Posts Tagged ‘Suzanne Brockmann’
Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
I just finished Judith McNaught’s Someone to Watch Over Me, and the main characters are… fine. He’s a bazillionaire who’s loved her for a long time. She’s a successful Broadway actress who doesn’t trust his criminal past. Like I said, they’re fine, with all the faint-praise-damning and forgettability that that word generally implies. But the book will end up on my keeper shelf anyway, because the secondary romance between Detective Samantha Littleford and and her superior, Lieutenant Mitchell McCord, is just too good not to reread.
What made Samantha and McCord so enjoyable? I love office romance/off-limits attraction plot devices because they put up plausible barriers to the couple’s courtship. As the senior police officer, McCord can’t express any feelings towards Samantha without running afoul of every procedure and regulation in the book. Consequently, he’s so self-contained that Samantha can’t even tell if he likes her. (more…)
Tags: All About Romance, judith mcnaught, secondary romances, susan elizabeth phillips, Suzanne Brockmann
Posted in Caroline AAR, Characters | 20 Comments »
Tuesday, May 7th, 2013
Hi, I’m Cindy, I have been doing AAR Reader polls with LinnieGayl and Lee for the last 7 years, and now I help with the updating of the Special Title Listings with Rike and LinnieGayl. It would be fair to say I love reading lists, my favorite lists being AAR Readers’ lists of favorite books. Now, ask me to rank my favorite romances and I freeze up. But I’ve learned from the best how every list created by a reader may have some caveats attached. I loved reading Jenna and Maggie’s lists because each came at it in different ways. Jenna took Pride and Prejudice off the table – it is just her very favorite book, it’s a classic and almost always ends up on a reader’s top romance ballot, so she posted it as a given. Maggie spoke of the books that created a journey to her reading preferences today and she mentioned the very first series book she read that would be considered an emotional favorite but left it off her final list.
In listing my favorites I originally made the rule that no author could be on the list more than one time. It forced me to think in a different way. Ask me to list my top 10 favorite Anne Stuart books and it would be agonizing, but to only allow one book made me look for the very best of each author’s work. I then promptly broke my rule because one author surprised me and showed me she could make any situation work. And finally, knowing this list wasn’t etched in stone helped me to move forward because I know tomorrow I can change my mind. With that, my list: (more…)
Tags: All About Romance, Anne Stuart, J.R. Ward, Katherine Sutcliffe, Kresley Cole, linda howard, loretta chase, Nalini Singh, Pamela Clare, Suzanne Brockmann, Top Ten lists
Posted in All About Romance, Books, Cindy AAR | 18 Comments »
Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
Before I begin, I must issue a disclaimer. I don’t have ten favorite books. I have hundreds of them. I imagine most of us here at AAR do. When the idea for the Top Ten Tuesday came up I was panicked wondering how I would narrow my list down to just ten. How could I do that? The simple answer is I can’t. I didn’t. The following list will cover one of my favorites from ten of my favorite romance subgenres. Each book is actually representing many peers. And that is an amazing thing. In looking over a few decades of reading romance novels I’ve fallen in love with the genre all over again. There have been so many fantastic reads over the years, so many books that captured the essence of just what I want from a romance novel.
Just what is that you might ask? The answer is both simple and complex. I want a lovely love story. Easy enough, right? Wrong. So many authors still confuse lust with love, giving us two bickering people who have hot sex while barely being able to be in the same room together without making us want to smack them both. Other authors confuse excitement with love, delivering fascinating tales which happen to include people falling in love but not really focusing their story on that magical fact. Yet other authors provide us with caricatures falling in love; their books could contain a disclaimer about no humans being involved since I certainly don’t recognize any humans I have ever met in their characters.
So what happens when authors do get it right? We have two people who genuinely get to know each other. We have the surface action of physical attraction and the emotional aspect of two people being enchanted by each other. We have real lives going on while the romance takes place. We meet friends and family who aren’t just set ups for the next book but who provide us with insight into our primary couple. And we have focus – an intense look into watching the characters fall for each other. That to me makes for a luscious love story. (more…)
Tags: All About Romance, linda howard, Lynn Austin, Mary Balogh, Pamela Morsi, robyn carr, Sarah Addison Allen, Stephenie Meyer, Susan Elizabeth Philllips, Susanna Kearsley, Suzanne Brockmann, Top Ten lists
Posted in All About Romance, Books, Maggie AAR | 24 Comments »
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013
Note from our pollsters: AAR is pleased to announce that starting on Tuesday October 1st, 2013 we will open polling for AAR Reader’s Top 100 Romance List. To get everyone ready for Top 100 poll we will post our reviewer and staff picks for their personal Top 10 Favorite Romances every Tuesday starting now until the poll opens in October.
