AAR Top 100 List

Artist Liu Bolin Hidden in Books on Shelf

Top 100 favorite romances.  If you haven't already voted, be sure to do so.  Remember that you DON'T have to vote for 100 books.  A list of 1 is still a list.  But you can only vote once, so if you have two favorite books, you'll have to vote for them in ranked order.
It's that time again for voting for the

This year I've added a lot of the M/M gay titles that I've enjoyed in the past few years, a world I didn't even know existed the first year I compiled a top 100 list.  So without further ado (as they say in the awards shows), here's how I voted for the Top 100 romances:

1.      Slightly Dangerous, Mary Balogh

2.      Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

3.      The Temporary Wife, Mary Balogh

4.      Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

5.      Dance with Me, Heidi Cullinan

6.      Suddenly You, Lisa Kleypas

7.      Something Like Autumn, Jay Bell

8.      Marriage of Mercy, Carla Kelly

9.      Love Lessons, Heidi Cullinan

10.  The More I See You, Lynn Kurland

11.  The Older Woman, Cheryl Reavis

12.  Covet Thy Neighbor, L. A. Witt

13.  She’s Got It Bad, Sarah Mayberry

14.  Beyond Duty, SJD Peterson

15.  A Reason to Live, Maureen McKade

16.  Tigers and Devils, Sean Kennedy

17.  About Last Night, Ruthie Marx

18.  Black Hawk Tattoo, Aundrea Singer

19.  Nothingness of Ben, Brad Boney

20.  Plan B, SJD Peterson

21.  Weekend with Mr. Darcy, Victoria Connelly

22.  After the End, Alex Kidwell

23.  A Different Kind of Forever, Dee Ernst

24.  It’s Not Shakespeare, Amy Lane

25.  After Ben, Con Riley

Be Prepared to Weep and Weep Again

I had Jojo Moyes' Me Before You on my Paperback Swap wish list for a year and still was on the waiting list when I spied it on the review list for All About Romance.  To say that I snarfed it right up might be a slight exaggeration--okay, totally not an exaggeration at all.  I couldn't wait to read it since I'd read so many wonderful things about it.

Then I read the book.  Well, Moyes definitely has a handle on pulling out readers' sobs.  I cried and sniffed through the whole book.  What a wonderful book, I thought.  Sigh.

As we usually do, my husband and I were discussing books over lunch one day.  I had a new review book to read when he asked me about the Moyes book that he'd seen me sniffling over.  What was it about, he asked.

Glibly I started telling him the plot, and as I did so, I found my initial enjoyment of it turn to rage.  Why in the heck should Louisa love Will?  What was lovable about the guy?  As I told my husband the story, I wondered why no one had just driven Will to Switzerland and offed him.

As I kept recounting the story--before I'd finished writing the review--it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn't a love story at all, but a tale of class differences and just another way that Britain differed from the States.  Moyes' genius wasn't in writing a love story for the ages but in explaining once again what the upper class is all about to America's middle class.  We are not like them.  Still.

Essentially, Will is an unlikeable git who pawns off his idea of an ideal life to a well-meaning woman who knocked herself out to make him happy.  Throwing money at her after he was gone was a nice finish, but in the end it was his way of turning her from her working class sensibilities to upper class snobbishness.  In effect, he cloned himself onto her and "gave" her his shallow life.

Was she better off now that he was gone?  We're all supposed to think she was much better off and had a chance of leading a much broader life.  But like everything else in the book, that's debatable.

It's Another M/M (Gay) Weekend

Seems like my M/M (Gay) romance reviews are being featured pretty regularly on Saturdays and Sundays at All About Romance.

This weekend's featured review is The Way Back by newbie author Carter Quinn, who is a promising new writer in my opinion.  His story is nothing new in romance circles, but Quinn's style and deft ability with words infuses a new and compelling quality to revitalize what otherwise might be considered trite.

Established authors work their entire careers for this quality, so for a new writer to achieve it is something very special.

Good work, Carter Quinn!  I eagerly await your next book.

Mature, Successful Men in Love

Shira Anthony's Aria is a delight--mainly because the two love interests are successful men in totally divergent fields and working out of completely different parts of the world.  When they fall in love, unlike many "straight" romances where the woman defers to the man and either reestablishes herself wherever he's based or completely quits her career to move where he lives, Athony's superstar tenor and talented lawyer must figure out how to make their lives mesh while keeping their careers.

Writers of "straight" romances should learn something from this and make their women characters more assertive.  No, this doesn't mean that the women demand that the men give up their jobs, but rather that the men and women learn how to negotiate in order to make their lives mesh.

If we're talking real equality, then this is a must.  A round of applause for Anthony who figured this out and made it a plot point in Aria.

My review of Aria was featured on AAR this weekend and can be read at the links associated with the book's title in this blog piece.

Back in the Saddle

I can't believe that it's been since August that I wrote and had reviews published.  After kidney surgery in May, I thought I was on the road to recovery until cracked ribs hit me in September.  With any luck, all that's behind me and I'm now really recovering.  It's been a long, slow process, and it turns out that I'm not a very patient patient.

It hasn't helped that I've read a bunch of "C" grade books during my recovery.  The first of the romances for AAR, Tallie's Hero, is reviewed today.  It's definitely one of those that I really wanted to like and in synopsis sounds wonderful.  Too bad the reality didn't pan out.  In fact, in places the book read like author Sarah Luck was just a little too close to her source material and was coping the give-away pamphlets and self-published booklets given away at historical sites.

Unfortunately, the next few reviews for AAR will be just as lackluster as this one was.  (The "cowboy" on the cover, however, is a real cutie!  Nothing lackluster about him.)