I was looking for a fun, light contemporary, and Hired Bride seemed just the thing. It had a quirky Southern matriarch, a dilapidated house – complete with taxidermy, and a marriage of convenience. I was all in. Deanna Beaufort works as a receptionist, barely making enough to get by and allow her sister to stay in college without working (although why that seems like a good idea is never explained). Despite having a long family history in Savannah, Georgia, which seems to indicate that they […]
Make Merry – no matter the season
So what if the holidays are over? Bring a little joy into your life by reading this anthology of Regency romances by some of the best historical romance writers. Well, some of my favorites, anyway. This delightful collection of tales overlap and intertwine around a Yule party, but each one is complete in and of itself and offers both delicious temptation and savory seductions, as well as some surprisingly deep emotional connections – not at all easy to pull off in short stories, much less […]
Tropes, Types, and Tortes
I am a sucker for free or inexpensive ebooks, and lately, I have been collecting contemporary romances – apparently a lot of them involving food. In this case, uptight perfectionist baker and up and coming TV style maker meets troublemaking athlete and his immature siblings. The whole reason I picked this up was that it opens with a highly publicized wedding going horribly awry on live TV, which is pretty much pure catnip for me, because I am not a nice person. The epic wedding […]
Let’s Do The Time Warp
Who among us has not thought about what we would tell our younger self if we could go back in time? If we’re honest, we acknowledge that our younger self, after getting over disbelief and the resulting freak out, would not listen to a damned thing we had to say. That’s the challenge for Cal Leandros in Nevermore, the tenth installment in Rob Thurman’s urban fantasy series, and it goes about as well as you might expect.