With self-publishing and a proliferation of small presses dotting the landscape, I’m not surprised to see that 2012 yielded a rather varied list of buried treasures. We have a diverse group of reviewers and from the looks of things, they read a pretty diverse crop of books this year both for review and just for pleasure. Thankfully, that’s yielded a list of buried treasure books covering everything from the self-published to the books from major publishers that just didn’t seem to generate nearly as much buzz as we thought they deserved.
Started with the self-published, Dabney Grinnan really enjoyed the erotic novella, By His Desire by Kate Grey. I also had a fun self-published discovery. Mary Castillo’s romantic suspense novel, Lost in the Light has its weak points, but the mystery intrigued me and I appreciated how the author managed to make her heroine both sympathetic and very flawed. (more…)
2010 seems to have been a good reading year for many of our readers and also for AAR staff. Some of the books we’ve loved have gotten lots of buzz, but there are always those buried treasures out there waiting to be found. Some of these books come from new authors or smaller presses, and a few are from bestselling authors who, for whatever reason, just didn’t get the buzz here on the site that staffers felt they deserved. So, here is our chance to point out the books from 2010 that we really think more people need to read.
Each year AAR features a list of staff members’ 
At one point, pretty much every reader has that moment of finding a wonderful, delightful book that doesn’t seem to be getting any love anywhere. It’s not flying off shelves at the bookstore, it’s not getting buzz all over the internet, it just doesn’t make sense. And that’s what our Buried Treasure column is for – it’s our time to mention the books that we really liked this year that just didn’t seem to get nearly as much attention as we thought they deserved. These may be books by midlist or small-press authors who should be better known or they may be lesser-known books by authors readers are more familar with. Either way, these books just haven’t gotten the attention we feel they deserve.
