I adored Rock Hard, Gabriel Esera and Charlotte Baird’s story, and was delighted to find the opening scene to Love Hard was their wedding day. By the time I tapped the final page, I realized it was the novel’s best, most vibrant one, with droll moments and full of affection, fun, and Esera family high-jinks. The Eseras are QUITE the clan. It is in this scene we are introduced to hero and heroine as they take their places as groomsman and maiden of honour. They are Jacob Esera, Gabriel’s rugby-star younger brother, and Juliet Nelisi. They are also former HS antagonists and, as a result, there’s a lovely dose of banter when they reunite. Not all is light and fluffy, however; they share a great sadness. Juliet’s best friend and Jacob’s HS sweetheart, Calypso “Callie,” died of meningitis soon after giving birth to their daughter. Callie and Jacob were teen parents. Jacob has been a single-dad to Esme going for six years.
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Tag: Wrong-Side-of-Tracks-Heroine
MINI-REVIEW: Roni Loren’s THE ONE FOR YOU (Ones Who Got Away #4)
Now that I’ve arrived at the end of Roni Loren’s conclusion to her four-book series based on the adult survivors of a Texas high school shooting, I can confidently say that, with Molly O’Keefe’s Crooked Creek Ranch series, Loren has written one of the best contemporary romance series of the past ten years. Though #4 wasn’t my favourite (my heart remains with The One You Fight For) it was a most satisfying conclusion. The One For You tells the romance of two of Long Acre High’s shooting’s survivors, prom queen beauty Kincaid Breslin and her best friend, Ashton Isaacs. Cue sixteen years. Ash returns to Long Acre from NYC (after having left soon after the tragedy, abandoning Kincaid) to stay with his deceased friend’s parents, Grace and Charlie Lowell (his ex-fiancée left him homeless). Ash is a globe-trotting successful writer and the opportunity for some down time to let the Muse have her way with him is welcome, even in the town he’d hoped to never see again … and the friend he can’t forget. Meanwhile, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Kincaid is now a successful realtor and in the midst of clinching a sweet deal on a charmingly dilapidated farm house … except, like most things, Kincaid can’t resist the call of the broken, so she buys it instead, hoping to juggle job and renos and start her own B’n’B. Like estranged friend Ash, Kincaid is still close to the Lowells; their son, one of the shooting’s victims, was her high school sweetheart. The Lowells own Long Acre’s sole bookstore, but decide it’s time to sell and retire. They ask Ash, who’s staying in the bookstore’s upstairs apartment, and Kincaid, to spruce it up and put it on the market for them. (more…)
Romance Novel Hangover: A Mini-Review of Caitlin Crews’s SNIPER’S PRIDE
Today, I had book hangover from staying up too late to finish Caitlin Crews’s Sniper’s Pride. Given it was a back-to-work Monday morning, it took a heck of a lot of coffee to keep me amiable and functional . Was it worth it? Did I love it? I’m not sure.
Sometimes, I read a romance novel not to have to think about those plague-y things that wake you up in the night and leave you with heart palpitations and morning-after disquiet — if you ever do manage to fall back asleep.
In the cooler light of day, wolfing down Crews’s romance left me the way overindulgence in Haagen-Dazs’s Espresso Chocolate Cookie Crumble does, vaguely nauseated with questionable self-respect. Sometimes though, a feral spinster needs to leave the world behind and Crews’s novel hit the sweet spot. With a day’s work done, a dinner-full stomach and some halfway decent rosé, I can think about my response to Sniper’s Pride with more dispassion. Crews is a talented writer; she has a smooth, quick, moving way with words and tropish twists along the way that surprise and delight. I disliked some of Sniper’s Pride‘s content and yet loved the sheer heroine-vindication and HEA-fulfilling development of its core relationship.
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MINI-REVIEW: Mira Lynn Kelly’s JUST THIS ONCE
I loved reading Thomas’s The Hollow Of Fear, but I was more-than-happy to sink into a thorough romance-romance, emotional, sexy, with a clear line to the HEA, littered with dark little moments. Though the day-job continues to be an albatross, I took a lot of time in my evenings to finish Kelly’s Just This Once, book three in The Wedding Date series. Like the others, Just This Once opens with the hero at the previous book’s hero and heroine’s wedding; it concludes with his own. A premise that’s a tad twee, but I forgive because the novels often win me over. In Just This Once, hotel-owning-rich-boy hero, Sean Wyse of the Chicago Hotel Wyse chain, is best-manning his guy best friend’s wedding, Max Brandt’s. His side-kick and ever wedding date is the friend of his heart and youth, Max’s younger sister, Molly. Sean and Molly’s friendship is immature, but kind of fun. He teases, she torments; they pretty much behave like two teens who secretly harbor crushes and take them out in silly pranks. Everyone in their friendship circle, the past and future heroes and heroines of Kelly’s series, look upon their shenanigans with affection and amusement. The silliness being given a critical nod, I liked how Kelly also built in true camaraderie, compatibility, and affection into the group’s relationships and a lovely tenderness between Sean and Molly, despite the occasional sophomoric behaviour.
