Reader Kris recently commented that when she reread Lisa Kleypas’ Dreaming of You it DID NOT hold up at all. She wrote:
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the ask@AAR: What are some great romances that are overtly political?
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the ask@AAR: Is there still a canon for romance? What books should or shouldn’t be on it?
Almost exactly a year ago, I asked whether or not AAR should, as it typically does every five years, do a new Top 100 poll. As is the case with most questions, readers were split. They also made interesting suggestions. People love top 100 lists. Put in Top 100 Romances in Google search (AAR comes…
the ask@AAR: What should AAR do to survive?
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the ask@AAR: What can we do better?
At All About Romance, we’ve built our reputation on honest, thoughtful engagement with the genre, but that only matters if we’re meeting the needs of the people who come here. Romance has changed, and so have readers. This survey is our way of finding out whether we’re keeping pace with that change. We want to…
the ask@AAR: If we were to create a list of THE 100 Romances Every Romance Reader Should Read, what would you put on it?
Later this year, AAR will ask readers to choose their 100 Top Romances as we’ve done many times over the decades. What does that mean? Are these the best romances ever written? Readers’ personal favorites? A representation of all the genre has to offer? Romances everyone should read? A series of comments by Jenna got…
This is an experience we’ve all had. There are romances we loved back in the day that now make us shudder or, at the very least, wonder what on earth we were thinking.
Earlier this year, I tried and failed to reread Devil’s Bride by Stephanie Laurens. The prose was absurdly purple, Devil is kind of a dick, and Honoria is just plain silly a great deal of the time. Today, it is a hard pass and yet, when I look at Goodreads, I see that in 2013 I gave it four stars which, for me, is high praise.
How about you? What are books that really no longer work for you? Why?