I always think it’s really interesting when an author sets up a character with a major flaw. I should clarify that by saying that I don’t consider flawed rakes to be very interesting. Frankly, there were apparently so many rakes in London that Home Depot would have sold them off for a dollar each (ha). Tessa Dare is a fairly new author, but she does something daring in A Lady of Persuasion: she sets up her heroine as a less-than-perfect sort of woman. In fact, Isabel Grayson is pretty close to being an uptight, overly pious, overly charitable twit. Except…she isn’t. […]
February 1, 2010 – 9:00 am
The sad truth is that I read this book three times – before it was published. It’s not as if I’m desperate for reading material, either. I have the novels for my Barnes & Noble column to read, and then all those novels that I might put in the column, but realize half way through that they won’t fit the topic (naturally, I keep reading), not to mention novels by authors whose books I never miss (see my Authors I Adore page!). I don’t have time to re-read books by debut authors, let alone a third go-around. But somehow every […]
October 2, 2009 – 9:34 am
Do you know what makes getting the flu acceptable? (And no, it wasn’t the swine flu…been there, coughed that, have the antibodies). It was the regular, uninteresting flu, and the only good thing about it was that I had five – FIVE – Elizabeth Hoyt novels waiting for me on my tbr shelf. So I read them. All of them. This is not acceptable behavior when you have a fever, because as mom always said, you’re supposed to sleep, not stay up at night reading. But I did it anyway.
Elizabeth Hoyt’s The Raven Prince is one of the most interesting, […]
August 1, 2009 – 10:00 am
This summer, my daughter tried sleep-away camp for the first time. How many ways can one spell the word DISASTER? She was so excited beforehand: she had her bag packed a week early, all the white tennis clothes in piles, along with the pink shirts that were supposed to prove that she was a girl not (as blind people tend to assume) a boy. Alas, in the first five minutes, she was directed to the boys’ dormitory. By the girls who turned out to be her new roommates. It went downhill from there.
Those of you who are parents know that […]
Mary Jo Putney is a brilliant, original writer. She doesn’t stick to the beaten track, rehashing the clichéd plots that we’ve all heard a millions times before. Instead, she tackles the hard stuff of life – alcoholism, spousal abuse, prejudice – all those things that ignorant readers of Literature think you can’t find in a romance novel. When I encounter one of those skeptics, the ones who think that romances are nothing more than bedroom farces, I hand them Mary Jo’s The Rake or The Spiral Path.
I was so delighted to find she was writing a new historical series! Loving […]
