Trade Me is a fun read you can feel good about. Last year I spent months rereading and contemplating Courtney Milan’s brilliant and overtly feminist The Brothers Sinister series. The series was set in Victorian England in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when women had few legal rights and the opinion of others could mean the difference between safety and disaster. Trade Me is Milan’s first contemporary romance and is no less bold. There are no overt misogynists or blatantly gender based obstacles […]
New Adult Romance, Not New Age Romance, Fortunately
I have already reread it. In historical romance’s greatest writer (and increasingly open iconoclast) Courtney Milan’s latest novel, Trade Me, her work steps sideways into the New Adult genre. In their early twenties, the main characters are young enough to be my children, but instead of putting me off, it created a similar kind of narrative distance to the historical elements in the romances I generally prefer. So much has changed since I was that age that this really is a different world for […]
Bad in Baltimore – A Fitting Name
Full disclosure: I’ve written a novel set in Baltimore. When I found this one I was a little excited to see how someone else would see Baltimore. It was fun seeing references to street names I knew and places I could kinda guess the locations of. I played “what place were they actually thinking of when they talked about this place”. That was nice. I really wanted to like this book. There were some problems with pacing and some plot devices that I was uncomfortable […]
A lot of people like this book. I don’t know why.
I love humorous, breezy chick lit. Books of implausibly normal girls with normal bodies falling love with improbably wonderful guys. I did not love this book. In fact, I pretty much LOATHED this book. The protagonist is a 26 year old kindergarten teacher named Moxie. She is a size 16, and while she is quite comfortable with her size, it has always been an issue with her cartoonishly manipulative step-mother. The book opens with Moxie having sex with a guy she doesn’t like after a […]
Not What It Sounds Like, But Click for an Unforgettable Book Cover Just the Same
Knitting in the City: Neanderthal Seeks Human, Neanderthal Marries Human & Love Hacked by Penny Reid
Don’t worry, despite the title it’s not one of these: Now, you can’t unsee it either. The Knitting in the City contemporary romance series is extremely highly-rated on Amazon and I both do and do not understand why. I don’t know what juju is in these books, but I keep re-reading the ones I have, particularly Neanderthal Seeks Human and Neanderthal Marries Human which both focus on the same couple. Re-readability is a kind of litmus test for me with this genre. I interact with […]
I mean, the price was right.
Bedding the Wrong Brother is a serviceable contemporary erotic romance that is, importantly, free on Kindle. It’s a pretty short story, so there isn’t any particular lip service paid to anything like a “plot” or “character development.” What we know is this: our heroine, Melina, has known the Dalton twin brothers, Max and Rhys, since childhood. Melina went on to have a respectable life in academia, but never really came alive in the bedroom. Part of this is because she dated jerks, and it’s partly […]
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