year-old Blake has taken time off from working for his father to complete a university degree. His relentless but loving father sees it as self-indulgent folderol. After an in-class confrontation, Blake suggests to Tina that they switch lives for the remainder of the semester. She is leery of the trust fund baby, but cannot resist the financial incentive that living his life would provide. She and her roommate move into his house. He moves into the not-so-very converted garage they live in.

Blake would seem to be indulging in poverty tourism, but he has excellent reasons for wanting to lift himself out of his daily existence and hopes to make the most of this escape. Tina’s pressures are visible and more tangible. Blake’s are internalized and haven’t been acknowledged or even noticed by the people around him. His responsibilities to his father’s company and Tina’s assumption of them require that they spend a lot of time together working/trying not to fall in love. Just Tina really. Blake is ready, willing, and able to fall in love with as soon as Tina gives the word, and before that really.

Trade Me flew by in the best possible way. The story was so well-constructed and written that I just floated through the book absorbing the characters and enjoying the ride. Tina and Blake were both interesting and sympathetic, which is not surprising for her given her challenges, but quite an author’s feat for him as he is  good-looking, successful, and filthy rich. The rich man’s son has problems of his own, most stemming from his relationship with his father, and he is young enough that his dad could participate in helping to fix them if only Blake could bring himself to voice his feelings.

The last portion of the book did suffer from Too Much syndrome. There was a whole lot of family drama and the kind of public denouement that is almost impossible to get away with. Milan nearly pulled it off and it certainly made for an exciting finish. Trade Me was a great, engrossing book which I would recommend warmly to readers. I look forward to the rest of the series.  If Milan has been bolder in character choices in her last books, the next one in this Cyclone series, Hold Me, promises to be a game changer.

New Adult romance recommendations can be found here.

A complete summary of Courtney Milan’s catalogue, with recommendations, can be found here.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful which includes the aforementioned observations.

 

Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati

book review January 21, 2015 Leave a comment

Before I continue to catch up on reviewing books I read last year, I want to take a moment to thank my ones of loyal readers who have all been waiting so patiently for more posts; silently and without interruption, or page views of the site to disturb my concentration, ignoring my blog completely to make sure I felt no pressure, going about your lives as though my sporadic reviews all of books in exactly the same genre are not the fulcrum of your very existence, and now you will be rewarded with a cursory and uninspired review of a book I liked well enough: Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati.

From Amazon: (Proof! “Cursory”. I’m not even going to write my own plot summary.)

When Elizabeth Middleton, twenty-nine years old and unmarried, leaves her Aunt Merriweather’s comfortable English estate to join her father and brother in the remote mountain village of Paradise on the edge of the New York wilderness, she does so with a strong will and an unwavering purpose: to teach school. (This is really just the first chapter or so.)

It is December of 1792 when she arrives in a cold climate unlike any she has ever experienced. And she meets a man different from any she has ever encountered–a white man dressed like a Native American, tall and lean and unsettling in his blunt honesty. He is Nathaniel Bonner, also known to the Mohawk people as Between-Two-Lives. (Hero alert!)

The first book in a larger series, Into the Wilderness is a historical novel in the vein of Outlander – a comparison the author no doubt finds tiresome – but without all that pesky time travel. A grand adventure and a great romance, the heroine is building a new life for herself in a strange country.  Elizabeth has been thrown into new cultures, both one that looks a lot like what she left behind in England and another that is completely new and foreign, plus there’s an attractive young man in the area. The hero is capable, stalwart, and other handy to have around frontiery things.  Nathaniel and Elizabeth take an instant interest in each other and manage to triumph over all machinations, travails, and travel (but not time travel as was previously clarified), to be together.

Historical books of the romantical variety can fall one side or tother of the verisimilitude divide and the ones which feel realistic are my preference. Most romances I read are not of the epic, multi-tome variety and I enjoy the plunge into detail that books like this one provide. I want to know everything: What are their clothes made of?  Who knit their socks? What are their pillows stuffed with? Did they even have pillows? How long does it take to travel? Where did they get the yeast for the bread? and so on. I can’t get enough of that kind of thing, but while I enjoyed this book, I had virtually no interest in the rest of the series in which the story continues for several more books, its chronology jumping ahead years at a time and Elizabeth and Nathaniel’s story takes a back seat to that of their family. Into the Wilderness was a consistently entertaining read, but, like that other series I can’t seem to help/am unwilling to stop comparing it to, the plot could be a bit Perils of Pauline as Elizabeth moves from adventure to crisis to challenge and back again.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by writer or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful which includes the aforementioned observations.

The Season Series: Season for Temptation, Season for Surrender, and Season for Scandal Season for Desire by Theresa Romain

book review December 14, 2014 Leave a comment

Confession: I blasted through all four books in the Season Series some weeks ago and while they left an impression, they did not leave a great deal of detail. No disrespect to Theresa Romain intended, I would recommend them as pleasant escapism, but everyday life has been quite busy of late and reading these books was taking a hit of reality evasion followed by a black out.

Season for Temptation (James/Julia)

James has come to spend Christmas with his fiancee’s family. Neither he, nor Louisa, are exactly on fire for each other, but they find one another pleasant and could do worse. Fortunately and unfortunately, Louisa has a younger sister, Julia, who takes one look at James, and he her, and finds a true match.

Season for Surrender (Alex/Louisa)

Louisa is not sorry that her engagement fell through, but she is tired of the conciliatory looks and remarks. She is persuaded to attend Alexander, Lord Xavier’s scandalous holiday house party. She wants the opportunity for a bit of adventure before descending into spinsterhood. Bonding over a mutual love of books and libraries Louisa and Xavier make their way towards a partnership. She needs to overcome her shyness, he needs to overcome some bad habits.

Wonderful Period Detail: When he invites Louisa to call him by his first name, Alex realises that at no point in his life has anyone ever really done so.

Season for Scandal (Jane/Edmund)

Alex, Lord Xavier has a handful of a cousin, Jane, who has a habit of gambling to make ends meet. When a game goes awry and crippling financial obligations result, she is extricated by Edmund Ware, Baron Kirkpatrick. They make a marriage of convenience which goes well, goes very wrong, and comes right in the end.

Season for Desire (Giles/Audrina)

The hero is an American. GADZOOKS! Giles and his father are in England on the trail of a family treasure. A chance meeting with Lady Audrina Bradleigh and a meteorological occurrence lead to a partnership in the search. Not surprisingly, this leads to another partnership as well.

The Season Series was notable for its excellent juxtaposition of historical detail, well counter-balanced expressions of physical affection, and interesting characters. Often these books have either history or romance on their side, so it was nice to read novels with both. The second book, Season for Surrender, was my favourite, but I would recommend all of them. They have a fine sense of fun and successfully become serious when they needed to; the people felt real and the historical elements realistic, and that is not as common as one might think in the genre. As long as the emotional lives of the characters ring true, historical waffling can be overlooked to some extent, but it is still a pleasure when the two are successfully dovetailed.

Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful.