Maya Banks's "Sweet Possession"

Grade: B

passion rating: Hot

Maya Bank’s latest Sweet erotic romance, Sweet Possession, may or may not be a tale of interracial romance. The cover, on which a topless man is pressed up against a topless woman, makes one think it’s likely the man is white and the woman is black or of mixed race. And while the man in the story, Connor Malone, is overtly described as white, his lover, Lyric Jones, is never ascribed a skin color. The only reason I thought about this as I read the book is that, in a lovely way, it doesn’t matter to the story. The barriers that stand in Connor’s and Lyric’s way are all of their own making and have nothing to do with social expectations. This is a nothing more and nothing less than the story of a man and woman learning how to love.

I’ve not read any other of Ms. Bank’s erotic romances but characters from the Sweet series permeate this book, and it’s pretty clear that compared to his co-workers and their partners, Connor’s idea of a good time is pretty tame. This book, for an erotic romance, is pretty tame. Connor and Lyric don’t make love until the book’s almost half done. And when they do, it’s in mainstream ways — no ménages, alternate entries, or fancy contraptions. This mainstream vibe is definitely, in the beginning, coming from Connor. Lyric, badly damaged by an abusive childhood, is a wild child. Yet her unconventional sex life has been about avoidance rather than connection, and from the moment she meets Connor she abandons her wilder ways. It’s clear to the reader — and, over time, to Lyric — that Connor Malone is a man who can show her how to conventionally love and be loved.


click here to read the rest of the review

Suzanne Brockmann's "Breaking the Rules"

Grade: C+

passion rating: Warm

Eden Gillman, one of the protagonists in Suzanne Brockmann’s 16th Troubleshooters novel, has had an exceptionally inopportune life. She’s been gang-raped, drugged, groped by every boss she’s ever had, sexually molested by her brother-in-law, assaulted by her step-father, slandered by the creep who took her virginity, abused by loser boyfriends, and repeatedly called a whore by her family. She almost drowned in Hurricane Katrina, was later menaced by crazed criminals, miscarried her baby, and suffered a crippling depression. And she’s just 19.

Amazingly, in Breaking the Rules, Eden’s not the character who has suffered the most. That would be Neesha, a young Indonesian girl sold into sexual slavery at age eight and then regularly raped and beaten for the next eight years. Neesha, who escaped her vile captors and is now on the run in Las Vegas, is connected to Eden through Eden’s younger brother Ben, an appealing 15 year old gay kid. Ben has been mistreated by his parents, shipped off to a horrific “Scare the Queers Straight” facility, mocked by his peers, and has life threatening diabetes. Ben meets the terrified Neesha while she’s hiding out at the mall, trying not to be recaptured by the international sex slavers. That meeting brings Ben and Eden — as well as Eden’s husband Izzy Zanella, her brother Dan, and his saintly girlfriend Jennilyn LaMay — to the attention of the uber-evil slaver thugs who will kill anyone who gets in their way.

I will offend Suzanne Brockmann fans worldwide, but I’m just going to say it: This is a weak novel. Its plot is meandering; its gloom, almost unceasing; the writing, inconsistent; and its lovers, limited by their snottiness — St. Jenni notwithstanding. I haven’t read all the books in the series so Eden, Izzy, Dan, and Jenni aren’t characters I am invested in. But, even if I had read all the Troubleshooters books, I still would have found this story wanting.


click here to read the rest of the review

Karen Ranney's "A Borrowed Scot"

Grade: B

passion rating: Warm

At the beginning of Karen Ranney’s new romance, A Borrowed Scot, the hero, Montgomery Fairfax, is at a London club surrounded by Latin-chanting men dressed in hooded robes. He’s there because he’s curious about the provenance of a numinous diamond-ringed mirror he’s inherited. Montgomery is the newly named Lord Fairfax of Scotland’s Doncaster Hall and has been told the Mercaii Club are London’s experts on all things paranormal. This evening, however, Montgomery is alarmed to see the Club’s members aren’t appraising or advising; they’re about to rape a drugged young woman: our heroine, Veronica MacLeod. 


Montgomery, of course, rescues her. But when he tries to return her to her detestable uncle and his odious family — she’s an orphan — they decline to take her back. They say her nocturnal escapade has ruined her reputation and thus might ruin theirs. Montgomery feels he has no choice but to offer to marry her and she, of course, says yes.

click here to read the rest of the review

Rachel Gibson's" Any Man of Mine"

Grade: B+

passion rating: Hot

Any Man of Mine is Rachel Gibson's sixth book featuring a sexy Chinooks ice hockey player, and it's a great one. That’s the good news. The possible bad news is it’s so similar in plot to the first book in the series, Simply Irresistible, I felt swamped by déjà vu as I raced through the pages.

I liked Simply Irresistible and I like Any Man of Mine. Ms. Gibson writes well about love that makes you laugh and love that makes you cry. Both books have moving storylines and characters easy to care for. It’s just a bit of a bummer that the stories are so akin to one another. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Great artists like Monet and Van Gough painted different versions of the same things over and over again and we consider each painting a masterpiece despite the sameness of subject. Perhaps we should just be pleased that Ms. Gibson has brought her formidable writing skills back to the story of two people who share a child but not, initially, a life.


click here to read the rest of the review

Shannon McKenna's "Return to Me"

Grade: F

passion rating: Hot

(the full review is published here--it's not a piece on AAR)

"Sometimes—in fact, lots of times--I just want a down and dirty bad boy hero who sweeps into town, throws the good girl over his shoulders and drags her off to a happy ending. This bad boy does and then gets the nice girl story has been done many times by Shannon McKenna, sometimes well (think Extreme Danger) and, unfortunately for this reviewer, sometimes terribly. It’s hard to find much to like about Ms. McKenna’s overblown Return to Me.

The hero, Simon, is a self-absorbed jerk whose behavior between the sheets is so aggressive it’s kinda gross. The woman he’s burning for, Ellen, he deflowered and then dumped seventeen years ago. But Ellen, an enabler if ever I’ve seen one, just lets him right back into her heart and other parts. I wish I could tell you why Ellen is such a pushover for Simon and his constantly feeling sorry for himself ways, but I can’t because Ms. McKenna hasn’t bothered to develop Ellen or Simon into in-depth characters.

Nor has she produced a coherent plot. As best I could tell, Simon left town after being accused of burning down a barn—we know he wasn’t really isn’t a bad guy because he did try to save the horses. Ellen stayed in town—and I mean stayed in town, it’s as if she has never been anywhere other than LaRue—and became the controlling owner of a bed and breakfast. We are supposed to think she’s sweet—as opposed to stupid--because she has an assistant who is terrible at all things bed-and-breakfasty but Ellen keeps her on, smiling benevolently when, yet again, Missy burns the muffins. Simon has come back to town because his uncle Gus shot himself and something about that just doesn’t feel right to Simon. That doesn’t stop him from constantly ruing that he’s returned to LaRue. (He feels he is brings bad luck to the entire town—yes, it really is all about him!) There’s a psycho villain who has disgusting flashbacks to Vietnam where he learned to enjoy setting others on fire. There’s an uptight guy, Brad, who was engaged to Ellen but really should be with Cora, a woman whose reputation he ruined. (Cora and Brad are actually much more interesting a couple than Simon and Ellen although that isn’t saying much.)

There’s lots and lots of sex and none of it’s very sexy. Both characters are described routinely as gorgeous, hot, and desirable, but given that neither of them were anyone I would ever want to meet, I found page after page of them moaning into each other’s mouth just plain out dull. Plus, the idea of this couple reproducing is so appalling, I kept worrying that one of the bazillions of condoms—Simon is a lot like the Energizer Bunny--they were using might fail. When Ellen and Simon aren’t in the sack, they spend way too much time feeling sorry for themselves. Ellen doubts herself for being with Simon, Simon doubts himself for being with Ellen. Halfway through the tale, I doubted myself for buying this book.

By the time I got to the incredibly bizarre scene where Simon and Ellen, escaping someone or something—it’s all a blur—, find themselves in a hidden grove filled with huge animal statues made by Simon’s dead mother, I gave up. I flipped to the end and was unhappy to see they appeared to having unprotected sex and planning a family. Hopefully, they and their progeny will never leave LaRue."

Christina Dodd's "Taken by the Prince"

Grade: C+

passion rating: Warm

"I never dreamed of being a princess when I was young. Queen, yes, princess, no. And yet, the Princess saga clearly sways many a little girl — Disney anyone? — and big girls too. Novels that feature princes as the hero strike me as the supersizing of the hero in historical romance. It’s not enough that a man be noble, gorgeous, rich, sexy as sin, and blessed with a fabulous tailor. No, the true fantasy fellow is also a prince and, by marrying our more beautiful than the sunrise heroine, he makes her — bluebirds twitter, flowers bloom — a princess.

Ms. Dodd’s latest historical romance, Taken by the Prince, tells the story of a lovely plucky virgin captured by a hunky, oh-so-good in the bedroom prince and, while it’s a fun read, it was a little too formulaic for me. It’s much better than bad, but not memorable enough to be really good."


click here to read the rest of the review

Maya Bank's "Hidden Away"

Grade: D+

passion rating: Warm

"Hidden Away by Maya Banks is the second book I’ve read recently in which the macho hero has hot sex with the heroine while he is seriously injured. This seems ridiculous.

Him: Honey, I know I need to be in the hospital but, more importantly, I need to be in you. Right now.


Her: Wonderful. I’ll just ignore all your wounds and assume that when you’re moaning, it’s in pleasure rather than in pain.


Him: Great. Uh, and would you mind being on top? I think I may have a ruptured kidney.


That said, wondering whether the hero — Garrett Kelly of KGI (the Kelly Group International, an elite private organization that makes the CIA look wimpy and underfunded) might expire while bedding heroine Sarah Daniels adds some much needed suspense to this book. Most of Hidden Away is, well, boring."


click here to read the rest of the review

Kresley Cole's "Dreams of a Dark Warrior"

Grade: B

passion rating: Hot

"Don’t read this review if you have any interest in Ms. Cole’s wildly popular Immortals After Dark series and haven’t begun reading it yet. This is the ninth book—the eleventh if you include novellas—and is chocked full of information about plotlines begun in earlier books. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend reading Dreams of a Dark Warrior unless you have read the all other books in the series. I’ve read most but not all and was, at times, befuddled. That’s not to say it not a great read—there’s a reason millions of the IAD books have been sold but it’s rather perplexing if you haven’t kept up with all the books preceding it.


Dreams of a Dark Warrior tells the disaster-prone love story of Aiden the Fierce (he’s a born again and again berserker) and Regin the Radiant (a Valkyrie). Regin and Aiden met centuries ago and are destined to lose and love each other over and over. Regin is an immortal and Aidan--striving for immortality but not quite there--are cursed to, every time they meet (in whatever incarnation Aiden is in this era), kiss and then have Aiden die. Regin has learned the hard way that loving Aiden means his death and thus has devoted most of her energies over the past few decades to the violent, entertaining, video-game playing life she shares with her immortal sisters at the wryly named Val Hall in New Orleans."


click here to read the rest of the review

Cynthia Eden's "Deadly Lies"

Grade: C

passion rating: Hot

"In Deadly Lies, the third book in Cynthia Eden’s series about the entirely fictional FBI’s Serial Services Division—they track and catch serial criminals--, the literally tortured heroine is Samantha “Sam” Kennedy. Sam was tortured by a cretinous killer known as the Watchman in the first book, Deadly Fear, and was last seen in the second book, Deadly Heat, having panic attacks. In Deadly Lies, Sam is determined to get her mojo back professionally and personally.

