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by Billie Bloebaum, December 31, 2013 5:10 PM
Ryan Dean is a fourteen-year-old high school junior who is doing his best to navigate adolescence and all its highs and lows. And you know what? Synopsizing this book doesn't really do it justice or explain why it's my #1 pick. Andrew Smith gets teenagers. He writes teen characters that are awesome and imperfect and completely identifiable. With this book, Smith manages to perfectly capture that ineffable something about the high school years that made them both the best and worst of times, and he will make you feel it all just as deeply as Ryan Dean, whether you want to or
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Contributors
by Billie Bloebaum, December 14, 2012 3:00 PM
 I love a good villain. I mean, Maleficent is my favorite Disney character, so I appreciate how truly amazing a well-done villain can be. I even have moods where I want nothing more than a two-dimensional, mustache-twirling, melodramatic villain to add a dose of over-the-top crazy to my reading. But here's the thing: not every book needs a villain. And, in particular, not every romance book needs a villain. Let's face it: feelings are messy, and relationships are hard enough without always having to contend with a creepy cousin who wants to steal your inheritance, or a shady man of business who is embezzling from your company, or a deranged ex who wants to kill you and/or your new lover. Sometimes an external villain is just too much and feels like a shortcut around the hero and heroine dealing with the real obstacles to their Happily Ever Afters. Recently, though, I was fortunate enough to read two lovely novels that don't play up external villains but instead focus on the hero and heroine working through their own, internal obstacles on the road to love. The Importance of Being Wicked by Miranda Neville features a character who has the potential to become a villain — and he is an eensy bit of one — but, since he is never a physical threat to the hero or heroine, he avoids true villain status. Instead, the villain here is debt, an enemy that most of us have tussled with. Caro's deceased husband left her saddled with debt, and Thomas needs to marry Caro's cousin Anne for her fortune, to save his estate. In the end, of course, the two find a way to be together, but it's pretty clear that money will always be an issue for them. In When the Duchess Said Yes by Isabella Bradford, what stands in the way of the protagonists' happiness isn't money but rather the youthfulness and idealism of the heroine and the jaded cynicism of the hero. Lizzie believes that love is forever, while Hawke is convinced that love will always fade and that he and Lizzie will eventually pursue separate lives. Watching these two work through their issues — well, mostly they're Hawke's issues — is lovely and heartbreaking and makes the HEA feel more well-earned than any kidnapping or murder attempt ever could.
Love is hard. Stuff gets in the way. Feelings get hurt and hearts get broken. Sometimes, the obstacles to true love are the everyday things we all deal with. In the hands of a skilled writer, there's no need for an external villain when the characters' inner demons can be just as difficult to
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Guests
by Billie Bloebaum, December 14, 2012 12:00 AM
I don't reread books often; I just don't have the time. But this is one book that will get reread annually, if not more often. While the bulk of Redshirts is a comedic romp that gleefully skewers the conventions of sci-fi television, the three codas at the end provide depth and poignancy to what has gone before
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Contributors
by Billie Bloebaum, November 16, 2012 3:00 PM
 Let me be perfectly honest: I'm not a terribly religious person, nor did I, in the years I was growing up, ever have a parish priest who was hot enough to be crush-worthy. So I'm not sure what sparked my love for historical romances featuring vicars as heroes. But give me a vicar (or a virgin or, best of all, a virgin vicar) for a hero, and I get all swoony even before I begin reading. Add in a former courtesan who has the gall not to feel ashamed of her past, a village full of judgmental gossips, and a gaggle of besotted young ladies, and what you would seem to have is the recipe for a comedic romp or even a farce. What you have, instead, is A Notorious Countess Confesses by Julie Anne Long. Although this book has its moments of levity, what it's truly full of are pages and pages of unfulfilled longing. It's the kind of longing that is all furtive glances and "accidental" brushes of hands and that I, as a reader, felt all the way down to my toes. It had me holding my breath and biting my lip and leaning forward in my chair and hoping, hoping, hoping that Evie and Adam (hah, I just noticed: Adam and Eve; glad that didn't occur to me before now because it's just a little too... something) could manage to come together in spite of the obstacles in their path. And they did. Of course they did. This is a romance novel, after all, and a happily ever after is de rigueur. But, man, did they have to work for it. And this was one of those novels, like Loretta Chase's Silk Is for Seduction last year, where I honestly believed that our hero and heroine might not end up together for reasons that were true to life and not just invented for the sake of plot. I did, sadly, feel that the ending was a bit rushed — not that it was a cheat or unearned in any way, but I would have liked to have seen it play out a bit more on the page. I wanted to witness more of the village's slow, begrudging acceptance of this unconventional pairing, rather than having to infer so much about how that acceptance came to be. That is, however, a minor complaint. Because, ye gods, the longing. I can still feel it two weeks