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REVIEW: Maisey Yates’s GOOD TIME COWBOY & A Confession from MissB
Over the summer, I jumped off the Maisey Yates bandwagon. She’s prolific and I did have an ARC in the TBR. Something Something Cowboy. I read the first page, slapped the Kindle shut and moved on. No can do. There it was *eye roll* the typical Yates antagonism, the heroine with the defiant mouth, the surly and/or laid-back hero … usually, this is reading catnip for me. I quixotically thought, Yates and I are parting company. You’d rightly say: here you are, MissB., reviewing another Yates romance. (Which I loved, btw … ) So, what happened? I have a terrible reader confession, so petty, kinda mean: I cannot read tall heroines, just can’t. No way. Every other ilk I’m cool with, but once a heroine confesses to tallness, there’s a disconnect. And that points to something about what I want as a reader: a tiny connection with the heroine that says, “You’re small, but you can do this.” Maybe because I’m small, like Jane-Eyre small, and since reading Brontë’s novel, it has stood as a model of what a heroine should be: humble, but never diminished. It’s terrible and … prejudicial … and goodness knows, we don’t need any more of that in the world, but there you have it. But with Good Time Cowboy, Yates hit all my satisfaction levels and I’m back on the bandwagon.
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REVIEW: Marion Lennox’s STEPPING INTO THE PRINCE’S WORLD
Miss Bates often wonders who can ever succeed Betty Neels in the rom-reader’s world of comfort reads? With every Marion Lennox she reads, she inches towards thinking that it might be Lennox. Not that Neels and Lennox have everything in common, but they do share in the decency, good eats, animals, and pathos of the worlds and characters they create. These elements are present in Lennox’s Stepping Into the Prince’s World. And like last year’s Saving Maddie’s Baby, there’s much to love.
Lennox enjoys writing an accident, or disaster as the hero and heroine’s meet-cute. When Stepping Into the Prince’s World opens, disgruntled Special Forces soldier, Raoul de Castelaise, realizes he must leave the military he loves to take up his native country’s, Marétal’s, rule. With his parents’ deaths when he was a child, his grand-parents ruled while he dedicated himself to military service. He’s reluctant to return, but return he must. Before he does, however, he goes to the Tasmanian port where he and his fellow soldiers had conducted manoeuvres and takes a friend’s boat for a sail, is caught in a terrible storm, and rescued by Claire Tremaine. (more…)
Mini-Review: Nicole Helm’s OUTLAW COWBOY
Ever since she was a tween, Miss Bates has loved the film version of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Miss Bates cannot resist the ethereally beautiful, vulnerable Audrey Hepburn or poignant Golden-Boy George Peppard. What Blake Edwards made of Capote’s novella is pure romance genre. More than anything, Miss Bates loved watching two morally compromised characters find love. They are, of course, morally compromised in their eyes, not the viewers’. Their growing love helps them re-evaluate who they are, see themselves in a better light, and give themselves what they deserve: love and belonging. In Nicole Helm’s Outlaw Cowboy, second in the Big Sky Cowboys series, Miss B. found just that, a viscerally satisfying romance about two people who are hardest on themselves emerging out of their dark nights of solitude to love, connection, family, and hope. Caleb Shaw is Mel Shaw’s brother; Mel is the heroine of Helm’s first romance in the series, Rebel Cowboy. That novel opened with Mel’s struggles to keep the Montana family ranch afloat. Bro’s on the bottle and father, paralyzed in an accident five years ago, has given up, checked out, and broods throughout the family home. When Outlaw Cowboy opens, baby bro Caleb has taken the ranch reins. He stopped drinking and desperately wants to retain ownership of the family land. Caleb is haunted by his mother’s abandonment and one terrible night he almost beat a man to death when he saw him holding a gun to his daughter’s head.
