Celebrating March 27, Part VI

Three Books to Celebrate: Day Six

Earlier this month, I reviewed three of the March 27 releases that I’m celebrating this week. I’ve linked to the full reviews in my excerpts below.

A Week to Be Wicked

By Tessa Dare

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: March 27, 2012

(review posted at Just Janga)

I’ve been a Tessa Dare fan since I read and gave top scores to her entries in Avon’s Fan Lit competition. I’ve read and loved the eight novels and two novellas that preceded A Week to Be Wicked, but I think this is her best book yet. Minerva and Colin are both characters who fall within the conventions of romance fiction (the bluestocking and the rake) and yet manage to be fresh and original. They are funny and flawed and completely engaging—an unexpected pairing that, against all odds, feels perfect.

At Your Pleasure

By Meredith Duran

Publisher: Pocket

Release Date: March 27, 2012

(review posted at The Romance Dish)

Meredith Duran is quite simply one of the best writers I’ve read. Her characterization is superb, her plots compelling, and her prose lucid and powerful. She also offers her readers the gift of difference in a genre more accustomed to sameness. Duran sets At Your Pleasure in England in 1715, the year after the coronation of George I. The possibility of a Jacobite rebellion was real; some scholars believe it was a more serious threat that the rebellion of 1745. Most readers of historical romance fiction are familiar with the rudiments of the latter rebellion, having encountered references to Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Battle of Culloden, and Cumberland’s brutal suppression in novels from Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders to those by Veryan, Gabaldon, Canham, and countless others. The political climate of England in 1715 when Catholics, including Catholic aristocrats, were denied the right to worship, to vote, to be educated is less familiar. Duran captures the realities of the period without slamming her readers in the face with a history book. And she combines historical accuracy with emotionally credible actions and reactions.

Confessions from an Arranged Marriage

By Miranda Neville

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: March 27, 2012

(review posted at Heroes and Heartbreakers)

Minerva’s deepening respect for the man Blake is empowers him to become more, and he is able when she needs him most to be commanding and powerful, every inch the duke with generations of dukes behind him. Perhaps the greatest evidence of the changes in Blake is his acceptance of what he is and what he is not, a self-acceptance tempered by his regret that he cannot be the man Minerva wants. And Minerva’s response to his self-acceptance is a lovely reminder that these two have grown into two people who like and respect one another as well as healthily lusting after one another.


“I’m not going to lead the party and I’ll never be a member of the government, let alone Prime Minister. I wish I could be the man you want, Minnie, but I don’t have it in me.”


“You are the man I want. You don’t have to be anyone different.”


Sigh! I’m a believer. Happily ever after all the way.





The three are very different books—a Regency road book (Dare), an early Georgian romance with a political subtext (Duran), and a forced marriage tale between opposites (Neville), but each features characters that capture the reader’s imagination and affections, plots that compel the reader’s attention, and prose that delights the reader’s ear. I highly recommend all three.


 Adding these three books to my March 27 list brings the total number of reviews to eight—five historical romances, two contemporary romances, and one women’s fiction novel. That a close approximation of my reading in romance/women’s fiction generally. What subgenres do your read most often?


Remember that the winner of the free book will be chosen randomly from among those who comment on Tuesday-Sunday posts. 

Tuesday Review: A Week to Be Wicked

A Week to Be Wicked

(Spindle Cove Book #2)

By Tessa Dare

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: March 27, 2012

Although she is her opposite in almost every way, Minerva Highwood loves her sister Diana and is determined that her beautiful, gentle sister not be married to Colin Sandhurst, Viscount Payne, a wastrel and a rake sure to bring Diana unhappiness.  Minerva’s determination leads her to pay a midnight visit to Colin. It’s common knowledge that Colin is in Spindle Cove only because he can’t support his London life until his cousin Bram’s trusteeship ends upon Colin’s marriage or his birthday, still two months away. Minerva first tries bribing Colin to stay away from Diana. When he informs her that her twenty-two pounds wouldn’t support him in London for a week, she proposes that they fake an elopement and he escort her to a meeting of the Royal Geological Society of Scotland. Minerva is confident her discovery of the prehistoric footprint of an unidentified creature will win best presentation in Edinburg and the five hundred guineas that accompanies it, a munificent sum that she will then give to Colin.

