February 1, 2009 – 11:28 am
~buy this book~So Enchanting is one of the most original romances I’ve read in years – and I say that with full recognizition that originality is a fraught concept in romance. People often think that a newly published romance is just a cookie-cutter version of a previously published romance. “Marriage of convenience?” they scoff. “That old plot!”
Well, the truth is that there aren’t that many plots in the world. They’re all old – as Shakespeare understood. He took all but three of his plots from published work: Romeo and Juliet copies its plot from a poem of the same title; […]
November 3, 2008 – 12:00 am
~ buy this book ~
I adored this book even though it’s all about things that I can’t do. I can’t throw a magic spell, for one thing. I can’t knit. My mother didn’t leave me a magic basket of yarn. I don’t even have three cats. But I was utterly charmed by Chloe Hobbs, the heroine of Casting Spells. She can do it all - and she ends up with a sexy cop as well.
The premise of the novel is that Salem has a counterpart: the sweet little Vermont town of Sugar Maple, which happens to be laid out on […]
One of the complicated things about romance is that it speaks to all sorts of desires PC and otherwise. In real life, we want men to be gentlemen. We like to be paid large salaries ourselves, and we’d prefer that our men are not collecting welfare. It’s great if they can whip together a pasta primavera, or at least hold their own in front of the dishwasher. We wouldn’t want them to be overly aggressive or wildly mysterious. In real life, wildly mysterious probably translates into something tedious like an addiction to on-line porn, or three wives he forgot to […]
I don’t know about all of you, but I’m getting burned out on vampires and werewolves. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have time for a particular delicious blood-sucking male, but I’m starting to feel about them the way I feel about chick lit these days: it had better be really fresh for me to go there. Case in point: I’m loving Christine Feehan’s Game series: books about men and women with various enhanced powers. But they’re definitely human. In short, I love paranormal, I’m just finding I like my men less hair and less toothy than seems to be […]
October 1, 2006 – 12:03 pm
I should say right away that I am not a vampire type of person. The mixture of kisses and blood doesn’t work for me as a whole (though I freely admit to enjoying a Carpathian novel now and then). But I am deeply, deeply addicted to novels of love and death. Do you know what I mean?
For me, novels of life and death are ones in which the stakes of the relationship involve our deepest will to live. They are novels in which a man or a woman will actually give up their life for the other person. I don’t […]
