#clean romances

We all have trials in life and we sometimes wonder if we can ever get through them. Then we get an awakening, something that helps us to appreciate the trials we do have. If given a choice, we would probably choose the problems we have rather than someone else’s hardships. Why is this? One day when I was feeling blue, my mother took me aside and told me about a young woman who made the most of…

Outlaws, Grizzly Bears, and Lake Monsters!

The Bear Lake Monster Research is so interesting and intriguing. It’s fun learning the details of something I’ve heard about for years but didn’t know all the facts or details. While writing a historical fiction series, I put some amazing incidents from history in each of my stories. I found that Butch Cassidy robbed the bank in Montpelier, Idaho in 1896, the same place and time period that one…

Une tasse de chocolat chaud pour l’âme

Ceci est mon propre montage de la couverture, car j’attends mes exemplaires papier bientôt! Compassion et courage!  Quand les jours se font courts, on cherche le réconfort d’un bon livre, avec un chocolat chaud. Ces cinq histoires parlent d’épreuves et de nouveaux départs, et comment l’amitié ou même l’amour peuvent s’épanouir dans les pires conditions, tant qu’on ne perd pas espoir en…

I was about a quarter of the way into The Gentleman Smuggler’s Lady, the first in this three-book collection, when I started getting an unsettling feeling of deja vu. A few more pages and I was sure I’d read the book before, though it took a close look at my Goodreads library before I figured out where. It was part of a box set called The Regency Brides Collection, published in 2017. Obviously a limited time run, that set is no longer available and the author has bundled this story with the other two books to create a collection of her own. The story doesn’t appear to have been revised or expanded for this re-issue, since I did read it through completely and the issues I had with it still stand. I’m reproducing my original review of the story here:

If you like Poldark, you’ll enjoy this one set on the rugged Cornish coast with smugglers and excise men aplenty. While nicely written, I quibbled with a few things such as Helen’s becoming engaged immediately after her father’s death with no mourning period, and the fact that there was no real resolution with the invisible antagonist of the plot. Enjoyable but probably needed to be about double the length. Four stars.

The second two books in this set are new to me, and both American pioneer romances rather than English historical.

The Doctor’s Woman is set in the Dakota Territory in 1862. Emmy Nelson was her doctor father’s assistant for many years, and after his death, finds herself roped into assisting the new doctor at the military fort, Dr. James Clark, in caring for the soldiers and an encampment of friendly Sioux close by. With measles, smallpox and injuries to deal with, James acts like a complete idiot. Despite claiming to Emmy that he’d read her father’s books and respected them a great deal, he considered his book-only education far superior to her hard-won experience and hands-on training and discounted every word she said. The really disappointing part, though, after he fell deathly ill with measles and then pneumonia, was that Emmy still had to get help from a ‘magical Indian’ friend to save him. With an arrogant hero I wanted to strangle and a racist trope thrown in, this one was a bit of a disaster. I can’t give it more than one star.

The third story, A House Of Secrets, is set in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1890 and is easily the best of the three. Amanda is the socialite daughter of a wealthy businessman, engaged to Joseph, the city attorney. Determined to turn a ruined, abandoned mansion into a school for underprivileged children, Amanda runs into the unexpected obstacle of her fiance while trying to obtain the deed. While James comes across as officious and judgmental at first as we meet him in the act of trying to shut down a brothel, he turns out to have good reason for despising prostitution and is doing his altruistic best to help young women who want to leave that life. This did read very short, though, perhaps because we start off in the middle of Amanda and Joseph’s romance. I’d have enjoyed this more with a full novel, because I wanted to read more of their love story and see them interact more. Four stars.

Overall I’m giving this three stars; bookended by two solid stories which would nevertheless have been improved by some more length to flesh out the plots and relationships, they were dragged down by one in the middle I thoroughly disliked.

Ladies of Intrigue is available now.

False Trust by Jennifer Youngblood – Promotion

What Readers are Saying:

This book had the perfect blend of romance and suspense for me. I was engaged and interested the whole way through. Fun story, great characters.

Excellent. This style is most definitely the authors’ forte. Clean romantic suspense at its best! Highly recommended.

This suspenseful romance grabbed my attention from the get-go and never let go.

I liked the combination of…

Romance Novels Make Great Summer Reading

Romance Novels are Ideal to Read When You Have to Read in Spurts When it’s hot and I’m feeling a bit wilted, I tend to read romance novels that don’t demand too much from me. This is especially true when I have to spend a lot of time waiting.   I had numerous computer problems this week. I used several tiny slices of time to read just a few pages while I was waiting for scans and reboots. Light…