She attempts to do the latter by picking up ultramasculine Max Ridgeway at a bar for a night of no strings sizzling sex. Sam isn’t, in general, promiscuous—Max is only her third lover—but, in an effort to escape her demons she goes looking for a wild one-night stand. She picks “the strongest man in the place” and goes home with him. Somewhat miraculously, Max makes her come within two minutes. Nonetheless, she slips out of his bed, planning never to rendezvous with him again. Two weeks later, though, after seeing a brutal crime scene involving a young man carved to bits, she seeks Max out, looking to lose herself again in his arms. (This time, Max is so great a lover; he makes her come –look, Ma, just my hand!--at a party in less than two minutes.) Later that night, after they have sex, Sam is again walking out on Max when his phone rings. It’s the same baddie who sliced up Sam’s earlier vic. The nasty piece of work now has Max’s younger step-brother Quinlan. Max and his wildly wealthy step-father need to come up with the big bucks in a hurry or, threatens our knife-happy villain, Quinlan will be slashed and trashed too."

Julie Ann Long's "What I Did for a Duke"

Grade: A-

passion rating: Hot

"Genevieve Eversea, of Pennyroyal Green, has been in love with Lord Harry Osborne for three years. Harry is all that Genevieve wants in a man — he’s funny, handsome, shares her knowledge and love of Italian art, and makes her smile every time she sees him. She is certain they make the perfect couple and that he’s just waiting for the right moment to ask her to be his bride. So it comes as a horrible, heartbreaking shock when he tells her he intends to propose to her best friend Millicent at an upcoming Everseas’ house party.

Alexander Moncrieffe, the sixth Duke of Falconbridge, is, at forty, a chilly, ruthless, formidable man. He’s rumored to have poisoned his first wife and is known for never ever losing. Alex is a man most fear and avoid, although his title and wealth allow him to go wherever he chooses. He has chosen to come to the aforementioned house party where he intends to debauch Genevieve whom he’s never met. Earlier in the month, he caught her scapegrace brother Ian naked in bed with Alex’s now ex-fiancée. Alex has never let anyone cheat or wrong him without exacting revenge and, to him, the seduction of Ian’s innocent sister is fair retribution for Ian’s transgression."

Anne Mallory's "One Night is Never Enough"

Grade: A

passion rating: Hot

"Anne Mallory’s One Night is Never Enough is as close to perfect as any love story I’ve ever read in recent memory. I bet it’s the best historical romance I’ll read this year and, yes, I know it’s only January. Ms. Mallory gets better and better with each novel she pens. Her last work, The Seven Secrets of Seduction, is a terrific read and earned a DIK from AAR. The heroine of One Night is Never Enough is a minor but fascinating character from The Seven Secrets of Seduction: one Charlotte Chatsworth, an Incomparable of the ton.

Charlotte has been raised to be a nobleman’s wife and to use her beauty to secure a place for herself and her family at the top of Regency society. When she was younger, she was sure such a future would bring her happiness. Now, she’s not.Her sot of a father has gambled away the family’s fortune and her mother’s and younger sister Emily’s very safety depends on Charlotte. Charlotte is horribly, heavily chained by her father’s determination to wed her to “the largest crown”—a wealthy peer."

Eloisa Jame's "When Beauty Tamed the Beast"

Grade: B

passion rating: Warm

"In When Beauty Tamed the Beast, Eloisa James’ second fairy tale based novel, our hero is Dr. Gregory House, the TV doctor with the crotchety brilliant medical mind. OK, so our hero isn’t actually Gregory House. He’s Piers Yelverton, the Earl of Marchant, and he practices his snarky, deductive medicine in a huge castle in Wales, but he’s essentially House complete with cane, problematic familial relationships, debilitating pain, and a very nasty tongue. Piers, like House, is a Beast.


The caustic Piers lives a life of self-imposed exile in his castle turned hospital in Wales. He was severely injured when young and suffers from chronic pain in his leg. He practices brilliant medicine on the locals — he is superb at diagnosing and treating their maladies. (He is not a surgeon — the cutting is done by his handsome French cousin Sebastien with whom Piers works.) Piers avoids anything resembling affection from others and has absolutely no plans to ever marry and produce an heir. In fact, all who know him believe his childhood accident left him impotent.


