What We’ve Been Reading

The Collection

Explore our full library of honest reviews and literary recommendations.

An Affair with Mr. Kennedy

I realized I wasn’t enjoying this Victorian romance when, for the tenth night in a row, I avoided the book. I turned on my Kindle and, instead of opening the…

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The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae

I literarily wended, linguistically traveled, and read with eager purpose, burgeoning desire, and incendiary yearning. Utterly determined — alone and seeking a reviewer’s sweet satiation — engaging my somnolent disbelieving…

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Unraveled

Over a rainy post-holiday weekend, I read – back to back – Courtney Milan’s Turner series. The series comprises three books and a novella and tells the tale, novella excepted,…

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A Lady Awakened

Ms. Grant’s excellent debut should really be titled A Lady and a Gentleman Awakened. Both the heroine, repressed Martha, and the hero, feckless Theo, are, by this novel’s end, alert…

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Seductive as Flame

I delight in sizzling sex and absorbing ambiance in my romances, so I was sure I’d love Susan Johnson. I’ve not read any of her other books, but she’s definitely…

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How the Marquess Was Won

I liked this book. I liked it a lot. And yet…. The truth is, I’ve so loved the last two books in Ms. Long’s Pennyroyal Green series, I Kissed an…

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Desired

At the start of Desired, Tess Darent, the Dowager Marchioness of Darent, in an attempt to elude raiding redcoats searching for radical reformers, ties a sheet about her waist and…

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The Sinner

Alex MacDonald, the Scots hero of Margaret Mallory’s The Sinner, has every attribute one could dream up for the perfect alpha male hero. He’s a “blindingly handsome” golden haired sex…

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Some Like It Hot

I’m wondering if Louisa Edwards wishes she’d chosen a different heroine for her latest Recipe for Love series. Somehow right now doesn’t seem like the best time to have a…

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A Scottish Love

The beginning of this book is so peculiar, it’s disconcerting. It’s 1859 in Inverness and Shona, the widowed Countess of Morton, so penniless she can barely feed herself, is interviewing…

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Blood and Fire

It’s safe to say I don’t want to live in Shannon McKenna’s fictional world. The bad guys are Machiavellian and ubiquitous, and way too much gruesomely horrifying stuff happens to…

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To Wed a Wild Lord

Ms. Jeffries’ latest in her Hellions of Halstead Hall series begins inauspiciously with an odd letter to readers from a character in the novel — the grandmother of the hellacious…

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