As a way to get to know me as one of the newer reviewers as well as something fun to get us all excited for this fall’s AAR Readers Top 100 Poll, mine is the first installment in a series of AAR staff posts discussing our personal Top 10 favorite romance novels. It’s always nice to rave about your favorite reads, and I’m excited for the chance to talk up these books, hopefully inspiring you to pick up a title that you, too, might love.
When deciding what books to include on my personal Top 10 list, I used one criterion above and beyond the “must be a romance” dictate. I applied the ultimate DIK question – if I had a chest that could only hold ten books to keep me happy while stranded indefinitely on a deserted island, which ones would I choose to put in it? (more…)
Tags: All About Romance, Catherine Nicolson, J.R. Ward, judith mcnaught, Julie Garwood, Kirstan Higgins, Kristin Cashore, linda howard, Sally Mandel, Suzanne Brockmann, Top 100 Poll, Top Ten lists
Posted in AAR Jenna, All About Romance, Books | 10 Comments »
Friday, May 11th, 2012
“Disability” can mean a whole lot of things: blindness, paralysis, amputated limbs, deafness, a chronic illness, brain damage. When I first started writing this blog, I thought it was a rare occurrence in romance novels. However, when I asked the staff here at AAR to brainstorm, we came up with a much longer list than I had anticipated.
In Virna DePaul’s upcoming book Shades of Desire, the heroine is coping with her recent loss of vision. Lily in Tessa Dare’s Three Nights With a Scoundrel is deaf, as are the heroines in Suzanne Brockman’s Into the Fire and Erin McCarthy’s Mouth To Mouth. (more…)
Tags: All About Romance, Catherine Anderson, Eloisa James, Erin McCarthy, Jill Barnett, Suzanne Brockmann, Tessa Dare
Posted in Characters, Jane AAR, Romance reading | 26 Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
I think we all know when we’re in the thrall of big time book crack.
But, hey, since defining the blazingly obvious is something we like to do around here sometimes, here goes: Literary crack (the good kind) is a series of books that continues to suck you in no matter how pissed off you might get or disappointed you may be and, even though you may drop out of a series for a while, you know as sure as the sun rises in the morning that you’ll be back. Sooner or later, you need your fix and that, baby, is the definition of crack.
And it hurts so good.
Okay, if it’s oh-so-obvious just what constitutes book crack, the next logical question is why isn’t there more of it since any writer able to crack (sorry) into the elusive code is guaranteed – and you don’t need a crystal ball to predict this – million dollar contracts in her future.
(more…)
Tags: Charlaine Harris, JR Ward, Suzanne Brockmann
Posted in Authors, Books, Characters, Heroes, Sandy AAR | 30 Comments »
Monday, February 9th, 2009
Though it’s nothing to be proud of, the “can’t look away from a train wreck” mentality is deeply engrained in most of us poor humans. And, sadly, the Brockmann Dead of Night kerfuffle has devolved into one of the biggest I’ve ever witnessed in more than 10 years of hanging around the online romance community.
On the one hand, you’ve got readers – formerly loyal readers – who feel betrayed by the author and who continue to express their outrage. On the other, you’ve got an author who seems to be closing ranks in a way I have really never seen before.
(more…)
Tags: Dead of Night, Suzanne Brockmann
Posted in Books, Online, Romancelandia | 75 Comments »
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
First, you’ll find no real Dark of Night spoilers here, though you should stop reading now if you truly don’t want to know anything. And, just to get it on the table, I know what happens in the book since I was sent an early copy.
And I loved it. Seriously.
Truth is, I’ve been out of the Suzanne Brockmann loop for a while. A few books ago I was s-o-o-o-o totally turned off by those manly men running around pointlessly in the woods while talking like teenagers that I checked out for a while. Then, I tried again with Into the Fire and it just failed to grab me.
I was in a definite – and, for all I knew, permanent – Brockmann lull.
(more…)
Tags: Suzanne Brockmann
Posted in Authors, Books | 80 Comments »
