I started reviewing for AAR when I was pretty young – 18 years old, and still fairly new to the genre. My tastes have changed and evolved quite a bit in that time. Looking at my reviewer profile, which hasn’t been updated since I started, I am rather skeptical of my “favorites,” some of which I don’t even remember anymore. I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about Hidden Fires by Sandra Brown, except that 6 years ago it was apparently one of my favorites.
My philosophy in choosing favorites is two-fold. One, my Top Ten should be more than a fleeting “books I’m enjoying now,” and therefore aren’t recent reads, or ones that I’ve read only once. Two, they should have something in them that would appeal beyond the romance. I think there is a subtle distinction between “books that a romance reader would enjoy” and “books non-romance readers would enjoy.” There are definitely some stories that I would recommend to fellow romance readers, but not anyone else. The best books are the ones that I think, “I could give this to a friend, and they would understand why I love romance novels.”
So, here we go: my top ten. (more…)
“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.
I sat down to write something kind of snarky about language use in historicals after having come across some particularly heinous examples lately, but I soon found myself thinking about something entirely different: Are we in the midst of a renaissance of the historical romance?
This week is extra special because we’re doing a double feature of Books with Buzz! As many of you know, Tessa Dare burst onto the scene last year with 
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, so we wanted to put together a special romance giveaway for our readers. We have seen a lot of fabulous new authors making their debuts in the past couple of years. Seeing so many good new voices makes one very hopeful about the future of romance and we hope that these new authors will keep writing for many more years. Several authors whose debuts were published in the past two years have offered prizes for our prize basket this Valentine’s Day and we are very excited to offer it to you! One lucky winner will get a prize basket stuffed full of goodies that includes:
