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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

 

 

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 (0)

 

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)

 

Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

April 2009

~buy this book~ 

I still remember discovering Susan Elizabeth Phillips – which happened to me, oddly enough, through an English bookstore in Florence, Italy. This was years ago. It was early evening and hot as the blazes (that was before my husband and I succumbed to installing air conditioning in his mother’s Italian apartment). So I was lying on a hot couch, drinking a gin-and-tonic, and reading SEP. And laughing. I laughed so hard that I fell off the couch and my husband accused me of drinking too much, thereby instigating a marital quarrel…

He was so wrong! I was drunk on one-liners and It Had to Be You. It’s still my sentimental favorite, but I have to say that plot-wise, Nobody’s Baby but Mine is the best. The heroine is a genius physics professor, Dr. Jane Darlington, who desperately wants a baby – but she absolutely does not want that baby to end up a genius like herself (as she spent her childhood and adolescence left out of children’s games and viewed as a weirdo). Now my take on this is that if I were a genius, I would roll with the punches… but hey, obviously this is one of those “don’t grouch until you’ve walked a mile in her shoes” kind of thing. So Jane decides to get pregnant – with someone stupid. That’s right: stupid.

Here’s where pop culture and genius collide: from the point of view of academics (and as an academic myself, I can assure you that this is pretty much true), where does one find a population of men who exhibit reckless disregard for life and limb, thereby signaling a marked lack of intelligence? On the football field, of course!

So Jane ends up a “special present” to Cal Bonner, the Chicago Stars’ top quarterback. At first things don’t exactly work out. Cal thinks Jane is (ahem) a good-time girl, and Jane’s skills in that area aren’t exactly top-notch. But one thing leads to another, and Jane gets exactly what she wants.

You’d think a genius would know that life is never easy. That actions have consequences, etc. But no… anyway, Jane and Cal end up together, fighting and making love. It’s hard for Jane to accept Cal’s degrees, once she learns of them…even harder for Cal to accept Jane’s stubborn, brilliant nature.

This is a wildly funny novel – don’t miss it! Make yourself a gin-and-tonic, warn your husband beforehand, and throw yourself on a couch.

By Eloisa Posted in Contemporary Comments (9)

 

Just One of the Guys by Kristan Higgins

March 2009

~buy this book~

I have to admit it. I love wallflowers. I think it’s the memory of a painful prom night sitting at the edge of the gym while couples circled the room to Stairway to Heaven, the girls with their arms limply around their partners’ necks. Since my date is now Out, I don’t count this as much of a personal failure (that’s my story and I’m keeping to it!).

But still…those charming memories mean that I have a huge fondness for a girl who isn’t circling the room in the arms of the football hero. And if she’s snappy and funny about being rejected – well, then I adore her. Just One of the Guys opens when Chastity O’Neill is being dumped. She’s also choking on a stuffed mushroom, but even after that little problem is solved, the conversation doesn’t go too well. She makes the mistake of asking the little creep why (any girlfriend could have steered her away from that question). His answer isn’t welcome: “I just don’t find you attractive enough…with shoulders like those, you could find work down on the docks.” By the time it turns out that she gave him a piggy ride for over a mile and a half, any reader knows that Chastity is seriously challenged in the feminine category. Although, thank goodness, she gives as good as she gets: “I think you need to bathe more often, Jason. This whole Seattle-grunge-patchouli thing is so 1990s.”

She ends up in the bar, nursing a Scorpion Bowl and a grievance, when along comes Trevor (“neither skinny nor pale, but brawny and chocolate-eyed and irresistible”). Unfortunately, another Scorpion Bowl leads to a hilarious conversation during which Chastity tries to get Trevor to admit that he finds her attractive – because otherwise he wouldn’t have slept with her all those years ago. This could be maudlin or depressing, but Chastity is such a funny, unique girl that I simply got swept along for the ride. After Trevor politely declines to answer, and a nice lesbian sends her a drink, she decides it’s time for a change. She needs to fall in love. Fast.
There are so many paranormal heroes out there these days (what man doesn’t have leopard spots or the ability to growl in the night?) that it’s incredibly refreshing to dive into a straight contemporary. Chastity makes a lovely Every-Woman, especially when a perfect doctor falls in love with her and Trevor tells her that he can’t leave his perfect girlfriend for her, even though they have the best crazy sex ever…

Don’t miss this book if you love Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Elizabeth Bevarly and Rachel Gibson. There’s another great contemp writer in town!

By Eloisa Posted in Contemporary Comments (7)

 

So Enchanting by Connie Brockway

February 2009

~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; Hamlet was taken from a play that we know only know as the Ur-Hamlet (though we know that there was a ghost running around under the stage yelling about revenge).

Within the boundary of plot, a book can be fantastically original – or stunningly unoriginal. So Enchanting is one of those books which negotiates fresh territory, and does it with wit. The book opens with Lord Greyson Sheffield, who is exposing yet another fraudulent “spiritualist.” Sheffield absolutely loathes spiritualists, since his father went bankrupt chasing after spiritualist after spiritualist who promised to “talk” to Greyson’s dead half-sister. So he rips off the table-cloth and exposes Mr. Brown playing a “spirit” violin with his naked toes while his wife supposedly contacts the afterlife.

The novel then jumps forward to the widowed Mrs. Brown (our heroine, Francesca, or Fanny) who is now living in Scotland as guardian to an orphaned young girl. And that girl has been accused of witchcraft. More importantly, Fanny still hasn’t learned how to control her own magical powers – and when Greyson shows up in Scotland to investigate the situation, things go haywire quickly.

Greyson and Fanny instantly recognize each other. Their conversations have the sophisticated, desirous snappiness of old Katherine Hepburn movies. Utterly delicious! At the same time, Fanny’s gift is nothing you would expect. She can’t even really prove to Greyson that she has it – because she’s not in control of its manifestation. Plus, Greyson’s young relative falls instantly in love with Fanny’s young ward, who likes to boast about her witchy powers (she has none), and ends up complicating everything.

This is a ravishing, funny story about people who are diametrically opposed, and yet absolutely suited for each other. The plot swirls around them, but it is really Greyson and Fanny who stand out in my mind as utterly original, interesting and lovable characters. Don’t miss this book!

By Eloisa Posted in Paranormal, Historical Comments (1)

 

 

 

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