Colin is amused by Minerva’s proposal, but despite his rakish reputation, he has rules. One is that he doesn’t ruin innocents. Nevertheless, a few days later he and Minerva are on their way to Edinburgh with a plaster cast of Minerva’s find, her trousseau in trunks, and a letter announcing their “elopement” left behind. The week that follows sees them escaping thieves and kidnappers, singing in a tavern, playing besotted lover and foreign mistress, and, as Minerva says later, with “Breathless passion and enough adventure to last a lifetime.” It also reveals the complex, challenging, ever changing person that each of them is. Minerva’s mother may see her as “plain, bookish, distracted, awkward with gentlemen. . . . hopeless,” but Colin sees her as beautiful, intelligent, and unique. The world may see Lord Payne as a light-hearted wastrel with a reputation as a womanizer, but Minerva sees his vulnerability, honor, and capacity for love.

Minerva considers a telling similarity between people and the extinct creatures she carefully embroidered on her trousseau bed linens:

Perhaps, she thought, people were more like ammonites than one would suppose. Perhaps they too built shells on a consistent, unchanging factor—some quality or circumstance established in their youth. Each chamber in the shell just an enlargement of the previous. Growing year after year until they spiraled around and locked themselves in place.

During their week together, Minerva and Colin discover the soft, vulnerable people inside the protective shell each has created. And it is the revealed, vulnerable people who fall in love passionately, tenderly, fearfully, totally.

I’ve been a Tessa Dare fan since I read and gave top scores to her entries in Avon’s Fan Lit competition. I’ve read and loved the eight novels and two novellas that preceded A Week to Be Wicked, but I think this is her best book yet. Minerva and Colin are both characters who fall within the conventions of romance fiction (the bluestocking and the rake) and yet manage to be fresh and original. They are funny and flawed and completely engaging—an unexpected pairing that, against all odds, feels perfect.

Their dialogue sparkles in the best Quinntessential fashion with some of the best one liners I’ve encountered. I loved an early comment from Colin: “I didn’t recognize your face without the book in front of it,” but my favorite is Minerva’s sentence directed to the gentlemen of the geological society. I won’t spoil it by quoting it. Dare also pens some luminously tender passages, the kind that echo after the reader puts the book away. One such passage offers a wise and apt definition of love.

She couldn’t “heal” him. No woman could. Events that far in the past just couldn’t be undone. But perhaps he didn’t need a cure, but . . . a lens. Someone who accepted him for the imperfect person he was, and then helped him to see the world clear.

My favorite romance novels are those that involve my brain, touch my heart, tickle my funny bone, and satisfy my love for lucid, textured prose. A Week to Be Wicked qualifies on all counts. It left me smiling and sighing, with a tear in my eye. Take advantage of the preorder discount, haunt your local bookstore on March 27, or have the book shipped to your door. This is one you definitely don’t want to miss.

What qualities set your top favorites apart from other books you enjoy reading?

Tuesday Review: A Handful of Christmas Stars to a Reread and a New Read

Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor
By Lisa Kleypas
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Release Date: October 26, 2010

Mark Nolan’s strongest commitment is to his coffee business, not withstanding his long-term girlfriend. That changes when his sister Victoria is killed in an automobile accident and Mark finds that she has named him as guardian of her six-year-old daughter, Holly. Her happiness becomes Mark’s primary concern: “For the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to have his heart broken… not broken in a sad or romantic sense, but broken open. He had never known this before, the desire to surround another human being with perfect happiness.” But Holly, grieving for her mother, has stopped speaking, and Mark feels helpless to end her silence.

