Tag: Re-United Husband-and-Wife

REVIEW: Marion Lennox’s SAVING MADDIE’S BABY

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Saving_Maddie's_BabyMarion Lennox sure knows how to put her heroes and heroines in a dangerous pickle. The last Lennox Miss Bates reviewed had a heroine dangling over a ravine. The hero rode in on an SUV to rescue her. In Lennox’s latest, the puerile-ly-titled Saving Maddie’s Baby, Dr. Maddie Haddon, eight months pregnant, is trapped in a mine shaft with an injured miner. She went harrying in to help, with no thought to mine collapses or massive baby belly. It would appear that Lennox, at least on the basis of her last two efforts, does love a TSTL heroine, except the heroine acknowledges she’s TSTL:

Heroes and heroines don’t choose to be brave, Maddie decided. Mostly they have bravery thrust upon them. In her particular case, a heroine was created when vast chunks of rock trapped one doctor in an underground mine, a mine she should never have been near in the first place. This heroine wasn’t brave. This heroine was stupid.

And with that rueful opening, Miss Bates had to forgive the TSTL heroine because she was thoroughly engaged in Lennox’s re-united-husband-and-wife medical romance.
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REVIEW: Sarah Morgan’s SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL

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Some_Kind_Of_WonderfulMiss Bates doesn’t understand why Sarah Morgan’s North American Puffin Island romance is marketed in a double-rom volume with Susan Mallery’s Ladies’ Man. If there was ever a romance that deserved to stand front and center on a cover, it’s Some Kind Of Wonderful. Which is why Miss Bates features the U.K. edition’s pretty, whimsical cover.

Morgan’s Puffin Island series has already given us two wonderful romances, one of the best HPs Miss Bates and friends have read, Playing By the Greek’s Rules, and First Time In Forever. Continuing the story of three bosom friends, Some Kind Of Wonderful tells Brittany Forrest’s tale, Brittany whose grand-mother bequeathed her Castaway Cottage on Puffin Island, the college besties’ summer hang-out and sanctuary when things go awry. Brittany returns to Puffin Island after breaking her wrist excavating Aegean Bronze Age weaponry in Crete. Dr. Forrest’s troubles go from “single spies to battalias” when her private plane ride to Puffin Island comes in the form of one silent, sexy stunner, ex-husband of ten years, Zachary Flynn – the bad boy who abandoned her ten days after their marriage.
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Wendy’s TBR Challenge: Lynne Graham’s THE GREEK’S CHOSEN WIFE, Or The Truculent Heroine

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Greek_Chosen_WifeMiss Bates has a weakness for heroines who rule with their chin … a chin described as defiant, stubborn, mutinous, obstinate. The thesaurus yields a world of possibilities. This perception of willfulness is the hero’s interpretation of the heroine’s personality. He knows better, thinks better, and it’s to the heroine’s benefit that she submit to his greater wisdom. BUT her usually stubborn little chin (body language is all in the romance novel, folks) goes up, or down, depending on whether her eyes spark defiance, or her brows lower with disobedience, and boom, she asserts her will … against the hero’s better judgement. No romance category is more subject to these interactions than the charged emotions, reactions, and interactions of the HP (no longer exclusive to Harlequin, of course, but most easily associated with it). In Lynne Graham’s The Greek’s Chosen Wife, Miss Bates found the most delightfully truculent heroine she’s read since early Julie Garwood, though Miss Bates would argue that Garwood’s heroines are oblivious over truculent (that’s for another post). As for Graham’s HP masterpiece, what could be more appealing than the chin-leading truculence of a doughy heroine named Pudding? Continue reading

REVIEW: Tina Beckett’s HER HARD-TO-RESIST HUSBAND Is Easy To Resist

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Her Hard To Resist HusbandAfter historical romance, Miss Bates loves category.  Ever since she read some of Wendy’s recommendations, she’s found the concentrated-focus-on-the-romance bent of them so satisfying.  And, darn it, Harlequin, though no longer the sole publisher of category-type romance, has such appealing covers that, truth be told, they’ve drawn Miss Bates in.  There are promises in those covers and Miss Bates has stood at the bookstore till hoping they’ll bear fruit.  Many times they have: she’s loved many a category romance and counts Sarah Mayberry as one of her favourite romance writers, followed by Molly O’Keefe, Karina Bliss, Donna Alward, Liz Fielding, Jessica Hart, and the beloved Betty Neels, of course.  She’s loved the HP line (she’s looking at you, Sarah Morgan and Kelly Hunter) with a love that is matched only by her love for funky shoes and frothy coffees.   With so many lines and volumes appearing monthly, however, quality can vary … and Tina Beckett’s Her Hard To Resist Husband, with its mouthful of a title, was flawed, not the worst Miss Bates has read, but most definitely not memorable, or interesting, or quirky as category romance can be. Continue reading