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Contributors
by Billie Bloebaum, October 19, 2012 2:00 PM
 Why is it that if I read one romance novel with a particular theme, I seem to read several all at once? It's happened with fairy tales and with spies being held prisoner by the French, and now it's also happened with pop-culture references. Two authors whose work I've really enjoyed in the past have dipped their buckets into the world of 20th-century pop culture for the foundations of their most recent novels. First, there is Jeannie Lin's My Fair Concubine. As you can probably tell from the title, Ms. Lin got her inspiration from My Fair Lady. But she only borrowed the most basic plotline: a young man from a good family must turn a girl of a much-lower social class into a "princess" in a very narrow window of time. Of course, in My Fair Concubine, over the course of this transformation, our hero, Fei Long, falls for our heroine, Yan Ling. The major conflicts at the heart of the novel — the enormous debt left by Fei Long's father at his death, and the problem of how Fei Long and Yan Ling can be together without serious political repercussions — are resolved a little too quickly and neatly for my taste. But Ms. Lin's depictions of ninth-century China and the growing affection between her protagonists are enough to allow me to (mostly) overcome my quibbles. The second book I read that made me wonder about a possible trend in pop-culture-inspired historical romances was Loving Lady Marcia by Kieran Kramer. The references in this one would have been obvious to anyone who wasn't me, but it took me until I was nearly halfway through the book before I caught on. The heroine's sisters are named Janice and Cynthia and her half-brothers are Gregory, Peter, and Robert. Her stepfather is Michael. A housekeeper named Alice takes care of the country home, where the sheepdog Tiger lives. It wasn't, however, until Lady Marcia had her nose injured by a stray ball thrown by her brother that I figured out what I was reading: Brady Bunch fanfic. And, honestly, I'm glad I was dim enough not to recognize it for what it was. I think if I had caught on at the beginning, my enjoyment of the novel would have diminished.
As it was, as soon as I recognized the source material, I started waiting for Sam the Butcher and Davy Jones to make an appearance, and wondering if Janice would invent a fake suitor named Roger Glass and if Robert would contract mumps from kissing a Millicent. I'm sure I've read other romance novels that have drawn from similar inspirational wells, but as I proved with Loving Lady Marcia, I can be blissfully
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Contributors
by Billie Bloebaum, September 21, 2012 3:00 PM
 Gack! Another fairy-tale-themed romance. It really wasn't my intention to go back to this particular well, but I thought this book was so lovely that I almost felt like I had no choice but to share my affection for it with you. Eloisa James is one of my must-read authors, and in The Ugly Duchess, she combines two of my favorite tropes: friends turned lovers and a story borrowed from a fairy tale. In this case, it's Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling (surprise!). Before you go all history police, Ms. James herself is aware of the anachronism inherent in basing a novel spanning the years 1809–1816 on a fairy tale first published in 1843 and acknowledges it clearly in the afterword. (And, really, isn't "The Ugly Duckling" just a Cinderella story with feathers?) The fairy tale is just a framework, anyway — a dressmaker's dummy around which to shape the fabric of the tale. And, oh, what a tale it is. Theodora and James have been friends for years. When James proposes, he does it in such a way that Theo is convinced he is in love with her, even though she is, at best, plain. Of course, this being Romancelandia, James has an ulterior motive for marrying Theo, and naturally, she finds out. There's a dust-up and he goes off a-pirating, only to return seven years later. In that time, Theo has made a success of herself and the estate. Nearly half the book takes place during the time they are separated, which gives the reader some insight into who they are as individuals. Some people have complained that James's actions — abandoning Theo for seven years, leaving her alone to run the estate his father had run into the ground, taking multiple mistresses — were unforgivable. But I don't feel that Theo let him back into her good graces too easily, and I never thought that she betrayed herself by taking him back. James's faults and mistakes seemed forgivable in the context of their relationship. (Compare this with another book I read where the hero kidnapped the heroine and locked her in an attic — and even when she had the means to escape she didn't and instead fell in love with him. I won't name the book or the author, but suffice it to say, I have yet to read anything more by her.) Maybe I'm willing to overlook what to others would be faults because Ms. James made me cry a little and laugh a lot with this book, which is rare enough that I treasure it when I find
