Month: January 2013

Another Woman’s Son by Anna Adams

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

Another Woman's Son
Grade – C+
Hotness Level – ember
Kink Level – None
Genre-Contemporary, Harlequin
Reviewed by Kate

Okay, get your pens and papers ready. Take notes — there’ll be a quiz at the end (okay, not really, but you still might want to take notes).

Best friends Will and Ben married sisters Isabel and Faith. Will and Isabel. Ben and Faith. Got that? Keeping up? Good. One more person to add to the mix. Tony is Ben and Faith’s toddler son.

When Isabel presses Will to have a baby, he admits he already has a son with — wait for it — Faith. That’s right, little Tony is really Will’s son, not Ben’s. Isabel leaves Will. She decides not to tell Ben about Tony’s true parentage.

Three months later (where the story starts), Will and Faith have decided to run away with Tony. They are in an accident with Tony being the only survivor. Faith had left a note for Ben, so he now knows Tony is not his biological son.

Ben is terrified Isabel will tell her parents that Tony is really Will’s son and they will want to take custody away from Ben. He decides the best course of action is to keep Isabel close to him, so he invites Isabel to stay with him while she is cleaning out Will’s house — the one she hasn’t lived in for 3 months.

Isabel is a great big ball of internal conflict. She feels guilty for not telling Ben about Will and Faith’s affair. She knows the best home for Tony is with Ben, but worries Ben might refuse to let her family visit Tony. She doesn’t like lying to her parents, but doesn’t want to ruin her parents’ memories of Faith with the truth of Faith’s infidelity.
This story has a fast timeline. Four months from start to finish. Ben and Isabel’s feelings for each other started within a few days of the funerals. I can usually overlook a quick sprint to being in love, but this felt a little off. To top it all off, the epilogue was a bit too hunky-dory for me. It was an okay read, but I don’t think I’ll be rereading this one.

The Sherbrooke Bride by Catherine Coulter

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

Note from Anne – this is the first romance novel I owned, the one that started me on my love affair with romance.  It hasn’t stood the test of time, though.  Back in the day, I reread this countless times.  I set romance aside for a few years and when I got back into it, I didn’t care for this one any more.  I actually ended up giving it away, because it made me feel yucky.  Kudos to Kate for taking on the challenge of reading My First Romance Novel.


Grade – C-
Hotness Level – Blaze
Kink Level – None
Genre-Historical
Series – Bride Series  #1
Reviewed by Kate

Douglas, Earl of Northcliffe, needs a bride and an heir to get his family off his back.  Due to a scheduling conflict, he sends his cousin, Tony, to wed the beautiful Melissande by proxy.  Unfortunately for Douglas, Tony and Melissande fall madly in love and elope.  Not wanting to return to Douglas empty handed, Tony makes the choice to proxy-marry Melissande’s younger sister, Alexandra, to Douglas instead — without informing him.

Douglas spends most of the book telling Alexandra he wishes she were her sister.  Alexandra, who has secretly loved Douglas for the last 3 years, spends the book alternating between planning ways to make Douglas love her and trying to run away.

While Douglas The Ass and Wishy-Washy Alexandra are the main characters, Tony and Melissande’s relationship is also a focal point — a disturbing focal point. Melissande, being beautiful, is very self-centered. Tony, being her husband, must train her to be a better person. This takes the form of “I’m your husband, you must do as say,” but left me feeling almost dirty. It came off as belittling, embarrassing, and degrading.

The repeated references to Alexandra’s spine being strapped to a broom handle and Douglas’s continued use of “tell me you understand” got tedious. A sub-plot involving a kidnapped mistress leading to Alexandra being kidnapped herself added another layer of weirdness to the story.

All in all, I’m glad I didn’t waste money on this one.

When You Don’t Get What You’re Expecting

Posted on by Dirty Girl Anne

So, I just finished all 38 pages of Cara McKenna’s Brazen.
Brazen
There.  Enjoy that cover goodness!  For about 37 pages I was in love with this short story.  It’s different.  It’s really hot.   Caroline and Sean are awesome together.  And Caroline put together an honest to goodness harem of young men who are on a schedule to come and hang out with her each evening.  (Or should I say hang out and come with her???)  But on that last page…  it’s not a happy ending.  They each go their own way.  I just didn’t see it coming and it really caught me off guard!  (Note to self: check tags on goodreads reviews to look for HEA before reading.)  I think I still would have read it if I’d known it was just about a short affair.  I think I would have liked it better for knowing what I was getting into, actually.  Which brings me to my point…

I hate it when I don’t get what I’m expecting!  I read to escape my real life.  I expect a HEA, and I appreciate some hot sex along the way.  But I’m picky about that, too.  I like to know what kind of heat level to expect before I read.  I’m generally ok if a book is hotter than I expected, but if I’m expecting explicit love scenes and I don’t get them, it leaves me disappointed.

Most of the time, reading for escape, I’m reading for an HEA.  The new 50 Shades trend of trilogies where you only get the HEA after all three books?  Drives me CRAZY.  I don’t want to wait that long!  But it makes me horribly mad to read and find a cliffhanger ending when I’m not expecting it!  That’s rare now, as I’m reading more reviews and on the lookout for such manipulations!  I’d rather think of the trilogy as one big book, and I don’t want to read them unless I can read them all.

There are excpetions, of course, because I totally love Dallas and Roarke (J.D. Robb) and I think I’ll read anything in the Kate Daniels world (though I’m a book behind!) and these are both series that stay with the same couple all the way through.  Oh, and the Adrian English series by Josh Lanyon goes on that same couple series list.  In each of these cases, the book itself comes to a pretty satisfactory ending, it just leaves you wanting more – not teetering at the edge of a cliffhanger.

So I know what I want.  And I’ll read reviews and snoop around to make sure I’m getting what I want.  And if I’m goign to step out of my usual, I like to know it going in.  (Ummm, yeah, people have mentioned that i might have some control issues.  It’s ok, I’ve got it under control.)  How about you?  Do you enjoy a surprise?  Are you ok with a cliffhanger?  What do you think?  ~Anne