Whether it was my mood, or a super-busy two weeks, I slogged through the first in Kaye’s new series, From Governess to Countess. If I had to give you a baseline of my narrative immersion, it’d be: perked up to the premise, dragged my way through two-thirds and zipped through the last. Kaye’s novel is well-researched, with a fascinating and nicely developped setting, a lovely heroine and engaging secondary characters. The hero, on the other hand, is concocted out of bleached-out niceness and a copious dose of cluelessness.
I loved the premise: a mysterious “Procurer,” a woman, in 1815 London, seeks out disgraced women to offer them a task that may reestablish their finances and reputation. She is a “procurer” of second chances and her first mission is Miss Allison Galbraith, a Scottish herbalist, whose work has been derided by London’s medical establishment. The Procurer offers Allison a job, in St. Petersburg, as governess to the three orphaned children of Duke and Duchess Derevenko, presently in the care of their military-officer Uncle Aleksei, recently returned from defeating Napoleon. Continue reading
Here I am again, with another Maisey Yates review under way, having thoroughly enjoyed the first in the Gold Valley series (an offshoot of the equally marvelous Copper Ridge series, the series that started it all, the ur-series!), Smooth-Talking Cowboy. Every time I read a Yates romance and add it to the love pile, I get to think about what it is that Yates is doing in the genre. There is nothing new or unfamiliar to Smooth-Talking Cowboy. It’s signature Yates and many of the tropes she likes to employ are present. I’ve met these hero and heroine types in previous romances and I liked them, just as I liked these two. 
No reading disappointment compares to a book that starts with fireworks of promise only to crash and burn like a petering petard. Such was Anna Bennett’s The Rogue Is Back In Town. I was excited after the first chapter (with its promise of early-Julia-Quinn-like humour); half-way through, I had a lip-twisting downward trend to my mouth; by 70% in, I was into eye-roll and exasperated sighs territory. 
Uncertain and with trepidation, I picked up Roni Loren’s The Ones Who Got Away. After watching the news reports about Margery Stoneman Douglas HS and its mass-shooting aftermath, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a romance with this premise. But I ploughed ahead and read it because I thought: dammit, is that a niggling doubt that the genre can’t, shouldn’t, would botch, a premise so raw and horrific? Can romance do the subject justice? That little snooty inner judgement said “No, spinster-girl, you’re giving this genre a chance to tell this story.” What I discovered is that Loren got some things right and others, wrong. What Loren got right was situating the story twelve years after the school shooting. While her protagonists’ lives were marked by their experience, the initial horror/trauma has dulled. They have built lives as best they can, found some peace, but the shooting has dictated to them too. The time lapse gives Loren some romance narrative wiggle-room: her hero and heroine are adults focussed on adult things, working, paying their bills, being responsible citizens. They achieved this by leaving their Texas town and what happened at Long Acre High. 
In an opening note to the reader, Stephanie Doyle describes how she’d written Her Secret Service Agent early in her career, unearthed, dusted off, rewrote and gave us the present volume in the Superromance category (which, sadly, will soon be defunct). In retrospect, having spent a few days reading Doyle’s Vivian and Joe, Doyle might as well have left Her Secret Service Agent moldering. This book is a right mess, a wrong mess, and every kind of mess in between. BUT, you’ll rightly ask, “Why did you keep reading?” Goodness knows I never hesitate to DNF, but Her Secret Service Agent reminded me of early Linda Howard, not category Linda Howard, but early romantic suspense Linda Howard and I used to love her. *pouts* Doyle’s Secret Service Agent is Howard with vertiginous character about-faces, a mystery resolution so obvious it sits down and has coffee with you
Romance narratives are alien to my personal experience and circumstances and I’m perfectly okay with this. It’s not what I look for in my reading and, as far as I’m concerned, “relatable” has always been a dirty-word. The important thing is that my primary fictive reading is “literarily” familiar to me: in other words, I always read Austen, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, and male authors, for the romance. When I started reading romance, I finally realized what they were missing. They left me hungry for more ‘o’ that; I took my romance where I could find it. Amber Belldene’s Not Another Rock Star added a dimension to romance I’ve never experienced. It felt as close and familiar to my theological viewpoint as a romance novel can get. I say this because what I have to say about Not Another Rock Star will be coloured by that sympathetic prejudice. It isn’t part and parcel of the religious tradition in which I worship, but its theological ethos and romance raison d’être are deeply sympathetic and right. I may have lost perspective, in other words, but take the review as you will, with that in mind. 