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by Billie Bloebaum, August 24, 2012 2:00 PM
 Wow. It's been quite a while since I nattered on about romance here. Part of the hiatus was due to a busy, busy summer, and part was due to the fact that nothing I read had really knocked my socks off. Oh, I read a lot of books that were good, and some were even really good, but I didn't come across anything that stuck with me for days and made me want to shove it into other people's hands. Until this week. The book that finally broke the meh streak was Almost a Scandal by Elizabeth Essex. I'll be honest and admit that the heroine, Sally, was a bit too good to be true (but not quite into Mary Sue territory), which was occasionally annoying. But there was so much that I liked about the book that I was willing to let some things slide that, in other books, might have made me stop reading. What really, really, really worked for me was that the book was set almost entirely on a naval ship, and there was a big, climactic action scene set during the Battle of Trafalgar. All of the scenes and details of shipboard life were so skillfully rendered that I could hear the clang of the watch bell and smell the salty tang of the sea air (and the funky musk of dozens of men with limited bathing opportunities living in close quarters). At times, the romance between Sally and Col took a backseat to the day-to-day events of life aboard the Audacious — and I was totally OK with that. Ms. Essex had obviously done her research, and it made the story that much richer and more textured. But, OK, I didn't pick up a historical romance to learn about life in the Royal Navy during the early 19th Century (that was just a bonus). I picked it up for a love story. And there was one. And it was a friends-into-lovers story, which I always enjoy. But you know what? I would have been perfectly content with this book if it had only been all of the ship stuff, and Col and Sally had just remained friends. The ship plotline was amazing and totally engrossing, and I even managed to kinda-sorta believe that the crew didn't recognize Sally as a girl (even though it's revealed at the end that a lot of them did, but let her stay on board because she had been pretty much raised on a ship and was super-fantastic at all sailor-y activities). I picked up this book for the love story but fell in love (or at least really deep like) with its glimpse of seagoing life. It's the shipboard parts that will send me back to read the book again, which is something I almost never
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by Billie Bloebaum, May 21, 2012 3:00 PM
 I have learned a lot from reading historical romance novels. Unfortunately, one of the primary things that I have learned is incorrect. During the Napoleonic Wars, many Englishmen were spies, as many as a quarter to a third, apparently. Not only that, but a lot of them were seemingly very bad at it and got captured by the French. Not all of these fictional English spies were awful enough to be captured, but enough were to make me wonder how, if this was the quality of the opposition, Napoleon was ever defeated. Okay. Okay. It's true that the villainous French captors often let slip Very Important Information during their sessions questioning/torturing their British captives. And these captors almost inevitably met their deaths at the hands of their erstwhile captives. But that doesn't excuse the fact that they got caught in the first place. I think the book that finally made me roll my eyes at the frequency of the capture of English spies was A Lady's Revenge by Tracey Devlyn. Not that the book itself is deserving of eye-rolling, just that it started right off with the rescue of a captured spy called "the Raven" (which about half of them are in these novels), and I had just finished reading Mary Jo Putney's No Longer a Gentleman, which is also about a captured spy. It was just too much, too close together for my little brain to take. Both novels are really quite good, but I don't recommend reading them back-to-back. Aside from likely making you question the competence of 19th-century British Intelligence agents, these aren't exactly fun, frothy reads. Of course, they both end with Happily Ever After, but the journeys to get there take some dark and twisted paths. In Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour in Glass (the sequel to my much-beloved Shades of Milk and Honey), Jane and Vincent head to Belgium on their honeymoon and there's some espionage involved and a prison break using the glamour (magic) of the title.