Maggie Collins is no stranger to grief. A widow, she has opened a toy store, the Magic Mirror, in Friday Harbor as one more step in building a new life. Even a mute child loves a toy store, and so it’s hardly surprising that Mark and Holly visit the Magic Mirror. Holly is enchanted by a fairy house that Maggie has made, and the two are clearly kindred spirits in their love for the imaginary world of fairy lore and other magic. Mark’s not happy about this departure from reality, but he tolerates it since, with Maggie’s encouragement, Holly begins to speak.

Both Maggie and Mark are quickly aware of their attraction to one another, but neither is ready to act on it. Mark feels a certain loyalty to his girlfriend, Shelby, and Maggie, two years after her husband’s death from cancer, is leery of opening herself to the possibility of more loss. So the two settle for friendship. They enjoy one another; they talk to one another, sharing the best kind of conversation: “As they continued to talk, it somehow slipped into the bonelessly comfortable, unstructured conversation of longtime friends, both of them letting it go where it would.”

But the attraction doesn’t disappear, and Holly’s letter to Santa adds a layer of complication. But Maggie has to be willing to take a risk and Mark has to learn to believe in magic before a little girl’s Christmas wish can come true.

More novella than novel, Kleypas’s first Friday Harbor book has less sizzle than her usual fiction, but it has the memorable characters the mix of sigh-worthy romance and real-life issues that characterized her Travis family contemporaries. Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor is several love stories—the love of a child, the love of family (even dysfunctional ones), and the love between a man and a woman—all tied up in a Christmas bow.               

Reading it, or rereading it, is also great preparation for the next Friday Harbor book, Rainshadow Road, which will be released in February. I’m excited about reading a Lisa Kleypas book, especially after no new books from her in 2011. Rainshadow Road Sam Nolan’s story, and I’m already a little bit in love with Sam. You can read an excerpt here.

Note: I am one of "Lisa's Divas" - a group of select fans who share info and content related to Lisa's novels and get sneak peeks and swag in return.  

Once Upon a Winter’s Eve

By Tessa Dare
Publisher: Samhain

Release Date: November 15, 2011

Spindle Cove’s Christmas ball is in progress, and Violet Winterbottom, an experienced wallflower, has claimed a corner from which to watch the dancing when a stranger, wet and bloody, staggers into the room and falls unconscious at her feet.  The language he speaks is a strange one to the citizens of Spindle Cove; only Violet can understand him. She identifies his language as Breton, the language of Brittany-- “As in Brittany, France,” as Bram Rycliff (hero of A Night to Surrender) says. Bram and the other members of the militia are suspicious of the stranger.  He may be a spy or the scout for an invasion force.

Violet isn’t sure she trusts him either, nor is she sure she trusts herself. The last time she gave her trust to a man, she ended up with a broken heart and indelible memories of The Disappointment.  Should she listen to her excellent mind that tells her this man is a mystery and a stranger, and an enemy stranger at that, or dare she listen once again to her heart?

Broken heads and broken hearts, language games and a truncated letter, pistols and promises—Dare weaves them all into a story with humor and heat and heart-capturing characters. You can read an excerpt here.

I knew I’d love this book from the moment I read the tagline: “Some wallflowers bloom at night...” and I did.  I loved Violet’s intelligence, vulnerability, and courage. I loved her stranger in the night. And I loved seeing Bram and Susanna’s happiness continuing to grow. Spindle Cove has become one of my favorite fictional settings. My second visit there was a rare treat, and I look forward to returning with A Week to Be Wicked (March 27, 2012).

I want to share the love by giving away two ecopies of Once Upon a Winter’s Eve--one in honor of a terrific author and one in honor of an equally terrific editor. Winners will be chosen randomly from among those who comment. With apologies to international visitors, the contest is open only to visitors within the  U. S.

What’s your favorite Christmas novella? To what 2012 books are you most looking forward?