Our heroine, the beauteous Linnet Berry Thrynne, needs a hasty marriage. All of London, including her father, believe that due to a few kisses with a prince and a dress that made her look enceinte, she’s probably pregnant and definitely disgraced. Linnet’s father — desperate for a groom — and Piers’ father — desperate for an heir — devise the perfect solution: Linnet will marry Piers, call the prince’s child his, and give the Marchant family a legal, blue-blooded heir. Linnet, despite knowing perfectly well the prince did no more than kiss her, agrees to this scheme because her father is insistent, no one in London will speak to her and, well, she rather likes the idea of marriage to an impotent man — she found the whole kissing thing with the prince quite distasteful. So, off the Wales she heads, the Beauty heading into the lair of the Beast."

Jo Beverley's "An Unlikely Countess"

Grade: C

passion rating: Warm

"Jo Beverley’s An Unlikely Countess marvelously illustrates life in aristocratic Georgian England. The book tells the story of the relationship between titled Catesby Burgoyne and bourgeois Prudence Youlgrave. The novel teems with examples of how stratified life was in England at the time. The novel does not, however, teem with a great love story. While reading it, I felt as though the book could easily have been assigned in one of my college European history classes as a study on gender and class in 1700’s England.


Cate (he has not yet become Earl) and Prudence (her middle-class parents are dead and her lawyer brother barely gives her enough money to survive) first meet when he rescues her from an attack. They spend a chaste night together—he stays in her hovel rather than in an inn and gives her two shillings and a tiepin in payment—and then leaves her. Several weeks later, after he unexpectedly becomes the Earl of Malzard when his older brother dies, Cate wonders how she is doing and seeks her. He finds Prudence about to be married to a violent older man (her brother’s idea) and, unable to see her so wed, Cate marries her instead. Cate and Prudence head off to Cate’s family seat, Keynings, where Prudence becomes the unlikely countess of the title."

Molly Harper's "How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf"

Grade: B-

passion rating: Warm

"This book has a plot pulled from quirky old TV shows with a bit of a Twilight-type love tossed in. The setting of Grundy, Alaska is a dead ringer for the town in Northern Exposure; the hero, hunky werewolf Cooper Graham, struggles with the same issues as did Oz in Buffy (“Am I a killer?” “Why am I always naked in fight scenes?”); the lovers put up a token resistance to their powerful, somewhat scent-based lust for one another. The novel is light, predictable, and pleasantly lacking the gloom and doom often found in tales of the not-quite human.

Mo Duvall-Wenstein — it would be a spoiler if I told you what Mo is short for —has rather abruptly moved to Grundy, a small town in Alaska, where everybody is an idiosyncratic character. She’s run away from her over-protective, hippy parents — they renamed themselves Saffron and Ash when they met - and the boring, unfulfilling life she had in small town Mississippi. Mo is looking for a home — a place where she can be her fairly mainstream self. She picks Grundy because she liked its charmingly Spartan Web site and its vast distance from her mother. Almost everyone in Grundy likes Mo from the moment she arrives — she’s an attractive single woman (it’s Alaska, where single women are in short supply) and she cooks well enough to immediately land a job in the local diner. The only people who don’t instantly like Mo are the surly waitress at the café who sees her as competition for the hottest -single-girl-in-town title and Cooper who dislikes “outsiders.”

Sabrina Jeffries's "How to Woo a Reluctant Lady"

Grade: B+ 

passion rating: Hot

"How to Woo at Reluctant Lady is the third book in Sabrina Jeffries’ Hellions of Halstead Hall series and it does not function well as a stand-alone book. That is fine with me because I have read the first two books in the series, but if you haven’t, don’t start here. There are five Sharpe siblings, each of whom will have their own book. The Sharpes are orphans being raised by their middle-class grandmother after their parents, Lord and Lady Stoneville, were shot and killed when the children were small. The cause of those deaths is a mystery whose plot line runs through the series in a way that demands a reader begin with book one, The Truth about Lord Stoneville, and then read the others in subsequent sibling order.