Miss Bates hasn’t ever warmed to Sarah Morgan’s contemporaries as much as she adored her categories (Playing By the Greek’s Rules is a must-read). The longer roms have been uneven, but Morgan made up for a lot when she penned New York, Actually. Its chicklit vibe and hokey opening weren’t auspicious and Miss Bates came close to DNF-ing. But she stuck to it … because Morgan … and, in the end, was captured by some clever, interesting things Morgan did. 
Miss Bates went back and forth on several category romances for Wendy’s TBR Challenge January “short read” before settling on Christine Rimmer’s The Lawman’s Convenient Bride. No rhyme or reason why, except Rimmer is fast becoming a comfort read. The writing is solid and Rimmer always achieves a balance of humor and sentiment. She also really comes down strong on marriage and fidelity without being smarmy or righteous and The Lawman’s Convenient Bride certainly conveys this. 
2018 will prove to be yet another Maisey Yates year for Miss Bates, as she can’t seem to quit Yates’s romances. Last year, she read seven … let’s see how many MissB manages to read in 2018?! If Slow Burn Cowboy is any indication, then MissB’s love affair with the Yates romance isn’t over. Every time she reads one, Miss Bates ponders what draws her to Yates’s romances and every time, her understanding of what makes Yates a great romance writer grows. Not every book is perfect, or memorable, especially after you read so many, you’re no longer reading for individual storylines, but for those writer “tells” that make the books so attractive to a reader-fan. Miss Bates finds in Yates a combination of an upholding of love and fidelity with a healthy dose of raw sexuality. This is not a new observation to Miss B.’s readers. This time around, however, Miss Bates noticed yet one more thing that she loves about Yates: she puts wit and sophistication into her banter/dialogue for characters who’d normally not be associated with wit and banter: cowboys and uneducated, albeit successful, nonprofessional, carpenters, builders, and small-business-owners, or as the hero of Slow Burn Cowboy identifies, a “laborer”. Her characters are wonderful combinations of earthiness and clever wordplay. Does Slow Burn Cowboy hold any surprises for the Yates reader? Not really. Does it satisfy? Absolutely. 
Whenever it’s hard to get “into” a book, given a difficult work week, Miss Bates turns to a category, romance especially an HP, and Jennifer Hayward always delivers. In this case, a Christmas rom in Christmas At the Tycoon’s Command, first in Hayward’s Powerful Di Fiore Tycoons series. The series centres on three bachelor brothers who receive their matrimonial comeuppance in the form of formidable heroines. This Di Fiore is CEO of Evolution, the heroine’s, Chloe Russo’s, legacy. Chloe’s parents, dead in a car crash six months ago, left the running of their perfume and personal care company in Nico Di Fiore’s hands. Nico sees his mission as placeholder to ensure that Chloe takes her rightful place in her family’s company. It’s the least he can do for her father, Martino, who acted as his mentor and ensured his family’s future, after Nico’s father collapsed the family fortune and mother abandoned the three boys. As the eldest, Nico’s shoulders bore the family responsibility and now, true to form, he bears Evolution’s responsibility and Chloe’s success. Chloe, on the other hand, has been hiding in the company’s Parisian lab, developing new perfumes, hiding and definitely avoiding the lethally handsome Nico. 