I was a great fan of Liz Talley’s Superromances, indeed one of my favourites ever is her Sweet Talking Man. There was no doubt then, though I’m not a WF fan, I’d follow her on her new-ish path into WF. So I read Room to Breathe, with uneven results: I still love Talley’s ethos and writing and I still don’t like WF. Room to Breathe is funny, witty, and offers loveable characters. It is organized around two main characters, not a hero and heroine as in a romance, but a mother and daughter: nearing-40 Daphne Witt, aka Dee Dee O’Hara, children’s author, and her 23-year-old daughter, failed fashion designer, Ellery. When the novel opens, Daphne, now a long-established divorcée, is feeling the effects of a dormant sexuality. Her ex-husband left her, claiming her then-new-found career interfered with their marriage. Like many women who married young and became mothers, Daphne is hurt and disappointed at the loss of her marriage, but loves her new-found freedom and independence.
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Tag: Louisiana-Set
REVIEW: Liz Talley’s SWEET SOUTHERN NIGHTS, Or When the Heart Plays “Patty-Cake”
Finding a new auto-read author is great comfort because Miss Bates knows that even if this romance isn’t her best romance, it’ll still be pretty darn good. The reader’s stakes are low; the central couple’s, high. Which is how Miss Bates likes’em. The first romance she read in Talley’s Magnolia Bend, Louisiana, series, Sweet Talking Man, made its way into her heart, head, and running list of 2015 Best Of (to come soon; how time has flown, dear readers). A favourite author’s romance isn’t read because the romance will be good, that’s a given, but to, once again, re-experience the author’s sensibility and world view. In Liz Talley we have an earthier, funnier Janice Kay Johnson. JKJ is one of MissB’s faves, a little more gravitas, a little grimmer, but equally perceptive about the psychology of families, small towns, nuanced child characters (no adorable plot moppets to be found) and love’s challenging transformations. Moreover, Talley does something that Miss Bates looks and hopes for in contemporary romance (maybe there’s a touch in JKJ too, on occasion): a nod to the role religion plays in ordinary people’s daily lives, without the inspirational proselytizing and priggish attitudes to sex and the occasional beer. Bring it on and bring more of it, please! Liz Talley’s third Magnolia Bend romance novel and without the blandness that comes with sweet, or “heartwarming” romance. Sweet Southern Nights, is the friends-to-lovers tale of two firefighting best friends: Eva Monroe, the former new girl in town who’s found a place to belong, and hometown bad boy, Jake Beauchamp, “hardworking firefighter, hard-playing Romeo.” Continue reading
REVIEW: Liz Talley’s SWEET TALKING MAN, Or Jane and the Viking
When you read a lot of romance, like Miss Bates does, it’s inevitable the narrative becomes stale. You lose patience and are more likely to curl your lip and DNF. There are romance writers, however, who renew your faith in the narrative’s ability to be fresh, yet familiar. The romance reader is this creature: she wants the familiar because it has meaning and the familiar to be sufficiently deviant to keep her interest and delight her. Liz Talley’s Sweet Talking Man was such a narrative for Miss B.: familiar and fresh, well-known conventions unfolding like beloved Christmas ornaments and their subversion unfolding like unexpected gifts. Thus transpires the story of B&B owner, PTA president, organizer-of-all-things, super-single-mom, forty-year-old divorcée heroine, Abigail Beauchamp Orgeron, and artist, teacher, vegan, ukulele-playing, thirty-four-year-old hero, Lief Lively, or as strait-laced Abigail calls him, “resident cuckoo bird.” The familiar is evident in the “opposites-attract” trope and romance narrative deviations in a 40-year-old heroine and the un-alpha-like interests of her December-to-his-May hero. Continue reading
Miss Bates Reads Romance 