How to Woo a Reluctant Lady is the best of the series so far in large part because it tells the story of one of the Sharpe sisters — Minerva — a more unusual a protagonist than either of her older brothers. Minerva is a successful writer of gothic novels, and one of the joys of this book is seeing the world through her writer’s gaze. Minerva is smart, droll, and insightful and it’s fun to watch her take her world and turn it into the stuff of novels. And while she is, of course, beautiful and blessed with a “lushly feminine” form, our hero Giles Masterson admires her intelligence and wit as much as he desires her in his bed."

Suzanne Enoch's "Rules of an Engagement"

Grade: C+

passion rating: Warm

"The most interesting thing about Suzanne Enoch’s latest novel, the third in her Adventure Club series, is its setting in the South Sea Islands. The islands, with their blood-thirsty natives, spiders the size of small mammals, topless natives, and scary weather, are much more gripping than either the hero or the heroine. Sadly, the cumbersomely named heroine, Zephyr Ponsley, and her suitor, Captain Bradshaw “Shaw” Carroway, are, well, dull. Their romance, most of which takes place on Captain Bradshaw’s ship, never drew me in or made my pulse race.

Zephyr and her father, famed botanist Sir Joseph Ponsley, are traveling the South Seas to document the area’s varied—and well-described—flora and fauna. Captain Carroway and his ship the Nemesis are traveling to Tahiti to return a small bejeweled mirror to a one-eyed native named King George who must have the mirror by a certain date or else an undefined curse will be unleashed. (This plot device made very little sense to me and came across as just that: An obvious plot device.) Additionally, The Royal Society has ordered the Captain to escort the Ponsleys on their “important to England” research mission, and off they all sail."

Elizabeth Essex's "The Pursuit of Pleasure"

Grade: B

passion rating: Hot

"The Pursuit of Pleasure is an interesting historical romance. Its author, Ms. Essex, who has an undergraduate degree in Classical Studies and Art History and a Masters degree in Nautical Archaeology, writes with such clear sense of place that her setting, pre-Regency Dartmouth England, leaps from the page. Her hero and heroine are somewhat harder to visualize, however.

The novel opens with Lizzie Paxton saying to a friend, “I do say I’ll never marry, but I have always wanted to be a widow.” Lizzie feels extraordinarily boxed in by the conventions for women in her time and believes that only by being a widow would she have the independence she craves. Her wish is overheard by her childhood love Captain James Marlowe, who has just returned to Dartmouth in order to begin a dangerous assignment for the Navy. James, for reasons he is not honest with Lizzie about, promptly proposes to her, telling her he expects to die on his coming mission. Lizzie, after a day’s thought, says yes. It’s clear that she and James are strongly sexually drawn to each other, although the reasons they both give for marriage are, initially, exclusive of their desire. (The childhood relationship between the two is given such short shrift that their current feelings for one another seem abrupt.)"

Wendy Corsi Staub's "Scared to Death"

Grade: C

passion rating: None

"In Wendy Corsi Staub’s latest thriller Scared to Death, a book with nary a spec of romance in it, a knife-happy serial killer is plotting to harm not one but three children. I found the angst-filled plot hard to follow and even harder to enjoy.

For starters, Scared to Death is a sequel to a book I hadn’t read, Live to Tell, and makes very little sense if you haven’t read the first book. As best I could make out, fifteen years ago a now-in-jail New York politician named Garvey kidnapped and killed a young boy named Jeremy in order to harvest his organs for Garvey’s oldest daughter, who had a life-threatening disease. People were violently slaughtered in someone’s kitchen and now those who weren’t murdered are trying to get on with their lives. This book begins a year later and, in it, Elsa Cavalon — Jeremy’s adoptive mother — and Marin Quinn— Garvey’s wife and Jeremy’s birth mom — are trying to raise the children they still have. For both women, life is very stressful. Elsa and her husband Brett are trying to adopt their foster daughter Renny and the process is challenging. Marin is struggling to hold her life and her two teenaged daughters (Carolyn and Annie) together after the shock of finding out her husband is a stone-cold killer. Both families are being menaced by — and we learn this almost immediately — Jeremy, who isn’t dead after all."

