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are taken from books I myself love, and heartily recommend you should read. Every month readers can post comments below the current review – it’s my own Book Club! Please feel free to join in and do check the archives!
~ Eloisa

 

 

For the Love of Pete by Julia Harper

November 2009

I have a huge fondness for stories of (for lack of a better word) wacky heroines. I don’t mean chick lit women, the ones who can’t balance their checkbook and lose their undies in the train station. I mean the ones who are obstinately marching along to their own drummer, wearing funny hats, playing in a ukulele band, eschewing fish net stockings. Susan Elizabeth Phillips has written some great ones, and so has another of my favorite authors, Christie Ridgeway.

Well, this last weekend I discovered Julia Harper’s contemporaries (she writes historicals as Elizabeth Hoyt) – and another great, quirky heroine. A perfect attraction-of-opposites story. Zoey Addler wears funky hats, big boots, and gets into shouting matches with men who steal her (shoveled) parking space. Having grown up in Minnesota, I can appreciate it. On the other hand, Special Agent Dante Torelli wears Hugo Boss suits and Italian shoes. He’s rich; she’s a poet. As the daughter of a poet, I can tell you that that her lack-of-money rang very true to me.

At any rate, Zoey and Dante get swept into an improbable but fun plot in which they’re chasing after two kidnapped babies (though not kidnapped in a scary way), a less-than-ruthless mobster, and two older Indian ladies. Meanwhile they’re being chased by a James Bond type of villain with a love of guns. It’s all great escapism.

And the romance? Super cute. Zoey jumps off the page. She’s uninterested in Dante’s money, but very interested in his other assets. It’s huge fun to watch Dante fall under Zoey’s spell, even as he fights the idea of a relationship with someone who is curvy rather than model thin, who wore a reindeer herder hat, and braids her hair. He, on the other hand, drives an eighty-thousand dollar car and listens to Frank Sinatra for fun. It’s a shock to him when Zoey has no interest in his bank account; he’s used to be seen through a sheen of money.

It takes a while for Dante and Zoey to find any private time but when they do – wow. Elizabeth Hoyt’s historicals are hot, and her contemporaries deserve the same label. This is a great novel for a rainy day – enjoy!

~buy this book~

By admin Posted in Contemporary Comments (1)

 

The Raven Prince by Elizabeth Hoyt

October 2009

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, sexy historicals I’ve read in ages; it was definitely worth the feverish hours of sleeplessness. For one thing, the hero is not your average Prince of Darkness. The Earl of Swartingham is tough, big and ill-tempered, all good heroic attributes. But he’s also covered with smallpox scars, and morbidly self-conscious about them, a feeling exacerbated by survivor’s guilt (the rest of his family died of the small pox), and his dead wife’s disgust. But he has to get married. Not to beat a drum that every romance reader knows too well, but he needs an heir. Luckily, he thinks he’s nabbed a young lady who claims that her stomach is not turned by his disfigurement.

Meanwhile, he also needs a secretary, because he keeps throwing things and howling, and his secretaries fly right out the back door. He ends up with a young widow, Anna Wren, who has more than enough backbone to stand up to him. This is where the novel becomes truly interesting. Edward and Anna become friends. Real friends. She doesn’t even see his scars: she sees the man inside. He doesn’t see a drab widow, but a sensual, strong woman whose adulterous husband was an idiot. Edward is dying to sleep with her…but he can’t.

She’s a lady, so she would never be his mistress. But she’s from a different class, so he couldn’t marry her. Plus, he’s practically engaged. To cap it off, she was married for three years without a child…and he needs an heir. So he can’t even contemplate marrying beneath himself.

Dying of sexual frustration, he heads off to a brothel… and she follows him, in disguise. After that, things become even more complicated. They have a couple of truly hot nights—but when he finds out, he’s absolutely livid. Did she compromise him? Does he have to marry her now, because she’s a lady? If he marries her, what about the children he’ll never have? Will that stand between them?

This is a great novel, worth staying up all night for. If you haven’t read it – get it now. It’s that good.

~buy this book~

By Eloisa Posted in Historical Comments (4)

 

What Happens in London by Julia Quinn

August 2009

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 parenting is (secretly) just a lesson in cutting you down to size. In the art of making your heart break and your temper flare at the very same moment.

But you know what? It’s possible to escape. My personal escape this last week was Julia Quinn’s newest, utterly delightful novel, What Happens in London. When I think of Julia’s novels, what comes to mind is a world in which mean girls (like those roommates) never triumph. In which the hero and heroine may well have surmounted a really tough, humiliating childhood, but they turned into thoroughly decent, thoroughly lovable and really terrific people. The kind you want to be your friend. Your daughter.

