Essays & Musings
What We’ve Been Thinking About
Thoughts on books, reading, culture, and the literary life.
A Few of My Favorite Scenes
March 13, 2015There’s been a lot in the media lately about women and desire and what it is, exactly, that flips the female switch from watching “The Bachelor” to wanting to do the…
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An interview (and giveaway) with author Stella Riley
March 11, 2015Back in 2013 when AAR staffers were asked to choose their top ten romances, one of my choices was A Splendid Defiance by the British author, Stella Riley. It’s a…
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A Guest Pandora’s Box: Erin Nicholas’s Getting Dirty
March 6, 2015Hello everyone and welcome to the second of our AAR blog columns. The basic idea is that we’re going to choose a book every month and have a hopefully-not-too-lengthy discussion…
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Midweek Minis
March 4, 2015When Good Earls Go Bad: A Victorian Valentine’s Day Novella by Megan Frampton is a quick read and one I’d recommend to anyone who likes frothy, fun historical romance. Ms. Frampton…
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a Pandora’s Box: Karina Bliss’s Rise
February 27, 2015Acclaimed literary biographer Elizabeth Winston writes about long-dead heroes. So bad-boy rock icon Zander Freedman couldn’t possibly tempt her to write his memoir. Except the man is a mass of fascinating contradictions–manipulative,…
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Dabney’s Best of 2014 List
February 11, 2015My romance reading in 2014 can be summed up in one word: Contemporary. When I look at the almost 200 romances I read last year, only a quarter of them…
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Talking with Larissa Brown about Beautiful Wreck, knitting, Iceland, and old Norse
February 9, 2015One of my goals for 2015 is to read all the romances my colleagues here at AAR picked as their choice for Best of 2014. (That column is here.) The first one…
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A Guest Pandora’s Box: Judith Ivory’s Beast
February 6, 2015Hello everyone and welcome to the first in what we hope will be on-going series here on the AAR blog. Every month or so we’re going to choose a romance…
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Maggie’s Best of 2014 List
February 4, 2015What constitutes a DIK/5 Star/Best of romance? For me, a DIK romance is a book that delights me, with characters I at least like (but normally, I love them) and…
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Heather’s Best of 2014 List
January 30, 2015When I began this endeavor, I really was not sure I would have enough books for a top reads post for 2014. I think I read so many mediocre books…
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It’s the 20th Anniversary of Lord of Scoundrels!
January 23, 2015AAR feels old! We can’t believe many of us first read Loretta Chase’s classic romance Lord of Scoundrels 20 years ago! We first reviewed the historical romance in 1997. The…
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Rose Lerner on her latest hero, being Jewish in Regency England, and an interesting bit about Ivanhoe
January 19, 2015Ash, the hero of my Regency romance True Pretenses, is a Jewish con artist who grew up in a London rookery and has been passing as a Gentile for a…
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