And then there are the novels of Joanna Bourne, which feature both French and English spies in various configurations but all working against and/or fleeing the Revolution or Napoleon. A French prison is actually the nexus at which the diverse storylines of her novels converge. (Well, prison and the character of Hawker, who I believe shows up in the pages of all four books.) The fact of the matter is that there couldn't have been that many spies working against Napoleon. But even if there were, I can't believe that such a large portion of them got caught. In time, I'm sure I'll be able to suspend my disbelief once again. Because as clichéd and unbelievable as I may find this storyline, I'm still a sucker for
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by Billie Bloebaum, April 6, 2012 2:57 PM
 Over the past several weeks, I've found myself reading a lot of books that take their inspiration from folk and fairy tales. This isn't unusual ? I've long been attracted to this sort of story ? but, what is unusual, at least for me, is how many of them have been traditional historical romance novels. I've always snapped up fairy tale-inspired young adult novels (like Cinder by Marissa Meyer) and literary fiction ( The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey) and especially fantasy (almost anything by Robin McKinley), but, although I have occasionally come across a romance novel built on the foundations of a classic fairy tale, it seems to have either become more common for these books to be published, or I'm just finding more of them recently. I think the realization of how many fairy tale-inspired romance novels I was reading first hit me this past week when I was reading Nicole Jordan's Princess Charming. The story is only very, very loosely inspired by the Cinderella story, but it reminded me that Kieran Kramer's most recent Impossible Bachelors novel, If You Give a Girl a Viscount was also a Cinderella story. So was Eloisa James's A Kiss at Midnight. And Ms. James's When Beauty Tamed the Beast was obviously inspired by Beauty and the Beast. And I realized that, not only were there a lot of fairy tale romances floating around out there, but most of the ones I had read took their inspiration from only two stories: Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast. So, I started digging through the attic of my brain in search of stories inspired by different tales, and came up with very little. Both Eloisa James (The Duke is Mine) and Victoria Alexander (The Princess and the Pea) have used, well, the Princess and the Pea. I don't recall that either book had a literal pea or a ginormous stack of mattresses, but both had potential brides being tested to ensure that they were worthy of the "prince."
And, then, well, that was kind of it. True, all of Elizabeth Hoyt's novels use fairy tales as framing devices, but those are original tales (and they're quite good and they need to be collected into their own book, but I digress), so don't really count. Where are the romance novels inspired by Rapunzel or Red Riding Hood or Snow White? I understand the abundance of Cinderella and Beauty tales, as they contain some of the core tropes of the romance genre, but, as much as I love fairy tales, I'm getting a bit bored with those two. I know there have to be novels based on other tales; I just haven't found them yet. I can't wait until I do. Fairy tales were, after all, the original Happily Ever
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by Billie Bloebaum, February 24, 2012 11:00 AM
 Recently, I've been on a streak of reading a lot of British "chick lit." I put chick lit in quotes because it's a fairly loaded term that isn't exactly accurate, but there isn't another shorthand term that quickly encompasses the idea of the genre. These aren't the books of bubblegum-pink covers and city girls questing for the perfect job, fashionable accessories, and/or Mr. Right. Instead, they're books about women, usually in their 30s, looking for happiness but willing to settle for contentment. There is a formula ? Dear gods, is there ever a formula! ? but it's one that I quite like. It generally goes something like this: A middle-class woman in her 30s experiences a crisis of some sort (adulterous husband, early widowhood, job loss, mountains of debt/impending poverty... or sometimes several of these in combination) and moves to a new home, often in the country. (If she already lives in the country, there will be no moving.) There are at least two potential love interests ? one who is OMG hawt and the other who is the best friend/shoulder to cry on. (Guess who she ends up with.) There are animals: usually a quirky dog and often some sort of farm animal. There is at least one scene where our heroine gets completely plastered and making an arse of herself. There is also inevitably a scene where our heroine is caught outside her home wearing wellies, a dressing gown, manky knickers, or any combination thereof. There is at least one idiosyncratic friend, one social group (book club, church choir, co-workers, or some such), and one or more eccentric/self-centered/emotionally exhausting family member. It all combines into a perfect storm of slapstick humor, heart-wrenching emotion, and a real sense of accomplishment for having gotten through it all. I think my love of this type of book can be traced back to Bridget Jones's Diary. I could never identify with the ladies of Sex and the City, but I felt like Bridget and I could have been friends. It's only recently, though, that I've been turning to this genre as my comfort-food reading. I'm completely enamored of the books of Jill Mansell, who is my go-to in this category. However, having recently binged on her titles, I've turned to such authors Freya North (Secrets), Catherine Alliott (A Crowded Marriage, the forthcoming A Rural Affair), Hester Browne (Swept off Her Feet), and Isabel Wolff (A Vintage Affair, which is lovely, though a little less humorous than the others). These are the books I turn to when I don't quite want a Romance, but still want a love story with a happy ending, and, so far, I haven't been
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