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Review: Jennifer Hayward’s CARRYING THE KING’S PRIDE
Jennifer Hayward’s Carrying the King’s Pride, first in the Kingdoms and Crowns series, opens with a break-up. ” ‘We should end it now while it’s still good. While we still like each other. So it doesn’t get drawn out and bitter. We did promise ourselves that, after all, didn’t we?’ “, says heroine Sofía Ramirez to lover and hero Prince Nikandros Constantinides. Hmmm … then, they have mind-blowing sex, “exit Sofía”. Whirl-wind sex is followed by a dizzying sequence of events: Nik’s brother dies, father suffers massive heart-attack and Nik’s spare-heir, billionaire-businessman-playboy status goes down like ebbing fireworks. Meanwhile back in Sofía-World, our heroine is working hard at her fashion-design and boutique business and eating A LOT of chocolate. Poof, add a little nausea and Sofía is preggers. Little does she know … Nik had her watched all along and knows immediately when she sees a doctor to confirm the pregnancy. He flies back to Manhattan and scoops her away to his Akathinian island-kingdom-paradise. All improbably delicious events and the premise to Hayward’s marriage-of-convenience romance: how can King Nik, though engaged to a Countess whose family’s wealth can save the island-nation, give up his heir? He can’t, of course, but fully expects Sofía to give up her life to marry him. Sofía puts up a feisty fight. Alas, she loves the arrogant ass and wants to have this baby too.
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REVIEW: Mira Lyn Kelly’s WAKING UP PREGNANT, Or “Love With the Proper Stranger”
Miss Bates loves the 1963 film, Love With the Proper Stranger, Angie Rossini and Rocky Papasano’s one-night-stand story (Wood and McQueen are wonderful). Angie lives with her widowed mother and brothers and is constrained by their control over her life. In an act of rebellion, she sleeps with Rocky and thereafter realizes she’s pregnant. Angie seeks Rocky to ask for help to pay for an abortion and he agrees. They spend several days together making arrangements. Two things happen: the day of, in a place sordid and frightening, Rocky stops Angie from going through with the abortion; and, Angie and Rocky reluctantly grow to know and like one another. There’s no insta-love. Rocky begrudgingly asks her to marry. Angie refuses and, yes, he has a hard time with that. It spurs his interest, however. (Another aspect to the film that is interesting is how Rocky and Angie want to escape the stifling atmosphere of their overly protective but strong-on-the-family-loyalty Italian-American clans.) The film ends with Angie’s “upper hand.” The possibility of an HEA is there, but not the surety. Angie is vindicated. Miss Bates loved Angie: determined to forge a life for herself, uncompromising in her desire for love and independence, resolved to marry on her terms, not her family’s or Rocky’s, or not marry at all. She is fearless and glowingly beautiful mama material, this Macy’s shop-girl barely scraping a living.
Miss Bates suspects that Mira Lyn Kelly aimed for the same effect in Waking Up Pregnant. Unlike the 1963 film, the 2014 novel doesn’t manage this as successfully. Miss Bates enjoyed reading it, thought it well-written, with innocuously sympathetic leads; however, its ethos was conventional and she couldn’t help comparing it, and it coming up short, to a film over 50 years old. It is a novel with a situation similar to that of Sarah Mayberry’s More Than One Night, which is not a Mayberry novel that received the attention it deserved, but Miss Bates liked it very MUCH. Kelly makes all the right noises for her heroine, Darcy, wanting independence and finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand; at least initially, makes her hero, Jeff, if not reluctant, then gobsmacked. But what’s most interesting about Stranger’s Rocky and One Night’s Rhys is their reluctance for insta-love for the heroine. They’re responsible and decent, but 
man, this is not where they want to be. The development of how they end up wanting to be there, as dads and husbands, is so much more believable and natural than the utterly-smitten-I’m-all-in-all-the-time Jeff. Romance novels are to a certain extent, yes, fantasies and Jeff’s sheer goodness, sexiness, and emotional open-ness are attractive, just not terribly compelling. It’s not as much fun when the hero doesn’t have far to fall (do check out Stranger‘s Rocky and his near-clownish antics at the end). Darcy too is an etiolated version of the Amazonian Angie. She pays lip-service to a “feisty” independence, but never enacts it. What does Waking Up Pregnant have going for it? Continue reading to find out
REVIEW: Jennie Lucas’s THE SHEIKH’S LAST SEDUCTION Couldn’t Breach Her “Ironclad Virginity”
The loquacious Miss Bates is rarely rendered speechless by a romance novel, especially of the suspension-of-belief-HP-variety, but Lucas’s Sheikh’s Last Seduction came close. Presents are romance fiction concentrated; when done well, they are the ultimate escapist fare, outlandish, skirting caricature, but sexy and fun. In the hands of a good writer, like Sarah Morgan, Kelly Hunter, or Caitlin Crews, even their most over-the-top qualities are transformed into sympathetic heroes and heroines, compelling story-lines, and heartfelt romance. When done badly, romance fiction can’t get worse; they open themselves up to ridicule (and that’s only from romance-loving readers). Lucas’s sheikh, Sharif, and his virginal prig of a heroine, Irene, never make their way to our hearts, but inspire, thanks to the sentimentality of the writing and unsavoriness of the sentiments, no more than a snicker … or a whimper … and, believe Miss Bates when she says there’s ne’er a bang to be found. Continue reading, but it won’t be pretty
Miss Bates Reads Romance 