Beverley Kendall's "A Taste of Desire"

Grade: B-

passion rating: Hot

"I had to wait a few hours after I finished this book to write this review — it’s hard to type when fanning oneself. This book is smoking hot — the sexual tension between the two leads crackles on the page and their love scenes are remarkably passionate. The hero, Lord Thomas Armstrong, is absurdly sure of himself, extraordinarily sexually talented, and gorgeous. The heroine, Lady Amelia Bertram, is sharp-tongued, headstrong, and, of course, beautiful. Their story, a loose retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, is both predictable and entertaining.

Amelia, at 19, has caused no end of problems for her widowed father. She has twice tried to run off with unsuitable suitors, is routinely shockingly rude, and refuses to marry any of the gentlemen who court her. Frankly, she’s often a brat. She is particularly discourteous to the handsome Viscount Armstrong, whom her father has mentored for several years — Thomas’s father died when he was just out of Eton. Amelia resents Thomas Armstrong’s closeness with her father, for she feels her father has woefully neglected her since her mother’s death when Amelia was thirteen. For his part, Thomas finds Amelia to be a “disrespectful termagant.” The first time they were introduced — a year prior to this novel — she insulted him at a ball by calling him “at best a rake about town, and, at worst a debaucher of women and maiden sensibilities.” If she’d been a man, he’d have thrashed her. Instead, he has since avoided her."

Sophie Jordan's "Wicked Nights with a Lover"

Grade: D

passion rating: Warm

"Wicked Nights with a Lover is not a very good book. It has a silly premise, irritating leads, and ick-inducing prose. Surely Ms. Jordan, who has written five other historical romances — I liked One Night with You a lot - as well as several paranormal and young adult novels, can do better than this.

Marguerite Laurent is living the dull life as temporary companion to the elderly. Her boring life is suddenly changed when a fortuneteller predicts that Marguerite will happily marry and be dead within a year. Marguerite believes her — the medium successfully predicted Marguerite’s employer’s death — and decides to “live life to the fullest” in the time she has left. Naturally, she hurries off to proposition a lord who had earlier asked to be her protector, although prior to her death sentence Marguerite was a very good girl and was appalled at his proposal. Now, however, a life of trashy passion calls to her — marriage is out given that Marguerite is convinced that the fortuneteller’s prophecy is her destiny."

Julia London's "A Light at Winter's End"

Grade: B

passion rating: Warm

"In Ms. London’s latest contemporary, Holly Drake, a 34-year old songwriter with a day job at a local coffee shop in Austin, can’t get along with her older sister Hannah. Hannah is everything Holly is not —polished, professional, and perfect — a fact their mother harped on for twenty years. Holly likes her life, although when she holds Hannah’s baby son Mason, she wishes she had a baby of her own. But, as a single songwriter/barista, Holly believes that having a baby isn’t a viable option for her.

In Holly’s view, being a mother is for women like her sister: Married, wealthy and superbly self-confident. Hannah, though, isn’t the woman Holly thinks she is and, days after their mother’s funeral, Hannah appears in Holly’s small studio apartment — a place Hannah’s only visited once in four years — and, with no real explanation, leaves Mason with Holly. Overnight, single carefree Holly becomes Mason’s mom. So, Holly (because her studio apartment is really really small) moves with Mason to the Drake family farm (which she inherited when her mom died), and begins life as a full-time parent."

my romance reviews

I am going to begin updating this blog with my reviews for All About Romance so that those of you who aren't on Facebook can have an easy way to see when I publish.  I will include the link, my grade and the first few paragraphs. I will direct readers back to AAR to read the full review--they're the one's who give me the books for free!


I also blog for them on non-book related issues, usually about once a week and I will post links to those pieces as well.


Thanks!