While I Was Away

While I was visiting my mother during the past week, two of my reviews ran on AAR:

Too Hot to Touch by Louisa Edwards was one of those books I thought I wouldn't like when I saw the cover.  A man naked to a while below his waste is holding a steaming fry pan of some indistinct food stuff.  Yeah, right, like he's pumped up with washboard abs standing over a kitchen stove swirling boiling hot food that could easily spill over onto his chest, arms, body!  Like I said, very off-putting for anyone who's ever been in a hot kitchen.  BUT Louisa Edwards' superior writing and the great story won me over.  I would never have picked this book up if I'd been surfing a bookstore, but I'm very happy I got to read it.  It's definitely a Desert Island Keeper, which Edwards is happy about too.

The Protector by Shelley Shepard Gray is the second book in her Families of Honor series about an Amish community.  While it was a good, gentle read, the book would be a disappointment for first-time readers of the series because it presupposes that everyone knows who each of the characters is and the relationships between the characters.  Also, the romance between the two main characters is blunted because the cast of characters and their individual problems introduced in the first book, The Caregiver, must be addressed.  In a slender book, that leaves little room for the main story.  I'm hoping the next book in the series, The Survivor, about one of my favorite characters, doesn't skimp on the details of her romance.