What We’ve Been Reading

The Collection

Explore our full library of honest reviews and literary recommendations.

If You Only Knew

Traditionally, the Happily Ever After in romance is that of my generation’s favorite childhood chant. “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage.” What marriage…

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Debt

I read Nina Jones’s Debt. It is a dark book. I can’t imagine ever wanting to read it again and yet, I found myself pulled into the utterly fucked up…

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The Stranger

Harlan Coben’s latest, The Stranger, is so like the author’s earlier books that, as I read, I kept confusing plots. The hero, a lawyer named Adam who has his safe…

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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…