Category — Romance

The Thirteenth House is the sequel to Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn.  Both books, along with the third, Dark Moon Defender, are fantasy-romances set in the mythical kingdom of Gillengaria, and are, unfortunately, fraught with the saccharine tendencies of romance novels of every other genre.  Sharon Shinn, although a fascinating world-builder, is prone to [...]

My goal when I began rereading the Anita Blake books was to finally write up a post centering on Obsidian Butterfly. I wanted to talk about how OB stood out as an awesome treatment of mixed race issues. Because it takes Anita out of her surprisingly monoracial St Louis context, and plunks her down in [...]

Sometimes? LKH makes me really really angry. Why? Because she takes these pretty standard tropes re: the angsty mulatta, tosses in some vampires/angry faeries, and voila! People love it.
 I’m gonna do a close read of The Laughing Corpse, one of the first books in the Anita Blake series. After this, I’ll probably do a follow [...]

In English as a Second Language, our heroine Alexandra goes to grad school across the pond primarily because her ex-boyfriend says she can’t. It’s a bit of a lark… but one that’ll take about a year to get through.
Right.
Hm. The writing style’s quick and witty (highlights include Alex attempting to spy on her flatmate’s ex-girlfriend [...]

Hello, my lovelies. I apologize for my enforced hiatus from book blogging – I just moved, and haven’t had reliable internet access for the last few weeks. But don’t worry. My lack of posting does not mean I haven’t been reading, so look forward to seeing a bunch of critiques coming up soon.
Now, on to [...]

The Witch of Cologne has a really awful cover. I actually resisted buying/borrowing it for a while, because the cover featured a woman in an awkwardly unlaced corset and sporting the 16th century equivalent of bed-head. but really now… Kushiel’s Dart had as raunchy a cover, and it was great fun, so I finally was [...]

I’m going to be blogging about WisCon 31 panels and events as soon as I can after attending them (hint: that’s not so soon), and posting to the relevant sections of THL. When I’ve posted them all, I’ll do a round-up post with links to all of my write-ups, and probably some others I [...]

I don’t know what it is, but romance novels fascinate me.  Every few months I’ll head to the used book store and trade some in to find more, taking far too long to make my decisions due to *cough* having to read the end of each book to make sure the female main character isn’t [...]