Sir Harry Valentine is one of my absolute favorite heroes. His childhood really was harrowing—his father was a drunk. A sloppy, vomiting, peeing-in-his-pants, careless drunk. The kind who dies falling out a window, and can never really remember (or care for) his children. Yet Harry has grown into a deeply sensitive, somewhat somber, adorable man who spends his days translating Russian documents for the War Office.

That is, until he moves next door to Olivia Bevelstoke, who promptly begins spying on him from her bedchamber window. Now Olivia is spying due to some delicious, if erroneous, gossip about a fiancée whom Harry never had. But the story is really from window-to-window, as Harry and Olivia flirt and quarrel and read aloud from a somewhat tawdry, hysterical gothic novel, Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron.

This novel is vintage Julia Quinn: a frolic about people whom you’d love to know—but a frolic that never becomes too light, never skims into Mad Baron territory. Harry has a truly difficult childhood, and Olivia, for all her beauty and her charm, is dangerously close to either expiring from boredom, or marrying a Russian prince when Harry moves next door. This is not a novel that avoids real life. But it makes real life, all of it – alcoholic parents and spoiled children – seem like a somber refrain quickly replaced by a joyful crescendo. In short: read this novel to remind yourself that children grow up, that independence can be had, that love is real.

~buy this book~

By Eloisa Posted in Historical Comments (3)

 

Loving a Lost Lord by Mary Jo Putney

July 2009

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 a Lost Lord is absolutely wonderful. It is the first in a series about English lords who all grew up at the same boarding house due to their reckless, unconventional ways. Perfect! I love them already.

But while the premise is terrific, this book goes far beyond the promise of a rakish hero. Adam, Duke of Ashton, was torn away from India as a child, and brought to England to train for his position as duke. Now, years later, he’s become the perfect duke – until he loses his memory in an accident and wakes up in a strange house.

That house belongs to Miss Mariah Clarke, a young lady in desperate need of a husband. So when Adam wakes up, she promptly tells him that they’re married. The rest of the novel is enchanting and incredibly romantic. Adam is torn between his first culture, that of India, and his second, that of England. Never truly at home anywhere, it isn’t until Mariah begins unfolding the complexities of his personality that he is able to find peace in himself.

But once his memory is recovered it turns out he’s engaged to a proper young lady. And Mariah takes a look at the grand ducal mansion and realizes that she’s not duchess material.

They have to fight, not only to be together, but to bring Adam’s worlds into balance - and they win when Adam realizes that “he felt as if he had come home for the first time in his life.”

This novel will leave you with a lump in your throat and a smile on your face. It’s utterly wonderful and not to be missed!

~buy this book~

By Eloisa Posted in Historical Comments (1)

 

It Had To Be You by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

May 2009

 

I’m always being asked which novel is my favorite. For goodness’ sake, people, that’s like asking me which of my two children is my favorite! The only possible answer is: the book that isn’t whining at me at the moment – i.e., any novel that’s out of my computer, out of copyedits, out of proofs, and safely on the shelves. I have huge fondness for all my printed heroes and heroines. I miss them, especially the heroines. By the time a book is finished, each of my heroines has become my girlfriend. She talks to me in the middle of the night. She says all the snappy, funny things that I would like to say but never remember in time. She tames her husbands! OK, enough said there.

It’s a lot easier to say which book written by someone else is my favorite. It Had to Be You is my hands-down favorite of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s books. I adore this novel, from the moment it opens (when Phoebe Somerville’s poodle pees on her father’s coffin) to the moment it closes (when Phoebe realizes that she’s just engaged in an intimate act squarely on the 50-yard line of a huge Sports Dome).

The novel takes place in Chicago, starting when Phoebe has to come back from New York for her father’s funeral. She brings with her a nervous poodle (see above) and a gorgeous Hungarian lover. Everyone is outraged – and that outrage only grows when it turns out that her father has left her his football team, the Chicago Stars. No one is more annoyed that the Stars’ head coach, Dan Calebro. He’s just the sexist, big type of man whom Phoebe loathes, and the feeling is mutual. Dan has been spending his time looking for the perfect wife, and he thinks he’s found her in a sweet-faced kindergarten teacher. He’s got no time to waste on someone like Phoebe, a woman with “a bad girl’s body, the sort of body that…could just as well have been displayed with a staple through the navel as hanging on a museum wall.”

But this novel isn’t a standard Opposites-Attract novel. Both characters have deep and complex personalities, rife with complexities and problems. Phillips unfurls each person with such adroit care, amid flurries of hilarious dialogue, that the reader hardly notices before she’s utterly fascinated by Dan and Phoebe. This is a brilliant, deeply romantic, deeply felt, deeply sexy book. Do not waste a moment if you haven’t read it – you have such a treat in store for you!

~buy this book~

By Eloisa Posted in Contemporary Comments (3)

 

 

 

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