The Collection
Book Reviews
Explore our full library of honest reviews and literary recommendations.
Tress
Earlier this year I read and fell head over heels over head over heels in readerly love with Larissa Brown’s Beautiful Wreck. (Melanie’s DIK review is here.) Ms. Brown was…
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Trade Me
Trade Me by Courtney Milan is the first thing I’ve read by Ms. Milan that didn’t work for me. I am an unabashed fan girl of her historical romances and…
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A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong
It’s always fun when a series goes back in time and shares the story of someone with whom you’ve already read a good bit about. The eldest Blackshear brother, Andrew,…
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Maybe This Christmas
Sarah Morgan’s Maybe This Christmas is the third in her O’Neil Brothers series. The first two (Sleigh Bells in the Snow and Suddenly Last Summer) received a B+ and an A-…
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Full Throttle
It took me two months to read Ms. McCarthy’s Full Throttle. The novel is the seventh in Ms. McCarthy’s Fast Track series, a sequence of books whose appeal has waned…
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Off the Edge
Romantic suspense is one of the most “difficult to do well” sub genres in romance. If the romance works the suspense is often weak. If the suspense is fabulous, the…
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When the Marquess Met His Match
I’ve read many historical romances featuring either a social climber or a fortune hunter. Usually these characters are paired with their opposite; the social climber falls in love with someone…
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Rumor Has It
I’ve read all of Ms. Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series and her Lucky Harbor series. So, whatever criticisms I have of her latest, it’s clear, on some level, her work is…
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The Last Hour of Gann
Wendy Clyde here. Dabney Grinnan and I are discussing R. Lee Smith’s The Last Hour of Gann, which was released in September. While Dabney had read Ms. Smith, this is…
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The Ruin of a Rogue
Gertrude Stein famously wrote “a rose is a rose is a rose.” The plot in Ms. Neville’s latest in her The Wild Quartet series, The Ruin of a Rogue, may…
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Glitterland
It would be easy label Alexis Hall’s debut novel Glitterland as literary fiction masquerading as romance. The language he uses – his metaphors are often show stoppingly gorgeous – and…
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Love and Other Scandals
Caroline Linden’s Love and Other Scandals is the best historical romance I’ve read this summer. Joan Bennet, the spinster heroine, has a sharper tongue and a sharper mind. The louche…
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