There is chatter in Romancelandia about Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle. Where her first two books were romances, this novel–and I haven’t read it so I’m just repeating what I’ve heard–is more women’s fiction. Readers, at least romance readers, are upset because the book is far heavier than they thought it would be. There are…
Reader Kris recently commented that when she reread Lisa Kleypas’ Dreaming of You it DID NOT hold up at all. She wrote: From Sarah saying NO to Derek not listening and the portrayal of the villainess, I won’t be reading it again. And I don’t understand why I loved it so much in the first…
This week on Twitter, a famous historical romance author made the point that there are good reasons authors of historical romance break with convention. She argued authors do so not because they’re lazy or stupid but because they are deliberately making choices they feel better serve the stories they tell. I think she’s right. Authors…
I’ve just finished reading Pachinko which I loved. It’s a multigenerational tale of Koreans living in Japan during the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the themes the novel explores is whether or not your nationality/race/ancestors define who you are. Lee, the author, makes a strong case that in places of great prejudice, it does….
I am on my yearly week long vacation with my extended family of 21 and almost all the women in the group are reading books set in or around WWII. My daughter and I are reading Pachinko, which begins in the early 30s, my mom is reading a book about female code breakers in Britain,…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent the last year listening to the Harry Potter books. I am currently at the end of book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and have just sobbed my way through the death of a beloved character. [su_spoiler title=”If you haven’t read the books, don’t read this!”][su_spoiler]Dumbledore dies. [su_spoiler][/su_spoiler]…
My daughter has a romance book club–this makes me so happy–and the next book they’re discussing is Anne Calhoun’s Uncommon Passion. After reading it, she said she liked it but she was distracted by all the sex scenes. (The book was written in 2013.) Calhoun always went–wonderfully in this reader’s opinion–heavy on the sex scenes…
Peeps–my kids are driving me just a little bit nuts. Two of my adult children are temporarily living with us in our three bedroom condo–and one of them has an extremely energetic dog. And while both are, in general, lovely young men, it’s abundantly clear to me that parents in their 60s should not share…
When my husband and I were first dating, we’d have this satisfying conversation about relational deal breakers. (We’d proverbially pat ourselves on the back because we, of course, did not have each other’s “I simply couldn’t be with someone who had/was _______________.” That’s how humans work–we find it easy to enumerate flaws. We don’t tend…
My book club just read Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter and, in our meeting, we had a long and heated disagreement discussion about whether or not and/or when it’s OK to lie to one’s children. The consensus was that it’s fine to lie to minors but that adult children should not be lied to…
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