Essays & Musings
What We’ve Been Thinking About
Thoughts on books, reading, culture, and the literary life.
Good News and Bad about Polls
June 18, 2017It’s clear to us we don’t have the manpower to do our usual reader’s pick the Best of Poll for 2016. We’re bummed about that but it is what it…
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A First Chapter from Bronwen Evans: Addicted to the Duke
June 10, 2017Prologue The Greek isle of Mykonos: August 1811 Alexander Sylvester Bracken, the Marquess of Tavistock, heir to the Duke of Bedford, on no account considered himself a hero. In all…
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Layla Rayne shares three fictional partnerships she loves
June 9, 2017Thanks so much AAR for having me as a guest blogger today. I’m delighted to be here to chat about my male-male romantic suspense series, Agents Irish and Whiskey. For…
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The Best of All Worlds: A Guest Post by Sherry Thomas
June 6, 2017Judith of Binge on Books and Open Ink Press emailed me February of last year and told me about an unusual project she was planning. The aim of the Sight…
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Romantic Gestures: It’s the Thought That Counts – by Roan Parrish
June 5, 2017I’ve never gotten a Valentine from anyone except my parents and my first through third grade classmates, back when you had to give a card to everyone, and I’ve been…
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Table-Rapping: The Secrets of Victorian Spiritualism by K.J. Charles
June 2, 2017available at Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo It was tough being a Victorian. In the nineteenth century, change—technological, scientific, cultural, religious—was accelerating at a previously unthinkable pace. Alfred,…
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Is Hot the new Warm?
May 18, 2017One of the things readers consistently tell us they like are our sensuality ratings. They’ve been a part of AAR since its inception and we think they help readers find books they…
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A Love for American Historical Romance: A Guest Post by Holly Bush
May 12, 2017I confess, I’m a complete sucker for a Regency romance. Give me a duke, a marriage of convenience, or a governess to lover trope, with all the accompanying bothersome rules…
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All About the Money: A Guest Post by Santino Hassell
May 2, 2017I have a complicated relationship with wealth. Instead of being intrigued by characters who are cool or sexy or likeable because of their money, power, and social status, I love…
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The Neverland of Vermont: A Guest Post by Sonja Yoerg
April 30, 2017When I tell people I grew up in Vermont, they often smile dreamily, as if I had claimed Neverland as my home state. In a sense, they are right. My…
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Blame your family! A guest post and a giveaway by Caroline Warfield
April 14, 2017Family—can’t live with them, can’t kill them. It seems to me that family is the cradle of our profoundest emotions: love, tenderness, jealousy, anger, envy, and, yes, hate. No one…
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Rereading Elizabeth Essex’s Dartmouth Brides
April 8, 2017In 2011, I read the first of Elizabeth Essex’s Dartmouth Brides books, The Pursuit of Pleasure. This is Ms. Essex’s debut novel and, especially for a first book, quite good. In…
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