Within Courtney Milan’s Brothers Sinister series, exist another series of books which chronicle the improbable adventures of Mrs. Larriger. The books are generally looked down upon by many of the characters as nonsense at best and a dreadful influence at worst. As it turns out, the books allow more than one of the characters to escape the confines of their narrow world. That’s what pop culture does, it allows us to escape through entertainment. Life, even when it’s a life with which we are […]
Another Historical Romance, But This One Is Genre Canon
I keep mentioning Dreaming of You in other reviews and it is on my overall recommendations list, so it seemed time to reread it and include it here. A classic of the genre originally published in 1994, Dreaming of You is part of the historical romance canon, if such a thing exists. It’s splendid, slightly dated, and Derek Craven is one of the greatest men in the genre. Complicated, brilliant, and intense, he is the supreme up-from-the-gutter hero. He would and did do almost anything he […]
The Poor Relations Series – Reviews 5-10
So this Scottish lady Marion Chesney wrote a whole bunch of books – mysteries, romances, what have you, using a bunch of pseudonyms. As M. C. Beaton, she wrote the Poor Relations series, which I guess can be classified as Regency romance/comedy of manners. I’ll review all six of them here, because there’s a through line that carries the entire series, plus the plot of each book follows pretty much the same formula and there’s no sense in writing the same thing six times with […]
Category Six Adversarial Manifestation….the Weirdness
Category Six Adversarial Manifestation. That’s what it’s called when Lucifer Morningstar – also known as the Devil, the Prince of Darkness or Satan – shows up at your apartment brewing you are really nice cup of fair trade coffee. So, our hero Billy is a struggling writer, living in Queens, working in a sandwich shop, recently dumped by his girlfriend and well…he’s a bit of a loser. He wakes up one morning with the Devil in his apartment, brewing a really awesome cup of […]