Everybody loves a strong heroine these days. Nobody wants to write about a wimp who needs to be rescued by the big, strong hero. In fact, in most books that are being written now, the heroine stands up and at least attempts to rescue herself when she gets into difficulties. Only if she’s tried to […]
I’ve talked a lot here and elsewhere about the critics of romance, who are, of course, legion. Their objections to romance novels fall into several categories—romances are poorly written, romances are unrealistic, romances create naïve expectations about male-female relationships, romances reflect the structure of patriarchy by holding up marriage as the be-all and end-all of […]
I just finished a historical by a well-known author. I finished it rather quickly, in fact, since I ended up skimming the last third. The hero and heroine were in love, you see, and he’d asked her to marry him, and she wouldn’t. Why? Well, that part wasn’t entirely clear, or rather her reasons kept […]
I just finished reading a 370-page novel in which the nasty banker was revealed as a double murderer in the end. The thing is, I knew the banker was the baddie after the first fifty pages. Why? Because nobody else in the book had been set up as a possibility. So unless the writer wanted […]
The Web has greatly increased the number of book reviewers available these days, both for ebooks and print books. And that’s all to the good. Given the number of books being published, it’s always helpful to have lots of people posting their own reactions to the latest books available, particularly if those books may appeal […]
I just finished Nancy Taylor Rosenburg’s thriller The Cheater. It’s part of a series, although I didn’t realize that when I picked it up. The heroine is a former DA who’s now a judge in Ventura, CA. She’s also a mess. Mind you, she has every right to be. In previous novels she was raped […]
When you write a series, you have one major problem that has to be dealt with—filling in the blanks for people who may not have read the earlier books. Authors who have long-running series are usually pretty straight-forward about this. Ed McBain always used to begin his 87th Precinct books with a quick run-down of […]
Recently, I sent a chapter to my critique group from a new MS I’m working on, an urban fantasy. I knew it was rough, and I needed some outside opinions. I got a lot of good advice from a couple of critique partners, but I found myself automatically rejecting the advice I received from the […]
Romance authors have it easy, at least in one sense. Even if we do a series, we rarely have the same hero or heroine more than once. The characters who hook up in book one may drop in to advise the characters in book two (as Cal and Docia do in Wedding Bell Blues), but […]
Recently, I’ve been reading a series written by a Prominent Romance Writer in her salad days. It concerns a family of sisters and the men who love them, and it’s pretty enjoyable, except for one thing. All the sisters seem to loathe the men they end up with, at least initially. And they show this […]
